Emancipation & Liberation

In European elections in June the Left Bloc in Portugal made the most significant gains of any member of the European Anti-Capitalist Alliance. In September, the Left Bloc made further advances in the Portuguese General Election. We asked Raphie de Santos, a supporter of the Fourth International, to analyse the evolution of the Left Bloc. Raphie’s mother escaped to Portugal in the 1930s from Franco’s Spain, only to seek refuge in Scotland during the 1950s from Salazar’s dictatorship. A shortened version of this article appeared in Scottish Socialist Voice, no. 348.

The Left Bloc (Bloco de Esquerda) has firmly established itself as the fourth largest party, just behind the Peoples Party (Partido Popular), in Portugal after their near 10% vote in the 27th September 2009 legislative elections, up 3.5% from 2005. This consolidated their 10.7% vote in the 2009 European elections when they displaced the Communist Party slate, the Unitarian Democratic Coalition (the Coligação Democrática Unitária or CDU bloc), as the largest left wing formation. The Left Bloc now has 16 members of the Portuguese Parliament, 350 local councillors, 3 members of the European parliament and over 4,200 members. How did the Left Bloc, in the ten years since its formation, becomes Europe’s largest far left party? This article sets out to try and establish this.

A brief history of Portugal

Portugal (from the Latin Portus Cale which means port of the Celts) is a country of 11 million people descended from the Celts, Germanic peoples, Moors and Romans. First formed as country in 868 AD, it was at war with neighbouring Spain for centuries facing long periods of occupation, only freeing itself of Spanish influence in 1640 when John IV was proclaimed King. This dynasty – the House of Braganza – ruled until 1910 when a revolution disposed of the monarchy. During this period, Portugal had been one of the early imperial powers building up an empire in Brasil, Africa, India, China and the East Indies only to see it decline.

The 1910 revolution ushered in a period of financial hardship which was exacerbated by participation in the First World War. A military coup took place and over a number of years Salazar, an economist, who offered solutions to Portugal’s bankruptcy, took sole power and established a military dictatorship. Opponents of the regime were murdered or put in concentration camps. A campaign was started by exiled dissidents in Britain and human rights activists to highlight what was happening to political prisoners in Portugal. This led to the establishment of Amnesty International.

The dictatorship was to last until the 1974 Red Carnation Revolution. Portugal was fighting anti-imperialist uprisings in Angola and Mozambique. Conscripted soldiers were inspired by the rebels they fought against and organised a left-wing coup. This coup took place on 25th April 1974, and six days later on May Day, millions took to the streets, for the first time in decades, to demonstrate their support for the coup which was evolving into a revolution.

For over a year it was not clear which direction the revolution would end up facing: a capitalist democracy or a revolutionary participatory democracy. All over the country there were land seizures, the establishment of workers, peasants and community councils. A situation of dual power was emerging between the capitalist parties that had emerged after the fall of dictatorship and the new forms of popular power. The decisive event came on November 25th 1975 when an ultra-left coup was easily put down.

An ultra-left group, the Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat – Revolutionary Brigades (Partido Revolucionário do Proletariado – Brigadas Revolucionárias) (PRP-BR) and army officers, led by Otelo Carvalho, had been behind it. The PRP-BR had links to the UK’s SWP (then the International Socialists) who defended their comrades’ actions. The coup allowed capitalist politicians such as Mario Soares from the social democratic Socialist Party (Partido Socialista) to say you can either have a capitalist democracy or a communist dictatorship. The revolutionary process in Europe that started with May 68 in France effectively came to an end.

The origins of the Left Bloc

The Left Bloc was formed by three currents that had emerged from the politics of the revolution. These groups were the People’s Democratic Union (União Democrática Popular, UDP) a pro-Albanian maoist group (Portugal has a large peasant population); the Revolutionary Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Revolucionário) (PSR) the Portuguese section of the Fourth International; and Politics 21 (Política XXI) a group of ex-Communist Party thinkers.

The PSR had stood for several years in elections and had gained no more than 2%, and then stood on a joint slate with PXXI gaining over 3%. The Left Bloc’s real success was attracting initially hundreds and then thousands of independent activists from the political movements.

The Communist Party (PCP)

Portugal’s left had been dominated for years by Europe’s most Stalinist communist party (Partido Cominista Portugues) (PCP) – for example it supported the unsuccessful coup against former Soviet leader Mikhael Gorbachev. They are unique amongst western communist parties in that they were clandestine until April 1974 and consolidated themselves as a pole of resistance during the dark years of the dictatorships. Therefore, they had and have a credibility which did not exist amongst other European communist parties whose policies strategy and tactics had been visible to the working class since the end of the Second World War.

But the PCP played a key role between 1974-1976 in legitimising the capitalist democracy which was counterposed to the developing revolutionary participatory democracy. However, they kept clear of the move to social democracy and Eurocommunism in other European communist parties and this saw their vote decline from a peak of 19% in 1979 to around a 7% in the two legislative elections in 2002 and 2004. They are now in a the CDU bloc with the Ecologist Party (‘Os Verdes’) and the Democratic Initiative (Intervenção Democrática). Both these organisations are PCP fronts under the complete control of the party.

A similar situation exists in the unions where the largest union organsiation – the General Confederation of the Portuguese Workers – is under the control of the PCP.

Breaking the bureaucratic control of the PCP

This left nowhere for the activisits in the many political movements and the smaller left groups to go. The solution to this was the formation of the Left Bloc. Discussions on the formation of the Left Bloc began in mid-1998. The PSR, the UDP and PXXI took the first steps to reaching a basic political agreement and setting the basis for the new movement, without rushing into a fusion, without disolving the existing organisations, and without requiring unity in all areas of activity. The presence from the beginning of independents, who supported the project, was a crucial aspect of the Left Bloc and gave it a much broader appeal than that of a simple electoral alliance of the three organisations.

At the same time a political and organsisational agreement between the organisations committed them to making the Left Bloc a space for the convergence of positions and practices, not an area for political disputes, thereby enabling rapid progress in building the structures needed for the electoral and political campaigns that followed.

The Left Bloc has beome increasingly popular over the last ten years, especially amongst youth, with imaginative campaigns and dynamic proposals. The majority of its support comes from colleges, cities and educated youth or adults from the countryside, gathering in both urban educated communities and dynamic labor unions, together with defenders of human rights and women’s rights, the rights of immigrants and minorities (they are especially involved in supporting a strongly multicultural society), and also many ecologists. At this point the Left Bloc is seen by some an alternative and refreshing “new” left political party compared to the older and more established PCP and SP. It is a diverse entity formed by people from multiple backgrounds.

The Left Bloc proposed Portugal’s first law on domestic violence, which was passed in parliament with the support of the PCP and the SP. It has fought for other important laws on civil rights and guarantees, including the protection of citizens from racism, xenophobia and discrimination, gay marriage laws, laws for the protection of workers, legalisation of drugs and anti-bullfighting laws. They have also campaigned for free legal safe abortion laws, allowing women to decide what they want to do with their bodies.

Some 600 trade union leaders, at factory and national level, appealed for a vote for the Left Bloc in September 2009’s elections. In Portugal they still have workers’ commissions (a remnant of the 1974 revolution) that are directly elected in each workplace. In Portugal’s biggest workplace, Ford-Volkswagen in Setubal, the Left Bloc’s supporters are the majority.

As an example of the Left Bloc’s innovative campaigning style, they created a board game and circulated it amongst young people. If the dice fell on a social problem you had to move back, if it fell on one of the Left Bloc’s proposals you could move forward and win. It was a big hit.

Collective revolving leadership

The Left Bloc operates a policy of having a revolving collectivist leadership.

This is to avod a situation where the party depends on one or a few individuals. When the Left Bloc first had members of the Portuguese parliament it revolved the representatives every 5 months. The National Committee of 80 people meets every two months. It is elected in proportion to the voting on the major resolutions at the annual conference.

Women must have minimum of 30-40 % of all positions in the party. This goes right down to the election to the NC based on support for resolutions.

Prospects after the election

At the time of writing (28th September 2009) the election has produced a hung parliament. The former incumbent – the Socialist Party (SP) – a centre social democratic party has the largest share of the vote at 36.6%. But they have overseen rises in taxes and cuts in pay to try and reduce Portugal’s budget deficit. Unemployment is nearing 10% and all this has seen an erosion of SP votes amongst their working class base. Some went to the Left Bloc, but others went right to the Peoples Party.

Portugal is the poorest country in Western Europe with an average annual salary of 15,000 euros and a third of workers taking home less than 600 euros a month. There have been large demonstrations with up to 100,000 teachers protesting and a general strike across Portugal. The right wing Social Democratic Party (PSD) has 30% of the vote and it proposes a program of cuts in public services. As in Scotland, the SP may form a minority government and rely on other parties, such as the PSD, to get key legislation passed.

The Left Bloc will be in the forefront of the opposition, both within and outside the parliament,to the austerity plans of the major parties. They will focus their campaigning around opposition to privatisation, rights for part-time workers and defending public services and pensions, with a wealth tax to help redistribute wealth.

The Left Bloc is an inspiration to all of us with its high levels of organisation and creative campaigning. This has led them to become Portugal’s third major political force despite the dominant role of social democracy and a large influential communist party. This hints at the direction radical anti-capitalist left parties across Europe could take and how the Scottish Socialist Party could grow from its current position.

A beacon of hope

The slogan of the resistance to the dictatorship which my mother applied to struggles everywhere “O povo unido jamais sera vencido” – “a united people will never be vanquished” – is embodied in the Left Bloc and offers us hope that the unfinished revolution of 1974 will see its successful completion with the replacement of capitalism with a just and open multicultural society that can inspire all of us to strive for the same result across the globe.

Not unlike the incorporation of labor, which proved to be the crucial political juncture of the twentieth century, the mobilization of indigenous Latin Americans represents what could be for many countries the most pivotal political event of the current century (1) -
Kent Eaton

The injustices in all countries [are] committed by their bad governments and their owners, who are called capitalists. They impose their own laws in favor of big business owners, forgetting about the people, the poverty, and the misery, and they take away our natural resources so that we can’t enjoy what is ours… [we must] look for ways to unite ourselves so that some day we will be free from this slavery that today the whole world suffers from. We are obligated to seek spaces and paths that allow our imprisoned compañeros and our children to have a dignified life. (2) -
Victoria, Zapatista Good Government Council, July 2009

This article is concerned with the thread between history and the present, the link between struggles in separate parts of the world, and the neoliberal world order in which we all live. In particular, it is an investigation into the response to the experience of living in a society structured around the needs of neoliberal capitalism by one of the most historically colonised and exploited peoples anywhere in the world: the roughly 40 million indigenous people of Latin America.

As indicated by the quotes above, the mobilisation of indigenous people in Latin America, and the demands they are pressing – which are quite contrary to the role set out for them by their ruling ‘elites’, or strategic planners in Washington – is constituting perhaps the most potent contemporary challenge to the neoliberal status-quo anywhere in the world. This is an admittedly one sided account, however we have all heard enough about the kinds of ‘progress’, ‘economic growth’ and ‘democracy’ currently on offer from neoliberalism. The indigenous movements studied in this article often see things a different way: World Bank structural adjustment programs and elite “democracy” as continuing historical oppression, exploitation and racism, while further stripping people of their ancestral land and natural resources.

As an initial caveat, it is clear that any exploration into such a topic can only give the briefest impression of the events occurring and issues at stake in Latin America. What I am attempting to do here is simply give an initial context, and to encourage the pursuit of further reading on the topic. Therefore, in the space allocated I will try and frame the global context of Latin America’s indigenous struggles. I will also draw a few comparisons between highland Scotland’s and Latin America’s experience of being brought into the modern world order, attempting to show how all peoples of the world are subject to similar historical forces to one degree or another. Thus, a sense of internationalism between ordinary people is necessary for any effort towards a more humane world. Finally, I will give selected examples of the struggles being waged by indigenous movements in Mexico, Guatemala, and Bolivia, and what lessons and inspirations we can take from them.

Neoliberal Order

So what are the basic principles of the neoliberal world order which both indigenous peoples in Latin America, and ourselves, are having our lives and societies shaped by? The guiding tenets of neoliberal capitalism are often called the “Washington Consensus”, described by Chomsky as “an array of market-orientated principles designed by the government of the United States and the international financial institutions that it largely dominates (the International Monetary Foundation (IMF), the World Bank etc.), and implemented by them in various ways – for the more vulnerable societies (e.g. in Latin America) often as stringent structural adjustment programs.” (3) The basic rules are to remove the barriers to trade and finance (so long as this favours the wealthy countries of the world), end inflation, privatise as much of the economy as possible (thus reducing social spending), and politically, “the government should ‘get out of the way’ – hence the population too, insofar as the government is democratic.” (4) The result is a society with massive profits for the few, high inequality, increasing poverty, low wages and low levels of political participation for the rest, amounting to “improved weapons of class war” for “the major concentration of power in the world, arguably in world history: the governments of the rich and powerful states, the international financial institutions, and the concentrated financial and manufacturing sectors, including the corporate media.” (5)

The reality of this structure of class forces is that in terms of the priorities of global power and the resulting neoliberal economic policies, programs for participatory democracy, human, social, economic and cultural rights, the redistribution of wealth, and the conservation of resources and the environment, are completely disregarded. Brief as this basic analysis is, it gives an idea of the structures of power facing both ourselves and indigenous and nonindigenous people in Latin America wishing to act together to improve their lives. In fact, to follow Chomsky’s line of analysis a little further, he suggests that for investigating the effects of neoliberal “democracy” and “free” markets we should look to Latin America as “the obvious testing ground”, as with almost no external competition, “the guiding principles of policy, and of today’s “Washington consensus” are revealed most clearly when we examine the state of the region.” (6)

In fact, Latin America has the highest levels of inequality anywhere in the world. Yet to understand the roots of this inequality, and where Latin America’s indigenous social and political movements are coming from in their resistance, it is necessary to understand their historical past, and even to draw comparisons with our own.

History Revisited

Earlier this year I embarked upon several holiday trips around the highlands and islands of Scotland. Perhaps my most revealing journey was the return trip from the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides, which took me to Skye by ferry, then by bus through the western highlands, including Glencoe, until I finally arrived in Glasgow. What had struck me on my trip, and on the journey home, was the emptiness of the landscape – not as an untouched ‘wilderness’, but rather by the story told by countless roofless stone dwellings and blackhouses, where the only residents are the sheep sheltering from the wind. A trip to the bookshelf of any tourist shop is enough to give answer to curiosity on why no people remain, and the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries are still strong in folk memory. Despite attempts to erase memories of the past – when the west of Harris was cleared, the graveyard was also demolished “to erase any rights and history of the people” (7) – both principled histories and folk song and story record what happened to turn the highlands and islands into one of the most sparsely populated regions in Europe. In the name of ‘improvement’, i.e. landlords looking to increase the productivity and profit of their estates, landlords ‘cleared’ (which often meant forceful and violent eviction) the people from their land to make way for large scale sheep farming or sporting estates, and as noted by Ken Andrew: “A harsh land, a harsh sea, and a harsh climate were hard enough burdens to be borne by the people, but harsh overlords backed by unfair laws, and servants of these laws, were the final tribulations, which brought a way of life to an end for many for the benefit of a privileged few.” (8)

One of the historical legacies of the clearances for Scotland has been the effects on Gaelic language and culture. The 2003 census showed that the number of Gaelic speakers has dropped to 58,000 – meaning that the language is struggling to survive.

The incorporation of the highlands and islands region into the British state through cultural and economic imperialism has a historical and contemporary parallel with other peoples and groups all over the world. This is particularly true of indigenous movements in Latin America. However, even in comparison with other experiences, the effects of colonialism and imperialism on the indigenous peoples of the Americas are staggering.

In 1492, when Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas, the continent contained around 100 million people, roughly one fifth of the human race. Ronald Wright explains that due to conquest, slavery, slaughter, and mainly Old World disease, by 1600 “after some twenty waves of pestilence had swept through the Americas, less than a tenth of the original population remained. Perhaps 90 million died…it was the greatest mortality in history.” (9) The civilisations, cities, writings and learning of the Maya, Aztecs, Inca, Cherokee and Iroquois (among many other indigenous peoples and groups) were destroyed, to be replaced by “imitation Europes” (10), with the indigenous nations “captive within white settler states built on their lands and on their backs.”(11) Pedro Alvarado, the man with a “psychotic mind” (12) who played a key role in defeating the Aztecs of Mexico, subjugated the Quiché and Cakchiquel Maya kingdoms in what is now modern day Guatemala. It took him the better part of the 1520s, along with a continued influx of Europeans, cavalry, steel, and most importantly disease, but eventually the Cakchiquels surrendered on 10 May 1530. He then subjected them to slavery, the paying of heavy tribute, and forced mining and washing for gold.(13)

In 1532 the Castilian Francisco Pizarro and his men took advantage of the fatal error of being underestimated by the Inca Emperor, and slaughtered Inca Atawallpa along with between 5,000 – 10,000 of his followers, (14) thus paving the way for the conquest of an Empire 3,000 miles long and several hundred miles wide, including the Inca of Peru and the Aymara of Bolivia. Thus the Andean peoples of modern day Peru, Ecuador, Chile and Bolivia were subjugated under Spanish rule, with structures of power that have held intact into the period of the modern republics, under the shadow of U.S. dominance. As the statue of the Duke of Sutherland still looks over the lands in Scotland where his agents burned the original inhabitants from their homes, Pizarro Palace in Lima, Peru, is a reminder to the indigenous peoples of the Andes of their defeat and their place within the new European order.

The historical experience of continued exploitation, colonialism, and racism has marked the memory of all these peoples. However, Ronald Wright, whose book is rightly considered a classic, notes that with remarkable historical resistance, the culture, ideas and traditions of many of these peoples still exist today. In the Andes 12 million people still speak the language of the Inca, and there are still over 6 million speakers of Maya languages: if Guatemala were truly democratic, then it would be a Maya republic. (15) Rather than being seen as relics of a past age, “they are living cultures, defining and defending places in the contemporary world. Only the West assumes that modernity and Westernization must be synonymous.” (16)

What are the traditions and values of these cultures? And what place for themselves are they trying to define and defend in modern societies? Importantly, what implications does this have for their relationship with the neoliberal order described above?

Resistance Awakening

As outlined above, the context for indigenous peoples in Latin America organising themselves and acting together to press their demands for autonomy, recognition, respect and collective territory is one of historical exploitation and suppression, as well as the contemporary structures of power that form the neoliberal order, as exemplified by Fiorentini’s description of the situation facing indigenous groups in rural areas:

“In the face of agribusinesses’ ever-concentrated land grab, extractive industries—state or international, and local and national government collusion, indigenous people all over Latin America are all living varied versions of the same ecological and social nightmare. Through environmental destruction like deforestation and pollution, direct violent eviction and territorial encroachment, or manipulative and coerced removal, indigenous communities are left without their traditional means of subsistence and thus are forced to join the overwhelmingly indigenous and mestizo urban poor or, well, die.” (17)

Against this sobering backdrop, however, indigenous organisations are managing to win victories, as the examples below indicate. These movements act not just to defend existing culture, rights and territories, but to extend participation in the national politics of the states within which they reside, combining with other movements to advance radical notions of democracy and resource and land management in accordance with various Andean and Mesoamerican values, such as self government and small scale collective ownership. (18)

Mexico

One of the areas where indigenous groups have achieved widespread attention for their resistance to both state power and neoliberal capitalism is Mexico, in particular the Zapatistas. To recap, on the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect, on 1 January 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) initiated an armed uprising in protest of the policies of the Mexican State and the effects that NAFTA would have on (Maya and non-Maya) peasants in Chiapas in southern Mexico. Since then, the movement has continued to exist and essentially form systems of autonomous government parallel to the state. (19) In the view of Neil Harvey, the Zapatistas were “a well organized indigenous army with a mass base of support”, that struggled for land reform, civil rights, democratisation of the political system, and the collective rights of women and indigenous peoples.” (20) This program had a significant effect on Mexican national politics, and as Sarah Washbrook explains the Zapatistas were active in “criticizing the authoritarian regime and its neoliberal economic policies and contributing to anti-globalization campaigns and movements for greater democratization.” (21) However, it is worth noting within the Zapatistas there have also arisen contradictions and divisions in its aims, and the movement is not as nationally significant as during the 1990s. (22)

That said, the Zapatistas are still in a standoff with the Mexican state to this day, and exert a great influence on the inspiration and imagination of popular struggle in Mexico and further afield. On 14 June 2006 a teacher’s union strike in Oaxaca city sparked into a popular uprising with a strong indigenous base, the significance of which is explained by Sedillo: “The success of the ensuing six-month-uprising was fuelled by strong ideas of traditional forms of land tenure and the subsequent strategies for self-governance that indigenous communal life entails.” (23) The Oaxacan People’s Popular Assembly (APPO) occupied the state capitol for six months, including middle-aged women occupying TV and radio stations throughout the city. The assembly was based on indigenous consensus organising as used for thousands of years, and they demanded the removal of the governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. They were driven out by acts of state violence (murder, disappearance, rape, torture and police led drive-by shootings), however their struggle continues unabated. (24)

Needless to say, the Zapatistas’ and other group’s campaigns for meaningful democracy, land reform and rights while opposing neoliberal reforms and authoritarian power has met opposition from the Mexican and U.S. Governments. The Zapatistas have endured state repression, most notably the paramilitary massacre of 13 men and 32 women who were members of an indigenous human rights organisation, while they were praying in a chapel. (25)

In fact, a wider backlash is being prepared by the U.S. and Mexican states to this unacceptable challenge from indigenous groups to their authority and interests. The U.S. government is supplying the Mexican government with a funding package in order to strengthen the Mexican security apparatus, known as the ‘Merida Initiative’, beginning with an initial$400 million. In the words of the U.S. State Department, this will help to “confront criminal organizations whose illicit actions (allegedly drug traffickers) undermine public safety, erode the rule of law, and threaten the national security of the United States.” (26) However, the U.S. military is simultaneously undertaking a detailed mapping of indigenous lands in Mexico, known as the ‘Bowman Expeditions.’ The researcher assigned to the project, Lt. Col. Geoffrey B. Demarest, has previously been the US Military Attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala 1988-91 during the U.S. backed repression and torture in that country, and has written on the relationship between land mapping data and successful counter insurgency campaigns. Tellingly, Demarest claims that “informally owned and unregulated (i.e. indigenous) land ownership favors illicit use and violence”, and also that “strategic power becomes the ability to keep and acquire ownership rights around the world.”

The aims of these actions are revealed by Mexican geographer and academic Oliver Froehling, who argues that the Merida Initiative and the mapping “subscribe to a military/political strategy” in which “the control and displacement of indigenous communities intends to remove potential political hot spots, contribute to military control of the region, and ultimately ‘liberate’ national resources for the benefit of the government and, in turn, its transnational allies.” (27) Importantly, according to Sedillo, this indicates that to U.S. strategic planners “the greatest resistance to the neoliberal world order in Mexico comes from indigenous communities claiming autonomy and self determination in the form of communal territory.” They are also aware of the tie between indigenous groups, their culture, and the land they occupy – and thus the best way to remove their opposition to neoliberal order is to move them from their land and simultaneously rob them of their culture and means of subsistence, leaving the way open for the exploitation of valuable mineral and other resources. (28) Thus, currently the struggles of indigenous groups in Mexico hang in the balance between a high level of indigenous awareness and organisation, and the building backlash of the Mexican and U.S. ruling elites.

Guatemala

The other major Maya area is Guatemala, where Pedro Alvarado first removed autonomy and dignity from the indigenous population in the 1520s, leaving the Maya nations captive within the Ladino state “built on their lands and on their backs.” There are 11 million people in Guatemala, and roughly 60% are indigenous Maya, divided into 23 ethnic groups and around 16 Maya languages. (29) As indicated by the past career of Geoffrey B. Demarest, Guatemala has suffered a civil war, with left revolutionary organisations and Maya groups fighting the state (and by proxy the U.S.), which lasted through the 1980s and only ended in 1996 when peace accords were signed. The Maya were the war’s greatest victims, and of the quarter of a million left dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees, most were Maya. The army also admitted to destroying over 450 Maya villages. (30) Despite this loss, Arturo Arias argues that today “Mayas walk with a quiet confidence and self assurance they did not have 25 years ago.” (31) To understand why this is, and the advances that Guatemalan Maya have made since 1996 towards shedding the exploitation and racism that has bound them for almost 500 years, we need to look at what their demands are for the establishment of Maya rights. In 1990 Maya academic Demetrio Cojtí Cuxil published a set demands that would be required to safeguard the “Maya nation”, which included: “control and utilization of natural resources, political autonomy, Maya representation in congress, Maya participation in public planning…the pre-eminence of international law, the reorientation of the cultural policies of the Guatemalan state…and a reduction of the discrepancy in material development between the (Ladino and Maya) nations.” (32)

These demands reflect the needs of indigenous people throughout the Americas, as articulated by Rigoberta Menchú, the Nobel-prize winning Guatemalan Maya: “What concerns us is the Indian today and of tomorrow. Why should we merely survive? We need to develop our ancient culture and offer it up as a contribution to the human race.” Her interview with Ronald Wright also includes some powerful insights into differing kinds of development and wealth distribution, differences between participatory and elite based democracy, and the relationship between indigenous peoples and the land, the abuse and unfair distribution of which “has generated the most conflict” between invader and invaded. (33)

In Guatemala today great steps forward have been taken, with a multitude of Maya organisations, Maya representation in Congress, and Maya language dictionaries, novels, literary criticism and political works being published, including bilingual editions. This means that Maya is being written down for the first time since the Spanish conquest. (34) Arias concludes that the Maya have now moved into a “post-colonial” mode of living, having broken free from “internal colonialism” (35) However, in terms of the demands made by Cojtí Cuxil, struggles remain for the Guatemalan Maya. Crucially, the demands for gaining control over the country’s natural resources and political autonomy are described by Arias as “still in the gestation stage.” (36)

Bolivia

Perhaps the country that has seen the most staggering advances by both indigenous movements and the population in general against historical oppression and the contemporary neoliberal order is Bolivia. Bolivia was following the standard model of a neoliberal U.S. client state during the 1990s, a “democracy” with most of the population excluded from any meaningful decision making and privatisation of much of the economy. Bolivia has the largest natural gas reserves in Latin America outside of Venezuela, and the state oil and gas company was significantly privatised (or ‘capitalised’ as it is referred to in Bolivia) in 1996. (37) However during the 1990s and early 2000s the population of Bolivia as a whole, with a special role played by Aymara indigenousbased organisations, has completely changed the direction of the Bolivian state. A series of mass actions has forced the ruling political class and their powerful multinational supporters to relinquish their monopoly on the levers of power. The Water War of 2000 forced the government to scrap a contract with a U.S. corporation to privatise the water of the city of Cochabamba. The Gas War of 2003, in which leaders of mass based social and political movements demanded the nationalisation of Bolivia’s natural gas, forced the president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada to flee to the U.S. after his orders to quell the protests left 60 dead and hundreds injured. As he left, 500,000 protesters converged on the capital La Paz. (38)

Finally, in 2005 the social and political movements – trade unions, agrarian unions, and various social movements and community organisations – gained a staggering victory: they forced the president Carlos Mesa to resign. He had passed a law which did not grant national control over gas reserves, and in reponse:

approximately 15,000 people filled the Plaza Marillo in La Paz on 30 May. On 1 June mostly Aymara peasants blockaded access to La Paz. Meanwhile, in the city of Cochabamba, peasants and factory workers led a massive march through the city centre. By 4 June all of Bolivia’s major highways were blockaded at 55 points throughout the country, bringing it to an economic standstill and provoking an exasperated Mesa to stand down. (39)

Following on from this, in 2005 Evo Morales became the first indigenous person to become a head of state in Latin America, when the former leader ofthe coca growers union was elected president with 53.7% of the vote, at the head of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) coalition, representing both trade unions, indigenous emancipation groups, and a raft of other social movements. It was the only time since Bolivia returned to democracy in 1980 that a candidate received over 50% of the vote, and it was the highest turnout in recent Bolivian electoral history. This has led some foreign observers (particularly in the U.S. establishment) to perceive of Bolivia’s democracy as heading in the “wrong direction.” (40) The election also swept the ‘traditional’ political parties from political significance. In analysing the results, the Bolivia Information Forum concluded: “[the vote] was not just a vote for Evo Morales…it was a vote against a system of political parties that no longer played a role in representing people’s interests. It was also a strong rejection of the liberalising economic policies pursued by successive governments in Bolivia since the mid-1980s.”(41) On his election Morales said:

What happened these past days in Bolivia was a great revolt by those who have been oppressed for more than 500 years… This uprising of the Bolivian people has been not only about gas and hydrocarbons, but an intersection of many issues: discrimination, marginalization, and most importantly, the failure of neoliberalism. We face the task of ending selfishness and individualism, and creating… other forms of living, based on solidarity and mutual aid. We must think about how to redistribute the wealth that is concentrated among few hands. This is the great task we Bolivian people face after this great uprising. (42)

Two of the major demands of popular movements in Bolivia had been to nationalise Bolivia’s natural gas and to hold a referendum on redrafting the constitution to better represent the country’s indigenous majority. In May 2006 Bolivia’s natural gas was re-nationalised. (43) The new constitution was ratified on 24 January 2009 by 61% of the vote, after heated negotiations with a recalcitrant opposition. An additional clause limiting land ownership to 5,000 hectares (not to be applied to already existing land ownership, which was a concession to the opposition parties) was passed by 80.65% of the vote. Key aspects of the constitution gave recognition of indigenous nations within the state, and recognised their right to cultural development and self government. Also, the state is to be held responsible for the social welfare of the population. Natural resources (including gas) are the property of the Bolivian people, administered through the state, and in terms of controlling the state, democracy is conceived as an inclusive participatory experience rather than simply periodic elections. (44)

Importantly for this radically democratic process is the influence of Andean cultural practices and traditions. The idea of an indigenous cultural heritage of democracy (the practice of assembling together face to face) and communal ownership of natural resources (ownership of water and gas as a collective cultural right) has been a powerful force in drawing together various organisations into popular coalitions. (45) Thus Aymara and wider Andean traditions and experiences influence the daily associational life as well as organisation and protest, including “principles of (rotating) leadership, accountability (extensive community consultation), community service, collective work [and] redistribution.” (46)

Where the process in Bolivia will go is uncertain. One factor to consider is that the opposition from the Bolivian ruling class, who have lost political but not economic power, and their allies in the U.S. government and transnational corporations, is not going away anytime soon. The opposition subjected Morales to a recall referendum, which he won with 67.4% of the vote in August 2008. Opposition groups, particularly in the wealthy department of Santa Cruz, hoped to destabilise the development of a new constitution and pushed for greater regional autonomy from central government. The U.S. ambassador Philip Goldberg was ordered to leave the country after being accused of conspiring with the opposition to destabilise the country. (47) Eaton argues that the reason wealthy groups in Santa Cruz were pushing for regional autonomy was because with the general population becoming involved in the political life of the country, this “directly challenged the special access that economic elites previously enjoyed in national political institutions” (48) (a special access that very much exists in Britain). Usually ruling classes would try to overthrow the popular democratic government with military force, the “authoritarian option”, however the situation in Bolivia and internationally doesn’t make this “feasible”. Or, they would try to force popular leaders to “moderate their anti market rhetoric”, which Morales has not done, or hope to bank roll another party into power: but the MAS is simply too popular. (49) It is a testimony to the changing times in Latin America and the strength of the mobilisation of the population in Bolivia that the only option left for the Bolivian ruling class is to attempt to exit from the national political scene and remove decision making on their affairs to a regional area where they would still be able to hold power. However despite some concessions in the new constitution, power clearly remains with the popularly controlled national executive, for now.

Conclusions

There are of course no certainties for the future of indigenous and non indigenous movements in Latin America. The neoliberal order which they challenge is powerful, and movements can be subject to ‘moderation’, corruption, division and steps backward. However, this article endorses the quote given in the introduction, that the effort of indigenous peoples in Latin America to organise themselves and gain control over their own lives “could be for many countries the most pivotal political event of the current century.” In doing so, they are confronting not only the neoliberal present, but the colonial past. We may remember that here in Scotland people still struggle to regain their lands, which are held by a tiny proportion of the population. In 1997 residents managed to raise $2.4 million to buy their Island of Eigg from their landlord. One of the recent landlords had called the islanders “drunken, ungrateful, dangerous and barmy chancers” and had threatened them with eviction. Also, Knoydart was ‘cleared’ in 1853, and in 1999 locals raised the money to buy it back and set up the Knoydart foundation for its care. (50)

What is clear from this analysis is that most of all the indigenous people of Latin America are looking to their future- how they wish it to look, not how their colonisers or strategic planners in Washington wish their lives to be structured. In fact, all over Latin America people are taking a stand against neoliberal doctrine and wider forms of oppression and exploitation and advancing principles conducive to a more socially just, materially equitable, and politically participatory way of living. How these conflicts with the ruling order are resolved will not just depend on individual national struggles, but on a spirit of internationalism and mutual solidarity between peoples in Latin America and the wider world. From this perspective, there is much to be optimistic about. In May 2009 the 4th summit of the Indigenous Peoples of the ‘Continent of Life’ gathered, bringing together regional indigenous groups from all over Latin America. They issued a fundamental demand: a “transformation of the singular nations toward plurinational nations, societies, cultures, and the overcoming of all forms of exploitation, oppression and exclusion.” May their vision, and ours, be realised.

References

1 Eaton, Kent, ‘Backlash in Bolivia: ‘Regional Autonomy as a Reaction Against Indigenous Mobilization’, Politics and Society, Vol. 35, No. 1, (March, 2007), p71
2 Bellinghausen, H., ‘They Believe that the Capitalist System is the Origin of Injustice’, La
Jornada, accessed: http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/kristinbricker/2009/07/zapatistas-plan-merida-seeks-eliminate-dissidents
3 Chomsky, Noam, ‘Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order’, (London, 1999), p19
4 Ibid, p20
5 Ibid, p164
6 Ibid, p94
7 The Highland Clearances, http://www.highlandclearances.info/clearances/postclearances_harriscairns.htm
8 Edited from an article by Ken Andrew, courtesy of Chebecto Community Net, taken from ibid, thedukesstatue.htm
9 Wright, Ronald, ‘Stolen Continents: Conquest and Resistance in the Americas’, (London, 1992), p14
10 Ibid, p13
11 Ibid, p4
12 Ibid, p56
13 Ibid, p60-61
14 Ibid, p80
15 Ibid, p4
16 Ibid, p9
17 Fiorentini, Francesca. ‘Movement Pachamama: Indigenous Movements in Latin America”, Left Turn, Issue 33, (June, 2009), accessed at: http://www.leftturn.org/?q=node/1320
18 Ibid
19 Washbrook, Sarah, ‘The Chiapas Uprising of 1994: Historical Antecedents and Political Consequences’, Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 32, No. 3, (June, 2005), p442
20 Harvey, Neil, 1998, The Chiapas Rebellion and the Struggle for Land and Democracy, London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p3, 12 in ibid, p422-423
21 Ibid, p418
22 Ibid, p444
23 Sedillo, Simon, Threat of Genocide: US Military Mapping Against Mexico’s Indigenous, ‘Left Turn’ (June, 2009)
24 Ibid
25 Ibid, p420
26 U.S. State Department, accessed: http://www.state.gov/p/inl/merida/index.htm
27 Sedillo, Threat of Genocide, 2009
28 Ibid
29 Arias, Arturo, ‘The Maya Movement, Postcolonialism and Cultural Agency’, p2, accessed: http://www.essex.ac.uk/conferences/fourthworld/ArturoAriasPaper.pdf
30 Ibid, p4
31 Ibid, p5
32 Ibid, p9
33 Wright, ‘Stolen Continents’, p273
34 Arias, ‘The Maya Movement’, p5-6
35 Ibid, p12
36 Ibid, p10
37 Bolivia Information Forum, accessed at: http://www.boliviainfoforum.org.uk/insidepage.asp?section=3&page=34
38 Albro, Robert, ‘The Culture of Democracy and Bolivia’s Indigenous Movements’, Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 26, No. 4, (2006), p388
39 Ibid, p387
40 Ibid, p388
41 http://www.boliviainfoforum.org.uk/insidepage.asp?section=3&page=30
42 Cited from PubliusPundit, accessed: http://www.publiuspundit.com/?p=2060
43 Albro, ‘The Culture of Democracy’, p388
44 http://www.boliviainfoforum.org.uk/newsdetail.asp?id=26
45 Albro, ‘The Culture of Democracy’, p393-394
46 Ibid, p396
47 http://www.boliviainfoforum.org.uk/newsdetail.asp?id=46
48 Eaton, ‘Backlash in Bolivia’, p92
49 Ibid, p93
50 http://www.highlandclearances.info/clearances/postclearances_landissuestoday.htm

Bill Scott uses the traditional song, Erin Go Bragh to explore the historical role of migrant workers in Scotland

In our feudal past, apart from the merchant towns such as Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, Scotland was almost purely an agricultural community. Three quarters of Scotland’s total land area is still agricultural land, mainly hill and upland grazing suitable only for sheep and cattle rearing.

Up until the 19th century the largest single source of employment for men was in agriculture with women also making up a sizeable proportion of the workforce. Then came the Industrial Revolution and the Clearances. Hundreds of thousands of potential farm workers emigrated to the New World or to find work in the mines (Fife, Lanarkshire, the Lothians) and factories of Edinburgh, Dundee, Glasgow and the West of Scotland.

But the new industrial workforce still needed to be fed. So where were cheap, and therefore profitable, agricultural workers to be found? The answer then as now was in migrant workers.

As male labourers became less plentiful the farm owners of fertile South and Central Scotland turned to female workers from the Highlands. In the martial Gaelic society of the Highlands & Islands women had always been the main harvesters. The main harvesting implement was the light toothed sickle which women wielded more efficiently cutting the grain and straw down to the root. Escaping grinding poverty and the rigid social convention enforced by the Kirk young Highland women flocked to take part in the hairst (harvest).

In 1827 a minister complained that the roads of Argyll were full of Highland women who had bought fripperies and fineries from wages earned at the hairst. Having been away the whole time from the restraining moral influences of males like himself! For these young women the hairst was viewed almost as much a holiday as work. Large groups of women from the same community would sign up and travel together taking a piper with them to play on the road as they walked to the hairst. Once they arrived they would live in communal bothies.

The Lothian hairst attracted labour from as far afield as Argyll and Wester Ross. At that time 46% of the agricultural labour force in the Lothians was female, higher than anywhere else in Scotland. As the Clearances accelerated the self-sufficient shielings and crofts of old were burnt to the ground and folk moved off the land to accommodate first the more profitable sheep and then hunting, fishing and shooting estates. The Napier Commission reported that in the 1880s Many young women went to the Lothians. It is sheer necessity that compels them to go. Whilst going to the herring (gutting and cleaning fish for the then new and very profitable herring industry) was a long term occupation, with many married women involved, the harvest shearers coming to the Lothians were mainly in their mid-to late teens.

Further labour came from the agricultural North East where the harsher climate meant that crops took longer to ripen. North East harvesters moved from farm to farm in the Lothians and then worked the harvest north through Stirlingshire, the Carse of Gowrie, Fife or even westwards into Ayrshire. Eventually they would arrive back in time for the hairsts in Banff, Buchan and Huntly.

The women who came south were paid £1 a week for their back-breaking labour but it seems that the independence gained and the possibility of romance far from the eyes of watchful ministers and fathers was also a strong attraction. A common concern in official and religious tracts of the period was this loss of social and sexual control over these mobile women earning their own wages. Some were even known to smoke!

In the early days shearers lived in farm outbuildings but as time passed purpose built bothies were constructed – still pretty basic with no running water and no toilet. Though living conditions were poor the hairst workers appear to have been well fed, with porridge, milk, bread, beer and very occasionally meat provided in addition to wages – with labour scarcer something had to be done to ensure these migrant workers would return the next year.

Many shearers embarked at Aberdeen to sail to Leith for the Lothians. In Leith the shearers disembarked at a place in the docks that locals derisively called “Teuchters’ Landing”. The former Waterfront Bar in Leith has now acquired this pretty unhappy name.

In the later part of the 19th Century after the Irish (and Scottish) Potato Famine, Irish male labourers, using the scythe-heuk, gradually replaced female shearers. The migrant Irish labourers mainly came from Donegal and originally worked in Dumfries & Galloway before gradually spreading out to other parts of Scotland. The scythe cut more corn, more quickly but male labour was more expensive which perhaps explains why there was still a demand for female labour in the Lothians as late as the early 1900s.

But the Clearances and grinding poverty also drove male agricultural workers south from the Highlands. This Scottish song from the mid-19th Century tells the story of a Highland Scot who is mistaken for an Irishman. At that time both groups were almost equally despised in Lowland Scotland being categorised as uncivilised savages, Papish (the Highlanders were actually more likely to be Episcopalian or even ‘Wee Frees’ but why let the facts stand in the way of prejudice), bog-walkers who couldn’t even speak English. Both groups were also in competition with locals for jobs and, because the Irish and Highlanders were often literally fleeing famine, were often prepared to work for very low wages, causing resentment as they undercut the locals.

The song, Erin Go Bragh, was revived and given a more modern arrangement – but retaining the biting irony of the original – by Dick Gaughan, a Leither, who is proud of his, second generation, Irish roots. The lyrics given here are close to those given on Dick’s website (there is always argument about how to set broad Scots down in writing).

The song demonstrates that West Highlanders had far closer links with their Irish cousins than they did with Lowland Scots. Stan Reeves of Edinburgh’s Adult Learning Project has experienced going into a village pub in County Cork to hear a song melody from the Western Isles with new more locally relevant lyrics attached, the song having been brought there perhaps over a hundred years before by Hebridean herring fishermen. Similarly tunes can be heard in the West Highlands that almost certainly originated centuries before in Ireland.

What the song also demonstrates is that intolerance and racial prejudice can start a lot closer to home than despising Poles or Lithuanians and accusing them of taking our jobs. How daft does, Lowland jobs for Lowland workers sound? Best to be like the bold Erin Go Bragh of this song and identify with others who are oppressed. Who knows some day it might be you yourself under attack.

But of course hundreds of thousands of Highlanders did not do as bold Erin Go Bragh did and retreat to the Highlands. Instead during the Clearances fully half of those forced off the land settled in Central Scotland. They found jobs in the factories, mines and mills. They joined trade unions. They became part of local Lowland communities. In the best sense of the word they were assimilated but so too were Lowland Scots.

Before the Clearances there was a clear divide in Scottish society between the Lowlands and Highlands, each viewing the inhabitants of the other with suspicion and as other to their own way of life. After the Clearances the songs and stories of the Highlanders were transferred into the families and communities they became part of. Yes that sometimes meant a sentimental attachment to a life and culture that had in reality been far from idyllic. But many now Lowland Scots genuinely did have a granny (because the older Highlanders were most reluctant to leave and least able to succeed as economic migrants) and a place they thought of and, for a time, had a clear memory of, as ‘home’ in the Highlands.

But in addition the Highlanders’ oral history of oppression, rebellion and struggle – the Massacre of Glencoe, the ’45, the Sutherland Clearances, the Battle of the Braes & the Land League – became incorporated as a seamless whole into the Lowland Scots narrative of the Covenanters, the United Scotsmen and the 1820 Rebellion. Gaelic and Lallans oral history became “our” history. It is that capacity to incorporate incomers which should give us hope that the current racism and prejudice towards migrant workers can, and will, be overcome as new Scots add the weft of their oral tradition to the rich cloth of Scots working class history.

Note: Nowadays Erin Go Bragh is better known as the Anglicisation of a Gaelic phrase used to express allegiance to Ireland. It is most often translated as Ireland Forever. Speakers of Irish often claim that it is a corruption of the Irish, Eire go brach. However the Scottish Gaelic phrase Eirinn gu brath, literally means, Ireland until the Day of Judgement and is pronounced almost identically to Erin Go Bragh. So it’s possible that a phrase which has come to strongly represent Ireland could have come originally not from the Irish (Gaeilge) but instead from the Scottish (Gaidhlig). Dick Gaughan’s website is at: http://dickgaughan.co.uk

Editorial from The Commune, no. 6

The jobs massacre currently taking place under the cover of recession is an attack which particularly endangers casually or precariously employed workers; furthermore, migrants are also being scapegoated for ‘stealing’ hard-to-come-by jobs.

Immigrants, many of whom are forced to leave their countries of birth by repressive regimes directly or indirectly put in place with a helping hand from British foreign policy, are expected to work long hours at low pay on casual contracts: and most of all, not to complain.

However, brave organising efforts have been mounted by many migrant workers to stand up to employers and demand basic rights: for example cleaners at university campuses or banks in the City of London demanding a living wage rather than just the legal minimum and fighting against redundancies. They are an example to the entire labour movement of how to fight back: they show the possibility of building working-class resistance to the recession. Yet as the ‘Justice for Cleaners’ episode shows unions like Unite are indifferent, or even hostile, to migrant workers. This despite the fact that for many migrants, raising your head above the parapet risks determined efforts by employers and the state to question your ‘right’ to live in the UK and therefore to weed-out troublemakers and organisers.

Recent liberal calls for an ‘amnesty’ offering ‘a pathway to citizenship’ for ‘hard-working’ illegal immigrants do not challenge this, since business interests and the state still decide who is ‘suitable’ for entry. The use of border controls to determine who may or may not live in the UK is an affront to any notion of democratic rights of the individual, and is also intimately linked with the racist idea that where you come from should determine whether you are allowed to choose to live here. Such border controls are also highly gendered, with women bearing the brunt of deportations and violence perpetrated by immigration officials.

Those who argue that migrants should not be allowed into the UK ‘for their own protection’, to stop them being exploited by unscrupulous employers, ignore the fact that hundreds of thousands of people work in the UK illegally regardless: in fact their status simply means that they are denied basic employment rights; subjected to practices such as the nonpayment of wages; and are in constant fear that their already precarious work status will be swept from under them. Borders, detention centres and deportations are a savage weapon in the hands of the bosses to control people. Capitalism needs to move the workforce around at its whim in order to mobilise it efficiently, much as the EU Posted Workers’ Directive has allowed bosses to ‘undercut’, breaking union and minimum wage agreements: the best way to fight this exploitation is not to retreat into protectionism, but rather to demand full freedom of movement and equal work conditions for all, regardless of any form of national discrimination.

As communists we are for a world without any borders or states. Opposition to all immigration controls is fundamental to the free society we envisage and the fight to build it starts now. We do not believe it to be some ‘optional extra’ to be neglected as it was by recent left electoral projects from Respect to No2EU. All workers have a common enemy in these racist, sexist, union-busting immigration controls.

Patricia Campbell reviews a crucial event in Irish history which occurred 40 years ago. This article first appeared in Fourthwrite (Summer 2009)

August 1969 was the year that transformed the face of the North forever. The civil rights marches of the previous year had launched a movement for change that the Stormont regime found impossible to cope with through normal democratic process.

Used for decades to having its every order obeyed, or at least having those who objected compelled to fall in line, the Unionist Party and its machinery of power decided to resort to the old tactic of subjugation through force. People demanding that antidemocratic practices end would be driven off the streets and battered into acquiescence – or pay a heavy price for challenging the authority of the regime. This method had worked in the past. In fact the very state had come into being through the bloody intimidation of that section of the population that had objected to its formation in the first place.

British governments in 1920/21/22 had allowed James Craig and his colleagues in the Unionist Party to use widespread sectarian violence in order to establish a 6-County state. Between July 1920 and July 1922, 453 people had been killed in Belfast, 37 members of the Crown forces and 417 civilians; 257 Catholics and 157 Protestants and two of no known religion. Of the city’s 93,000 Catholic inhabitants, 11,000 had been forced from their jobs and 23,000 driven from their homes. This was the environment in which the northern state was created.

During the early months of 1969, supporters of the unionist state had viciously attacked a series of peaceful demonstrations. A march by students in January was ambushed outside Derry and clearly identified among the attackers were numerous members of the police reserve, the ‘B’ Special. In incident after incident for the following few months, thus the level of violence increased. The RUC riot squad was responsible for a number of deaths when members of the force used their batons on civilians in Derry City, Dungiven, Co. Derry and Coalisland, Co. Tyrone.

When the Derry Citizens Defence Association (DCDA) was formed in July of 1969, it decided to organise a defence of the Bogside in order to prevent further lethal attack by the RUCC and ‘B’ Specials. The Stormont regime was unwilling to curb the activities of any of its supporters and made no attempt to prevent the Apprentice Boys parade taking place in Derry on 12 August. There was little doubt that rioting was going to break out when thousands of unionists began strutting along the city walls, reminding the inhabitants of their second class status in Northern Ireland. As the Apprentice Boys march was coming to an end the expected happened and fighting between the RUC and local residents intensified.

Unlike previous occasions, the RUC met with stiff resistance from the people of the Bogside and found it impossible to gain control of the area as the DCDA organisation proved effective. Key to the success of the defenders was their decision to occupy the high flats in the centre of the district and use is as a strong point to hurl stones and Molotov cocktails down on the advancing police below.

The struggle lasted throughout the night and into the next day and still the RUC was unable to penetrate the Bogside. Tension grew throughout the North as all sides watched the conflict develop. Nationalists and republicans were anxious to see what could be done to help the defenders while Unionism was becoming increasingly hysterical as it watched its absolute authority being challenged on the streets.

Grassroots unionism was demanding that live ammunition be used against the Bogsiders but Stormont’s cabinet knew that with the world watching so closely, it would be a gross mistake. With the situation under scrutiny, the Unionist regime understood that Britain would exact a very high price from the Belfast parliament if its police force were to be seen to carry out a Sharpville style massacre in Derry with the world’s press watching.

Under increasing siege

With the Bogsider defenders under increasing siege, word was circulated in all nationalist and republican areas that it would be necessary to organise demonstrations to take pressure off the people in Derry. Demonstrations were organised in nationalist towns across the North and RUC and ‘B’ Specials were dispatched to contain the events. In town after town these events grew increasingly violent. Police and ‘B’ Specials began to use the live ammunition that their supporters had been demanding and gunshot casualties were inflicted on nationalist civilians in several towns. In Armagh city ‘B’ specials shot and killed a Catholic civilian making his way home from a local bar.

The greatest violence, however, broke out on the night of the 14th August in Belfast. A protest march had taken place on the 13 and in its aftermath the IRA exchanged gunfire with the RUC, wounding one constable. On the night of the 14th crowds of unionists gathered in the Shankill area and other unionist districts. As daylight began to fade, shooting broke out. Desultory at first and growing in intensity as time went by. As darkness fell, the RUC sent armoured cars equipped with heavy machine guns into the lower Falls and Ardoyne firing into houses and killing several of the occupants.

As the armoured cars raced through the narrow streets they had little difficulty winning control of these districts. Once in charge, the RUC started to systematically shoot out street lighting. With the streets in darkness and the inhabitants terrified, crowds of unionist arsonists supported by off duty ‘B’ Specials started to pour into the lower Falls and Ardoyne and other nationalist areas in Belfast. IRA units in Belfast were seriously under resourced in August 1969. The republican army’s head quarters staff had taken a decision to reduce its arsenal in Belfast in order to ensure that local unit commanders would not precipitate a sectarian blood bath by undisciplined operations. The decision was well meant and had a certain logic in light of the progress of the civil rights movement but in the context of Northern Irish reality it was a mistaken and naive judgement.

Badly outnumbered they put up a spirited resistance to the counter revolutionary assault and joined by veteran members of the organisation prevented a much greater amount of damage being inflicted on the nationalist community.

It was nevertheless, beyond doubt that the nationalist communities in the Falls and Ardoyne areas had suffered greatly with a huge number of homes burned out and many families driven from their property. The trauma was enormous and evoked memories of the worst days of the 1920s. Within days efforts were being made to find arms and to organise military defence of these districts. The IRAwas to split over the issue and in practice this period signalled the end of peaceful, non-insurrectionary protest.

The British government sent troops into Derry and Belfast but refused to curb the powers of the Stormont regime. In time it became obvious that London had little interest in radically reforming Northern Ireland and the Home Secretary of the time, Jim Callaghan, told nationalist politicians that theycould have ‘reform’ but it had to happen within the parameters of a Stormont regime. This dictate of ‘any colour you like so long as it’s orange’ was to ensure that the very existence of the state had to be challenged if change was to occur and that is exactly what was to happen. Nothing was the same after August 1969. The Orange state was in free-fall.

JM Thorn, Socialist Democracy (Ireland) analyses the defeat of the Irish Left in the second Lisbon Treaty referendum.

The Lisbon Treaty was passed on October 2nd, overturning its rejection by the Irish people in June 2008.

The margin of victory was emphatic – the ‘Yes’ vote winning by a majority of 67 percent of voters to 33 percent. Turnout was 58 percent, up from last year’s 53.1 per cent. A total of 1,214,268 people, or 38.8 per cent of the total electorate, voted Yes, while 594,606, or 19 per cent, of the electorate voted No. There was a yes vote in 41 out of 43 constituencies. Large ‘Yes’ majorities, over 80 percent, were recorded in Dublin and nearby Dun Laoghaire, while only rural Donegal voted ‘No’. There was a swing in favour of the treaty from last year, when it was rejected by 53 to 46 percent, of around 20 per cent. In all, there were almost half-a-million extra ‘Yes’ votes in this poll – a clear indication that the endorsement for the treaty was down to a change of opinion rather than a change in turnout.

So why was there such a dramatic turnaround in public opinion? One explanation lies in the efforts of the ‘Yes’ campaign this time round, when a whole array of organisations and individuals were mobilised to support the treaty. This coalition ranged from the European Commission, political parties, the media, business groups and individual companies, trade union officials, the hierarchies of the churches and various celebrities. It represented social partnership at its broadest and the determined effort of what could be described as “the establishment” to ensure a ‘Yes’ vote this time round. They simply came back with a better organised campaign and spent more money in pursuit of the result they want.

Reasons for defeat

Some in the ‘No’ camp have blamed the imbalance in the resources available to each side as the main reason for their defeat. But this is not really convincing. It has always been the case that pro-EU forces in Ireland have had these advantages. Indeed, it was the case in last year’s referendum in which the Treaty was rejected. What made the critical difference this time was not the better organisation or greater resources of the ‘Yes’ campaign but the changed circumstances in which the vote took place. Since the last referendum in June 2008 Ireland has suffered an unprecedented economic collapse. The economy has contracted by almost ten per cent, the banking system has failed, unemployment has doubled and public finances have deteriorated rapidly. What this crisis has done is to expose Ireland’s economic vulnerability and also its dependency on external forces, whether that is foreign capital or the EU.

There was therefore a ‘fear factor’ at work that the ‘Yes’ campaign played upon to win support for the Treaty. The argument was that Ireland needed the EU in order to revive its economy and shield it from the worst of the recession. This was the main thrust of the ‘Yes’ campaign, with slogans such as “Yes for Jobs” and “Yes for Recovery”. The fear, or the threat, behind such claims was that rejection of the Treaty would leave Ireland isolated, ruined and on the margins of Europe.

This argument is a false one. Indeed, it could be argued that the policies of the EU, particularly on the euro and low interests rates, were in part responsible for Ireland’s economic crash. It could also be argued that the EU is in part driving the cuts agenda with its budget deficit rules for euro members. The EU is also playing a key role in the bail out of the banks. These are counters to the idea that the Irish people are being saved by the EU. But they weren’t made by the ‘No’ campaign.

The clear message of the ‘Yes’ campaign contrasted to the disparate and conflicting messages coming from the ‘No’ side. This in part is a result of the hodgepodge of political groups that made up the ‘No’ campaign. These ranged from the Catholic right, in the form of Cóir, to the left in the form of the Socialist Party and SWP. A much weaker element of the ‘No’ side this time was the neo-liberal strand represented the Declan Ganley’s Libertas. It had been weakened by the general retreat of neo-liberalism in the face of the economic crisis and the adoption of interventionist policies by Governments across the EU. Indeed, its involvement this time helped the ‘Yes’ side play up the supposedly progressive side of the EU – contrasting the harshness of the extreme liberal position with the more statist approach of the EU.

Given the weakness of Libertas this time round, the strongest element on the ‘No’ side was the left. There was a good opportunity to run a ‘No’ campaign that was explicitly socialist and orientated towards the working class. Unfortunately that opportunity was spurned. The SWP and Socialist Party ran campaigns which opposed various pro-market aspects of Lisbon, as well as steps towards greater militarism, but articulated no fundamental opposition to the EU as a capitalist institution and offered no political alternative other than to echo aspects of the rhetoric of the nationalist right.

Concession towards nationalism

The tilt towards nationalism was expressed most clearly by the Communist Party with its declaration that a ‘No’ vote was the work of “true patriots”. The concession towards nationalism was also reflected by the inclusion of Sinn Fein in the broad left campaign despite that party’s ambiguous position on the EU. In the second referendum Sinn Fein merely called for a “better deal” for Ireland. Ironically, it was left to Cóir to raise any issues that related to the working class. One of the most effective posters in the campaign was the one they produced on the minimum wage.

The only organization to offer any left political message was the Socialist Party, and that fell far short of what was promised. On election to the European parliament Joe Higgins had promised to build a socialist campaign. In reality he followed the sectarian history of his organization, joining the distinctly unsocialist broad campaign and presenting his own organization as the socialist campaign.

Any hopes that the left would learn anything from the debacle were dispelled when Kieran Allen of the Socialist Workers Party appeared on a special edition of the Vincent Browne show on RTE (Irish state television channel). The vote had been lost because the corporate establishment had united. There was establishment press bias, undemocratic intervention by Ryanair and IBEC who provoked a scare about jobs and brought in the issue of Europe in general instead of sticking to the details of the treaty. The main issue to arise from the campaign was the need for a party to represent the 30% who had voted ‘No’.

So we lost because the bosses united against us. In that case socialism is doomed – when will the conditions arise when they don’t unite against us? The bosses made a political case around jobs and the economy – a killer blow when our strategy was to avoid politics!

Allen’s final comment gives the game away -that we need a party to represent the 30% who said ‘No’. There is no doubt that we desperately need a working class party in Ireland. There is no doubt but that the nucleus of that party is to be found in the people who said ‘No’. The task of Socialists is to separate out those who voted for their class from the ex-republicans and Catholic right-wingers also in that vote. As long as Kieran Allen and other leftists pursue the apolitical opportunist and electoralist numbers game they will be an obstacle to a new party of the working class rather than facilitators of it.

The ‘Yes’ vote on Lisbon will give a boost to the government as it presses ahead with another cost cutting budget and the establishment of the National Assets Management Agency. The same arguments that were made so effectively for Lisbon can be made for these. However, that will be more difficult, as unlike Lisbon there are disputes between the political parties and within the capitalist class on how to proceed. These divisions at the top of society provide an opportunity for a working class opposition to emerge. Indeed, despite the disappointment of the Lisbon vote, it did reveal the existence of a solid core of the populace, who despite threats and coercion rejected the will of the political establishment by voting ‘No’. It is also the case that this ‘No’ vote was largely concentrated in the working class and the most marginalised sections of society. The ‘No’ vote was a class vote; the problem was that it was not a class-conscious vote.

This summarises the problem faced by the Irish working class – that it doesn’t have its own independent programme. It isn’t helped by groups proclaiming themselves socialist failing to advance one, but instead adapting to reactionary ideas. This was the story of the Lisbon campaign. While putting forward an explicitly socialist programme would not have produced a bigger ‘No’ vote, it would have been a better vote and would have better prepared a section of the working class for the struggles that are to come.

We assess the politics behind the SNP government’s proposed independence referendum and its likelihood of success.

Megrahi, behind-the-scenes deals and the ‘liberal’ US onslaught

Political developments in Scotland are hotting-up in the aftermath of the decision by Kenny MacAskill, the SNP’s Justice Minister, to release Abdelbaset Ali-Mohamed al-Megrahi, the so-called Libyan bomber,on compassionate grounds.

Whatever the undisclosed background negotiations behind this move, involving New Labour at Westminster and SNP at Holyrood, the political fallout has been considerable. Earlier negotiations between the British and Libyan government, involving Tony Blair and Jack Straw, had strongly implied a prisoner transfer agreement. Megrahi would finish his sentence in Libya, in return for BP oil concessions. The Scottish government thwarted this. It denied any right to the British government to interfere with the decision taken by the Scottish judiciary, which had been given original responsibility for Megrahi’s trial, held at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, in 2000-1.

What has become abundantly clear is that Gordon Brown and Lord Mandelson wanted Megrahi released before his death, to ensure that British corporate interests in Libya weren’t jeopardised if he died in a British jail. MacAskill’s willingness to take responsibility for Megrahi’s release was an added bonus for the New Labour-led British government. It meant that the SNP-led Scottish government could take all the blame, when the right wing press, both in Britain and the US, orchestrated the howls of outrage about ‘weakness’ in the face of terrorism.

It is possible that the SNP leadership thought that, with Barack Obama as President, the new US Democrat government would welcome MacAskill’s compassionate approach. After all Obama had personally given an undertaking to the Moslem world in Cairo on June 4th that he represented a new type of American leader. However, as the continuing war in Afghanistan (and now Pakistan), the continued build up of pressure on Iran, and the US’s failure to discipline Netanyahu in the face of continued Israeli settlements on the West Bank demonstrate, Obama is only trying to re-brand US imperialism, not challenge it.

So ‘liberal’ Obama, Hilary Clinton, and the late Ted Kennedy, led the attack on the Scottish government. Meanwhile, the rabid American Right soon ended any delusions about the longstanding affectionate ties between Scotland and the US. In their eyes, Scotland replaced France as the country all ‘good American’s love to hate. Only now it is the Scots who are ‘haggis-eating surrender monkeys’. Back in Scotland, the British unionist parties, New Labour, Conservative and Lib-Dem, characteristically decided to echo the sentiments emanating from the US. They launched an attack on the Scottish government and the nationalist SNP.

The SNP recovers from the attacks and announces its independence referendum

The SNP has been trying for years to win the approval of corporate America, with the prospect of low business taxation and the attempted cultivation of Scottish-American business figures and politicians. Donald Trump, the dodgy property speculator, has been assiduously wooed. Therefore, defending MacAskill’s decision in the face of blatant US imperial pressure did not come easily to the SNP leadership, particularly after the display of Scottish saltires being waved at Tripoli’s airport, welcoming Megrahi upon his return. After all, MacAskill still insisted that heacted solely on compassionate grounds, and that he upheld the Scottish court’s extremely dubious decision that Megrahi was guilty. MacAskill didn’t want to tread on the toes of the Scottish legal establishment.

Early opinion polls seemed to indicate that MacAskill was indeed isolated. However, the Church of Scotland, followed by the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, gave their public backing to MacAskill. Whilst this was undoubtedly embarrassing to sections of the unionist alliance, it was the decision of Nelson Mandela to support MacAskill that turned the tables. Within days, support for MacAskill’s decision had risen to 45% in Scotland.

Sensing a possible drubbing in any Scottish General Election their actions might precipitate, the unionist opposition retreated from a vote of ‘No confidence’ in MacAskill at Holyrood. They settled for a motion condemning the Scottish government’s handling of the affair. Although the unionist parties have an overall majority in Holyrood, their alliance began to break up. Former Scottish Labour Ministers, Henry McLeish and Malcolm Chisholm, backed MacAskill, and the Conservatives decided to switch the focus of attention to Gordon Brown and Westminster Government involvement in Megrahi’s release.

It was in this context that the SNP Government announced next year’s legislative programme on September 3rd, with its proposal for a referendum on Scottish independence given flagship status. Now the unionist parties can kill this off at the first hurdle, by using their majority to vote down any such bill in Holyrood. Scottish First Minister and SNP leader, Alex Salmond well knows this, but has likely calculated on there being a British Conservative Government under David Cameron next year. This could place the SNP in a good position before the next Holyrood General Election in 2011, especially with an impotent New Labour in ‘opposition’ at Westminster.

The November 12th Glasgow North East by-election

However, a more immediate by-election battle is taking place in Glasgow North East on November 12th, after the resignation of the disgraced Westminster Speaker, Michael Martin. With the SNP not wanting to be portrayed as the ‘Orange’ party (Labour’s main accusation against it, when it stood against Scottish party leader, Helen Liddell, in the notorious Monklands East by-election in 1994) their leadership is taking no chances. It has adopted David Kerr as candidate. He is a member of Opus Dei!

Glasgow City Council is one of the few Scottish councils still under Labour control, so the SNP cannot so easily be held responsible for the type of unpopular local policies, which contributed to their surprise defeat in the Glenrothes by-election last November. So, Labour has now switched its focus to an alleged SNP bias against Glasgow city, highlighted by the Scottish Government’s decision to cancel the planned Glasgow airport rail link.

The SNP strategy of trying to appeal to all Scots, regardless of class, has also come unstuck. The introduction of new local service charges for pensioners in Fife was just one indicator of where the SNP’s real loyalties lie. In Edinburgh they share responsibility with the Lib-Dems for the council’s attempt to impose draconian pay cuts on refuse disposal workers, with the threat of privatisation looming. In West Dunbartonshire, they have suspended SSP councillor, Jim Bollan, for nine months, for his tireless commitment to working class communities.

The long honeymoon, enjoyed by the current SNP government, is now under strain. The SNP is wedded to a neo-liberal economic model, which once placedfailed corporations such as the Royal Bank of Scotland in the driving seat of their proposed new Scottish economy, and lauded the successes of the Irish ‘Celtic Tiger’. Today, the SNP meekly accepts its role in administering the Westminster government’s measures to deal with the current crisis – massive public spending cuts to bail out the bankers.

The Scottish government has also frozen council taxes now for three years. This further contributes to the squeeze on social spending. Added to all this, the full consequences of the SNP’s fawning before Trump, means that the Scottish government looks prepared to back a compulsory purchase order to evict residents from their homes in Aberdeenshire to make way for Trump’s new golf course and leisure complex –the new Clearances.

The build-up of reactionary forces and the divided Left

Although the prime press interest in Glasgow North East will be the battle between New Labour and the SNP, there will be other significant political struggles going on. In the last election here, the Conservatives did not field a candidate, following the mainstream parties’ convention of not standing against the Speaker. This left the way open for the Scottish Unionists to stand. They represent that traditional Orange wing, abandoned by the Conservatives, when the party broke their link with the Ulster Unionist Party in the 1970’s. David Cameron has recently reforged that alliance. Official British Conservative backing for a Protestant unionist party in ‘the Six Counties’ will have knock on effects in Glasgow, where sectarian divisions still exist.

However, the Orange Order in Scotland is still not prepared to throw its weight fully behind the Tories. GrandMaster, Ian Wilson, has said the Order will be backing the Labour Party, wherever they are best placed to defeat the SNP in elections. Labour remains Scotland’s premier Unionist party.

Both the previous New Labour/Lib-Dem and current SNP Scottish governments at Holyrood have promoted a bureaucratic and moralistic campaign against sectarianism in Scotland, based on the false notion that there is a ‘war between two tribes’, Protestant and Catholic or, sometimes more simply, between Rangers and Celtic. The real underlying issue is support for, or opposition to, the British occupation of part of Ireland. One of the aims of this official ‘anti-sectarian’ campaign is to cutback on the many Orange Order and the handful of Irish Republican marches held in Scotland’s Central Belt. This will become a focus of opposition for hard line loyalists. There is also the planned provocation in Glasgow, organised by the fascist Islamophobic English Defence League’s satellite organisation, the ‘Scottish Defence League’ (SDL), on November 14th.

The BNP are standing in the Glasgow North East by-election. They would love to have the sort of clout that loyalists in ‘the Six Counties’ demonstrated, when the PSNI meekly bowed before their intimidation of Roma families in Belfast. Furthermore, despite BNP denials, there is obviously an overlap between BNP and EDL/‘SDLBNP. Like the loyalists in ‘the Six Counties’, they have shown a growing admiration for the apartheid state of Israel and its brutal methods. So, it is only an inner hard core of Nazi ‘Sieg Heiling’, swastika worshippers that cling on to the old anti-semitism. The majority of Union Jack waving fascists find plenty to celebrate in the history of British unionism and imperialism.

Furthermore, there are other nasty links being forged. The mainstream, usually socially liberal, Church of Scotland is under growing attack by the reactionary Fellowship of Confessing Churches (FCC), with 45 parishes threatening to break away, unless the Church publicly condemns homosexuality. The FCC is backed by Sam Cole, DUP councillor and Orange Lodge chaplain, along with Maurice Bradley, former mayor of Coleraine, Danny Kennedy, Ulster Unionist depute leader, Sir David McNee, former Chief Constable of Strathclyde, and a hundred members of the ultra-conservative Presbyterian Church of America, which also opposes the ordination of women ministers.

Tragically, the Left today is divided in Scotland. In the last Glasgow North East election, the SSP easily defeated both the Scottish Unionists and the BNP, although Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party (SLP) was able to do better still and get 14% of the vote, in the confusion caused by the absence of an official Labour candidate, with Michael Martin standing solely as the Speaker. The SLP has left no organisation on the ground and is, in effect, now only one man’s vanity party.

The concern now is that, with a Left split between the SSP, Solidarity/Tommy Sheridan party and the SLP, the BNP’s vote could overtake the Socialist vote. Whilst Sheridan will cultivate the celebrity vote, he faces competition from John Smeaton, the ‘people’s hero’. Meanwhile, John Swinburne, the ex-MSP, from the Scottish Senior Citizens Unity Party, and Mikey Hughes, former Big Brother runner-up, campaigning for the disabled, are also standing. More worrying than any likely BNP vote in itself, would be the opportunity this could provide them to become the ‘shock troops’ of hard right unionism in Scotland, at a time when the issue of Scottish independence is coming to the fore.

When Nick Griffin visited Scotland on October 28th, he said he supported a referendum for Scottish independence. However, he made it quite clear that the BNP would strongly oppose those campaigning for a ‘Yes’ vote. He is lining himself up with ultra unionists like the Tory, Michael Forsyth, and New Labour’s Wendy Alexander, who also want a referendum campaign to see off any threat of Scottish independence for the foreseeable future. You can rest assured, whatever differences they still have, that these ultra-unionists don’t intend to confine their opposition to polite democratic debate – and the BNP are signalling that their services can be called upon to defend the Union.

The SNP unprepared for the British state counter-attack – a socialist republican and ‘internationalism from below’ approach needed

The SNP remains a thoroughly constitutionalist party, and has indicated, by its recently declared support for the British monarchy, its complete willingness to play politics by Westminster rules. The problem is, that the British ruling class only play be these rules when it suits them. When their state is under threat, both Conservative and Labour governments have shown their preparedness to utilise the antidemocratic Crown Powers to thwart any challenges, as any Republican living in Ireland can testify. If necessary, they would not be averse to covertly encouraging British loyalists, as the British state’s continued financial support for their organisations in ‘the Six Counties’ demonstrates.

Furthermore, the SNP’s complete lack of appreciation of the continued imperial role of British troops in the world is highlighted by its continued support for the British Army’s Scottish regiments. SNP Westminster defence spokesperson, Angus Robertson, has announced that ‘English’ troops would be welcome to remain in Scotland after ‘independence’. It probably won’t be long before the SNP retreats further to accommodate US imperialism. They could settle for Scotland being removed from the NATO frontline to become a ‘supporting’ state within NATO’s Orwellian renamed second tier, ‘The Partnership for Peace’. NATO bases in Scotland would still remain available for imperial use.

Scotland, with its North Sea Oil, and its numerous British and NATO military bases, is far more central to ruling class interests, than ‘the Six Counties’. It is unlikely that the British state will just wait until the Scottish independence referendum bill comes to Holyrood. US and British security services are probably preparing a strategy, using both official and unofficial forces, to marginalise the threat of the break-up of the UK and the potential loss of NATO bases.

Although there is no deep-seated tradition of independent republican organisations in Scotland, there is nevertheless widespread popular support for a Scottish Republic. Furthermore, this is strongly linked to support for public services provided on the basis of need, and opposition to British and American imperial wars. A vote for the SNP has sometimes expressed this feeling in a sentimental way. As the SNP moves further to the Right such support is becoming as undeserved as a vote for Labour from those hoping to improve their lives.

It is the job of socialist republicans to organise such sentiments in an effective way, by linking everyday struggles, such as the ‘Save Our Schools’ campaign in Glasgow today, with the demand for a Scottish Republic tomorrow, when the SNP independence referendum comes up against British unionist intransigence. Only the SSP links its support for independence with opposition to all imperialist wars, whether or not they are sanctioned by the UN – a thoroughly undemocratic body, which is nothing other than a plaything of the imperial powers. In contrast, the SNP stance on the ongoing US/British war in Afghanistan has been profoundly ambiguous.

Since the British state and its Irish government allies coordinate their actions through the ‘Peace Process’ and Devolution-all-round; and both the British and Scottish TUCs and the Irish CTU promote ‘social partnerships’, which subordinate workers’ interests to those of the bosses; whilst the BNP and loyalists are trying to cement links ‘across the border’ and ‘across the water’, it becomes all the more imperative that Socialists in these islands organise ourselves on the basis of ‘internationalism from below’ to more effectively promote working class interests throughout these islands. We need to build on the success of last year’s Republican Socialist Convention.

Issue 18 of Emancipation & Liberation is out now.

If you would like to buy this issue or subscribe, contact us.

Comments are open, so until articles are online, feel free to discuss the articles below. When they are online you can discuss the article in it’s comment section.

• Editorial: Can the SNP deliver Independence?, RCN
• Lisbon Treaty passed in second referendum, JM Thorn
• August 1969, Patricia Campbell
• Migrant Workers are at the heart of our fightback, The Commune
• Highland migrant workers, Bill Scott
• History and Resistance: The rise of Latin America’s indigenous movements, Ewan Robertson
• Portugal’s Left Bloc consolidates its gains, Raphie de Santos
• Afghan women bear the brunt of the hypocritical war on terror, RAWA
• Iran after the elections – an interview with Yassamine Mather, Anne McShane
• Solidarity with Scottish PSC action, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network
• It was the worst of times, it was the best of us!, Rod MacGregor
• Book review: A Celebration of the Life & Times of Robert Burns and What Burns means to me, Mary McGregor
• Book review: Out of Eden – the Peopling of the World, Richard Abernethy
• Savings in the Down-Turn, Jim Aitken
• An unrepentant revolutionist, Jim Slaven
• The Legacy of James Connolly – an interview with Jim Slaven, Allan Armstrong

Colin Fox speaks to Allan Armstrong about the vision and mission of the Edinburgh People’s Festival

What made you revive the Edinburgh Peoples Festival after almost 50 years?

We didn’t start off with the intention of reviving the Edinburgh Peoples Festival (EPF). At Hamish Henderson’s funeral in 2002, a group of us, including Bill Scott, Karen Douglas and Craig Maclean, started to discuss Hamish’s achievements. This was the man after all who had formally accepted the Italian surrender in the Second World War, first translated Gramsci into English, was the driving influence behind the Scottish folk revival, wrote Freedom Come All Ye and the John Maclean March, a working class intellectual and the man who founded the Edinburgh People’s Festival in 1951.

Years before I had come across an essay Hamish had written on the significance of the Edinburgh People’s Festival in Andrew Croft’s book Weapons in the Struggle, and it was a real eye-opener for me.

So, a group of us decided to organise a one-off event to commemorate Hamish and his contribution to our struggle. We opted to have it at the Jack Kane Centre in Craigmillar for several reasons. One, Councillor Jack Kane had been the original Chairman of the EPF back in the 1950’s. Two, Craigmillar, on the city’s southern outskirts is Edinburgh’s poorest district and the Edinburgh Festival itself never went beyond EH1. We also had good community activists in the area we could rely on to publicise and promote the show. Things just escalated from there.

I guess looking back we recognised the importance of the original People’s Festival in acting as a foil or critique of the Edinburgh Festival itself. It has never really been designed for the majority of the city’s people. Ticket prices are now disgracefully high. Local indigenous performers will find it difficult to find a stage or platform and are shunted away for the month.

Where does most of the support for the EPF come from?

We found our original support in Craigmillar where we quickly got the backing of lots of local community groups, like the Craigmillar Artspace. We also learned quick lessons. We put on Bill Douglas’s film, My Ain Folk in the Newcraighall Miners’ Welfare without realising that, although people dearly loved Bill, they felt his depiction of their village rather dismal. Nonetheless the area is proud to have produced such talented people. At the last count we have presented shows in 20 different communities throughout the city and Midlothian.

Beyond local support, the EPF has received backing from the organised active Left. Tommy Shepard, who runs The Stand Comedy Club has been a fantastic help. Support has also come from local playwrights Cecilia Grainger and Barry Fowler, and from many key artistic community development groups in Wester Hailes and North Edinburgh.

Local trade union branches have been key to our financial success. It has been their support that has enabled us to take performances to the local communities and always keep tickets at affordable prices. [We usually charge £2 when the performances and events are not entirely free]. We are indebted to Unison healthworkers, posties, railworkers, teachers, firefighters, railway workers and civil servants unions. They have been very generous, partly, as I remind them, because they haven’t been giving out much strike pay over the last eight years!

As a socialist, why do you see it important to promote popular culture?

Art and culture can be thoroughly inspiring and educational. In Gramsci’s writings you can see the blueprint which led the Italian Communist Party to have one million members in the early 1970’s.

My partner, Zillah and I, attended a festival in France in the late ‘80s organised by the French Trotskyist party Lutte Ouvrier (LO). We were amazed to see 30,000 people there in the grounds of a chateau just outside Paris being entertained and enjoying themselves on an array of attractions. Festivals like these are still common on the left in France, Italy and Spain, bringing together tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. It became clear to me that much of the mass support for socialism on the continent, came not so much through public and party meetings, but because of the wider cultural activities of the Communist Parties and groups like the LO.

The French Communist Party’s L’Humanite by all accounts attracts hundreds of thousands of people.

In Britain we have had Miners’ Galas, May Days, and more recently the Tolpuddle Martyrs celebration. In the 1980’s, when I was in the Militant we used to organise huge political and cultural events in the Royal Albert Hall, Alexandra Palace and the Wembley Arena with 8000 people. They were brilliant. I have to admit that I enjoyed those performances with groups like the Who, Billy Bragg, Red Wedge, Paul Weller and Skint Video more than the Conferences. Truth be told, I probably still do!

In your opinion, what have been the highlights of the EPF so far?

There are very many that spring to mind. Perhaps the earliest is the EPF’s ‘discovery’ of David Sneddon, who we found busking on Chambers Street. We got him to perform at the Jack Kane Centre that first year with his group, The Martians and people were really bowled over by him. A few weeks later, I remember, Alan McCombes phoned me and told me to switch on the TV. His daughters had been at the Jack Kane Centre and were telling him that David Sneddon had just won the BBC’s first Fame Academy! The press were all over us for photographs of him at his first public performance, in Craigmillar.

We also had Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson. We cheekily phoned her up and asked if she would perform at our show Bart Comes to the Simpsons. All the kids in Edinburgh are born at the Simpsons Maternity! She was terrific about the whole thing and the show was just a fantastic success.

We also took the comedian, Mark Thomas, and Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six into Saughton Prison for a show. Originally, it had been agreed that STV would film the event but the governor pulled the plug. The show went on without the cameras and the guys inside thought it was brilliant. They were all over Paddy Hill at the end. We have been back ‘inside’ just about every year since.

We had a line up in 2003 for a cultural debate, or ‘flyting’, which looking back was quite unequalled anywhere in Edinburgh since.

Whose Culture is it anyway? starred Paul Gudgeon, then Director of the Fringe, the irrepressible Richard Demarco, Tommy Shepard, actor Tam Dean Burn, Joy Hendry the publisher, Kevin Williamson, the late Angus Calder and Claire Fox from the Institute of Ideas. They were all going at it hell for leather with poor Sian Fiddimore from Wester Hailes desperately trying to keep it all in order.

Last year, we launched the first of what will become the Annual Hamish Henderson Memorial Talks. It was given by Hamish’s biographer, Timothy Neat. And that went very well, certainly one of our highlights – and I think our first sell out event!

The exhibition we mounted, in the Craigmillar Arts Space, telling the story of the Edinburgh People’s Festivals from 1951 is just excellent. It was subsequently shown last November at Wordpower’s Radical Book fair at the Out of the Blue Art Centre in Leith. It is currently on show at the Jack Kane Centre before it goes off on tour.

With trade union financial backing, we also organised a local Art Competition last year, with £1000 in prize money. This was a great success too and a foray into a new field for us.

Richard Demarco, one of the leading figures associated with the Edinburgh Fringe, has given the EPF considerable encouragement. Do you see this as a sign of wider recognition for the EPF?

Richard Demarco is the only person who has been to every Edinburgh Festival. He has been responsible for bringing over many artists to Edinburgh, including from Eastern Europe, when it was unfashionable to do so. Despite Demarco’s centrality to the Festival and the Fringe he has always been an outsider. He remains driven by a passion for the arts and his effervescence is infectious. He has given the EPF a helluva lot of encouragement. He made a typically passionate contribution to the debate we organised at Out of the Blue in August 2007, on the future of art in an independent Scotland. Elaine C. Smith also spoke in similar vein.

But the truth is the People’s Festival has been treated with complete disdain by the Edinburgh establishment and its media, including the local Evening News. Bourgeois commentators have turned their noses up at the popular culture we offer. Nevertheless, they have grudgingly been forced to recognise our innovative approach on a number of occasions.

The People’s Festival has begun to organise events outside the traditional Edinburgh Festival slot. Why did you decide to organise a celebration of the 90th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution for example?

People have often said that, even if with some exaggeration, that Edinburgh is a cultural desert outside the official Festival in August. The People’s Festival decided to ‘cash in’, if I dare utter the term, on the fact we are here the whole year round. And since we had grown considerably we felt that it was time to try and extend our activities beyond August.

The opportunity came then in 2007, with the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, an event I believe is the greatest of the twentieth century. Others in the People’s Festival saw the possibilities so I approached Trevor Griffiths, the scriptwriter for the film, Reds, and asked him to come up and celebrate the occasion with us. In the interview he did with me at the event in The Stand, Trevor explained that in fact he was the fifth person chosen by Warren Beattie to write the script. Beattie had bought the film rights to John Reed’s classic, Ten Days That Shook The World. Tommy Shepard offered us The Stand for the event on a night in October. The comedian, Paul Sneddon (aka Vladimir McTavish) and Alistair Hulett’s folk group, the Malkies, performed alongside the Oscar nominated Trevor Griffiths. It was quite a night!

We also worked with Edinburgh’s excellent Word Power bookshop to produce the pamphlet, What the Russian Revolution Means To Me. Word Power is are markable resource. Elaine Henry and Tarlochan Gupta-Aura do a great job in sustaining a radical bookshop, when most other left bookshops have disappeared.

The following January, the EPF took on the organisation of an alternative Burns Supper. For the previous decade, this responsibility had been successfully taken on by the SSA/SSP, but it was good to broaden it out. The radical and controversial Burns scholar, Patrick Scott Hogg, spoke, whilst comedian Bruce Morton performed. People even came from as far away as Dublin to attend that one – seeing it advertised on our website!

This January the EPF organised a very successful event to celebrate 250th anniversary of Robert Burns’ birth. Tell us how the contributors were chosen and what else has been planned this year for this anniversary?

We wanted to offer an even better Burns event than that held the previous year. At first we hoped we could get the noted Marxist literary critic and writer Terry Eagleton to speak, but he could not make it. John McAllion stepped in and spoke tremendously well about the link between Burns’ art and his radical commitment in the 1790’s. The ever popular, Vladimir McTavish provided the comedy, whilst we had great musical sessions from the young black American jazz player, William Young, and from Edinburgh’s rising singer songwriter, David Ferrard.

We have also received money from the Lipman Milliband Foundation to produce a pamphlet later this year, What Robert Burns Means To Me.

You have a particular interest in the Scottish artist, Alexander Naysmith. What plans have you for the EPF to bring Naysmith to people’s attention?

Alexander Naysmith is known to everyone but they perhaps don’t realise it, he painted the most famous portrait of Burns. Like Burns, Naysmith was a radical and was blacklisted for his views. He began life as an apprentice coach painter in the Grassmarket before becoming a very successful portrait artist, possibly Scotland’s best, studying under Allan Ramsay, and working in Paris and Milan. But the big mystery about Naysmith is why he suddenly changed to landscape painting apparently at the height of his career. None of the art books will say why, but I know why and actually so do they. It was his politics. His wealthy patrons refused to give him any commissions because he made no secret of his radical republican views. He talked with great passion on the American and French Revolutions during the long portrait sittings. So, under advice from no less a figure than his close friend and ally Robert Burns he took up landscape painting instead. He rose to equal heights in this genre too.

Naysmith was a close friend and collaborator of Burns and out lived the poet by 40 years. He was one of us. And I want the People’s Festival to recognise one of Edinburgh’s people, to organise an exhibition, this August, in the Craigmillar Arts Space, with Naysmith’s portrait of Burns at its centre. We want to make Naysmith’s work and life more widely known. We display work by new artists inspired by him.

Angus Calder is another important writer, who has recently died, associated with Edinburgh. Are there any plans to organise an event celebrating Angus?

There was recently a memorial event for Angus, which I was unable to attend. Angus made many contributions to history and culture and was himself an award-winning poet. He was a member of the SSP and I got to know him quite well. He was a generous and strong supporter of the People’s Festival. I can still remember his contribution at The Flyting we organised in Wester Hailes in 2003. The idea was to revive the great Scottish tradition of cultural polemic, much associated with Hugh MacDiarmid and others, once again largely centred on this city.

The EPF would like to work with others to get more commemorative events organised. We don’t want to take responsibility for everything and I think that’s the best way forward with Angus’s work.

Recently Patrick Scott Hogg asked us if we could organise something to celebrate the great Scottish radical, Thomas Muir. The EPF thought it would be more appropriate that this was done in a West of Scotland setting.

One of Edinburgh’s most controversial figures has been James Connolly. Do you see the EPF trying to reclaim this great socialist republican for Edinburgh?

One of the members of our Committee is Jim Slaven who is well known in the city as organiser of the James Connolly Society. Jim played a key role, in the face of strong opposition, in trying to get Connolly’s legacy recognised in this city. Last August, we hoped to get Terry Eagleton up to speak. This may still happen.

However, in June, Jim was successful in getting the City of Edinburgh Council to organise a one-day event, to coincide with Connolly’s birthday. The event, Over the Water, had speakers from Ireland and Scotland. This June, the EPF hopes to organise a Connolly event in the evening, after the day’s official events. Connolly is very much one of our people and we feel he should be supported by all on the Left especially.

What else has the EPF got organised for this coming year.

We have worked with others, particularly on the Trades Council, in re-establishing May Day in this city. Last year we had Aida Avila from Colombia, Sean Milne, the radical journalist, and Pat Arrowsmith, veteran CND activist, amongst others, as speakers. This year we have Mark Lyons, convenor of the UNITE branch at Grangemouth Refinery, Hilary Wainright, editor of Red Pepper and Matt Wrack from the FBU joining us. We hope to give pride of place to Aleida Guevara, Che Guevara’s daugher, in celebrating 50 years of the Cuban Revolution.

We are also putting on a 20 years after the Poll Tax exhibition, which will concentrate on the role local people and communities played here in defeating this hated measure. The fightback started in Edinburgh, and included such veterans of the struggle as Sadie Rooney, one-time Labour councillor for Prestonfield – until she saw sense!

We also hope to bring a piece of theatre from London’s West End would you believe. The EPF’s producer Barry Fowler is going down to attend the London premiere of Maggie’s End written by Ed Waugh and Trevor Wood in the Shaw Theatre. The play is about the reaction of mining communities in the North East of England to the announcement of Thatcher’s death. Just the job, eh!

It would be great if we could put this on as our first full theatrical production. Even better, if our showing of Maggie’s End coincided with Thatcher’s actual demise!

What event would you like more than any other to put on the EPF?

Along with the photographer, Craig Maclean, I have often discussed the possibility of putting on some free ‘Outdoor Cinema’. Craig and Rob Hoon (from Out of the Blue) have already experimented with projecting huge images on prominent city landmarks. I certainly think the EPF should remain ‘dangerous and challenging’. I like the idea of guerrilla cinema as agitprop!

Edinburgh People’s Festival website

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

—Voltaire

The government of the United States had a major problem. It was April 1917, and on the sixth day of that month, eager to get into the First World War, they declared war on Germany.

Their big problem was this.

Although the American government was up for a fight, the American public was steadfastly pacifist. They saw the war in Europe as just that, a European war, nothing for them to get themselves involved in. Something clearly had to be done to get the population of the United States into a more warlike frame of mind.

On April 13, 1917, president Woodrow Wilson set up the Committee for Public Information, or the Creel Commission as it came to be known. The commission was headed by George Creel, a well-known muckraking journalist, the other formal members being the secretaries of war, state and the navy.

With the Creel Commission’s arrival, modern wartime propaganda in the media age was born. Its aim was to turn pacifist America into a society thirsty for war, to make patriotism and hatred of all things German the noblest aim of every American citizen.

In this the Creel Commission was spectacularly successful. Within months of its formation the American public’s mind was filled with hatred for Germany, German immigrants, anything at all German.

How did the Creel Commission manage to engineer such a remarkable turnaround in public opinion in such a short timeframe?

Quite simply, the Creel Commission understood how to use the media that was available to them (radio, telegraph, films, newspapers, &c.), and harnessed it to change public opinion, with appeals to patriotism and a huge disinformation campaign.

Blatant lies about German soldiers murdering babies and hoisting them up on their bayonets were spread, lies supplied by the British intelligence services, whose stated aim was to control the thoughts of the world (or more specifically at that time the thoughts of the influential intellectual and political classes of the United States). These lies were so powerful that they still persist to this day.

The Creel Commission distributed pamphlets, urging the public to keep an eye open for German spies and recruited the then fledgling Hollywood film industry to produce luridly titled films, such as To Hell with the Kaiser, The Claws of the Hun and The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin.

The Four Minute Men

Telegraphs, cables, radio, all were employed to turn the American population against Germany and all things German, but Creel’s real master stroke was the creation of a group of orators who came to be known as The Four Minute Men.

June 5, 1917, was the date set when all males would have to register for the draft. Many feared a repeat of the draft riots of the Civil War (one of the causes of those riots being a provision whereby those able to afford three hundred dollars could pay a substitute to go and fight for them).

One month before draft registration George Creel unleashed the Four Minute Men on the American public. Their first subject was Universal Service by Selective Draft. In movie theatres the length and breadth of the United States a slide was shown announcing the appearance of the local Four Minute Man.

He would deliver a speech which was never longer than four minutes, a speech designed to stir patriotism and anti-German feeling in the audience.

Four Minute Men were usually local professional men possessed of good public speaking skills, and from May 12 to May 21, cinema audiences were harangued by 75,000 orators, promoting the idea hat in honour of future draftees, registration day should be treated as a festival of honour.

The Four Minute Men were spectacularly successful. On draft registration day, ten million men signed up, where only two months previously no one had wanted anything to do with a European war.

The Four Minute Men went on from this triumph to address their audiences on such topics as Why We Are Fighting and What Our Enemy Really Is. They spoke at lodge and labour union meetings, lumber camps and on Indian reservations.

They operated in 153 universities, there were even junior Four Minute Men who spoke in high schools. By the time the war was over they had given 755,190 speeches to a total of over 314 million Americans. They reached more than 11 million people a month and were the First World War’s most effective form of propaganda.

With the United States finally in the war, and with ever-growing rumblings of discontent and fears of revolution on the home front, the writing was on the wall for the German war effort.

When Germany finally surrendered in 1918, many people on both sides came to realise the huge part that propaganda and the Creel Commission had played in the German’s ultimate defeat, not least among them an Austrian corporal with a funny toothbrush moustache who was to learn the lessons of the Creel Commission well, indeed he was to learn them to devastating, truly devastating, effect.

Right up to the present day the lessons of the Creel Commission are evident whenever states have to convince their populations of the correctness of their decision to go to war, or their support for one side over another in some conflict in which they are not directly militarily involved.

Ruthless

In the very recent past we have seen the Israeli propaganda machine at its ruthless best, defending the Zionist state’s armed wing, the IDF, as it behaved in a manner which would have drawn admiring looks from any playground school bully.

Whenever Israel was challenged or in any way criticised on the enormity of its actions in Gaza, the stock answer on our television screens from a string of literate, media trained Israeli spokespersons was that Israel had the right to protect itself from rockets fired from Gaza.

The lack of questioning of the Israeli government’s party line by a supposedly free media in so-called Western democracies shames those newspapers, radio and TV stations which failed to do so. No reporters were allowed into Gaza and in the hugely compliant mainstream western media, few even bothered to ask the questions, What have you got to hide? or even, But why are Hamas firing rockets into Israel?

Barely anyone connected to the mainstream media explored or attempted to explain the history of the Palestinian conflict, and there was very little mention of the fact that since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 they have mounted what in mediaeval times would have been called a siege of that city.

And while many may disagree with Hamas they are the democratically elected ruling party in Gaza.

Shamefully biased

While there was no chance of Israel losing militarily, there was even less chance of them losing the propaganda war in the west, thanks to the shamefully biased coverage that the savage attack on Gaza received from the compliant BBC and western news channels and newspapers. (I consciously use the word attack and not war, because war hints at some level of comparable military ability.)

No one, however, should really be surprised by the BBC’s compliance. Its attitude toward the Palestinians during the attack was augmented soon after by its shocking and disgusting refusal to broadcast the aid appeal for Gaza, which brought it condemnation from all sides. The BBC pleaded protection of its independence and impartiality, but the corporation is not now, and never has been, a neutral organisation.

Even in its early days, in 1926, during the general strike, it would not allow Ramsay MacDonald the right of reply to Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin. Lord Reith, the BBC’s first director, outwardly gave the impression that he was keen to defend the corporation’s independence and impartiality from the intrusion of the state, but in reality he was prepared to block any views being aired which did not chime with those of Baldwin’s Tory government.

Bearing this in mind, the shockingly biased reporting we viewed on our screens should not leave anyone open-mouthed with astonishment. If a crude rocket fired from Gaza fell on an empty school in Israel, this would receive equal or better coverage than the fact that weapons using the latest technology were falling on occupied buildings filled with real people in Gaza.

Propaganda, it would appear, is not just about stirring up patriotic feelings and creating hatred for the enemy, it can also work at a very effective level for the state by promoting one side’s view in a conflict while largely ignoring the other’s. It can also be a powerful manipulator of perception by what it chooses to omit to tell us.

Not that Gaza is the only example of state propaganda at work in recent times. In the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 we were assured that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction; there were sexed up dossiers designed to scare us; the Iraqi people deserved democracy and not some tyrant ruling over them; and that we were just the people to deliver that democracy to them.

Of course Saddam Hussein was an evil tyrant, but he did not officially become so in the eyes of the West until he invaded Kuwait and threatened the flow of oil to the west. Up to that point he had been a puppet of the west, had even been armed by them, basically allowed to do what he wanted in his own little fiefdom.

When he gassed the Kurds at Halabja in 1988 it didn’t cause too much of a stir in the western media, but once he stepped out of his little box and into Kuwait he became the devil incarnate. Following the first Gulf War there followed a long period leading up to the second, in which sanctions and propaganda were the weapons of choice.

Fever pitch

In the year leading up to the invasion in 2003, the propaganda reached fever pitch. The gassing of the Kurds at Halabja went from an event which had been largely ignored and became a crime against humanity, and the alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction was high on the agenda as a reason for invasion as Saddam was demonised by his former friends.

Sexed up dossiers flew in the face of the evidence of the weapons inspectors who had quietly but effectively been disarming Iraq since the end of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. The propaganda machine went into overdrive, and yet, it didn’t quite succeed, as millions took to the streets around the world to demonstrate against and oppose the planned invasion.

But they went and did it anyway (which is fair comment on the kind of democracy that we live in, and by extension also the one which was planned for Iraq). Of course, no weapons of mass destruction were found, but Saddam was overthrown and Iraq got its democratic government. Oh, yes, and western companies did rather well out of the reconstruction of Iraq.

However, the fact that so many people opposed the war in Iraq demonstrates that even the most vehement state propaganda cannot fool all of the people all of the time. And despite the age of the embedded war reporter being upon us, where reporters are given guided tours of the battlefield rather than roaming free to report what they see, still the truth of the horrors of war, and the things done in our name, occasionally seeps through.

Remember the pictures from Abu Graibh of the torture taking place there? Or the iconic picture of the little Vietnamese girl horribly burned by napalm fleeing her village? Or Seymour Hersh’s uncovering of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam?

Hersh was not actually in Vietnam, but uncovered the story by following a trail of rumour and stories around the United States. Which can only leave you wondering what the huge press corp actually in Vietnam were doing to fill in their time.

Even now, we are living through a time of war time propaganda, as our liberties are curtailed and the state places us all under increasing surveillance, all necessary, we are told, if we are to win the War on Terror.

As socialists, we understand that to win the current war on terror is actually quite easy, it’s just a matter of stopping invading other countries to plunder their resources. By making others feel more secure we thus increase our own security, it’s that simple. Resources thus saved could be used to fight the real wars on terror, such as the terror of the elderly, living on pittance pensions, having to choose between eating or heating their homes in winter.

However, I digress.

From the Creel Commission to the War on Terror, state wartime propaganda has tried, through various mechanisms and with varying degrees of success, to unite populations behind the state’s view.

Ironically, however, a side effect of the creation of the Creel Commission was to have devastating consequences for the left in the United States.

During the First World War, in the States, nearly nine million people worked in war industries and a further four million were in the armed forces. When the war ended, economic difficulties and labour unrest rose to the surface as war industries were left without contracts, leading to many being made redundant.

There were two main union/socialist groups in the United States at that time—The Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW or Wobblies), led by Bill Haywood, and the Socialist Party, led by Eugene Debs.

The Russian Revolution was still fresh in many minds and there was a widespread paranoia regarding anarchists, communists, socialists and dissidents. Following a string of bombings by anarchists, America was beset by fear, in what was to become known as the Red Scare.

Because the IWW and the Socialist Party had both been outspoken objectors to the war, this made them unpatriotic in the minds of much of the American population, and to be even loosely associated with them would arouse suspicion.

A shipyard strike followed by a general strike in Seattle in 1919 was wrongly attributed to the IWW. Charges that they were inciting revolution were levelled against them. Newspaper headlines across the country urged that the strike be put down. The mayor of Seattle guaranteed the city’s safety by announcing that 1500 police and the same number of troops were available to him to break the strike. The strikers, fearing they couldn’t succeed, and might damage the labour movement, called off the strike.

Demonised

All strikes in the next six months were demonised in the press as plots to establish communism, conspiracies against the government and crimes against society.

May Day rallies in 1919 in Boston, New York and Cleveland ended in riots and on June 2 another multi-state bomb plot was uncovered, all leading to an increase in tension, in which workers who went on strike were seen as enemies and fair game for persecution.

The Boston Police went on strike in September, as did the steel workers in a nationwide strike a few weeks later. The Boston police were sacked and replaced, and the steel strike ended without the workers getting any of their demands.

Strikers were branded red and unpatriotic as a general state of hysteria swept the nation. Colleges were seen as hotbeds of revolution and current or prior membership of a leftist organisation led to many secondary school teachers being dismissed.

The Justice Department formed the General Intelligence (or anti-radical) Division of the Bureau of Investigation. It compiled 200,000 cards in a filing system detailing radical organisations, individuals and case histories nationwide.

Thousands of alleged radicals were deported or imprisoned. Counsel was often denied, they were not allowed contact with the outside world and they were often beaten and held in inhumane conditions. (So, Guantanamo was nothing new in America’s history!)

On January 2, 1920, in 33 cities across the United States, more than 4000 supposed radicals were arrested. The New York legislature expelled five socialist assemblymen and 32 states passed laws making it illegal to fly the red flag.

Eventually, saner heads prevailed. Twelve eminent lawyers published a report detailing and condemning the Justice Department’s abuse of civil liberties. The decision to bar the socialist assemblymen was treated with disgust by newspapers and many prominent politicians of the day.

Newspapers came out against proposed anti-sedition bills, in which they saw the seeds of censorship, and business leaders realised that deporting immigrants (many of whom were wrongly branded communist) was leading to the loss of cheap labour. Finally, the Red Scare fizzled out.

Before it did so, however, the propaganda techniques created by the Creel Commission in wartime had extended its tentacles into peace time and dealt a major blow to the left in the United States.

It also gave birth to the modern day public relations business which, with its agenda of controlling the public mind, has never looked kindly on the left, neither in peace time nor in time of war. But it has never been able to quite kill the left off, either.

It should not be forgotten that around the time the Creel Commission was inciting a pacifist population to war that, on the other side of the Atlantic, John McLean stood in the dock of the High Court in Edinburgh on May 9, 1918, charged with incitement to mutiny and sedition, and uttered the unforgettable words, I stand here, then, not as the accused, but as the accuser of capitalism, dripping with blood from head to foot.

State propaganda may commit vast resources to induce their populations to approve of their military ventures, but by putting a socialist perspective on the facts we can always see through the lies and deceptions and shine a light on their darkness.