> On Jan 15, 2025, at 8:26 AM, Marv Gandall via groups.io
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> [Edited Message Follows]
> On Tue, Jan 14, 2025 at 05:51 PM, Mark Baugher wrote:
> ...the Ukrainian working class will be much worse off under Russian
> domination from a successful invasion.
> How so, Mark? Are Ukrainian oligarchs and mutinational corporations from the
> NATO countries less inclined to exploit the country's labour force and its
> other resources than Russian oligarchs? What evidence is there, for example,
> that workers in the embattled Donbas were better off when it was controlled
> from Kiev and its proxies rather than from Moscow and its proxies? Has the
> class independence of the workers on either side been strengthened by taking
> up arms against the other?
> Seems to me these are the questions at the heart of the debate.
James P. Cannon has been a big influence on me since I was 19. He was a former
IWW syndicalist, left wing Socialist Party of America member, founding leader
of the US communist parties of the 1920s, and founder of US American Trotskyism
(https://www.perlego.com/book/2382829/james-p-cannon-and-the-origins-of-the-american-revolutionary-left-18901928-pdf).
He was both product and producer of the US revolutionary left. Marv knows this.
Cannon thought civil liberties were essential to US working-class struggle:
Open and public operation, free speech and assembly and other rights uplifted
the political sophistication of the working class, in general, and
working-class organization, in particular. It is no irony that Cannon was
imprisoned by the US government for speaking against US entry into World War
II: He knew that capitalist governments, when threatened, quickly rescind those
liberties, and he helped to create the International Labor Defense to get
wobblies, socialist, and communists out of jails and prisons in the wake of the
post-WWI Palmer Raids. Cannon knew the costs of not having open operation. As a
leader of the Communist Party of America, he was charged with pulling together
into a single organization the many US language sections such as Finnish,
Yiddish, Italian, etc. Most of these organizations voted in the fledgling US
communist groups to stay underground - like in the old country and like the
Bolsheviks, as if it were a choice. Cannon's genius was to get inside each of
the language federation to find people who disagreed with the leadership and
favored open and public operation of the revolutionary party.
That's a long-winded way to get to my point: I think Cannon would favor workers
fighting the totalitarian invader at the borders rather than at their front
doors in the middle of the night.
Mark
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