Free Leonard Peltier
By Nick Estes

March 5, 2023

Source: Jacobin


The way Leonard Peltier tells it, he was a criminal the day he was born — but not by choice. The seventy-eight-year-old Anishinaabe and Dakota elder says his “aboriginal sin” was being born Indian in a country founded on Indians’ forced disappearance.

Recent investigations by the US Department of the Interior into the federal Indian boarding school system have confirmed Peltier’s version of history and what Native people have been saying for generations: that the boarding system was a horrific, sprawling network, encompassing more than four hundred schools across thirty-seven states or then-territories and targeting countless Native children. For more than 150 years, government officials stole Native children from their families, and many never returned home. Federal agents punished, and sometimes imprisoned, recalcitrant parents for keeping their children away from schools where their languages, their sense of self, and sometimes their very lives were taken from them. The child removal policy aimed to destroy Native families and weaken resistance to land seizures.

Peltier was nine years old when a government agent snatched him and his sisters away from their grandmother and placed them at the Wahpeton Boarding School in North Dakota. He remembers his grandmother crying, barely understanding the words of the person taking her grandchildren. He recalls parents singing “that way they do when someone has passed” as their children were loaded onto buses. “Maybe that day was my introduction to this destiny I did not choose,” Peltier wrote last year about his harrowing first day of boarding school. That episode, which he called “one of horror,” has haunted Peltier for life.

Last month marked Peltier’s forty-eighth year behind bars, locked away in a federal penitentiary in Florida, far from his family and homelands, and serving two consecutive life sentences for killing two FBI agents on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in June 1975, a crime he says he did not commit. His supporters consider his life of incarceration a collective punishment for indigenous people’s long history of defiance against US government policies. He is the longest-held indigenous political prisoner in the United States.

A nearly five-decade-long campaign to free Peltier has drawn the support of millions, including many Native nations, politicians, activists, celebrities, and world leaders. In the 1980s, more than seventeen million Soviet citizens sent petitions to Washington calling for Peltier’s release. Their government granted him political asylum and sent him a physician to examine his ailing eyes. The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, where Peltier is enrolled, has urged President Joe Biden to free its elderly citizen and has prepared for his return home. Even a former federal prosecutor who helped keep Peltier in prison has petitioned for his clemency. Last year, United Nations experts recommended Peltier’s immediate release after finding that his imprisonment was so excessive it amounted to arbitrary detention.

Despite all appeals, the FBI remains the most outspoken opponent of freeing Peltier. “Retribution seems to have emerged as the primary if not sole reason” for Peltier’s continued imprisonment, Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI agent who was close to his case, wrote in a letter to Biden last December urging Peltier’s release. She called the FBI’s near half-century campaign an “emotion-driven ‘FBI family’ vendetta” against Peltier and the American Indian Movement.

Leonard Peltier, AIM, and the Fight for Native Rights

Born in 1944, Peltier joined the American Indian Movement (AIM) during the group’s heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. AIM had been formed in 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, partly to end Native family separation and police violence. Two studies from 1969 to 1974 found that 25 to 35 percent of all Native children had been separated from their families and placed into institutions, foster care, or adoptive families. Many of AIM’s founders, like Peltier, had survived boarding schools only to face racism and inner-city poverty, incarceration, or the threat of having their families broken apart. AIM’s purpose was to build an alternative to this grim reality and to fight for Native rights.

Post–World War II Indian policy in the United States sought to formally end relations between the government and American Indian nations. “Termination policy” abolished more than one hundred tribes and removed millions of acres of land from federal trust status, opening them up for privatization and resource extraction. “Relocation policy” aimed to finish what termination had started by inducing hundreds of thousands of Native people to leave their reservations to find employment in far-off urban centers like Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Urban poverty and discrimination replaced rural, reservation poverty. These assimilationist policies gave rise to the Red Power movement in the 1960

s.

A wall on Alcatraz with the written message, “Indians Welcome.”

 (Loco Steve / Wikimedia Commons)

Urban Native activists began occupying abandoned federal property to dramatize their demands, famously taking over the Alcatraz prison island in San Francisco Bay in 1969. AIM followed suit, leading a nationwide takeover of Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) offices in 1970 in protest of discriminatory hiring practices that privileged white employees over American Indian employees. The actions helped transform AIM from a local Twin Cities, Minnesota organization into a national movement.

By 1972 AIM had chapters in every region of the United States, and the same year, Peltier formerly joined AIM. He followed the movement to Washington, DC, taking over BIA headquarters during the Trail of Broken Treaties, which sought to reestablish treaty-making and nation-to-nation relations with the United States.

That action drew the ire of tribal leaders in the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation, located largely in South Dakota, who banned AIM leaders from the reservation. Dissident Oglalas called on AIM to take a stand at Wounded Knee, abolish the tribal council, and reinstate the validity of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and the traditional Lakota government. They obliged — for seventy-one days, beginning on February 27, 1973, Oglalas and members of AIM occupied Wounded Knee, South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Following the highly publicized takeover, violence and terror gripped the Pine Ridge. Dick Wilson, the autocratic tribal president, led a vicious crackdown on reservation dissidents, who sought to overturn a corrupt tribal council system that catered to outside economic interests and the assimilationist policies of the BIA. AIM allied itself with the “traditionals,” those who defended Lakota spirituality, sovereignty, and treaty rights. Elders, like Celia and Harry Jumping Bull, called upon Peltier and AIM for protection from Wilson’s vigilante “goon squad” and the FBI, who were waging a low-intensity dirty war against AIM and its supporters in the aftermath of Wounded Knee.

Leonard Peltier’s 1972 headshot. (FBI via Wikimedia Commons)

Two months before the firefight that would change Peltier’s life — and following the 1974 acquittal of AIM leadership involved in the Wounded Knee takeover — the FBI issued an internal position paper entitled “FBI Paramilitary Operations in Indian Country,” a how-to plan for confronting AIM in a battlefield-type situation. The report referred to an area outside the village of Oglala as having bunkers that would require a paramilitary force to overtake. The month before the firefight, FBI personnel, mostly SWAT team members, swarmed the Pine Ridge Reservation. One FBI map of the Jumping Bull property identified “bunkers” that turned out to be crumbling root cellars. Tensions were high, and the FBI appeared ready for war.

On June 25, 1975, FBI agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler wore plain clothes and drove unmarked vehicles into the Jumping Bull ranch — outside Oglala on the western side of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation — while supposedly serving a warrant for assault and theft of a pair of cowboy boots. The agents never identified themselves, and a firefight erupted, catching a family with small children in the cross fire.

The shooting roused Peltier and his AIM group, which included Native youths, some of whom returned fire. One hundred fifty FBI agents, BIA police, and local vigilantes surrounded the property shortly after the shooting started. Peltier, his group, and local residents barely escaped through a barrage of bullets.

When the shooting stopped, three lay dead. The FBI claims Williams and Coler were shot in the head at close range. Joe Stuntz, a twenty-three-year-old member of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, was also killed. An unknown police agent shot Stuntz in the head. No one was ever prosecuted for his murder.

Meanwhile, Peltier and his group split up. Some of the youngsters returned to pay their respects at Stuntz’s funeral. Peltier and the others went underground. But the FBI, leading one the largest manhunts in its history, eventually caught up with them, eager to mete out its version of justice.

The Trials

The circumstances surrounding the June 1975 firefight — which a US Commission on Civil Rights investigation described as part of an FBI “reign of terror” against AIM and its supporters — were enough to convince an all-white jury in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1976 to acquit Peltier’s codefendants of murder charges on grounds of self-defense.

Bob Robideau and Dino Butler’s defense offered evidence of the FBI’s history of misconduct, which had recently been revealed during high-profile Senate hearings spearheaded by Idaho senator Frank Church. Church himself testified at the trial that “certain groups” — like the Communist Party, the Black Panthers, and the antiwar movement — “were targeted for surveillance [by the FBI] at least in part because of political attitudes.” AIM, too, faced its share of FBI harassment: disruptive informants, bad-jacketing campaigns, and paranoia-inducing surveillance.

The evidence presented was so damning that Peltier would be free today if he had been tried alongside Butler and Robideau. But he was prosecuted separately, with the government selecting a less sympathetic judge and less favorable venue (Fargo, North Dakota).

Peltier had fled after the shoot-out to Canada, where he was arrested and extradited to the United States based on false affidavits given by Myrtle Poor Bear, who claimed to be Peltier’s girlfriend at the time and an eyewitness to the agents’ killings. She was neither, nor had she ever met Peltier before his trial. Poor Bear later recanted her story, claiming she was coerced and threatened by FBI agents to provide false testimony. Other witnesses said FBI agents also threatened them or coerced their testimony.

FBI bullying of witnesses, however, was not allowed to be presented as evidence to the jury, nor was the climate of fear the FBI had created on the reservation. The prosecution withheld important ballistics evidence, it was later revealed, that could have been exculpatory. And one juror openly admitted to the court that she was “prejudiced against Indians” yet was allowed to remain on the jury.

In April 1977, the jury found Peltier guilty, and the judge sentenced him to two consecutive life sentences. “I have done nothing to feel guilty about,” Peltier told the judge. “The only thing I am guilty of and which I was convicted for was of being Chippewa and Sioux blood and for believing our sacred religion.”

On appeal, the government was forced to drop its theory that Peltier personally shot the agents due to lack of evidence. It instead pivoted to an accusation of aiding and abetting their murder. When asked whom Peltier was aiding and abetting, US Attorney Lynn Crooks answered, “whoever did the final shooting.” He added: “Perhaps aiding and abetting himself.”

Putting aside the absurdity of aiding and abetting oneself, Peltier could not have aided and abetted his codefendants, because aiding and abetting self-defense is not a crime. And according to the government’s own account, his codefendants were the only people close to the agents’ bodies during the firefight.

The theory upon which Peltier’s conviction now rests “is that he was guilty of murder simply because he was present with a weapon at the Reservation that day,” former US Attorney James Reynolds write in a 2021 letter to President Biden asking for Peltier’s clemency. Reynolds worked on Peltier’s prosecution and appeals cases, but believes today that his prosecution and continued incarceration “was and is unjust.” The prosecution was “not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense on the Pine Ridge Reservation.”

In a phone interview, Peltier told me that the facts of his case prove his innocence — but that the truth alone has not set him free.

Freedom for Peltier

Three days before the Jumping Bull shoot-out, the Church Committee decided to investigate FBI surveillance of AIM. But the decision was hushed up the day after the firefight. The International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee and Oglala members have been calling for a congressional investigation into the murders, rapes, and beatings that went uninvestigated or unsolved during that reign of terror.

According to Coleen Rowley, the former FBI agent, the bureau “indoctrinated” new agents at Quantico in the prosecution’s version of Peltier’s case in the 1980s. While FBI agents have restricted First Amendment rights, they made an exception for Peltier, she said, encouraging agents to write op-eds against his release and even marching in front of the White House during the final days of the Clinton administration to oppose a possible presidential pardon. Rowley is a rare dissenting voice as a retired FBI agent once close to Peltier’s case.

But there are more unanswered questions about Peltier’s case and uncertainty about his freedom. In a recent message to supporters, he spoke about his fear of never getting out of prison, or of only having a limited amount of time with his family before he leaves this world for the next.

February marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Wounded Knee occupation, but the wounds of the past have not been healed. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which aimed to reverse the Native family separation that took away Peltier and countless others, is on the chopping block at the Supreme Court. And the Biden administration has been silent about Peltier’s clemency application — his only legal chance at freedom.

“I live in the nation’s fastest-growing reservation in the United States,” Peltier once said about his predicament in federal prison.

But in a recent statement to supporters, Peltier expressed hope and encouraged them to teach their children “to plant a food forest or any plant that will provide for them in the future.”

“Plant a tree for me,” Peltier said.

The Ghost of Stalin Still Hasn’t Been Laid to Rest
Josef Stalin died 70 years ago today, having stamped his indelible mark upon the Soviet system. Stalin’s legacy continues to haunt the post-Soviet landscape, right up to the present war with Ukraine.

By Ronald Suny

March 5, 2023

Source: Jacobin


The event itself was quite banal — the dismal, solitary end of a life. Josef Stalin, at the time unarguably the most powerful man in the world, died alone seventy years ago today in his dacha, Kuntsevo, in the woods outside of Moscow.

He had been carousing the night before with his closest comrades — Lavrentiy Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and a few others. They had watched a film and drunk quite a bit, and Stalin saw them off early in the morning in a very good mood.

He retired to his office, where he slept on a couch with instructions not to be disturbed. There on March 5, 1953, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. A long, slow final agony brought his sanguinary reign to an end.
Stalin’s Legacy

The legacies of a great despot, however, do not die with the man but still haunt the country he shaped for a quarter of a century. The author of a transformative “revolution from above,” which turned a vast agricultural economy into an industrial power second only to the United States, Stalin saw himself as the heir of Vladimir Lenin, who had in October 1917 brought their party, the Bolsheviks (later Communists), to power in the largest country on the globe.

But Stalin was the architect of a system based on state terror that undermined the original aspirations of the revolutionaries of 1917 to create a socialist state anchored in the active participation of ordinary people through the soviets of workers, peasants, and soldiers. That first revolution was inspired by popular desires for democracy, in the socialist sense of empowerment of working people. Stalin’s second revolution was a desperate forced march into industrial modernity, driven by a leviathan police state that imagined itself to be the “vanguard of the proletariat.”

Western historians of the Soviet Union were divided between those who saw Stalinism as the inevitable outcome of Marxism, Leninism, or the utopian ambitions of Russian radicals, and those more doubtful about “iron laws of history,” who contextualized and historicized the degeneration of a popular revolution into a vicious despotism. Explanations for the rise of a second-level comrade of Lenin to supremacy ranged from Stalin’s personal drive for power to the opportunities for dictatorship (rather than democracy) offered by the backwardness of an overwhelmingly peasant society.

Stalin’s own mentor, Lenin, harbored serious reservations about the possibility of building a socialist society in Russia without the aid of successful socialist revolutions in the more developed West. He gambled that a seizure of power by militant Marxists in Russia, the “weakest link in the capitalist chain,” would propel workers in the aftermath of World War I to rise up and overthrow their own kings and capitalists.

But after a brief flurry of strikes, protests, and insurrections, Europe and the United States settled down into a new era of stabilized capitalism and bourgeois democracy. Soviet Russia was left isolated, and the Communists were forced to retreat into Lenin’s New Economic Policy or NEP (1921–28), a kind of state capitalism, and to make major concessions to the peasant majority of the population and the non-Russians of the new USSR.

After the death of Lenin in January 1924, Soviet Communists debated how to restore the devastated economy of the country, and the NEP seemed to work best as a cautious, moderate program of reconstruction. In the mid-1920s, Stalin and his close collaborator at the time, Nikolai Bukharin, banked on the productivity of the peasantry and promoted Lenin’s gradualist policy as the best road to build “socialism in one country.”

International revolution had receded as a possibility, except, perhaps, in colonized and semi-colonized countries. Even as Moscow’s usurpation of real sovereignty from the non-Russian republics made the Soviet Union more and more resemble an empire of a new type, the USSR saw itself — and acted abroad accordingly — as the major enemy of European imperialism.

In the period between the two world wars, the USSR was the source of inspiration for anti-colonial movements in what became known as the third world. The Communist International, which never managed in its thirty-four years to launch a single successful revolution anywhere in the world, nevertheless encouraged young radicals like China’s Mao Zedong or Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh to gnaw away at the sinews of colonialism and Western domination. Outlaws in their own lands, they were for better or worse disciples of Stalin.

Building the State

Of the Communist leaders in the Soviet Union, in sharp contrast to his nemesis Leon Trotsky, Stalin was the least interested in the internationalism of Lenin’s vision. His principal concern was the preservation and progress of the USSR — its industrial development, its unity, and its security.

He was first and foremost an étatist, a builder and promoter of the state, and his idea of the state was one in which centralized power, the elimination of dissent, and maximal security had been achieved. What was imagined in the West as totalitarianism was never actually reached. The “little screws,” ordinary people of whom Stalin spoke fondly and condescendingly, never completely succumbed to the will of the state. But Stalin’s aim was as close to totalitarianism as could be imagined.

To eliminate the economic power of the peasants, he forcefully, brutally drove them into collective farms, appropriated their grain, and caused famines from Ukraine to Kazakhstan. To discipline the intelligentsia, he terrorized any deviation of the official line, ending the avant-garde experimentation of the 1920s and enforcing a conservative conformity that combined realist style with romantic depiction of an idealized Soviet people. And to enhance his own power, he deployed the police to eliminate all who stood in his way, including most of the closest associates of Lenin — among them Bukharin.

The legacy of Stalin remains deeply contradictory. The country was industrialized and became more urban. Despite the purges that decimated the highest ranks of the military, he and his generals forged an armed force able to destroy the menace of fascism. Stalin led the Soviet Union to a victory that made the world safe for capitalism and liberal democracy.

However, in the Cold War competition with the West, he opted to set up Stalinist regimes in East and Central Europe, isolate East from West, and hold firmly onto an external empire as a buffer against his feared opponents in Europe. The USSR lost the Cold War, not in 1991, but already by 1953 as the United States rallied the major industrial powers into the anti-Soviet NATO alliance, economically and militarily far more powerful than the Soviet-led bloc.

The countries of the Warsaw Pact suffered through an unequal competition for half a century until an idealistic reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, attempted to reduce the chasm between the two blocs and surrendered the spoils of World War II for aid from the West that never came.

Distrusting the People

Stalin was a Bismarckian realist, a Machiavellian master of political power, who believed it was better to be feared than loved. For him, politics was war by other means. He did not trust his own people, especially those closest to him, who lived precarious lives until the day he died. He remained suspicious of their deviations and wavering lack of faith, and at the end of his life referred to his closest comrades as kittens lost without him.

And he did not trust the working people to whom the whole Soviet project was dedicated. He told various people that the masses had the “psychology of the herd” — they were “like sheep who would follow the leading ram wherever he might go.” That ram was the vanguard party, as well as its leader. To a relative he confided his belief that the common people needed a tsar, “a person they can worship and in whose name they can live and work.”

He believed that he understood the dynamics of history and society; he had learned them from his reading of Marx and Lenin. But from an early age he was convinced that the scientific sociology of Marxism had to be effectively taught to the masses, who would have difficulty advancing beyond their personal life experiences.

What kind of socialist was Stalin? Was the emancipatory message of Karl Marx destined to end up in the tyranny of one man and his obedient party? What had happened to the trust in the possibilities of empowering ordinary working people and making it possible for them to govern themselves in both the political and economic realms?

Such an original socialist idea, buried in Stalinist Russia, required a deep faith in the potential of human beings to respond to and learn from both experience and education and seize the opportunity to emancipate themselves from capitalist (and statist) exploitation and religious illusions. Like other political thinkers on the Left, Marx, Engels, and Lenin, whatever their occasional doubts and setbacks, were confident that human nature contained within it the possibilities of acquiring socialist consciousness. That positive evaluation of human potential is the opposite of how conservatives and reactionaries think of human nature.

The Sword of Justice

For those on the Right, humans are condemned by their brutish nature — their original sin, their aggressiveness and competitiveness, their acquisitiveness, greed, and individual self-interest — to live in realms of inequity and exploitation. Creating a good society will do little to make humans good, they claim. As the reactionary writer Joseph de Maistre eloquently summed up the philosophy of the Right, “In a word, the mass of the people counts for nothing in every political creation.”

Or, even more to the point:

All greatness, all power, and all subordination depend on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Take from the world this incomprehensible agent, and in that very instant order gives way to chaos; thrones collapse, and society disappears. . . . The sword of justice has no scabbard; it must always menace or strike.

In the pantheon of political thinkers and actors, Stalin was a man of the Right, deeply suspicious of his own subjects, convinced that there was no alternative to governing through coercion and satisfying the basest needs of the people.

And yet, when his state was severely threatened by the deadliest political movement in modern history, he relied on those “little screws,” and they sacrificed themselves for a cause that the dictator had sullied. Stalin emerged as a beacon around which to rally. Before being executed by Nazis, victims shouted, “Za rodinu. Za Stalina” (“For the Motherland. For Stalin”).

Initially, Stalin was shocked at Hitler’s decision to invade the USSR, but he soon set the tone for the amalgamation of Russian and Soviet patriotism as he portrayed the Soviet struggle as a global resistance to fascism and a war of liberation. As Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer argue:


Despite the losses, Stalin conveyed optimism, contrasting the Soviet cause, defending one’s native land, with German aims, an empire to be built, in Hitler’s own words, on “the extermination of the Slav peoples.”

Russian and non-Russian nationalisms fused with Soviet patriotism, as Jonathan Brunstedt’s work has shown. A pan-Soviet internationalist, even supra-ethnic, story of the patriotic unity of the Soviet people was generated during the war and prevailed into late Stalinism and afterward.
Rising Again

While the images on Soviet posters of radiant working-class and peasant heroes and heroines of diverse nations did not reflect the actual lives people led, they represented ideals and aspirations that inspired colossal sacrifices. Yes, ordinary Soviet people worshipped Stalin, whom they were prevented from really knowing, but his cultish self-presentation gave them strength and guidance. The regime itself may have been criminal and thuggish, but its representatives and representations visually, in poetry, in prose, in celebrations, and in songs resonated in their affective connections to protecting a homeland and building a new society.

Some months after Stalin’s coffin was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum in October 1961, the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko memorialized the event:


Slowly the coffin floated, grazing the fixed bayonets.
He also was mute- his embalmed fists,
just pretending to be dead, he watched from inside.
He wished to fix each pallbearer in his memory:
young recruits from Ryazan and Kursk,
so that later he might collect enough strength for a sortie,
rise from the grave, and reach these unreflecting youths.
He was scheming. Had merely dozed off.
And I, appealing to our government, petition them
to double, and treble, the sentries guarding this slab,
and stop Stalin from ever rising again
and, with Stalin, the past.

As Yevtushenko warned, Stalin’s phantom continues to stalk the Soviet and post-Soviet landscape, right up to the present war with Ukraine. The worst instincts of a dictator are on display in Vladimir Putin’s Russia: the overcentralization of power; the repression of dissent; the futile attempt to fool all of the people all of the time; and the search for security in expansion and isolation.

Mississippi Republicans Want Their Own Cops and Judges in Majority-Black Jackson

Black leaders compare the push to expand a state police force responsible for recent shootings to “apartheid.”

By Mike Ludwig

March 5, 2023

Z Articled
Source: TruthOut


Unable to seize power electorally in a city where more than 80 percent of residents are Black, Republicans in Mississippi are pushing legislation that would put the capital city of Jackson under the thumb of unelected judges and a notoriously aggressive state police force that answers to controversial state officials rather than local leaders.

The legislation is part of a package of bills that put Jackson City affairs under state control and rapidly expanded the state-run Capitol Police force, which is responsible for a rash of recent shootings that killed or injured Black residents and left families demanding answers. Community activists and the city’s firebrand progressive mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, describe the proposed state takeover with words like “racism,” “apartheid” and “power grab.”

Republican lawmakers, virtually all of them white, claim race has nothing to do with their proposals and they are only trying to help Jackson with a backlog of court cases and an understaffed police department. However, in a deeply Southern city with a long history of segregation, white flight and simmering tensions between Black city leaders and state politicians maneuvering to siphon off resources to whiter suburbs, politics are never so simple.

Mayor Lumumba says Republicans are exploiting their supermajority in the legislature to “undermine the self-determination” of residents living in a city with one of the largest Black demographics in the nation. Local critics say that’s par for the course in Mississippi, where the largest Black population of any state is governed by a legislature and state government dominated by white Republicans.

“These bills are an anti-democratic effort to reject the will of a majority of voters and those they elect into the hands of a few,” Lumumba said in a statement to Truthout. “Most are being drafted by lawmakers who live far outside the city limits of Jackson and have shown no interest in consulting with city leaders or residents on issues that will have a dramatic impact on their lives.”

Lawmakers from around the state spend half the year in session in Jackson, and they’ve routinely sparked power struggles with the city government since Jackson elected its first Black mayor in 1997. The latest uproar began with the recent passage of House Bill 1020, which would expand Jackson’s Capitol district and its Capitol Police force into surrounding neighborhoods that tend to be wealthier and home to bars, restaurants and the majority of Jackson’s white residents.

The expanded Capitol district would have its own court system with judges appointed by a white state Supreme Court justice, a proposal Mayor Lumumba and other residents says is a blatantly unconstitutional move to that would encourage racial profiling of Black residents. Activists say Republicans are essentially trying to create a “state-occupied, extrajudicial territory” controlled entirely by white state officials in one of the country’s Blackest cities.

After public outcry, Republicans in the State Senate drafted their own proposal. Instead of expanding the Capitol district, the Capitol Police force would be expanded and the entire city of Jackson put under its jurisdiction — on top of the existing local police force. The bill is written to give Mayor Lumumba, the local police department and the majority-Black city council no say in the matter. Rather than institute a new, unelected court, local courts would be temporarily stacked with five judges appointed not by Jackson’s elected officials or residents, but by Mississippi’s white and conservative-leaning chief justice.

Rukia Lumumba, executive director of the People’s Advocacy Institute and Mayor Lumumba’s sister, says any proposal to expand the Capitol Police would direct tax dollars toward racial profiling and heavy-handed police tactics rather than resources for public health and violence prevention that the community desperately needs. The attacks come as community groups and city leaders are building and seeking funding for non-carceral public safety initiatives, including a new Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery.

“It’s not just a system of apartheid, they are trying to bring back broken-windows policing and bring back stop-and-frisk policing,” Rukia Lumumba told Truthout in an interview. “Residents of Jackson do not have the ability to hold Capitol Police accountable.”

The Capitol Police’s role in the community shifted from patrolling government buildings to policing residents last summer after a new, tough-on-crime chief expanded patrols into neighborhoods and added “street suppression” units, according to local reports. Instead of local officials, the Capitol Police answer to Mississippi Department of Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell, who has worked with Republican leaders to beef up drug enforcement in Jackson and staunchly defended state officers and troopers accused of extreme violence.

Rukia Lumumba said the Capitol Police are perceived to act as if all Jackson residents are “armed and dangerous” and routinely profile people for drug possession based on their age, skin color and even what kind of car they drive. Mississippi has some of the nation’s harshest drug laws and the second-highest rate of incarceration next to Louisiana, all while leading the nation in rates of poverty and child hunger.

“The Capitol Police have had a very contentious relationship with residents in Jackson. Within the past 10 months, they’ve shot eight people, killing one, Mr. Jaylen Lewis, a young person,” Rukia Lumumba said. “They’ve also shot Ms. Latasha Smith, who was sitting in her apartment complex when a stray Capitol Police bullet came through and is still lodged in her arm.”

Rukia Lumumba said the victims and other residents are still waiting for answers and accountability. At a community meeting last September following the death of Lewis, a 25-year-old Black man, Tindell denied claims that his officers’ use of force is grounded in racial bias.

“I’m going to refute any undertones that this is just going after Black people … don’t tell me I’m racist,” Tindell said, adding that his officers would continue stopping crime “the right way.”

Supporters of more policing point to an alarming spike in homicides in 2021, when Jackson, like many other cities, saw an increase in gun violence fueled by pandemic isolation and deep economic desperation. Still, property crimes dropped by double digits the same year, and the homicide rate dropped by 13 percent in 2022. Rukia Lumumba said crime among young people has also plummeted since 2013, thanks in part to community activism and organizing.

Similar community-based efforts sustained residents and received international praise during an infrastructure crisis in 2021 that left people in Jackson without running water for months. However, the Jackson community gets little credit from statewide Republicans, who routinely blame the city’s struggles on its elected leaders as they seek to intervene. The Lumumbas point the finger right back.

“It’s absolutely not a failure of Black leadership and residents’ care and concern and engagement in the process to fix it,” Rukia Lumumba said, adding that she believes reported crime rates have been inflated for political reasons. “It is the willful diversion of wealth from this city and the creation of falsehoods and narratives that paint our city as ungovernable, that paint our city as the wild west of violence.”

Other bills under consideration in Mississippi’s legislature would dilute the Jackson City government’s control over sales tax revenue and its drinking water system, which became a national symbol of divestment and environmental racism last year when flooding collapsed the system and sparked a months-long crisis that pitted Chokwe Lumumba against the state’s Republican governor. Mayor Lumumba secured nearly $800 million in federal and other aid to fix the system, but Republicans introduced legislation to create a regional water authority that opponents say would allow state appointees to seize Jackson’s assets.

“Because they can’t believe that his young Black man from the this predominantly Black city was able to go over their heads and get this money,” Rukia Lumumba said of her brother.

The New Right Wants Activist Judges to Rule, Not the People

Liberal “anti-populists” often portray grassroots democracy as more a threat than an asset. But as reactionaries turn to judges to win their political battles for them, it’s time the Left got serious about putting power in the hands of the majority.

People wait in line outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on February 21, 2023. (Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images)


BYMICHAEL WILKINSON
03.05.2023
Jacobin

Interviewed in 1991, after more than a decade of Republican rule, liberal legal scholar Ronald Dworkin was asked whether he feared that, if the political tide changed, his model of an activist supreme court might be wielded by conservatives to strike down progressive legislation. Dworkin’s answer was revealing: yes, he had “nightmares” that it could happen; that placing his faith in the judiciary could be “betting on the wrong horse.”

He conceded that if this were to happen, it would weaken his faith in the principle of a powerful court overseeing a liberal interpretation of the constitution. But, he added, he wouldn’t be around to see that. And, he concluded, it was a gamble he was willing to take, because it was a structure worth preserving. He had elaborated this structure in his work in painstaking detail, advocating a principle of integrity centered on a “moral reading” of the constitution, which would be developed through the rulings of Herculean (liberal) judges.

Dworkin’s interviewer, human rights lawyer and academic Conor Gearty, then a strong opponent of judicial review, highlighted the precariousness of Dworkin’s apparently principled position in a system where political and judicial power were intertwined. He joked that perhaps Dworkin was willing to take the gamble in the hope he would be appointed to the Supreme Court by a future Democrat, President Mario Cuomo (father of the recent governor of New York). Gearty noted how grim prospects were from a progressive perspective: the celebrated constitutional right to abortion, protected since 1973 in Roe v. Wade, was in danger of being abolished over the next twelve months, the US Supreme Court having moved a long way from the liberal Warren Court of the 1950s and 1960s, and by the early 1990s having the numbers to overrule Roe.

Gearty was ahead of himself. In the ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a year after his interview with Dworkin, the Supreme Court upheld the essentials of Roe and established that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protected a woman’s right to an abortion prior to fetal viability. But fast forward thirty years, and in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, decided in June last year after a controversial leak of the draft opinion, the court finally overturned Roe (as well as Planned Parenthood v. Casey).

With the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, controversially nominated by Donald Trump just before the 2020 presidential election, the ideological shift of the court had been cemented. But no legislation needed to be struck down for this conservative coup to take effect. Social conservatives had already passed legislation against abortion in several states, in anticipation of the ruling by a newly configured court. A challenge to one of these trigger laws, in Mississippi, had led to the ruling in Dobbs. With a majority of justices holding that there is no constitutional right to abortion, the green light was given to state legislation banning it. Doubts were also cast over the status of other rulings protecting constitutional rights, such as the right to same-sex marriage.

Had Dworkin’s worst nightmare come to pass? Not exactly, or, at least, not yet. The fear expressed in his 1991 interview was about progressive majorities being thwarted by conservative justices; Dobbs merely returned the issue to the states via a new, but in other ways traditional, interpretation of the Constitution. Some states have since adopted or begun to enforce laws banning abortion; but others have expanded abortion rights and amended state constitutions to include them, including California and Michigan. In Vermont, voters overwhelmingly chose to approve, by referendum, an amendment to guarantee sexual and reproductive freedoms, including the right to abortion. The backlash against Dobbs may well have politically benefitted the Democratic Party, boosting support for Biden and the Democrats in recent midterms.
Will of the Majority?

But the current situation is even more unsettling than the nightmares envisaged by Dworkin in 1991. Back then, the mainstream debate in Anglo-American constitutional theory took place on the terrain of the justification of constitutional review of legislation and over the so-called counter-majoritarian dilemma: Why should the judicial branch be entitled to overrule the will of the majority? It pitted scholars such as Dworkin against those keen to defend majoritarian democracy as represented by Westminster-style parliamentary regimes.

As a matter of US constitutional law, however, Dworkin’s antagonists were elsewhere. The justices spearheading the conservative turn of the Supreme Court, such as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and now Barrett, are associated with “originalism,” the belief that the constitution should be interpreted as originally intended. In the interview with Gearty (as well as in his broader body of writing), Dworkin explicitly dismissed that theory, by arguing that it doesn’t answer, but merely defers, the key question: What is the best way of interpreting that intention given all the possible ways it could be understood?

That ambiguity, and the flexibility of meaning of the original text, allowed originalism to be taken up by an array of constitutional scholars, including progressives who argued that the meaning evolves to adapt to new circumstances. Some even proposed hybrids of originalism and living constitutionalism under the rubric of “living originalism.” While diverse in detail, a feature of these debates over constitutional interpretation was that the political radicalism of originalists, as well as of their adversaries, was limited by the authority vested in the constitution itself. To the counter-majoritarian problem, these scholars had an answer unavailable to Dworkin: the founding constitutional text is underscored by the authority of “the people,” whether dead or living.

The terms of the debate began to change after September 11, 2001, when it transpired that executive power posed the real threat to civil and political liberties, as waves of emergency measures were enacted, ostensibly in response to terrorist threats concurrent with the spread of the global “war on terror.” Measures would be pushed through with little or no oversight or parliamentary scrutiny, and often by liberal governments: from torture and drone attacks, to surveillance and detention without trial, liberties were traded off for security. The massive “infrastructure of fear” created in the wake of 9/11 survived, even as the threat dissipated. This was no tyranny of a legislative majority; it was a power grab by the executive.
New Right Project

During the most recent decade, liberals (in Europe as well as the United States) have been tormented by a more troubling prospect than a piece of rogue legislation or a discrete legal transgression: the fear that conservative populists will rip up the basic rules of the game in alliance with judicial elites, and with the vast administrative state built up over the previous decades at their disposal. It is against this background that a new brand of conservatism is emerging, which rejects fidelity to the constitution and, ironically, appropriates Dworkin’s work to circumvent it.

This New Right project speaks the language of judicial deference while embracing the tremendous power and governing apparatus of the administrative state. Unfettered by any allegiance to the constitutional text, or to the principle of popular sovereignty underwriting constitutional authority, it argues for a much more aggressive and unapologetic conservative agenda. It is based, like Dworkin’s project, on political morality, but it is directed in polar opposition to his liberal worldview and without any constraints of integrity.


This new constitutional theory is based not on a reading of the constitutional text at all, but on the principles of natural law as declared by medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas. It abandons the liberal emphasis on the equal protection of rights in favor of government directed toward the “common good.” But it doesn’t go far in saying what that means — beyond stipulating the rejection of progressive rights such as same-sex marriage and freedom of speech and dismissing libertarian rights to unfettered use of individual property. And it doesn’t advocate any project of explicit constitutional change to get there.

While confused as constitutional theory, politically, the idea of the New Right appears to be to unite a “post-liberal” bloc in the United States, galvanizing those alienated from liberal elites and seizing on the widespread discontent with the vast inequalities in American society (and replicated elsewhere). In this way it has attracted support beyond the conservative right. But it offers up no actual political economy to substitute for neoliberalism or to redress its various social deficits. Should it therefore be ignored, or dismissed because of its obvious opportunism?

A closer look suggests that the rub lies elsewhere. In the new battle lines being drawn, the terrain has shifted from the evergreen debate about the legitimacy of judicial review to the situational one of justifying unbound executive power. But “situational,” here, is given the broadest meaning; the moment of exception is not restricted to any imminent threat. The judicial power that Dworkin’s model appeared to celebrate is now to be manipulated to sanction dramatic and indefinite executive intervention, including the dictatorial powers necessary to restore social order and revitalize the common good. A conservative elite will replace the liberal elitism of the past decades, unleash itself from rhetorical ties to the existing settlement and overturn a century of mistaken constitutional practice.

How is this to be achieved? The New Right dismisses appeals to popular sovereignty, as well as day-to-day democratic legitimacy. It gives democracy no particular value. Deference to the legislature is urged only to the extent necessary to ensure the stability of the political settlement. But stability, it turns out, is highly subjective. In an emergency situation, it is trumped by considerations of natural law.

In an unsettling echo of German jurist Carl Schmitt, the exception justifies the use of extraordinary power to return to the norm, only the norm is now said to have been extinguished a century ago with the interwar break from classical jurisprudence and buried with the postwar progressivism that followed. Stability, though valued by conservatives, must not become fetishized. The true end of government is to secure the natural law as understood in Catholic social doctrine; institutional hurdles must give way.
Constitutional Renewal?

If the hope is that the end justifies the means, the “bet” taken by the New Right appears quite different from the originalists’ one — and a far heftier gamble. But why take the bet at all? Conservatives have largely been able to pursue their projects or at least frustrate those of their opponents using the vehicles of the Constitution and the existing institutions of power. It was the electoral college that put Trump into the White House, not the popular vote.

The New Right suggests no program of democratic or constitutional renewal. As Corey Robin noted in the lead up to the 2020 presidential elections, “Conservatism has ceased to be a political project capable of creating hegemony through majoritarian means.” And despite the appropriation of liberalism’s jurisprudential hero, neither will it be able to do so through judicial fiat alone. If not through constitutional or through majoritarian means, then how? From the perspective of this new movement, Dworkin’s mistake was not to bet on Hercules, but to put Hercules in the wrong role. Its remaining hope appears to lie with an authoritarian figure of Herculean power to restore the natural order of things in a period of deep crisis for the US system of constitutional government. Are all bets off?

Liberals themselves have long given up pushing for a vibrant democracy or, like Dworkin, they have an awkward relationship with it; often preferring to double-down on constrained versions of democracy in their rhetorical battles against populism. It has been critical legal scholars in the United States who have consistently argued that the Constitution was never meant to install a democracy (an argument flatly rejected by liberals like Dworkin) and who now insist that the United States needs radical constitutional renewal in order to overturn political elitism and embrace majoritarianism and grassroots democracy.

In his seminal work in jurisprudence, Dworkin projected the constitutional contest as a two-horse race, between Court and Congress. He missed the threat of expanding executive power. But in seeing only a contest between institutional authorities, he also missed the diminishing status of democracy in practice. He was betting not only on the wrong horse, but on the wrong race.

CONTRIBUTOR
Michael Wilkinson is a professor of law at the London School of Economics and author of Authoritarian Liberalism and the Transformation of Modern Europe.

We Need to End Colonialism, Not Defend ‘Jewish Democracy’

The current protest movement in Israel is an internal Zionist dispute that seeks to preserve "democracy" without challenging settler colonialism, apartheid, and Jewish supremacy over Palestinians.

March 5, 2023

Source: MondoWeiss


Since Israel’s Minister of Justice, Yariv Levin, announced sweeping “reforms” in Israel’s judicial system, intended to nullify the power of the Supreme Court to declare laws unconstitutional and to pack the judiciary with political appointees, a regime based on settler colonialism, apartheid and Jewish supremacy over Palestinians has been debating how to preserve itself as “a democracy”. A growing protest movement has arisen calling for civil disobedience, including “militant” statements of defiance by former senior political, security and military officials.

No one can predict how this confrontation will end. It is clear, however, that it represents solely an internal Zionist dispute. The protests never reference the other side of Israeli “democracy”: the exclusion of Arab citizens, who the “opposition” leaders make clear are neither welcome to join the protests nor are even considered a legitimate part of the political system. On the contrary. The leadership of the opposition believes that conspicuous participation of Palestinians in the demonstrations might actually harm their struggle against the government, since it gives the ruling coalition of Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and Smotrich a pretext for smearing the protests as “anti-Zionist”. And, needless to say, those who struggle to “preserve democracy”, the Zionist “liberals”, have never even pretended to recognize the national and democratic rights of the Palestinians living under a cruel regime of colonial apartheid in the 1967 Occupied Territories, the refugee camps and the Exile.

Regardless whether the coalition and the opposition in Israel reach a settlement or whether the rifts that have developed within the state and the settler society will remain incurable, our Palestinian people continue their struggle and their legendary steadfastness. Nonetheless, given the political realities, a debate has arisen within the political elite of the 1948 Palestinians over how to best respond to the events. Leaders of some Arab political parties and a handful of activists do call for participation in the demonstrations of the Zionist opposition. The overwhelming majority of our people, however, refrain from participating, realizing the moral contradiction and political harm that such participation entails.

We are not observing a class struggle. The colonial project and the privileges it provides to the settler society prevent the development of class consciousness. Nor is it a struggle over the solutions required to end the crimes of occupation, colonialism and apartheid or to end the suffering of the Palestinian people. Rather, we are witnessing merely a struggle over who shapes and controls the apartheid system, all with the aim of preserving Jewish supremacy and colonial rule. And, for Palestinians, it matters little who does control the court system. Whether liberal or conservative Zionists, the Israeli courts, from the lowest to the highest, will continue to legitimize and enforce the crimes of expulsion, massacres, and ethnic cleansing, all of which are essential to preserving the Israeli state apparatus’ control over the Palestinian majority between the River and the Sea.

For all these reasons, Palestinian citizens refuse to participate in demonstrations aimed at protecting “Jewish democracy”. Palestinians and the Jews who oppose apartheid and settler colonialism must continue building a united resistance movement; they must not get distracted by “protests” that only legitimize a fake democracy and in fact strengthen its repressive system of colonization and control. A genuine movement of liberation requires a long-term resistance strategy, a national and human liberation vision. It should unite those who live in Palestine and those who were expelled by the Zionist movement and its embodiment, the state of Israel. This movement should pose a clear alternative: building a single democratic state in historic Palestine on the ruins of the apartheid regime and its criminal offshoots.

This is the real alternative to participating in a protest movement intended to preserve a racist colonial regime. It is a realistic alternative, demanding long, hard struggle. But it leads us in the right political direction, unlike protests that only offer cosmetic improvements to an unjust and violent system of oppression. This goal can only be achieved by a Palestinian national, democratic movement, after rebuilding itself, recovering its liberating, humane vision and mobilizing around a political program – in our view, that of a single democratic state over all of historic Palestine. It requires the articulate combination of internal popular struggle with external struggle as represented by the boycott strategy and the force of international solidarity.

We Aren’t Talking Enough About Wage Theft


Every year, $50 billion are stolen from American workers by their bosses. The Left and labor should be working tirelessly to pass anti-wage-theft legislation at every level of government.


On January 9, Denver City Council unanimously voted to pass Resolution 22-1614, an anti-wage-theft bill that significantly increases Denver workers’ ability to reclaim wages stolen by their bosses. (Alvaro Gonzalez / Getty Images)

Denver City Council started 2023 on the right foot. On Monday, January 9, the council unanimously voted to pass Resolution 22-1614, an anti-wage-theft bill that significantly increases Denver workers’ ability to reclaim wages stolen by their bosses.

Almost four years in the making, Resolution 22-1614 is not only a victory for the Mile High working class but an opportunity for the American left as a whole. By advocating for similar anti-wage-theft bills across the country, socialists will be able to simultaneously protect workers, punish offending businesses, and rise above the culture war noise to show the working class that the Left is the only political force seriously committed to improving their material conditions.
The Denver Bill

“Wage theft” is broadly defined as when a boss doesn’t pay a worker what is legally owed. Its most common forms are minimum wage violations, unpaid overtime, forcing employees to work through meal breaks, illegal paycheck deductions, and straight-up theft. When taken together, these offenses reach a staggering amount. According to the research of the Denver City Council, up to $728 million is stolen from Colorado workers every year.

In addition to taking money out of individual workers’ pockets, stolen wages compound to deprive working-class communities of much-needed economic activity and taxes to fund crucial social programs such as schools, transportation, and health care. Instead, stolen wages are stashed in the bank accounts of thieves, far from the places they are needed most.

But thanks to the efforts of Denver’s labor unions, left-wing groups like Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and DSA-backed city councilors, Resolution 22-1614 now severely hampers would-be criminals by empowering workers to easily reclaim what is rightfully theirs while punishing businesses that steal from Denver’s working class.


The new bill gives aggrieved workers two paths to reclaim stolen wages. The first is through the Denver Labor office, which will investigate the claim and has the ability to charge employers wages owed plus 12 percent interest. The second option is the right of private action, which enables workers to sue in court for treble damages, attorney’s fees, reinstatement of employment, and $100 for every day they went with wages unpaid.

In addition to these avenues, the bill also increases the statute of limitations for wage theft to three years, expands the definition of “worker” to include independent contractors (Uber drivers, DoorDashers, etc.), and institutes “up the chain” restitution, enabling workers to pursue wages from businesses that hired their direct employer.

With clear restitution processes, stern penalties, and expanded protections, Denver’s Resolution 22-1614 is the gold standard model of anti–wage theft legislation. The Left should look to replicate it in every city and state in America.
The National Issue

Unfortunately, wage theft is not confined to the Rocky Mountains. The research conducted by Denver City Council found that up to 68 percent of low-wage, city-based US workers suffered at least one wage-theft violation during the typical workweek. According to the Economic Policy Institute, up to $50 billion is stolen from American workers through wage theft every year. For comparison, the FBI estimates the total value of 2019 robberies to be $482 million, meaning employers stole one hundred times more from Americans than did traditional thieves.

And while any dime stolen from any worker is an inexcusable crime, like most forms of exploitation, the most common victims of wage theft are the most marginalized. As women, migrant workers, and workers of color are the most likely to have their wages stolen, anti-wage-theft protections are a social justice issue as well as a labor one.

With wage theft posing a daily threat to the United States’ working class, left-wing and labor groups across the country should make the passage of anti-wage-theft bills a top priority. While some areas do have existing anti-wage-theft legislation — and there’s the “Wage Theft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act of 2022” currently sitting in the House of Representatives — it’s evident that what’s already in place isn’t enough to stop this pervasive threat. Given the pressing need to protect US workers’ hard-earned pay, socialists should look to implement anti-wage-theft protections at every level of government.

\\\\\

Legal protection is not the only benefit such a push would bring. In addition to combating injustice, advocating for anti-wage-theft bills would draw a clear line between the political actors who actually seek to help workers and those who employ pro-worker rhetoric to obscure their reactionary politics. To the detriment of the Left, the pro-capitalist establishments of both major political parties are adept at parroting pro-labor sentiments, diverting working-class attention and sapping the socialist movement of potential supporters.

Donald Trump and the Republicans position themselves as “a working-class party” by scapegoating immigrants as the cause of wage stagnation. Meanwhile they cut corporate taxes and endanger workers with deregulation, as seen in the horrific East Palestine train disaster. And as we saw from President Joe Biden’s decision to preemptively break the railroad workers’ strike earlier this year, the Democratic Party rests on its union-endorsement laurels while doing very little for workers themselves.

It could be a long time before socialists have the power to bring about an effective anti-wage-theft bill at the national level. Introducing them to local polities is both more attainable and promising, as political tribalism and the distortions of corporate media are much less prevalent at the lower levels.

Once anti-wage-theft bills are before state legislatures and city councilors, there is little room to waver. Either the politicians are for protecting workers, or they stand with the thieving bosses. If they choose the former, the Left has just delivered important legislation protecting the marginalized and curtailing corporate theft. And if politicians choose the latter, they will be revealed as anti-worker politicians who talk for labor but walk for the bosses. Both outcomes have the potential to bolster our project of building a fighting working class.

CONTRIBUTOR
Joe Mayall is a writer from Denver, Colorado. His work can be found at JoeWrote.com

The Tragic Lives of the Communists Trapped in Stalin’s Shadow

Communists who came to the Soviet Union seeking refuge found themselves caught up in the madness of the Stalinist purges. But many, argued Isaac Deutscher, still couldn’t think of breaking with the system that Stalin created and ended up working for their former persecutors.

Following the death of Josef Stalin on March 5, 1953, his friends and political colleagues, including a number of communist leaders from Central and Eastern Europe, gather at the tribune of the Moscow mausoleum. (Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

BY ISAAC DEUTSCHER
03.05.2023

 Jacobin 

The historian Isaac Deutscher was a member of the Polish Communist Party until he was expelled for opposing Stalin’s political line in the 1930s. In this essay, first published as “The Tragic Life of a Polrugarian Minister” in 1952, Deutscher wrote about the fate of East European communists who had been imprisoned in the Soviet Union, accused of treachery and espionage, only to be put in power by Stalin’s army and secret police after the war. Deutscher’s fictitious “Polrugaria” was a composite of several East European countries, including his native Poland.

Polrugaria need not be exactly located on the map. Enough that it lies somewhere in the eastern reaches of Europe. Nor need the name of Vincent Adriano, a high Polrugarian official, be looked up in any Who’s Who, for he is a half-real and half-imaginary character. Adriano’s features and traits can be found in some of the people who now rule the Russian satellite countries, and not a single one of his experiences related here has been invented.

It need not be specified what post Vincent Adriano holds in his government. He may be the president or the prime minister or the vice-premier, or he may be only the minister of the interior or the minister of education. In all likelihood he is a member of the Politbureau, and he is known as one of the pillars of the People’s Democracy in Polrugaria. His words and doings are reported in newspapers all over the world.

It is common to refer to men of Adriano’s kind as “Stalin’s henchmen,” “Russian puppets,” and “leaders of the Cominform fifth column.” If any of these labels described him adequately, Adriano would not be worth any special attention. To be sure, he is unavoidably something of a puppet and an agent of a foreign power, but he is much more than that.
Formative Years

Vincent Adriano is in either his late forties or early fifties — he may be just fifty. His age is significant because his formative years were those of the revolutionary aftermath of the First World War. He came from a middle-class family that before 1914 had enjoyed a measure of prosperity and believed in the stability of dynasties, governments, currencies, and moral principles. In his middle or late teens, Adriano saw three vast empires crumble with hardly anybody shedding a tear.In his middle or late teens, Vincent Adriano saw three vast empires crumble with hardly anybody shedding a tear.

Then he watched many governments leap into and tumble out of existence in so rapid and breathtaking a succession that it was almost impossible to keep account of them. On the average, there were a dozen or a score of them every year. The advent of each was hailed as an epoch-making event; each successive prime minister was greeted as a savior. After a few weeks or days, he was booed and hissed out of office as a misfit, scoundrel, and nincompoop.

The currency of Polrugaria, like the currencies of all neighboring countries, lost its value from month to month, then from day to day, and finally from hour to hour. Adriano’s father sold his house at the beginning of one year; with the money he received he could buy only two boxes of matches at the end of that year. No political combination, no institution, no established custom, no inherited idea seemed capable of survival.


Moral principles, too, were in flux. Reality seemed to lose clear-cut outline, and this was reflected in the new poetry, painting, and sculpture. The young man was easily convinced that he was witnessing the decay of a social order, that before his very eyes, capitalism was succumbing to the attack of its own deep-seated insanity.

He was aroused by the fiery manifestos of the Communist International signed by Lenin and Trotsky. Soon he became a member of the Communist Party. Since in Polrugaria the party was savagely persecuted — the penalties for membership ranged from five years’ imprisonment to death — the people who joined it did not do so, in those days, for selfish or careerist motives.

Adriano, at any rate, gave up without hesitation the prospect of a secure career in the academic field to become a professional revolutionary. He was prompted by idealistic sympathy with the underdog and by something he called “scientific conviction.” Studying the classics of Marxism, he became firmly convinced that private ownership of the means of production and the concept of the nation-state had outlived their day, and further, that they were certain to be replaced by an international socialist society which could be promoted only by a proletarian dictatorship.

Proletarian dictatorship meant not the dictatorial rule of a clique, let alone of a single leader, but the social and political predominance of the working classes, “the dictatorship of an overwhelming majority of the people over a handful of exploiters, semifeudal landlords and big capitalists.”

Far from disowning democracy, the proletarian dictatorship, so he thought, would represent its consummation. It would fill the empty shell of formal equality, which was all that bourgeois democracy could offer, with the content of social equality. With this vision of the future he plunged deep into the revolutionary underground.
Hard and Rusty Edges

We need not relate in detail Adriano’s revolutionary career — its pattern was, up to a point, typical. There were the years of his dangerous work in the underground, when he lived the life of a hunted man without name or address. He organized strikes, wrote for clandestine papers, and traveled all over the country studying social conditions and setting up organizations.Adriano organized strikes, wrote for clandestine papers, and traveled all over the country studying social conditions and setting up organizations.

Then came the years of prison and torture and of longing in solitude. The vision of the future that had inspired him had to be somewhat adulterated with expedients, tactical games, and tricks of organization — the daily business of every politician, even of one who serves a revolution. For all that, his idealism and enthusiasm had not yet begun to evaporate.

Even while imprisoned he helped sustain in his comrades their conviction, their hope, and their pride in their own sacrifices. Once he led several hundred political prisoners in a hunger strike. The strike, lasting six or seven weeks, was one of the longest ever known.

The governor of the prison knew that in order to break it he had first to break Vincent Adriano. Guards dragged the emaciated man by his legs from a cell on the sixth floor down the iron staircase, banging his head against the hard and rusty edges of the steps until he lost consciousness. Vincent Adriano became a legendary hero.

With some of his comrades, he at last managed to escape from prison and make his way to Russia. Inasmuch as he spent several years in Moscow, it is now often said and written about him that he belongs to that “hard core of Moscow-trained agents who control Polrugaria.” Such words, when he happens to read them, bring a sadly ironical smile to his lips.

When Adriano arrived in Moscow in the early 1930s, he was not among the chief leaders of the Polrugarian party. Nor was he greatly concerned with his place in the hierarchy. He was more preoccupied with the confusion in his own mind that arose when he first compared his vision of the society of the future with life in the Soviet Union under Stalin.

He hardly dared admit, even to himself, the extent of his disillusionment. This, too, has been so typical in the experiences of men of his kind that we need not dwell on it. Typical, too, were the truisms, the half-truths, and the self-delusions with which he tried to soothe his disturbed communist conscience.

Russia’s inherited poverty, her isolation in a capitalist world, the dangers threatening her from outside, the illiteracy of her masses, their laziness and lack of civic responsibility — all this and more he evoked to explain to himself why life in Russia fell appallingly short of the ideal.

“Oh,” he sighed, “if only the revolution had first been victorious in a more civilized and advanced country! But history has to be taken as it is, and Russia is at least entitled to the respect and gratitude due the pioneer, whatever that pioneer’s faults and vices.” He did his utmost not to see the realities of life around him.
Beast of Burden

Then came the great purges of 1936–38. Most leaders of the Polrugarian party who had lived as exiles in Moscow were shot as spies, saboteurs, and agents of the Polrugarian political police. Before they died, they (and even their wives, brothers, and sisters) were made to bear witness against one another.

Among the dishonored and the executed was one who more than anybody else had aroused Adriano’s enthusiasm and sustained his courage, who had initiated him into the most difficult problems of Marxist theory, and to whom Adriano had looked up as a friend and spiritual guide.

Adriano, too, was confronted with the usual charges. By a freak of fortune, however, or perhaps by the whim of the chief of the GPU, Yezhov, or of one of Yezhov’s underlings, he was not made to face a firing-squad.Adriano could not reconcile himself to the fact that he, the proud revolutionary, was being used as a beast of burden in the country of his dream.

Instead, he was deported to a forced-labor camp somewhere in the subpolar north. With many others — Trotskyites, Zinovievites, Bukharinites, kulaks, Ukrainian nationalists, bandits and thieves, former generals, former university professors and party organizers — he was employed in felling trees and transporting them from a forest to a depot.

Frost, hunger, and disease took their toll of the deportees, but the ranks were constantly filled with newcomers. Adriano saw how people around him were first reduced to an animal-like struggle for survival, how they next lost the will to struggle and survive, and how finally they collapsed and died like flies. Somehow his own vitality did not sag. He went on wielding the axe with his frostbitten fingers.

Every third or fourth day it was his turn to harness himself, along with fellow prisoners, to the cart loaded with timber and to drag it across the snow- and ice-covered plain to the depot several miles away. Those were the worst hours. He could not reconcile himself to the fact that he, the proud revolutionary, was being used as a beast of burden in the country of his dream.

Even now he still feels a piercing pain in his heart whenever he thinks of those days — and that is why he reads with a melancholy smile the stories about the mysterious “training in fifth-column activity” he received in Russia.
Shouting Into the Ether

With a shred of his mind he tried to penetrate the tangle of circumstances behind his extraordinary degradation. At night he argued about this with the other deportees. The problem was vast and confused beyond comprehension. Some of the deported communists said that Stalin had carried out a counterrevolution in which every achievement of Lenin’s revolution had been destroyed.Some of the deported communists said that Stalin had carried out a counterrevolution in which every achievement of Lenin’s revolution had been destroyed.

Others held that the foundations of the revolution — public ownership and a collectivist economy — had remained intact, but that instead of a free socialist society, a terrifying combination of socialism and slavery was being erected on those foundations. The outlook was therefore more difficult than anything they could have imagined, but there was perhaps some hope, if not for this generation then for the next.

Stalinism, it was true, was casting grave discredit upon the ideal of socialism, but perhaps what was left of socialism might still be salvaged from the wreckage. Adriano could not quite make up his mind, but he was inclined to adopt this latter view.

Events now took a turn so fantastic that even the most fertile imagination could not have conceived it. One day, toward the end of 1941 (Hitler’s armies had just been repulsed from the gates of the Russian capital), Adriano was freed from the concentration camp and taken with great honors straight to Moscow.


The Kremlin urgently needed East and Central European communists capable of broadcasting to the Nazi-occupied lands and of establishing liaison with the underground movements behind the enemy lines. Because of their country’s strategic importance, Polrugarians were especially wanted.

But not a single one of the chief leaders of the Polrugarian party was alive. The few less prominent ones who had been dispersed in various places of deportation were hurriedly brought back to Moscow, rehabilitated, and put to work. The rehabilitation took the form of an apology from the Security Police to the effect that the deportation of Comrade So-and-So had been a regrettable mistake.

Several times a week, Adriano, facing the microphone, shouted into the ether his confidence in the Land of Socialism, extolled Stalin and his achievements, and called on the Polrugarians to rise behind the enemy lines and prepare for liberation.
Faithless Tutelage

He sensed sharply the incongruity of his situation. He was now a propaganda agent for his jailers and torturers, for those who had denigrated and destroyed the leaders of Polrugarian communism, his friend and guide among them. At heart he could neither forget nor forgive the agony and the shame of the purges. And with a part of his mind he could never detach himself from the people he had left behind in the north.Adriano was eager to help defeat the Nazis, and for this, he felt, it was right to join hands ‘with the devil and his grandmother’ — and with Stalin.

But he could not refuse the assignment. Refusal would have amounted to sabotage of the war effort, and the penalty would have been death or deportation. Yet it was not merely for life’s sake that he was doing his job. He was eager to help defeat the Nazis, and for this, he felt, it was right to join hands “with the devil and his grandmother” — and with Stalin.

Nor was this merely a matter of defeating Nazism. Despite all he had gone through, he clung to his old ideas and hopes. He was still a communist. He looked forward to the revolutionary ferment that would spread over the capitalist world after the war.

The more severe his disillusionment with the Soviet Union, the more intense was his hope that the victory of communism in other countries would regenerate the movement and free it from the Kremlin’s faithless tutelage.

The same motives prompted him to agree to a proposal, which Stalin personally made to him a few months later, that he should organize a Polrugarian Committee of Liberation and become its secretary. It was certain that the Red Army would cross into Polrugaria sooner or later. The Committee of Liberation was to follow in its wake and become the nucleus of a provisional government.

Adriano’s hands were full of work. He was now in charge of liaison with the Polrugarian Resistance. He issued instructions to the emissaries who penetrated the enemy lines or were parachuted behind them.

He received reports from the guerrillas in the occupied country and transmitted them higher up. He arranged that leaders of the noncommunist and even anti-communist parties be smuggled out of the country and brought to Moscow. And he induced some of them to join the Committee of Liberation.
The Two Adrianos

The sequel is known. The Committee of Liberation became the provisional government, and then the actual government of Polrugaria. The noncommunist parties were squeezed out one by one and suppressed. Polrugaria became a People’s Democracy.Moscow, for its own reasons, was telling the Polrugarians that they should not look too much to Russia as their model.

Adriano is one of the pillars of the new government, and so far nothing seems to foreshadow his eclipse. He has not found the way out of the trap; neither has he been crushed in it.

There are two Vincent Adrianos now. One seems never to have known a moment of doubt or hesitation. His Stalinist orthodoxy has never been questioned, his devotion to the party has never flagged, and his virtues as leader and statesman are held to be unsurpassed.

The other Adriano is almost constantly tormented by his communist conscience, a prey to scruple and fear, to illusion and disillusionment. The former is expansive and eloquent, the latter broods in silence and hides even from his oldest friends. The former acts, the latter never ceases to ponder.

From 1945 to 1947, the two Adrianos were almost reconciled with each other. In those years the Polrugarian party carried out some of the root-and-branch reforms that for decades had been inscribed in its program. It attacked the problem of Polrugarian landlordism. It divided the large semifeudal estates among the land-hungry peasants. It established public ownership of large-scale industry.

It initiated impressive plans for the further industrial development of a sadly underdeveloped country. It sponsored a great deal of progressive social legislation and an ambitious educational reform. These achievements filled Adriano with real joy and pride. It was, after all, for these things that he had languished in Polrugarian prisons.

In those years, too, Moscow, for its own reasons, was telling the Polrugarians that they should not look too much to Russia as their model, that they ought to find and follow their own “Polrugarian road to socialism.” To Adriano, this meant that Polrugaria would be spared the experience of purges and concentration camps, of abject subservience and fear.

Communism, intense industrial and educational development, and a measure of real freedom to argue with one’s fellow and to criticize the powers that be — this seemed to be the achievement of an ideal.
Roads to Socialism

What disturbed him even then was that the people of Polrugaria were showing little enthusiasm for the revolution. To be sure, they saw the advantages and on the whole approved them. But they resented the revolution that was being carried out over their heads by people whom they had not chosen and who did not often bother to consult them and who looked like stooges of a foreign power.

Adriano knew to what extent the presence of the Red Army in Polrugaria had facilitated the revolution. Without it, the forces of the counterrevolution, with the assistance of the Western bourgeois democracies, might have reasserted themselves in bloody civil war, as they had done after the First World War.He who has been an outcast in Stalin’s Russia has watched with a shudder as his ‘Polrugarian road to socialism’ has become more and more the Stalinist road.

But he reflected that a revolution without genuine popular enthusiasm behind it is half defeated. It is inclined to distrust the people whom it should serve. And distrust may breed dark fear and terror as it had done in Russia.

Yet, although he saw these dangers, he hoped that through honest and devoted work for the masses, the new Polrugarian government could eventually win their confidence and arouse their enthusiasm. Then the new social order would stand on its own feet. Sooner or later the Russian armies would go back to Russia. Surely, he thought, there must be another road to socialism, perhaps not exactly a Polrugarian one, but not a Russian and a Stalinist road either.

In the meantime, Vincent Adriano did a few things that were understood only by the initiated. He sponsored in Polrugaria a cult to glorify the memory of his old friend and guide who had perished in Russia, although Moscow had not officially rehabilitated the latter’s memory. The biography of the dead leader can even now be seen displayed in Polrugarian bookshops, side by side with the official life of Stalin. Since the circumstances of the martyr’s death are not mentioned in the biography, only the older communists are aware of the hidden implications of this homage.


Adriano has also set up a special institute which looks after the families of all the Polrugarian communists who perished in Moscow as “spies and traitors.” The institute is called the Foundation of the Veterans and Martyrs of the Revolution. Such gestures give Adriano a measure of moral satisfaction, but he knows that politically they are irrelevant.

As the two camps, East and West, began to marshal their forces and as the leaders on both sides, each in their own ways, confronted everybody with a categorical “who-is-not-with-me-is-against-me,” Adriano’s prospects darkened. If he could have had his way, Adriano’s answer would have been a hearty “plague o’ both your houses.”

He who has been an outcast in Stalin’s Russia, a beast of burden in one of his concentration camps, he to whom every copy of Pravda, with its demented hymns to Stalin, gives an acute sensation of nausea, has watched with a shudder as his “Polrugarian road to socialism” has become more and more the Stalinist road. Yet he does not see how he can depart from it.
History’s Irrational Forces

He takes it for granted that all the West can offer to East and Central Europe is counterrevolution. The West may extol freedom and the dignity of man (and who has explored the meaning of these ideals as tragically and thoroughly as Adriano?), but his gaze is fixed on the gulf he sees between Western promise and fulfilment. He is convinced that in his part of the world every new upheaval will bring more rather than less oppression, more rather than less degradation of man.At times, Adriano would be happy to give up his high office and withdraw into obscurity. But the world has become too small.

He is willing to concede that those who speak for the West may be quite sincere in their promises, but he adds that he has retained his old Marxist habit of disregarding the wishes and promises of statesmen and of keeping his eyes on social and political realities. Who among the Polrugarians, he asks, are ready to rally to the banners of the West? There may be a few well-meaning people among them, but these will be the dupes.

The most active and energetic allies of the West in Polrugaria are those who have had a stake in the old social order, the privileged men of the prewar dictatorship, the old soldateska, the expropriated landlords and their like. These, should the West win, will form the new government, and, in the name of freedom and of the dignity of man, let loose a White terror the like of which has never been seen.

Adriano had known their terror once, also. But that was at a time when the old ruling class believed that their rule would last forever, and when their self-confidence prevented their terror from becoming altogether insane. Now, if they came back, they would be mad with fear and revenge. The real choice, as he sees it, is not between tyranny and freedom, but between Stalinist tyranny, which is in part redeemed by economic and social progress, and a reactionary tyranny which would not be redeemed by anything.

At times, Adriano would be happy to give up his high office and withdraw into obscurity. But the world has become too small. He cannot seek asylum in the West. This, in his eyes, would be not much better than treason — not to Russia, but to his ideal of communism. Nor can he withdraw into obscurity. Resignation and withdrawal on his part would be a gesture of opposition and defiance, and this the regime he has helped to build would not allow.

How much is there in common between the young man who once set out with Promethean ardor to conquer history’s insanity as it manifested itself in capitalism and the middle-aged cabinet minister who vaguely feels that history’s irrational forces have overpowered the camp of the revolution, too, and, incidentally, driven him into a trap?

He does his best to bolster his own self-respect and to persuade himself that as statesman, dignitary, and leader he is still the same man he was when he championed the cause of the oppressed and suffered for it in the prisons of his native land. But sometimes, while he solemnly receives delegations of peasants or salutes a colorful parade, a familiar sharp pain pierces his heart; and suddenly he feels that he is merely a pathetic wreck, a subpolar beast of burden.

CONTRIBUTOR
Isaac Deutscher was a Polish historian whose works included Stalin: Biography of a Dictator and a three-volume study of Leon Trotsky: The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast.