LaborFest

6 days ago

Anonymous blogger exposes Imperial Japan's historical mistreatment of Korea
www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2025/01/177_389720.html
Posted : 2025-01-11 09:42Updated : 2025-01-12 11:17

This composite image shows pictures of the building that housed the Keijo Nippo as well as Maeil Sinbo, published in the Keijo Nippo Dec. 26, 1938. Courtesy of Exposing Imperial Japan
By Jon Dunbar
Korea was a colony of Japan for 36 years, from 1910 to the end of World War II in 1945. However, there is a distinct lack of information available about this period, especially in English. One emerging resource is Japanese-language newspapers of the era, published in Korea.

An anonymous Japanese American blogger, who goes by the online handle "tpjv86b," has been translating this content into English as part of his Exposing Imperial Japan project.

"As I explored online resources, I noticed that there was hardly any comprehensive material available in English about this critical era," he told The Korea Times. "This period profoundly shaped modern Korea, yet much of its nuance and everyday realities remained obscured to English-speaking audiences."

The project began after tpjv86b discovered an extensive collection of old newspapers, including issues of the Keijo Nippo, or Gyeongseong Ilbo, dating from 1909 to 1944, hosted on the Internet Archive website. Published in Seoul, the Keijo Nippo was considered a de facto mouthpiece of the Japanese governor-general.

Through his website exposingimperialjapan.com, tpjv86b has been sharing his own translations with commentary of the articles.

"When I began reading through these newspapers, it felt like stepping into a time machine," tpjv86b, 44, said. "The pages were filled with stories and articles that vividly captured the day-to-day lives of Korean citizens under Japanese colonial rule. These were not just dry records of statistics or detached accounts of historical events — they were deeply personal, raw snapshots of life, including the propaganda that shaped public perception at the time. It had the power to bring history to life in a way few other resources could."

The topics he covers range from unsettlingly banal to outright horrifying.

"Korean Woman in Hanbok Detained by Imperial Police in 1944 Seoul for Wearing the 'Wrong' Clothing in Violation of Wartime Attire Regulations," is the title of one recent blog post, published Dec. 30. "Colonial regime called for intensified Imperialist training to make Koreans more ‘Japanese’ to address low morale, high turnover rates, and black market activities among Korean forced laborers in 1944 Japan," read the title of one post from Aug. 29.

A promotional image for the Keijo Nippo (Gyeongseong Ilbo) newspaper shows an illustration of the Korean Peninsula. Courtesy of Exposing Imperial Japan
"I felt a strong sense of urgency," tpjv86b said. "If these stories were not shared, they risked being forgotten as time passed."

He said his research has led to several surprising discoveries.

"For instance, I had no idea about the depth of the religious justifications used to enforce Japanese-Korean unification under State Shintoism. The colonial regime taught that Koreans were descendants of the Shinto god Susanoo, the younger brother of Amaterasu, the sun goddess and ancestor of the Japanese imperial family. This narrative framed Koreans as inherently Japanese, claiming that they had simply forgotten their true heritage and needed to be 'reawakened' to their Japanese identity. I had some awareness of ideological messaging, but I never knew it extended to such granular and deeply embedded beliefs," he said.

"Another shocking revelation was the level of humiliation embedded in the colonial propaganda. While I had known there was an element of humiliation, I did not realize the depth of it until I delved into the materials. Koreans were consistently portrayed as inferior — as children or younger brothers — who needed to look up to 'older brother' Japan for guidance and leadership … The sheer scale and intensity of this messaging were truly unsettling."

A comic strip titled “The New Age has Arrived” depicts a very condensed and accessible vehicle for the narrative Imperial Japan wanted to promote, published in the Xinshenbao newspaper Jan. 1, 1942. Courtesy of Exposing Imperial Japan
Initially, the source of the uploaded occupation-era newspapers was a mystery to tpjv86b, but eventually, someone claiming to be the original uploader made contact. He called this a "pivotal moment for my research," opening up access to an even greater collection of historical materials, which he said were "sourced from a proprietary, paid database, making them inaccessible to most people without specialized access."

"I am not at liberty to reveal this individual’s identity, but I can share that he is an academic affiliated with a Western university," tpjv86b said.

Both tpjv86b and the uploader at the Western university keep their true identities hidden.

"This is a deliberate choice made in light of the significant risks associated with releasing critical or negative information about Imperial Japan," tpjv86b said. "The historical realities of this period remain contentious, and addressing topics such as colonial rule, forced labor or comfort women often invites intense backlash from denialists and nationalist groups."

He cited the cases of Uemura Takashi, a former journalist who was vilified by nationalists for writing two articles in 1991 about Kim Hak-sun, the first South Korean victim of wartime sex slavery to publicly share her story, and historian Paula Curtis who in 2021 triggered a ferocious online backlash from denialists merely for retweeting an article in The New Yorker about the debate over Japan's wartime sex slavery.

"These incidents illustrate the real-world dangers of engaging with these topics," tpjv86b said. "Scholars and individuals who explore the darker aspects of history often face not only public vilification but also professional and personal risks. My anonymity allows me to continue this work without jeopardizing my family or career and ensures that the focus remains on the history itself rather than on me as an individual. My goal is to shed light on these critical issues, and staying anonymous allows me to do so safely and effectively."

He added that Japanese society should not be seen as monolithic, and while the oppression and hardships of Korea under Japanese colonial rule are often considered an awkward and unpleasant topic in Japan, he believes there is a silent majority who do not take a pro-imperialist stance.

A promotional image for the Keijo Nippo (Gyeongseong Ilbo) newspaper shows an illustration of a rail map of the Korean Peninsula. Courtesy of Exposing Imperial Japan
"While denialist voices in Japan can be quite vocal and assertive, I believe there is a silent majority who recognize that historical revisionism is ultimately a form of wishful propaganda. These individuals may not always speak out, but their awareness and quiet acknowledgment suggest a more nuanced perspective within the broader population. This gives me hope that dialogue and understanding can continue to grow, even in a context where these discussions remain sensitive and challenging," he said.

One personal detail that tpjv86b was willing to share about his own background was that he spent a year studying in Germany under an exchange program.

"That year abroad left a lasting impression on me, particularly in how Germans approach their history — a process they call 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung,' or coming to terms with the past," he said.

"In Germany, I witnessed a deeply introspective and transparent approach to confronting historical atrocities. Whether addressing Nazi-era crimes or the surveillance and oppression under the East German Stasi, Germans have sought to open archives, document oral histories, and make the past as accessible as possible. This level of accountability and willingness to examine even the most painful chapters in minute detail struck me as a mature and responsible way to deal with history. It inspired me to imagine a similar approach being adopted in Japan," he said. "My work on Exposing Imperial Japan is in part a reflection of these influences."

A promotional image for the Keijo Nippo (Gyeongseong Ilbo) newspaper / Courtesy of Exposing Imperial Japan
Although tpjv86b has visited Korea, he confessed a lack of understanding of Koreans' own perspectives and memories of the occupation era.

“As I am not Korean, my understanding of the Korean perspective is limited, and I would like to learn more about how this history is viewed from within Korea,” he said. "What I hope is that through the translated articles and materials, Koreans can gain a clearer picture of the structures that perpetuated oppression during this period. I hope the materials I provide can contribute to a nuanced and informed understanding of this complex history. I hope it can evolve into a more polished, collaborative resource curated by professional historians, with features like contextualized primary sources, analysis and multilingual content."

In the time since he started the project, the National Library of Korea has made high-quality scans of the Keijo Nippo available to the public. This comes after tpjv86b encouraged readers on his site to ask the staff at the National Library of Korea to add Keijo Nippo to its digital reading hall. While he didn't take credit for this development, he praised the library for it.

"The library’s decision to make this collection publicly available is a huge step forward in preserving and sharing historical records from the colonial period. I hope this inspires further efforts to fill in the gaps, such as locating and digitizing missing issues or improving scans where the pages are incomplete," he said. … See MoreSee Less

Anonymous blogger exposes Imperial Japan's historical mistreatment of Korea

www.koreatimes.co.kr

Korea was a colony of Japan for 36 years, from 1910 to the end of World War II in 1945. However, there is a distinct lack of information available about this period, especially in English. One emergin…

LaborFest

6 days ago

Tulsa Massacre Was a ‘Coordinated, Military-Style Attack,’ Federal Report Says
The Justice Department’s conclusion follows an investigation of the 1921 atrocity in Oklahoma in which up to 300 Black residents were killed.
www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/us/tulsa-race-massacre-report.html
A black-and-white image showing a panoramic view of multiple city blocks in ruins.

By Audra D. S. Burch
Audra D.S. Burch writes about race and identity and spent time in Tulsa to report on the centennial of the 1921 race massacre.
Jan. 11, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, in which a prosperous Black neighborhood in Oklahoma was destroyed and up to 300 people were killed, was not committed by an uncontrolled mob but was the result of “a coordinated, military-style attack” by white citizens, the Justice Department said in a report released Friday.

The report, stemming from an investigation announced in September, is the first time that the federal government has given an official, comprehensive account of the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921, in the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood. Although it formally concluded that, more than a century later, no person alive could be prosecuted, it underscored the brutality of the atrocities committed.

“The Tulsa Race Massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a statement. “In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings and locked the survivors in internment camps.”

No one today could be held criminally responsible, she said, “but the historical reckoning for the massacre continues.”

The report’s legal findings noted that if contemporary civil rights laws were in effect in 1921, federal prosecutors could have pursued hate crime charges against both public officials and private citizens.

Though considered one of the worst episodes of racial terror in U.S. history, the massacre was relatively unknown for decades: City officials buried the story, and few survivors talked about the massacre.

The Justice Department began its investigation under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which allows the agency to examine such crimes resulting in death that occurred before 1980. Investigators spoke with survivors and their descendants, looked at firsthand accounts and examined an informal review by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, the precursor to the F.B.I. In that 1921 report, the agency asserted that the riot was not the result of “racial feeling,” and suggested that Black men were responsible for the massacre.

The new 123-page report corrects the record, while detailing the scale of destruction and its aftermath. The massacre began with an unfounded accusation. A young Black man, Dick Rowland, was being held in custody by local authorities after being accused of assaulting a young white woman.

According to the report, after a local newspaper sensationalized the story, an angry crowd gathered at the courthouse demanding that Mr. Rowland be lynched. The local sheriff asked Black men from Greenwood, including some who had recently returned from military service, to come to the courthouse to try to prevent the lynching. Other reports suggest the Black neighbors offered to help but were turned away by the sheriff.

The white mob viewed attempts to protect Mr. Rowland as “an unacceptable challenge to the social order,” the report said. The crowd grew and soon there was a confrontation. Hundreds of residents (some of whom had been drinking) were deputized by the Tulsa Police. Law enforcement officers helped organize these special deputies who, along with other residents, eventually descended on Greenwood, a neighborhood whose success inspired the name Black Wall Street.

The report described the initial attack as “opportunistic,” but by daybreak on June 1, “a whistle blew, and the violence and arsons that had been chaotic became systematic.” According to the report, up to 10,000 white Tulsans participated in the attack, burning or looting 35 city blocks. It was so “systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence,” the report said.

In the aftermath, the survivors were left to rebuild their lives with little or no help from the city. The massacre’s impact, historians say, is still felt generations later.

In the years since the attack, survivors and their descendants and community activists have fought for justice. Most recently, a lawsuit seeking reparations filed on behalf of the last two known centenarian survivors was dismissed by Oklahoma justices in June. In recent years, Tulsa has excavated sections of a city cemetery in search of the graves of massacre victims. And in 2024, the city created a commission to study the harms of the atrocity and recommend solutions. The results are expected in the coming weeks.
Audra D. S. Burch is a national reporter, based in South Florida and Atlanta, writing about race and identity around the country. More about Audra D. S. Burch … See MoreSee Less

Tulsa Massacre Was a ‘Coordinated, Military-Style Attack,’ Federal Report Says

www.nytimes.com

The Justice Department’s conclusion follows an investigation of the 1921 atrocity in Oklahoma in which up to 300 Black residents were killed.

LaborFest

6 days ago

The Hidden History of Trotskyists in Vietnam
www.leftvoice.org/the-hidden-history-of-trotskyists-in-vietnam/
Before they were slandered as fascists and wreckers, Trotskyists led one of the most advanced processes of working-class activity in Vietnam’s history. This buried revolutionary legacy provides lessons on anti-imperialist class struggle, lessons that are more valuable than ever.

Samuel Karlin

January 10, 2025

The United States continues to court allies in the Asia-Pacific as it pursues greater competition with China. In 2023, Vietnam moved closer to supporting U.S. imperialist interests. The two countries announced that they were upgrading their relationship to a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” the highest level of U.S. diplomatic engagement with other countries.

Biden encouraged technology and aviation companies to work more with Vietnamese companies. This signals that the United States may soon be using Vietnam as a new front in the developing “chip war” with China. How Trump relates to Vietnam as part of this trade war (which he is sure to escalate) is to be seen, especially since Trump puts forward a more protectionist policy focused on increasing U.S. manufacturing. Whatever the case, there should be no doubt that any American technology companies operating in Vietnam will subject Vietnamese workers to intense, dehumanizing exploitation. This is a tragic state of affairs for the Southeast Asian country, which once dealt one of the most important blows to U.S. imperialism.

Vietnam won its national liberation by militarily defeating France and the United States and by expropriating capitalists and big landlords. How could such a country now partner with U.S. imperialism to develop a tech industry within the framework of a larger capitalist rivalry?

Covering the full trajectory of postrevolutionary Vietnam is not the aim of this article. Instead, the goal here is to explore a buried history of revolutionary Vietnam, a history that runs from the 1930s to 1945 and reveals how Vietnam’s fight for liberation won despite blows dealt by the very leaders who are now remembered as revolutionaries and anti-imperialists. This is the history of a different revolutionary leadership in Vietnam, one that fought not just for national liberation but for proletarian internationalism and the leadership of the Vietnamese working class. It is the history of Trotskyism in Vietnam.

The Seeds of Revolution in Vietnam

In 1887, France colonized Vietnam (then known as French Indochina). Over the next several decades, the country stood out for its production of rice, rubber, and other resources. French colonialism created conditions of uneven and combined development: while the economy and society were largely agrarian, the South of Vietnam became industrialized, creating a distinct working class and a national bourgeoisie that reaped some benefits of the industrial development from French colonialism.

As the colony developed, so did the aspirations of the Vietnamese people, who were subjected to exploitation, violence, and humiliation by the French. This led to a nationalist movement that, though largely petty bourgeois in character, sought to rally the peasantry behind it. This movement, led by the Viet Quoc (a nationalist party similar to the Chinese Kuomintang), reached its apex in February 1930 with the Yen Bai revolt. Although this revolt was important to the development of class struggle in Vietnam, it failed to win over the Vietnamese masses and was easily crushed. As a result, several Vietnamese intellectuals began developing a deeper Marxist perspective for revolution in Vietnam. Yet they did so amid a fierce battle over the development of socialism itself.

At the time, Russia was undergoing a Stalinist counterrevolution, while Leon Trotsky waged a struggle to maintain the revolutionary ideas that led the Russian Revolution to victory, such as the leadership of the working class and an emphasis on internationalism. This battle for the continuity of revolutionary Marxism and Leninism is encapsulated in Leon Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution, which contrasts the success of the Russian Revolution with the defeat of the 1927 Chinese Revolution. Trotsky critiques Stalin’s “stageist” conception of revolution, which suggests that the proletariat in underdeveloped countries is obligated to endure a phase of capitalist development before a socialist revolution can happen, disconnecting the tasks of the bourgeois revolution (national liberation, for example) from those of socialism, and forcing the working class to play a backseat role to the national bourgeoisie. Trotsky also criticized Stalin’s theory of “socialism in one country,” according to which Russia could maintain socialism in isolation, even though capitalism exists on a global scale and informs all material relations, and so affects all attempts at socialism. This is how Stalin justified the abandonment of the international revolution.

A Vietnamese intellectual named Ta Thu Thau drew similar conclusions to those of Trotsky, having followed the Chinese Revolution of 1927 and seeing how Stalin directed the Chinese communists to subordinate their struggle to the bourgeois Kuomintang, setting them up to be betrayed and massacred by this national bourgeois leadership and undermining the revolution. Shortly after the defeat of the Chinese Revolution, Stalin would do a 180 and direct communist parties to engage in ultraleft actions. This policy informed the activity of the Vietnamese communists who participated in the Yen Bai revolt. Informed by the defeat of the Chinese Revolution and the Yen Bai uprising, Ta Thu Thau would go on to join Trotsky’s Left Opposition, which fought the Stalinist counterrevolution. Writing from exile in France in 1930, Ta Thu Thau argues,

The Yen Bay revolt, characterized by an ideological insufficiency, not to say an absence of a theoretical basis linked to reality… raises more than ever the problem of the Marxist training of the militants. Being part of the “revolutionary” movement for five years, we have more than once had the opportunity to witness betrayals and discouragements, coming from a lack of ideological preparation.

In 1930, the Vietnamese Stalinists founded the Communist Party of Indochina (PCI). The Trotskyists developed a program as a fraction fighting for revolutionary ideas within the PCI. Their program, published in 1930, argues fiercely against the Stalnists’ arguments that colonies were too weak to have a proletarian revolution and that first communists must fight for a bourgeois revolution. The Trotskyists’ program, in contrast, presented the need for workers’ hegemony in the anti-imperialist struggle and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the way to deliver national independence and other democratic demands.

In 1931, Ta Thu Thau was deported back to Vietnam from France, and when he arrived, he connected with other Trotskyist sympathizers. He would go on to be one of the main intellectual leaders of the Vietnamese Trotskyist movement, though there would be many other important Trotskyist militants and leaders. The stage was set for a political struggle over the revolutionary movement’s leadership in Vietnam.

While the confrontation between Trotskyists and Stalinists was not unique to Vietnam, it played out in a peculiar way. After the wave of nationalist uprisings, the French colonial regime greatly repressed political activity. With their limited forces, the Trotskyists and Stalinists worked together along with some important leaders of the nationalist movement in a joint effort to strengthen the workers and peasants’ struggle against colonialism. Much of this history is documented by Ngo Van, a historian and ex-Trotskyist, who recounts the revolutionary activity of 1930s Vietnam in his memoir. He writes,

With the peasant movement decapitated, several insurgents, most of whom had passed some time in France — Nguyen Van Tao (a Stalinist communist), Ta Thu Thau, Phan Van Chanh and Huynh Van Phuong (Trotskyist Opposition communists), Tran Van Thach and Le Van Thu (Trotskyist sympathizers), and Trinh Hung Ngau (an anarchist) — regrouped around their elder, Nguyen An Ninh, and took the initiative of legally opposing the regime during the Saigon City Council elections of April-May 1933. They launched a weekly French-language newspaper, La Lutte. … Thus it was that the two communist tendencies, Stalinist and Trotskyist, formed a common front in 1933 within La Lutte. This unique alliance, at the very moment the USSR and everywhere else in the world Stalin and the Communist Parties loyal to him were hunting down anyone even remotely suspected of “Trotskyism,” lasted nearly three years. Stalinists and Trotskyists, in a joint struggle against their immediate enemies, the colonial regime and the bourgeois Constitutionalist Party, worked together to publish a newspaper for the defense of workers, coolies and peasants.1

La Lutte’s existence as a grouping of revolutionaries, as well as a legal newspaper, was vital for bringing revolutionary ideas to Vietnam’s workers and peasants in the aftermath of the French crackdown on political activity. While the La Lutte group held no illusions that they could do away with colonialism through positions in the Colonial Council, they took advantage of the fact that the body designated 10 seats for Vietnamese. As a slate of six candidates, they used the elections to publicize revolutionary ideas.

French historian Daniel Hemery explains,

The three principal slogans of the candidates, the “Three Whales” of the revolutionary movement, were first the Amnesty, secondly, raising wages, dividing up the great estates, and freedom for the trade union movement, and thirdly, the installation of peoples’ power. They had a real impact. For the first time in Indochina an election took place with a radical challenge to the established political order, and on the claim to a parliament elected by universal suffrage. La Lutte had put the problems of ordinary people at the centre of its campaign, and supported a detailed programme of immediate demands.

The success of La Lutte in the election was in large part a product of their mix of legal, semilegal, and clandestine activity to connect to the masses. While the Stalinists focused on building alliances with bourgeois nationalists and trying to establish influence among the peasantry, the Trotskyists built deep connections with Saigon’s working class. Along with their legal propaganda in La Lutte, they developed a powerful network to spread socialism among the Saigon proletariat; militants distributed leaflets and flyers in working-class neighborhoods and factories, and they served as leaders in workplaces to popularize socialist ideas.

The Breakup of La Lutte

The 1935 election marked the high point in collaboration between the Trotskyists and the Stalinists. Initially, the two tendencies had built and maintained a political agreement based on the general benefits of unity, but as the class struggle developed, their strategic differences became more acute. Among these differences, the question of internationalism and imperialism was key.

Both the Stalinists and the Trotskyists superficially agreed on fighting French colonial oppression, but the how was a deal breaker for the revolutionary movement of the time. The Trotskyists believed that class struggle was the only way to fight for national independence, as opposed to promises from the national bourgeoisie. They argued that the revolutionary demand for national liberation was one that the Vietnamese bourgeoisie could not deliver, owing to its connection to French colonialism. It would have to be the workers and peasants who took up the demand.

Writing in 1930, Ta Thu Thau explained his views on the subject:

The artificially-created indigenous bourgeoisie is not capable of making any revolution. The indigenous bourgeois bloc, incapable of an independent existence, has welded itself firmly to the French bourgeoisie — which holds on tight to it, and uses it to break up the revolutionary struggle in the name of Annamite2 nationalism. … A revolution based on the organization of the proletarian and peasant masses is the only one capable of liberating the colonies. The question of independence must be bound up with that of the proletarian socialist revolution.

In contrast, and in line with the Stalinist theory of socialism in one country — which abandoned international revolution in favor of maintaining the interests of Russia by allying with imperialist powers — the Vietnamese Stalinists prioritized Moscow’s foreign policy dictates, even when these undermined the development of class struggle.

The fundamental difference between the Trotskyists and Stalinists was exposed in 1935. After the failures of the ultraleft period (in which Stalin discouraged Communist parties from uniting with other left-wing parties and workers’ organizers to fight the rising tide of fascism, leading to defeats of revolutions in Spain, Germany, and elsewhere), Stalin allied with French imperialism. Stalin foolishly believed that he could negotiate breathing room with the imperialists, promising these powers that if they left Russia alone, he would put the brakes on workers’ revolutions expanding to imperialist countries. This ran in contrast to Lenin and Trotsky’s understanding that the only way to protect the Russian Revolution was for the revolution to spread to the imperialist countries.

In line with Moscow’s popular front strategy, in which the working class would be subordinated to bourgeois leadership, the French Communist Party helped bring socialist Leon Blum to power. While many leftists, to this day, romanticize the French popular front for advancing important reforms for workers, the reality is far more complicated. In the grand scheme, the popular front prevented class struggle from developing beyond reforms to a point of workers’ revolution by getting workers to buy into a fundamentally bourgeois program which was building towards the confrontation between imperialist powers in the form of the Second World War. This bourgeois character of the popular front also had grave implications for the fight against French colonialism. Leon Blum essentially governed as the left wing of imperialism. As a result, his government restrained the further development of anti-imperialist struggle in France while maintaining the brutality of French colonialism abroad. This led Ta Thu Thau to describe Blum’s regime as “the popular front of treason.” Even in Vietnam, the Stalinists followed Moscow’s line, defending Blum’s popular front government as it oppressed the Vietnamese people. This began to create political tension within La Lutte.

Daniel Hemery writes,

This local United Front that was dictated by the necessities of the struggle against strong colonial oppression soon became disrupted by the evolution of the politics of the Russian Communist Party, and consequently the politics of the French party. The France-Soviet Pact of May 1935 converted France into an ally of Russia, and the French Communist Party now had the duty of defending “French democracy” against Fascism. The Stalinist group dutifully dispensed with its usual jargon of “French Imperialism,” no longer talked about national independence, and imparted a purely reformist direction to its slogans.

While Ta Thu Thau and the group of leaders around him worked to maintain their alliance with the Stalinists, two of the other Trotskyist leaders of La Lutte — one of whom was Ngo Van — broke off and launched the Internationalist Communist League, whose publications criticized the Stalinists for abandoning their opposition to French imperialism, as well as Ta Thu Thau for maintaining the alliance with the Stalinists.3

Shortly after the Internationalist Communist League was formed, its leaders were arrested and would remain imprisoned or exiled until the revolutionary events of 1945. The La Lutte leaders, on the other hand, were about to witness the greatest surge in class struggle since the Yen Bai uprising. This time, however, it was the proletariat of Saigon at the forefront.

Hemery writes,

The ferment among the workers manifested itself in partial strikes that culminated in the general strike of 1937 that included workers in the arsenal at Saigon, of the Trans-Indo Chinese Railway (Saigon-Hanoi), the Tonkin miners and the coolies of the rubber plantations, the mass of the proletariat, in other words. They were demanding an eight hour day, trade union rights, the right to strike and convene, a free press, etc. It was during this struggle that the workers, assisted by the militants, organised their strike and support committees and their contacts throughout the country. There was something spontaneous in this wave of demands and chain explosions, and in the limited understanding of the workers and peasants. They were fed on the illusion of the possibilities of freedom and social reform offered by the Popular Front of the metropolitan country. Agitation and propaganda and the legal and underground activities of the organised political groupings, whose members could be counted on the fingers, are not enough to explain this vast movement.

In response to the Vietnamese workers’ activity, Blum’s popular front regime showed that it was no different from the previous representatives of French imperialism. Unions were banned, militants were sent to prisons and even death camps, and the nationalist movement, which sought to develop Vietnamese capitalism, saw its organizations and press dissolved. Under the dictates of Moscow, the Vietnamese Stalinists continued to defend the popular front, even as it directly attacked all those struggling for liberation in Vietnam. The Trotskyists, on the other hand, called on the workers to organize action committees to carry forward their struggles. As a result of this agitation and the organic connection the Trotskyists had to the working class, hundreds of action committees began to form, in which workers democratically discussed their demands and strategized. The French regime worked to crush these committees, and in response, the Trotskyists exposed the Stalinists’ alliance with the regime that was attacking the workers and holding back the development of class struggle.

In 1937 French companies were forced to negotiate with rank-and-file workers organizations (which were primarily led by Trotskyists). The Trotskysists were deeply involved in the 1936-37 strike wave, including its high point in which rail workers struck from July 10 to August 9, bringing the rail lines (and the country dependent on them) to a standstill from Saigon to Hanoi. A dossier from the colonial regime at the time names Trotskyist militant Ta Khac Triem as “the Trotskyist ringleader who played an important part in the general strike on the railways,” according to Ngo Van’s book.

Meanwhile, the Trotskyists were also developing their propaganda work, using La Lutte to ruthlessly criticize Blum and the popular front and foment strikes and other workers’ actions. They also had networks of militants distributing agitational leaflets. Despite Ta Thu Thau’s attempts to maintain the alliance, the Stalinists broke from La Lutte in 1937, just as the sham Moscow Trials were taking place. The Moscow Trials purged all of Stalin’s opposition in the communist party, massacred many of the fiercest revolutionaries in Russia, and secured the power of Stalin’s bureaucracy. Stalin extended this attack on his opposition internationally. Under orders from Moscow, the Vietnamese Stalinists launched their own organization and press, in which they attacked the Trotskyists as spies and saboteurs, just days after they had been organizing with the Trotskyists as comrades. This break was largely fueled by the Trotskyists’ refusal to remain silent about the repression carried out by the French popular front government, and which the Stalinists continued to defend.

As the colonial regime repressed the Vietnamese workers and peasants, the Stalinists remained consistent in their abandonment of anti-imperialism. In 1938, the colonial regime launched a bond measure to collect millions for war, and to conscript 20,000 additional infantry troops from the Vietnamese population. The conscription was so unpopular that recruitment centers were sites of protests, including self-mutilations. Rather than oppose the conscription, the Stalinists’ propaganda argued that the colonial regime should lower the price of war bonds so that poorer workers and peasants could afford them. Governor-General Joseph-Jules Brévié even sent a telegram to the colonial minister expressing his appreciation for the Stalinists’ support, while noting that the Trotskyists continued to cause problems for the regime.4

The Trotskyists certainly did cause problems for the colonial regime, and the strength of their denunciations of the popular front government, along with their now deep roots in the working class, showed in 1939 that they had in fact emerged as the trusted leaders of the Saigon proletariat. According to some historical accounts, they had 5,000 militants around this time. In the 1939 Colonial Council elections, the Trotskyists and Stalinists ran in competition with one another, and with contrasting programs.

As Ngo Van writes,

The Stalinists, with their newspaper… and their “Democratic Front” slate of candidates, were leading a campaign for democratic reforms in exchange for their support of the colonial regime’s policy of “defending Indochina.” The Trotskyist Tranh Dau/La Lutte group opposed this and denounced all compromise with the colonial regime. They based their propaganda on the need for a “united front of workers and peasants” against war, against the setting up of a national defense fund, against the raising of taxes and the creation of armaments taxes, and against forced conscription of more infantry troops. They put forward their revolutionary project: set up factory committees and peasant committees to control the activity of the banks, industries, businesses, and agricultural companies; put the management of transportation and postal services in the hands of the workers; divide up among poor peasants the lands belonging to the banks, the Church, and big landowners; entrust peasant committees with the task of abolishing feudal exploitation; and oppose war by working toward the eventual formation of a soviet federation of Asia.5

It was the Trotskyists who won 80 percent of the vote in these elections. At this point the Vietnamese proletariat’s hunger for national liberation was stronger than ever. The Trotskyists ran as the only candidates who were unequivocal in their opposition to the imperialist policy of the popular front in France, winning the trust and respect of the masses, while the Stalinists paid for their capitulation to the colonial regime.

The Trotskyists’ advance would, however, not last long. The outbreak of World War II came shortly after their victory, and so did another wave of repression. Both the Trotskyists and Stalinists were arrested, exiled, and forced into hiding. They would remain largely absent from developments in Vietnam for the next several years, but would have one final showdown in 1945.

Revolution and Counterrevolution

With most of the revolutionaries in prison, exile, or hiding, the imperialist world war played out in Vietnam. The most important change the war brought was the Japanese invasion of 1940, which overthrew French rule. Lacking the forces to fully occupy Vietnam, the Japanese regime relied on many of the administrators of the French colonial government, as well as youth militias formed from supporters of Vietnam’s nationalist movement and religious sects. In this way, Japan controlled Vietnam up until 1945, when Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh movement, in partnership with the Allied powers, defeated the Japanese occupation in the North. Shortly after, Imperial Japan was defeated in the war. It was announced that the Allies were on their way to Vietnam, and Japan would continue to run the South of the country until they arrived. But with the Viet Minh victorious in the North, the contest over who would rule the country had already begun.

Throughout Vietnam, workers and peasants began to organize, informed by the experience of the strike wave and action committees in the late 1930s. In the coal industry, for example, 30,000 miners elected workers’ councils to manage production themselves. Such measures put workers in control not only of the mines but also of railways, the telegraph system, and public services. They set up a literacy campaign, mandated equal pay for all types of work, and organized themselves from the position of “no bosses and no cops.”

In the South, the Trotskyists and Stalinists began to reemerge amid the wave of revolutionary fervor. Even after imprisonment and exile, the Trotskyists were still remembered as the respected leaders of Saigon’s working class. Meanwhile, strengthened by the conquest of power in the North, the Stalinists went around Saigon with loudspeakers calling for all to defend the Viet Minh and distributing leaflets claiming that they were on the side of the Russian, Chinese, British, and U.S. Allies for independence.

On August 21, the right-wing nationalist groups, organized under the United National Front, called a demonstration for national independence.

Ngo Van describes the atmosphere at the time:

On 21 August 1945, for the first time in the political life of the country, from the morning onwards, veritable masses of people assembled like ants and filled the Norodom Boulevard, then the Botanical Gardens near the governor’s palace, and then crossed the major arteries in order chanting slogans: “Down with French imperialism!” (“Da dao de quoc phap”), “Long live the Independence of Vietnam!” (“Vietnam hoan toan doc lap’”) whilst the flags and banners floating above this moving army indicated the presence of the Vanguard Youth, who had been a pro-Japanese organisation only yesterday, peasants led by Stalinist militants who had come from the environs of Saigon, workers of Saigon-Cholon, Cao-daists, Buddhists of various sects grouped around their bonzes, the Hoa Hao, and the militants of the Trotskyist La Lutte and Internationalist Communist League groups. The latter, under the flag of the Fourth International, raised the slogans of “the land and ricefields to the peasants, the factories and enterprises for the workers!” …

But in fact everybody went down into the street with different aspirations. The only common but overwhelming sentiment was “never to see the French back in power, long live the end of the colonial regime!”

Historian Richard Stephenson describes the show of strength by the Trotskyists and workers at this demonstration, and the response of the Stalinists.

The Trotskyists of the International Communist League joined the march with banners demanding “Land for the peasants and nationalization of industry under the control of the workers.” Several tens of thousands of workers rallied behind their banners, and by the end of the day a provisional Central Committee for People’s Committees was established, with a workers’ guard for the Saigon-Cholon area under the leadership of Nguyen Hai Au (a Trotskyist from the north, where he had written a social novel).

Realizing the implications of this, the Stalinists in the Vietminh forced the United National Front to merge with them on August 23, and two days later established a de facto government, through a coup carried out with the right-wing nationalists.

Having seized power in alliance with the national bourgeoisie, the Viet Minh began declaring that those who supported peasants seizing farms would be “punished severely without mercy” and that those who called on the people to take up arms would be “considered saboteurs and provocateurs, enemies of national independence.” These statements were clearly threats against the Trotskyists. The Viet Minh also began shutting down any mobilizations that they did not call. The Trotskyists continued calling for action committees, land for the peasants, and the arming of the people, but they offered “critical support” for the Viet Minh. Meanwhile, the Viet Minh were offering their uncritical support to the imperialists, directing the masses to “remain calm” and prepare to welcome the British.

But the British had no intention of negotiating with the Vietnamese. After they arrived, they suppressed mass demonstrations. The Viet Minh, hoping to get the British stamp of approval to run the country, directed the masses to give up their weapons. The police — now overseen by the Viet Minh — began disappearing leaders of the country’s religious sects that had long been oppressed by French colonialism. These sects now hoped that winning independence would guarantee them religious freedom, something the Viet Minh and certainly the British had no interest in supporting. The British repression of the Vietnamese had begun, and the Viet Minh was helping carry it out. The masses, however, were not done fighting.

As Ngo Van recounts,

During the night of 22-23 September 1945 French troops, supported by Gurkhas commanded by British officers, reoccupied various police stations, the Post Office, the Central Bank and the Town Hall. They met no immediate resistance. The news spread like a trail of gunpowder and triggered off a veritable insurrection in the working class districts of the town. Explosions were heard in widely separate areas. The movement had broken without anyone giving any kind of directive. …

In all the outlying suburbs trees were cut down, cars and lorries turned over, and primitive furniture piled up in the streets. Elementary barricades were set up to prevent the passage of French and Gurkha patrols, and the taking up of strategic positions by the imperialist forces. The centre of the town rapidly fell under the control of the French and Japanese troops, supported by Gurkhas. But the poorer suburbs of Khanh Hoi, Cau Kho, Ban Co, Phu Nhuan, Tan Dinh and Thi Nghe were firmly in the hands of the rebels.

The Vietnamese people, and particularly the workers, had begun to fight back. But the Viet Minh was uninterested in a worker-led revolution that might challenge its leadership or its strategy of class collaboration. While dodging the British and French troops who were now fighting to snuff out this revolution, the Viet Minh began to massacre any Vietnamese groups fighting for independence based on the leadership of the proletariat. This included the revolutionary workers in the North, such as the recently formed workers’ militia at the Go Vap tramway depot. These workers, who had organized so militantly that they had been able to win demands from Japanese imperialism just months earlier, were massacred by Ho Chi Minh’s counterrevolutionary forces. The Trotskyists in the South would learn that their greatest leader, Ta Thu Thau, had been murdered in the North shortly after Ho Chi Minh came to power. In the South, they put up a fight but were no match for the combined terror of the British, French, and Viet Minh. Like Ta Thu Thau, the Trotskyists in the South were massacred.

As Trotsky had warned in the Permanent Revolution:

Petty-bourgeois parties based on the peasantry are still able to retain a semblance of independent policy during the humdrum periods of history when secondary questions are on the agenda; but when the revolutionary crisis of society puts fundamental questions of property on the order of the day, the petty-bourgeois “peasant” party automatically becomes a tool in the hands of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.

At this point, however, the Vietnamese masses had seen that as workers, they could run the country themselves. The smaller peasants had seen how the land could be owned by those who work it. For a short time, Vietnam belonged to the Vietnamese, and they were not about to lose it again.

Permanent Revolution in Vietnam

In the conflict that played out between the Vietnamese Stalinists and Trotskyists from the 1930s to 1945, we can see the fundamental differences in Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and Stalin’s theory of socialism in one country.

As the Russian Revolution showed decades earlier, the international development of capitalism creates conditions in which the workers of underdeveloped and even colonized countries can carry out revolution that enacts agrarian reform, expropriates capitalists, and puts workers in power in alliance with peasants. With this theory in mind, the Vietnamese Trotskyists contributed to the development of revolutionary workers’ activity in Vietnam, building strong connections to the proletariat in Saigon and, as a result, winning some of the basic democratic demands that the Stalinists claimed had to be won by negotiating with the Blum regime and later the British. This is because — as Ta Thu Thau explains above — the Trotskyists saw in the proletariat the only class that was completely independent of French colonialism and other attachments to imperialism. Thus, the proletariat had everything to gain from a socialist revolution against both the national oppression under colonialism and their exploitation by capitalists, while the Vietnamese bourgeoisie had much to lose from such a revolution.

As Trotsky put it,

There have been epochs in which the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie were able to set up their revolutionary dictatorship. That we know. But those were epochs in which the proletariat, or precursor of the proletariat at the time, had not yet become differentiated from the petty bourgeoisie, but on the contrary constituted in its undeveloped conditions the fighting core of the latter. It is quite otherwise today. We cannot speak of the ability of the petty bourgeoisie to direct the life of the present-day, even if backward, bourgeois society, insofar as the proletariat has already separated itself off from the petty bourgeoisie and is pitted antagonistically against the big bourgeoisie on the basis of capitalist development, which condemns the petty bourgeoisie to nullity and confronts the peasantry with the inevitable political choice between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Of course, the Vietnamese Trotskyists were well aware that a revolution in Vietnam could not survive in isolation, but they had confidence that the victory of the Vietnamese workers and peasants against colonialism could inspire revolution throughout the other colonies, hence their vision for an eventual “soviet federation of Asia.”

And what about the peasants? Many Stalinists distort Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, claiming that it writes off the peasants as reactionary, and claim that the examples of peasant revolutions, like the 1955 revolution in Vietnam, disprove Trotsky’s ideas. But in reality, Trotsky had a far more nuanced understanding of the role of the peasantry in revolutions, and in Permanent Revolution he lays out in great detail how this analysis aligned with Lenin’s own understanding. It is not that peasants cannot play an essential role in the revolution. In fact Trotsky and Lenin argued that in undeveloped countries, the workers’ alliance with peasants was necessary for the success of the socialist revolution. However, because the peasantry does not represent a homogeneous class with shared interests, but rather a group ranging from petty-bourgeois landlords to oppressed toilers, as a class the peasants could not develop and deliver an independent, consistent revolutionary program. Rather, peasants could either take up a bourgeois program or be won over to a revolutionary workers’ program depending on the development of class struggle.

Trotsky even applied this idea to Vietnam, writing in response to the Vietnamese Trotskyists’ program published in 1930, arguing that the Vietnamese program did not give enough weight to the importance of the peasantry, as well as the national question. As he put it then:

It is necessary to speak more clearly, more fully, and more precisely about the agrarian question: the role and significance of the semi-feudal landed proprietors and of those with large landholdings in general; and about how much land the revolution would have at its disposal and as a fund for land distribution if it expropriated the large landed proprietors in the interests of the poorest peasants. The peasant question is left out of the declaration altogether.

Unless the regime of colonial enslavement is overthrown, the expropriation of the large and medium-size landowners is impossible. These two questions, the national question and the land question, must be linked in the closest possible way in the consciousness of the workers and peasants.

In contrast, the Stalinists had no faith that the workers or small peasants were prepared to run the country themselves, and depended on their alliance with Vietnamese nationalists who wanted to carve out their own space in the capitalist system and exploit the Vietnamese workers and small peasants themselves. As a result, the Stalinists did everything they could to appease the bourgeois nationalists even when that meant defending imperialist powers and subduing class struggle.

In 1945, the Stalinists’ strategy was tested in reality and led to a defeat of the first ever seizure of power of the Vietnamese over their own country. The Viet Minh, however, would defeat the French eight years later. But this delayed victory was not a success of the Stalinist strategy. Quite the opposite. As Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello argue in their book, Marxism and Military Strategy, the French defeat was made possible by subjective conditions in world capitalist relations after World War II, conditions that allowed revolutions to develop and even win despite misleaderships. They write,

It was not until the CP abandoned the United National Front and was willing to call for an agrarian revolution that the situation took a fundamental turn. … This led to a sudden shift in the balance of power that surprised the French in the battle of Dien Bien Phu and resulted in victory against the forces of occupation. …

Now, if to defeat the counterrevolutionary forces it was necessary in both China and in Indochina to abandon the most fundamental premises of the strategy of protracted war, what is the relationship between strategy and the triumph of the revolution in both countries?

To answer this question, it is essential to understand the exceptionally favorable conditions for the revolution prevailing at that time. Unlike World War I, World War II led to the design of a new world order. Its implementation was not only a matter of dividing the world into “areas of influence” between the USSR and the imperialist powers and establishing the supremacy of the United States among the latter; the war between States had resulted in a series of civil wars, revolutions and situations of dual power, which needed to be resolved in one way or another. …

It is in the context of the disrupted capitalist balance of the immediate postwar period and the weakness of imperialism worldwide in dealing with the various emerging contradictions that the triumph of the revolutions in China and Indochina would take place.6

They go on to point out that, by abandoning their initial strategy in 1953, the Stalinists created a situation in which “by the time the revolution finally triumphed, U.S. imperialism was more stable and was able to impose the partition of Vietnam in 1954.”7

As everyone knows, the Vietnamese masses would go on to defeat the United States, though it would take two more decades, more than 3 million Vietnamese lives, and a complete desecration of land throughout the country, which still affects the Vietnamese people to this day. Again, this defeat of the United States came not because of the Stalinist strategy, but in spite of it. As Trotsky predicted in the Permanent Revolution, once the workers’ and small peasants understood their own power, and once the role of the national capitalists was exposed, the revolution would spread. This spread of the revolution in Vietnam forced the Stalinsts to adopt elements of a workers’ program, like expropriation of big landlords and nationalization of industry, in order to maintain their legitimacy and to resolve the contradiction of Vietnam’s isolation from the imperialist powers. However, the top-down, bureaucratic leadership of the Stalinists would lead to Vietnam’s revolution only achieving partial victory. In a sense, it created conditions of dual power in which the class contradictions in Vietnam went unresolved. The tensions between different classes were kept in check through the role of the state, but the existence of international capitalism left the always lingering possibility for the gains of Vietnam’s revolution to be undone through the eventual advance of imperialism.

We can thus see the bankruptcy of the Stalinist “stageist” revolution in modern-day Vietnam. Just as Ta Thu Thau argued in 1930, the Vietnamese bourgeoisie cannot carry out socialist revolution. Vietnam is now socialist only in name. What gains the Stalinist victory brought in the 1970s have mostly, if not entirely, been discarded in favor of capitalist restoration. The Vietnamese regime has opened the country to imperialist multinationals that seek to use cheap, precarious, unorganized Vietnamese workers in a capitalist competition between the United States and China. So much for national liberation.

As Trotsky explains,

Under the conditions of the imperialist epoch the national democratic revolution can be carried through to a victorious end only when the social and political relationships of the country are mature for putting the proletariat in power as the leader of the masses of the people. And if this is not yet the case? Then the struggle for national liberation will produce only very partial results, results directed entirely against the working masses.

We can see these “partial results” in Vietnam’s having won its independence by expropriating the capitalists, but under an anti-democratic leadership that had already crushed the vanguard of the working class. Even as the Stalinists in Vietnam began building somewhat of a workers’ state after defeating the United States, it was deformed by its lack of working-class democracy, and limited by its material isolation within the imperialist world.

Despite the “partial results” that today fuel the restoration of capitalism and imperialist entrenchment in Vietnam, the national liberation victory of the Vietnamese working class and peasantry is rightfully still celebrated to this day. Their inspiring struggle against the United States fueled an international wave of revolutionary imagination and activity in the 1960s and 1970s, touching even the imperialist countries; French students occupied universities with barricades, and U.S. students, workers, and even troops and veterans protested en masse against the U.S. invasion.

Even to this day, there are young people in the heart of imperialism who study Vietnam’s revolution as inspiration for our own political work. Vietnam is an active point of reference for youth in the heart of imperialism who are being politicized by the Palestinian struggle for national liberation. Yet far too many people — including this author at one time — have looked to the wrong leaders, those who waged a counterrevolution and won national liberation not because of, but in spite of, their class collaboration. Instead, we need to see what Ta Thu Thau and the Trotskyists saw: that it is the working class of past and present who must lead the revolution. In solidarity with the working class internationally, only they can defeat imperialism once and for all.

Notes

↑1 Ngo Van, In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary (Oakland: AK Press, 2010), translated by Helene Fleury, Hilary Horrocks, Ken Knabb, and Naomi Sager, 56–57.
↑2 Under French colonialism the Vietnamese people were referred to as Annamites
↑3 There is a rich debate to be had over whether the Trotskyists at La Lutte subordinated their politics too much to their alliance with the Stalinists, and what role this may have played in limiting the spread of revolutionary ideas. With a lack of published materials available to study, and a lack of space in this article, that debate cannot take place here.
↑4 Van, In The Crossfire, 98–100.
↑5 Van, In The Crossfire, 98–100.
↑6 Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello, Estratégia socialista y arte militar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones IPS, 2017), 377–78. An English-language edition of this book is forthcoming.
↑7 Maiello and Albamonte, Estratégia socialista. … See MoreSee Less

The Hidden History of Trotskyists in Vietnam – Left Voice

www.leftvoice.org

Before they were slandered as fascists and wreckers, Trotskyists led one of the most advanced processes of working-class activity in Vietnam’s history. This buried revolutionary legacy provides less…

LaborFest

1 week ago

Historians’ Group Votes to Condemn ‘Scholasticide’ in Gaza
After contentious debate, members of the American Historical Association voted to condemn what a resolution described as Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s educational system.
www.nytimes.com/2025/01/06/arts/historians-gaza-israel-education.html

A lectern on a podium reads American Historical Association.
The vote followed months of organizing by supporters of the resolution, some of whom had been involved in previous failed efforts to pass measures critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.Credit…Natalie Keyssar for The New York Times
Jennifer Schuessler.png
By Jennifer Schuessler
Jan. 6, 2025
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Members of the American Historical Association, the country’s largest group of professional historians, approved a resolution on Sunday evening condemning Israel’s military action in Gaza. It argued that the destruction of most of the enclave’s education infrastructure, along with many archives and libraries, amounted to “scholasticide.”

The vote came during the group’s annual meeting, which drew nearly 4,000 of its more than 10,000 members to Manhattan for four days of scholarly panels and discussions. Several members described raucous debate over the measure, which was approved by a vote of 428 to 88, despite signals that it was opposed by some of the group’s senior leadership.

On Monday, the measure moved to the group’s elected council, which under its bylaws can endorse the measure, veto it or decline to concur, which would send it within 90 days to the entire membership for ratification. Later that afternoon, the group’s executive director, James Grossman, said that the group “had a vigorous discussion of the resolution, and has postponed a decision on how to act until its next meeting, which will be within a few weeks.”

The resolution’s passage suggested a new phase in the cultural battles over the Israel-Hamas war, which began after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the intense Israeli military response that has left much of the enclave in ruins. Fallout has rocked campuses and cultural organizations across the United States, and contributed to the resignations of a number of university presidents.

At the historical association meeting, the vote followed months of organizing by supporters of the resolution, some of whom had been involved in previous failed efforts over the past decade to pass measures critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

The measure, which was introduced by the group Historians for Peace and Democracy, does not demand a boycott of Israeli institutions or scholars. Instead, it calls for a permanent cease-fire, and for the historical association to form a committee “to assist in rebuilding Gaza’s educational infrastructure.”

The Israeli military campaign, the resolution states, has “effectively obliterated Gaza’s education system,” destroying 80 percent of its schools, all 12 of its universities and numerous archives, museums, cultural sites, which it says “will extinguish the future study of Palestinian history.” As a basis for the charge, the resolution cites an April 2024 statement by United Nations experts, which said Israel’s “pattern of attacks” amounted to “scholasticide.”

The Israeli government has disputed that report, saying it had no “doctrine that aims at causing maximal damage to civilian infrastructure,” and blaming destruction of Gaza’s schools on the “exploitation of civilian structures for terror purposes” by Hamas.

The Sunday vote, which was open to all members, reflected political and generational divides within the historical association, several members said. The overflow crowd, which spilled into the hallway outside the hotel ballroom where the vote occurred, was notably young and diverse. Some in attendance said that was particularly striking at a time of deep concern over the imploding academic job market and diminished prospects for newly minted scholars.
“It was a different and younger generation of historians that the A.H.A. has nurtured and needs to continue to nurture and support,” said Atina Grossmann, a scholar of Weimar, Nazi and postwar German history at Cooper Union.

The five members who were allowed to speak on each side of the resolution included current and former leaders of the organization, who debated both the substance of the resolution, and the appropriateness of the group’s weighing in on the conflict at all.

In recent years, the association has stepped up its advocacy in Washington, and has taken a leading role in opposing state laws aimed at restricting teaching about race, gender and sexuality. But in what some saw as tacit criticism of the resolution, Grossman, the group’s executive director, read a prepared report noting that the group’s lobbying was “limited to history itself.”

“We are not a political organization, which is essential if we are to have any standing to provide Congress with briefings on such issues as the histories of deportation, taxation, civil service and other pressing issues,” he said, according to a written version of the remarks.

Barbara Weinstein, a former president of the group and a professor of Latin American history at New York University, who spoke in favor of the resolution, noted that the group had previously taken positions condemning other military actions, including the Iraq war and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Opposing the destruction of archives and educational institutions, she said after the vote, is a legitimate concern for scholars.

“Not only is this a protest against an attack on Gaza that has killed many people and destroyed many buildings,” she said. “It’s a protest against the erasure of their memory. And for historians, the erasure of people’s memories is the erasure of the people.”

Among those speaking against the measure was the group’s president-elect, Suzanne Marchand, a historian of modern Europe at Louisiana State University, who will take office next year. Marchand, reached by email, declined to comment.

The historical association is not the only scholarly group currently wrestling with Israel and Gaza. Last month, the executive council of the Modern Language Association, which represents nearly 25,000 literary scholars, said it could not hold a vote on a resolution endorsing a call to boycott Israel, since the measure would run afoul of its contracts with public universities in states that forbade doing business with contractors that boycott Israel. But the council also said it was “appalled by the continued attack on Gaza,” and encouraged “other methods of responding to Israel’s destruction” of the enclave.

Eight former presidents of the group then signed a letter urging it to reconsider and allow a debate on the measure at its annual meeting, to be held Jan. 9 to Jan. 12.

David Waldstreicher, a professor of early American history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said the resounding vote at the historical association, after years of failed measures condemning Israel, reflected shifts in the profession.

“Opinion is changing,” he said after the Sunday vote. “This war is not like other wars. That is obvious to students of history.”

But some members said the vote would only fuel continuing political attacks on higher education, which many fear will escalatein the second Trump administration.

“This feeds directly into the idea that academics are unapologetically political and are all on board with a pretty far left-wing view of the Israel-Hamas war,” said Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a professor of 20th-century American history at the New School who spoke against the resolution.

“There are plenty of us who have a diversity of viewpoints,” she said. “But if a resolution like this goes through at the biggest organization of historians in America, that’s really bad for us.”
Jennifer Schuessler is a reporter for the Culture section of The Times who covers intellectual life and the world of ideas. More about Jennifer Schuessler … See MoreSee Less

Historians’ Group Votes to Condemn ‘Scholasticide’ in Gaza

www.nytimes.com

After contentious debate, members of the American Historical Association voted to condemn what a resolution described as Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s educational system.

LaborFest

2 weeks ago

Butler On Paris Commune
cosmonautmag.com/2025/01/butler-on-the-paris-commune/
Kyle A. Edwards introduces this republication of General Benjamin Butler’s remarks on the Paris Commune by highlighting the contemporary necessity for a mass independent workers’ movement.

W. Aléxis, Paris (1871), lithograph [recolored]

Introduction

The Paris Commune of 1871, it could be argued, constituted the belated promise of the 1848 European Revolutions, the first time the working class actually took political power, even if just for a couple of months. In 1848, Frederick Douglass was initially fascinated with the anti-monarchical revolts. However, once the working class attempted to throw their weight into the revolutions, Douglass denounced their actions—first by disparaging an April Chartist demonstration as “wild and wicked” and then by denouncing “the foul undertaking” of “the communists of Paris” in June 1848.1

Douglass, the fugitive slave turned abolitionist leader turned revolutionary recruiter for the Union Army during the Civil War, covered the events of the Paris Commune of 1871 closely, as well, in his newspaper, the New National Era.2 For April and June 1871, published around the same time as Karl Marx’s most important contribution to the Communards, The Civil War in France, Douglass wrote of “the spectacle of disastrous failure, and almost [feeling] like despairing of the fitness of the French for self-government.” The masses of Paris were “blind and deluded tools of their leaders.” Instead of glorious or heroic, they were “deluded, ill-starred men.”3 He attacked communists and workers fighting for a democratic and social republic as antithetical to republican institutions—equally bad as monarchists. After the bloody repression of the Thiers government—the conservative bourgeois republic with its Bonapartist generals and the monarch-friendly parliament—was made apparent, Douglass criticized the conservative regime as unworthy of the name ‘Republic,’ but he never came over to the side of the Communards.

Another contemporary figure, lesser known than Douglass but subsequently more consequential, had a different opinion about the Commune.4 When Karl Marx looked to Paris in April 1871, he exclaimed, “What resilience, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians!” No matter the mistakes the revolutionary workers of Paris made and even if their efforts went down to defeat, the rebellion was “the most glorious deed of our Party since the June [1848] insurrection in Paris.”5 In his May Address of the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association, mentioned above, Marx wrote, “Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class.”6 Marx, in print and in organizational labor, supported and defended the revolutionary Parisian workers.

Liberals and conservatives alike, in respectable and bourgeois circles certainly, but even in abolitionist milieus, looked at the Commune in horror.7 They suspected class conflict on a monumental scale was possible in the United States. This suspicion was correct: the rise of labor unrest in the United States culminated in the St. Louis Commune during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.8 Wendell Phillips, one of the most radical of the abolitionists, was one of the few American supporters of the Commune; this may be unsurprising, given his post-Civil War affiliation with labor politics and his flirtation with the First International.9

A more surprising endorsement of the Paris Commune came from Benjamin Butler: a former Democratic supporter of Jefferson Davis at the 1860 Democratic National Convention in Charleston, South Carolina. A Massachusetts Democrat before the firing on Fort Sumter, Butler was appointed as a general by Abraham Lincoln based on political criteria—the need to find and promote Democratic defenders of the Union and the 1860 election against the secessionists. Butler quickly realized a defense of the Union would require attacking slave property and a hard war. He made some of the first moves to confiscate escaping slaves as property of the enemy along the line of march to free them early on in the Civil War during his command at Fort Monroe, Virginia. He oversaw a hard, though not brutal, occupation of New Orleans.10 By May 1864, Butler’s conduct had so impressed Marx that he wrote to Engels, “There’s nothing I would be happier to see than success for Butler. It would be of inestimable value, were he to enter Richmond first.”11 This shift, developed in the struggle against the oligarchic slavocracy, combined with some advocacy for labor in the antebellum years, led Butler to develop and expand his radicalism in the post-war years, unlike the great majority of Republicans, to include advocacy for former slaves receiving “‘a fair share of the lands” they had already worked for generations and “support for and deepening identification with American labor.”12 This is counterposed to the ardent defense of private property by the Republican Party, including by one of the best liberalism had to offer—Frederick Douglass.

A campaign speech Butler made in Gloucester, Massachusetts, interestingly reprinted without comment in Douglass’s newspaper, made it clear that Butler not only had a deep identification with American labor, but also looked internationally to workers fighting for their rights and for power. While lacking in a truly class-based analysis of the Commune, calling it a struggle for a “town government” or a “municipal form of government,” in the mold of the old New England town halls, Butler also recognized it was a “struggle of the workingmen” that “should form the germ of a future republic.” Butler looked back to the municipal revolution of the 1770s and 1780s, certainly progressive in its role in fighting the monarchy through expanded political participation by common producers, as the lens in which to analyze the Commune. Still, he, much better than Douglass, saw that the Versailles government offered fighting workers “nothing but extermination” and explained much more clearly the destruction of monarchical property by retreating workers than did Douglass, who abhorred such actions. This defense of the Paris Commune was likely part of the reason Butler was described by one critic as “the greatest socialist demagogue of our day.”13

Reprinted below is Butler’s speech as it was printed in the New National Era, a rare example of a radical liberal in the United States offering solidarity to the masses in Paris in motion, the Commune, which Marx thought could “serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule.”14

It’s clear that opposition to the progressive march from bourgeois to proletarian revolution, or revolution in permanence, animated the retreat by northern liberals from Reconstruction. In addition to developments like the rise of the National Labor Union and the Colored National Labor Union in the wake of the Confederacy’s defeat, the movement for an 8-hour work day, and spreading strikes, the reaction of liberals to the Paris Commune proved a decisive turning point in how the once revolutionary Republican Party would abandon “their commitment to equality and tie the party to big business.”15 The revolutionary role the Republican Party played, backed by small farmers and workers in uniform, joined after January 1, 1863 by free Blacks and former slaves, in the defeat of the slavocracy and the Reconstruction Amendments should never be forgotten. But, led by “bloody constitutionalists,”16 liberal revolutionaries who refused the stern duties necessary to plant the seeds of interracial democracy, the revolutionary initiative had passed from the hands of the capitalist revolutionaries, becoming the historic mission of the working class and its allies. Reactionary terror in the South combined with the flight from equality in the North, resulting in counterrevolution—the worst setback for the American working class in its history. And as Michael Goldfield has noted, “all subsequent U.S. political history… has largely been the working out of those contradictions bequeathed by the Civil War and Reconstruction.”17

Looking at how reform liberals and radical liberals—Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and Benjamin Butler again being other important examples—considered and debated the Paris Commune compared to Marx can also help us make sense of political debates today. The lessons Marx took away from the failed revolutions in Europe of 1848-1849, that in politics workers must organize independently of the capitalist class and what happens in the voting booth and the halls of Congress or Parliament is subordinate to what happens in the streets, picket lines, and on the battlefield, were strengthened and enhanced by the experience of the Paris Commune. Famously, “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purpose.”18

The fight to replace capitalism with a society where human solidarity takes the place of the wage and debt slavery systems that continually grinds down the working class and its allies on the land won’t be decided by democratic socialists who caucus, vote with, and campaign for one of the parties of capital. Their proposed reforms, as Marx and Engels outlined in Part III of The Communist Manifesto, are “desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.”19 The working class must build a labor party based on the unions, not simply one with electoralist ambitions, but one which will organize the entire working class to defend our interests with a view to taking state power. As Marx and Engels concluded, the working class movement must have its own political party and candidates in elections, to count their forces, maintain their independence, and educate the public about their revolutionary program. In the United States, this may seem a more remote possibility than ever. The working class has been in retreat for decades, since at least the 1970s. Physical ties to the truly mass movements that built the CIO, smashed Jim Crow, opposed the Vietnam War, and fought for women’s rights are fading.

Yet, importantly, today, there are embryonic struggles that show the nadir is behind us. Workers have been and are in motion, more willing to use union power to fight for raises needed to fight inflation and schedules that allow them to see their families. To fight against the two-tiered system put into contracts following the 2008-2009 financial crisis. To fight against dangerous working conditions and for control of safety on the job. These fights by workers and their unions—in industrial bakeries, in auto, at hotels, on the railroads, by longshore workers, by communication workers, teachers, and flight attendants, at Boeing, and even on campus with graduate worker unions—are the most important thing going on today in politics. Much more so than which candidate, Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, both committed to ruling on behalf of the capitalists, won in November.

Class conflict and economic crisis are inevitable under capitalism. The outcomes of these struggles, however, are not. And what type of leadership the working class and others squeezed during economic downturns will look to is not preordained either. Just as the Trump phenomenon makes some long for a return to the George Bush-era Republican Party, there will likely be someone who will make Trump look tame in comparison when the capitalists are willing to take off the kid gloves and unleash a real fascist movement. There are big labor battles ahead but until our class breaks with both parties it will not be able to build the disciplined movement of millions needed to take the future into our own hands and create a new society based on human needs and human solidarity. Or as Butler put it, “the struggle of the workingmen, the struggle of the laborer… should be the germ of a future republic.” That microbe must grow into the fight for a workers and farmers government on the road to joining the global fight for socialism.

-Kyle A. Edwards

General Butler on the French Situation

From the July 6, 1871 edition of New National Era

Gen. Butler, in his speech at the dedication of the new town hall in Gloucester, on Thursday, after some local allusions, said:

“Here we see a town hall built by the people, and for the people. As I listened to the eloquent and appropriate address of the gentleman who has given you an historical account of the town organization of the State, it brought to my mind the great event which has distinguished this year, and perhaps its effect on human liberty will distinguish this century, possibly overshadowing the great act of emancipation by which this country liberated four millions of people. It is because the act of which I am about to speak has a connection with town governments, and interfered with the liberties of mankind, that I refer to it now. You were well told that to our town system we owe our liberties, and I am reminded that our earlier towns declared war and carried it on more than two hundred years ago. The towns of Massachusetts Bay declared war upon the royal governor and drove him to Castle William. One hundred years after the town of Billerica, in Middlesex county, put upon its own records, where it stands to-day, as eloquent and effective a declaration of freedom and independence as that which was afterwards penned by the immortal Jefferson, in convention of our fathers assembled. The British came, as we all remember, and attempted to stop the progress of liberty by order General Gage to see that no new town meetings were called in the city of Boston, and our fathers got rid of that by adjourning the old one from year to year and never calling a new one. The reason why liberty has never found a firm foothold in the Old World is a want of town or municipal organization.

We have all heard with horror, disgust, and indignation, of the great struggle which has recently taken place in France between the Commune and the Versailles government. We have all made our minds up upon it with more or less intelligence, because we have only heard the story of that conflict through the mouths of the enemies of the Commune. What was that Commune? It was an endeavor of the people of the city of Paris to have a town government such as we enjoy here, or a city government—in one word, a municipal form of government; that they should not be ruled against their consent by the general government of France. They wished to secure that which we no more appreciate than the air we breathe, or the water we drink—a town government.

That terrible struggle was the struggle of a city of two millions of people insisting upon a right we all enjoy, that of self-government. It was the struggle of the workingman, the struggle of the laborer of the middle class for self government which should be the germ of a future republic. How dreadfully and fearfully that struggle was carried on we have heard, and how dreadful its results we all know, except that none of us can foretell what has been the result on the future liberties of mankind by the crushing out of the Commune. The crushing out of a people struggling for such a government has, I fear, rolled back the tide of republican liberty in Europe for years and years, if not forever.

This thought has hardly yet obtained a place in the minds of the American people. We have only been told they attempted to set fire with petroleum to the great structures built by kings and princes; that they pulled down the column erected to commemorate the great deeds of the first Napoleon in the Place Vendome. That last was done by the decree of the civil government. Why? Upon what theory was that done? We are told we must execrate the men that did it. They said this column was erected as an emblem of the military glory of a despot, to commemorate his deeds. The first act of a free people was to tear it down and level it to the ground, although they might destroy a work of art in so doing. Was not that in accordance with the spirit of free institutions?

We hear that the Versailles government overpowered them, and they offered to deliver themselves up and become–what? Become prisoners of war. They were answered, “Nothing but extermination.” And then we are told that they said, “If we are to be exterminated then all the monuments of human despotism shall fall with us; the palace of the Tuileries, the Louvre—all the great public buildings erected by the sweat and toil of unrequited labor shall come down, if we are to perish.” In the agony of desperation—and it was an act of desperation, not by any manner of means to be justified or defended; but, simply to speak the truth to you, it was an act of desperate men—they fired their own city. What could make well-taught women, well-instructed men leave their homes and fire their own and their neighbors’ houses but desperation? What was that act but the turning of the worm when it was trodden upon? Does it lie in the mouth of the lover of American liberty to say that the laboring men of Paris should not pull down the places of kings, raised by despotism and wrong, by unrequited labor, which never in any free government could have been made? Therefore I thought fit on this occasion to call to your attention the struggle of people maddened, infuriated, wronged, in the hope and with the endeavor to obtain that which we enjoy—a municipal government. That was the struggle of the French Commune. It was the effect of a wronged people arising in its wrath and its madness.

But, you say, they were but the working men, and you point to their deeds, the tearing down of temples and the burning of buildings. What did the Versailles or the Thiers government do when they obtained the mastery of the city? They marched them out by fifties and by hundreds, the tender women and the still tenderer children of thirteen or fourteen, manacled together, and shot them by machinery. Because men were not often found cruel enough to do the act, therefore the mitrailleuse, a gun that works by machinery, by simply turning a crank, was used to mow them down by platoons. For the purpose of obtaining a municipal government and liberty under the law, this great struggle has gone on, and I pray you one and all to read it with this view, for the purpose of strengthening your love for the institutions of your own Government, and for the appreciation of the benefits of a municipal government.

I do not intend to trespass longer upon your time. I hope to meet with you sooner or later to speak upon the prosperity of Gloucester; upon recent legislation and executive action of the treaty-making power; upon the business of Gloucester. We are to have the seas open to us as they were to our fathers.

Whatever treaty laws may do with your fish, they cannot take away our granite, or the strong arm which cuts the granite block out and fashions it into building purposes. That depends upon ourselves.

I mean to address you upon this point. This is not the day or the hour for that. … See MoreSee Less

Butler on the Paris Commune – Cosmonaut

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Kyle A. Edwards introduces General Butler’s remarks on the Paris Commune by highlighting the necessity for an independent workers’ movement.

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Labor Music From Turkey
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Marşlar-Ezgiler

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UİD-DER, işçi sınıfının birliğini ve dayanışmasını güçlendirmek, sömürüye karşı mücadeleyi yükseltmek için kuruldu. Kapitalizmi yıkıp insanlığı ve doğayı kurtaracak yegân…

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The robots are coming – for the gig economy: the smart satire of Lapsis
This article is more than 10 months old
This small-budget film with a high-tech concept follows a cable layer who is made to compete with robots at work
www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/jan/31/lapsis-film-2020-noah-hutton-best-thriller-movies-sci-fi#…
rmed with a unique premise and some thoughtful ideas, Noah Hutton’s 2020 film Lapsis is a sharp piece of job-hell science fiction that takes a shot at exploitative casual labour and the gig economy. The world of Lapsis is almost identical to ours but with one significant difference: the advancement of quantum computing, which has revolutionised society.

Quantum trading is a huge business and, to support it, an equally huge infrastructure must be set up. Enter the cablers: a casually employed workforce who trek through the forests of upstate New York, armed with only a GPS device and a spool of cable, to connect quantum trading nodes situated throughout the countryside.

Ray (Dean Imperial) works as a delivery driver to support his younger brother, Jamie (Babe Howard), who suffers from a form of chronic fatigue syndrome known as omnia. To get Jamie into a highly regarded treatment centre, Ray needs fast cash – and there is good money to be made laying quantum cable. Ray’s acquaintance Felix (James McDaniel) offers him a “cabling medallion”, which licenses Ray to do the work in exchange for a cut of his wages.

Ray begins work for CBLR, who keep their employees on a short leash, pitting them against robot cablers that are designed to pressure workers into optimal performance. The robots will literally pick up the slack and steal routes if employees progress too slowly. On one route, Ray meets Anna (Madeline Wise) and learns of a nascent labour movement seeking to disable the robot cablers and force management to the negotiating table.

There’s something joyfully surreal about Lapsis’s lo-fi sci-fi. The collision of high-tech concept with low-tech execution makes it feel somewhat at odds with itself. But it is quite the achievement to make the science fiction believable in a movie where the evidence of said technology is little more than a roll of cable and the surface level is simply people hiking in the woods.

The incongruity of cutting-edge technology placed slap bang in the middle of nowhere is never more apparent than with the massive, metallic cubes the cablers are required to connect. They are completely out of place in the natural world and their strange, monolithic presence brings to mind the obsidian rectangles from 2001: A Space Odyssey. But where Kubrick’s masterpiece implied a technological utopia, Lapsis suggests the opposite.

Lapsis review – sci-fi satire targets the gig economy
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Because Lapsis is telling us the age-old story of wealth created off the back of a labouring class. Interspersed throughout the movie we see excerpts from smug corporate videos extolling the virtues of flexible work models while happily ignoring the erosion of their employees’ rights.

Cablers are forbidden from taking unauthorised rest breaks or deviating from their routes; there are parallels to present day, amoral workplace practices where retail workers are denied chairs or call centre operators are allotted timed toilet breaks. CBLR cracks down on robot tampering to suppress a potential strike, and this too feels very much in line with notoriously union-phobic big tech companies. If our world were to be changed by quantum computing tomorrow, it’s hard to imagine it would unfold that differently to Lapsis.

Ray’s story is as absorbing as the ideas it’s wrapped up in. His determination to help his brother brings him into areas he is unfamiliar with, both physically and ideologically. Ray’s belief in the American dream is challenged and he is drawn into the mystery at the heart of the film: who is the original owner of his cabling medallion?

Lapsis’s simple, unassuming approach proves that with the right idea (and several hundred metres of electrical supplies) you don’t need millions of dollars or flashy special effects to make compelling and thought-provoking science fiction. Imagine that. … See MoreSee Less

The robots are coming – for the gig economy: the smart satire of Lapsis

www.theguardian.com

This small-budget film with a high-tech concept follows a cable layer who is made to compete with robots at work