Claudia Jones: A Legacy Deferred–Excerpts From a Talk Delivered byAndrea Egypt

Claudia Jones — a legacy deferred

Published Mar 10, 2010 5:58 PM

Excerpts from a speech by Andrea Egypt at a Workers World Party Black History Month forum in Detroit

Sometimes a legacy can be buried within the rubble of politics for a long time, waiting to be unearthed and refined like a diamond in the rough.

Such is the legacy of Claudia Jones. She was persecuted by the McCarthyite anti-communist witch hunt and by the McCarran-Walter and Smith Acts against immigrants.

Claudia Jones was a triple threat: She was Black, a woman and a communist, at a time when this country was undergoing social and political upheaval.

She was powerful in both theory and practice, with a radical, revolutionary approach that challenged national and women’s oppression. She launched transnational challenges to U.S. foreign policy from the perspective of Marxist and Leninist theory.

She had the ability to address a wide range of issues and was widely known as the Communist Party’s principal theorist on the “woman question.” She wrote reviews, theses and essays on Pan Africanism, Black nationalism, Afro-Asian Caribbeanism and immigration rights as well as the West Indian diaspora of struggle, using her journalistic skills to integrate issues of race, class and gender on local and international levels.

She was noted for the party’s theory of the “triple oppression” of Black women. She wrote that “if the party wanted to be a place of equality, then it means above all fighting for the economic equality of women, because her economic dependence on men in our society, and her exclusion from production makes for a double exploitation of women and triply so for Negro women in present-day society.”

Jones was born in 1916 in Port-au-Spain, Trinidad, then a British colony. Her family lived well until the cocoa industry crashed and her father lost his job. The family was forced to emigrate. She was 8 years old when they moved to Harlem, where they lived in squalid, impoverished conditions.

Shortly after they assimilated, her mother died due to spinal meningitis and overwork in the garment factories. Her father could find only custodial work to support the family. They were so poor that Claudia missed receiving an important Citizenship Award at her high school because she had no clothes to wear for the ceremony.

Due to poor conditions, at the age of 17 she contracted tuberculosis and was committed to a sanitarium for a year. She suffered severe lung damage that affected her health throughout her life.

Her health, her living environment, the death of her mother, her father’s employment situation, her inability to find work except in laundries and factories, as well as her sisters being confined to housekeeping jobs — these encounters with racism, sexism, poverty and working class exploitation would later inspire her, as a journalist, to call for equal pay and equal rights for all women of the world, starting with Black women, in order to win real change.

Black journalism was on the rise. Between 1935 and 1936 she wrote a weekly column for the Negro Nationalist newspaper. She attended marches and rallies on matters like the Scottsboro 9 case. She was impressed by how the Communist Party’s legal defense raised the case to a national level, exposing the racist injustice of the criminal court system.

She decided to join the Young Communist League and by 1937 was elected to its National Council. In the 1940s she became associate editor of the Weekly Review. Her weekly column, “The Quiz,” answered questions on religion, the Soviet Union and other political inquiries.

She was editor in chief of the Political Score, which responded to political and social events and racial concerns surrounding the African-American struggle. She wrote “Half the World,” where she noted that the Communist Party needed to refine its position on gender and asserted that “white women need to be clear that the Negro question is prior to, and not equal to the women question.” She met with some criticism but stood firm in her belief that as the position of Black women advances, so will the entire social structure.

Her assessment was that “women bore the brunt of the culture’s economic and social exploitation and since women made up half the world population, no attempt to move society forward is possible if half the population remains unaccounted for and under-represented.” Between 1945 and 1946 she was Editor of Negro Affairs in the Daily Worker and was elected a full member of the National Committee of the Communist Party.

FBI agents had begun infiltrating her rallies and meetings to build a case against her for expulsion from the U.S. As she became more influential within the Communist Party in relation to her anti-imperialist views, the FBI seized upon the fact that no birth records identified her as a U.S. citizen.

Jones was arrested for deportation on Jan. 19, 1948, but released on $1,000 bond a day later. FBI records show a firestorm of protests and petitions against her deportation.

The FBI continued to plant agents at every rally and event she participated in. Jones was arrested again in 1951 with many other party members, including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, under the Smith Act. Because of a speech she had given on International Women’s Day that challenged the overall male patriarchal establishment, she was charged with plotting the overthrow of the government. Her bail was raised higher this time.

Jones was sentenced to one year in prison but remained free on appeal. In 1955 the Supreme Court refused to hear her case and she was sent to federal prison, where she suffered a heart attack. She never recovered and her health began to interfere with her journalism.

Finally she was released but was forced into exile in Britain. She found refuge in the Caribbean community of Notting Hill, where she eventually became the Mother of Carnival.

There she also founded the West Indian Gazette an Afro-Asian Caribbean newspaper in 1958. She brought both awareness and self-identity to a nation subjected to the same racist and fascist imperial oppression, with a British twist. But her health and the newspaper began to suffer as she went in and out of hospitals to battle cardiovascular disease.

In 1964, Claudia Jones died of a heart attack. She was buried to the left of Karl Marx’s grave at London’s Highgate Cemetery. May we never forget to give her a rightful place for historical advancement and achievement in Black history and culture.
——————————————————————————–
Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Page printed from:
http://www.workers.org/2010/us/claudia_jones_0318/

Greece Hit by Strikes, Rebellions Over Austerity Plan

Greece hit by strikes, riots over austerity plan

By ELENA BECATOROS, Associated Press Writer

ATHENS, Greece – Serious street clashes erupted between rioting youths and police in central Athens Thursday as some 30,000 people demonstrated during a nationwide strike against the cash-strapped government’s austerity measures.

Hundreds of masked and hooded youths punched and kicked motorcycle police, knocking several off their bikes, as riot police responded with volleys of tear gas and stun grenades.

The violence spread after the end of the march to a nearby square, where police faced off with stone-throwing anarchists and suffocating clouds of tear gas sent patrons scurrying from open-air cafes.

Police say 12 suspected rioters were detained and two officers were injured.

Rioters used sledge hammers to smash the glass fronts of more than a dozen shops, banks, jewelers and a cinema. Youths also set fire to rubbish bins and a car, smashed bus stops, and chopped blocks off marble balustrades and building facades to use as projectiles.

Thursday’s strike — the second in a week — brought the country to a virtual standstill, grounding all flights and bringing public transport to a halt. State hospitals were left with emergency staff only and all news broadcasts were suspended as workers walked off the job for 24 hours to protest spending cuts and tax hikes designed to tackle the country’s debt crisis.

Riot police made heavy use of tear gas during the start-and-stop clashes throughout the demonstration, including outside Parliament. Strikers and protesters banged drums and chanted slogans such as “no sacrifice for plutocracy,” and “real jobs, higher pay.” People draped banners from apartment buildings reading: “No more sacrifices, war against war.”

The demonstrators included hundreds of black-clad anarchists in crash helmets and ski masks, who repeatedly taunted and attacked riot police with stones and petrol bombs, at one point spraying officers with brown paint. Shopkeepers along the demonstration route hastily rolled down their shutters, while a few blocks away, people sat at outdoor restaurants, nonchalantly continuing their meals.

Tear gas wafted through the city center’s streets, sending businessmen in suits scurrying for cover, their eyes streaming.

Minor clashes also broke out in the northern city of Thessaloniki, where about 14,000 people marched through the center.

Fears of a Greek default have undermined the euro for all 16 countries that share it, putting the Greek government under intense European Union pressure to quickly show fiscal improvement.

It has announced an additional euro4,8 billion ($65.33 billion) in savings through public sector salary cuts, hiring and pension freezes and consumer tax hikes to deal with its ballooning deficit, but the measures have led to a new wave of labor discontent.

The cutbacks, added to a previous euro11.2 billion ($15.24 billion) austerity plan, seek to reduce the country’s budget deficit from 12.7 percent of annual output to 8.7 percent this year. The long-term target is to bring overspending below the EU ceiling of 3 percent of GDP in 2012.

The new plan sparked a wave of strikes and protests from labor unions whose reaction to the initial austerity measures had been muted. Thursday’s strike shut down all public services and schools, leaving ferries tied up at port and suspending all news broadcasts for the day. However, some private bank branches were open despite calls from the bank employees’ union to participate in the strike.

While their colleagues clashed with groups of protesters, some police joined the demonstration.

About 200 uniformed police, coast guard and fire brigade officers, who cannot go on strike but can hold protests, gathered at a square in the center of the city shortly before the marches got under way.

“The police and other security forces have been particularly hard hit by the new measures because our salaries are very low,” said Yiannis Fanariotis, general secretary of one police association. He said the average policeman made about euro1,000-euro1,200 ($1,360-$1,635) a month if weekend and night shifts were included.

Joining the protest “doesn’t feel strange, because we are working people like everybody else and we are all shouting out for our rights,” he said.

The government says the tough cuts are its only way to dig Greece out of a crisis that has hammered the common European currency and alarmed international markets — inflating the loan-dependent country’s borrowing costs.

But unions say ordinary Greeks are being called to pay a disproportionate price for past fiscal mismanagement.

“They are trying to make workers pay the price for this crisis,” said Yiannis Panagopoulos, leader of Greece’s largest union, the GSEE.

“These measures will not be effective and will throw the economy into deep freeze.”

A general strike last Friday was marred by violence during a large protest march. Riot police used tear gas and baton charges against rock-throwing protesters, who smashed banks and storefronts, while left-wing protesters roughed up Panagopoulos as he was addressing a rally.

The labor unrest could spark fears that the government will have trouble in implementing its new measures.

Greece insists it doesn’t need a bailout, and its European partners are reluctant to fund one. But it has called for European and international support for its program, saying that unless it receives that support and the cost for it to borrow on the market falls, it might have to appeal to the International Monetary Fund for help.

On Wednesday night, Deputy Prime Minister Theodore Pangalos said Greece could bypass the costly process of borrowing from edgy markets by urging international institutions to buy its bonds at a set interest rate.

“We want, if there is an unjustified speculative attack against Greek bonds, to know that one of these institutions that have the substantial means to absorb such market products will come and say ‘look here, I am buying Greek bonds at this price, with this interest rate,’” Pangalos told private Mega TV.

He did not say which institutions he was referring to, or elaborate on the interest rate.

Markets think some kind of rescue would be organized if default looms. Speculation has focused on possible guarantees for Greek bonds or help from state-owned banks in other eurozone countries.

Africa still hungry despite annual $3 billion of aid and $33 billion of food imports - UN

One in three Africans is chronically hungry, despite $3 billion spent on food aid for the continent annually and $33 billion in food imports, the director of the food security at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) has warned.

UN agency welcomes independent probe into Somalia food aid operations

The World Food Programme (WFP) said today it would welcome an independent inquiry into its operations in Somalia, after a United Nations monitoring group alleged that contractors have diverted the agency’s food aid away from the hungry.

The green revolution sweeps into the bathroom

The humble toilet is set for a techno upgrade that could reduce pollution and save water, says Helen Knight

Leaf Clean plans share buy-back

Date: Wednesday 10 Mar 2010
LONDON (ShareCast) - Leaf Clean Energy, which recently saw its plans to merge with carbon trader Trading Emissions fall through, said it plans to buy back just under 15% of its shares at no more than 65p a share. The clean energy investment company’s net asset value (NAV) per share at the end of 2009 was 158.23 US cents, equivalent to around 105.7p per share. The company said its investments are performing ‘adequately against a difficult background’ and it remains confident that its portfolio will generate value. ‘The prospects for the environmental/clean energy market look considerably more positive than six months ago, as the underlying drivers remain strong - increasing focus on climate change and the environment more broadly and energy security issues,’ the company’s asset advisor, EEA Fund Management, said. The company saw loss before tax in the six months to 31/12/09 narrow to $22.83m from $39.51m in the corresponding period of 2008.

Gezhouba profits abroad

By Liu Yiyu (China Daily)Updated: 2010-03-10 09:45
The Gezhouba dam in Yichang, central China’s Hubei province. LIU JUNFENG/FOR CHINA DAILYBeijing - China Gezhouba Group Co Ltd (CGGC), one of the largest engineering and construction companies involved in the Three Gorges Dam project, said overseas contracts are likely to take up half of its business in the future, according to its president Yang Jixue.
“Overseas markets will account for 50 percent of our business in the next three years, from the current 36 percent, boosted by massive projects in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia regions,” Yang said.
The group now has 44 overseas projects - mostly hydroelectric-power related - in 17 countries or regions, according to Yang.
The State-owned infrastructure company, based in Central China’s Hubei province, last month signed a 4.97 billion yuan ($727.78 million) contract with a Kazakhstan company to set up a hydroelectric-power plant in that country. The contract with Kazakhstan Natural Gas Technology Co Ltd would allow it to construct a 254-megawatt hydroelectric-power station on the banks of the Chilik River in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan.
The volume of Gezhouba’s overseas business ventures is much higher than its larger rivals - the average of which is 20 percent - mainly because as a leading builder of hydroelectric projects, Gezhouba has a limited market at home compared with its larger rivals which are more experienced in other infrastructure construction, industry analysts said.
“As the main contractor for China’s Three Gorges Dam, Gezhouba is very experienced and advanced in hydroelectric projects, which afforded the builder many opportunities in the market, said Li Zhirui, an industry analyst with First Capital Securities. “China’s construction contractors, as a whole, have big advantages because of their low labor costs in the global construction market.”
However, they have a smaller market share in more mature markets including the US and Europe, Li said.
Yang estimated that the group would secure 50 billion yuan in new orders in 2010, with 20 billion yuan from foreign markets and 30 billion yuan from the domestic market.
“We expect 30 percent revenue growth this year based on current orders in hand and the growing momentum,” said Yang.
The builder said new orders secured in January this year increased by 40 percent compared with the same period in 2009.
Gezhouba signed 42 billion yuan in new orders in 2009.
“The impact of China’s 4 trillion yuan stimulus package on the infrastructure sector will fade out in the years to come, resulting in less investment in public construction work and forcing domestic contractors to tap developing markets,” Li from First Capital said.
In the meantime, the company, primarily engaged in the construction of power plants, dams, roads, bridges and civil engineering projects, is also diversifying its business by increasing its cement output to 20 million tons in 2010, which, according to Yang, would generate 4 billion yuan in revenue this year.

Feed-in tariff ‘killing off’ burgeoning UK small turbine industry

RenewableUK says inconsistencies in tariff favour solar panels, which takes microgeneration business out of UK

Zara Maung
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 10 March 2010 13.06 GMT
UK small wind turbine manufacturers say they will lose out to foreign solar panel manufacturers in the race to cash in on the UK government’s new feed-in tariff scheme.
They claim their products will be penalised because solar panel owners will receive higher government subsidies than wind turbine buyers. As the arrangement stands, a wind turbine would qualify for 26.7-34.5p per KWh in government subsidies, while solar panels would typically bring in 41p per KWh.
Turbine manufacturers will also have to pay a fee of up to £100,000 to have their models certified for the scheme, and they argue that planning rules make it harder for customers to get approval for turbines.
Due to come into effect on 1 April, the tariff – also known as Clean Energy Cashback – will offer home owners a government subsidy for installing small-scale renewable energy technologies, including solar panels and wind turbines.
Alex Murley, RenewableUK’s head of small systems, said: “Small wind is the only microgeneration technology which UK manufacturers dominate the market for. If we don’t get this right we could be shooting ourselves in the foot and killing off a burgeoning UK success story.”
According to Renewable UK, planning applications for small wind turbines have traditionally taken up to 14 months to process. Britain’s oldest surviving small wind manufacturer, Ampair, has accused some local authorities of “systematically rejecting” applications.
The government promises to allow households to install small turbines without planning permission from June, but turbine manufacturers say the current planning allowance is too limited, restricting domestic wind turbines to a hub height of 10 metres and 2.2 metres blade diameter.
This will allow a 1.5KW turbine, producing an average of 800KWh a year in windy conditions – less than a fifth of the average UK household’s electricity needs. By comparison, UK panel installer Solarcentury has estimated that the typical 18 metre square domestic solar panel installation would on average generate just over 2,000KWh – nearly half the average household’s electricity consumption.
The government’s Energy Saving Trust said that although such limitations are fine for urban roof top turbines, wind turbines in rural locations need to be bigger for small wind turbines to generate a significant amount of energy for the UK. It is these rural locations that will generate the lion’s share of energy from “small” turbines. EST figures published last year show small turbines could meet 4% of the UK’s electricity demands but only 4% of that energy would come from small turbines in urban locations.
UK manufacturers currently produce four-fifths of the country’s small turbines, 3,500 of which were installed in the UK in 2008. All larger wind turbines and the vast majority of solar panels are manufactured abroad.
David Sharman, managing director of Ampair, claims the UK government is penalising its own manufacturing industry through inequalities in the feed-in tariff.
He also claims that the rigorous tests to qualify for the tariff’s quality assurance certificate, the Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS), are prohibitively expensive at at £50,000-£100,000 per product certified. No small wind turbines have so far been MCS accreditedbut the government has set up an MCS ‘transition list’ for small wind turbines, which allows them to temporarily qualify for the tariff for one year while they complete the accreditation scheme.
Responding to criticism of planning restrictions for wind, a spokesperson for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: “We consulted on the proposals to find the right balance for these technologies. We want to enable homeowners to install microgeneration easily and also make sure we’re fair about planning permission for larger installations. Different homes will be suitable for different technologies based on a number of factors – it’s not a one size fits all.”

Outlook for biodiesel less than shiny

By Zaidi Isham Ismail

THE outlook for biodiesel this year is choppy given the high prices of its feedstock crude palm oil (CPO) and waning interest, Frost & Sullivan Asian director Chris de Lavigne said.De Lavigne said that in the current world situation, interest in petroleum-based ethanol was down 70 per cent from its highest point in 2008; and in vegetable oil-based biodiesel, down nearly 80 per cent since it was highly realised in 2005.Interest in biodiesel peaked in 2007 and dropped 70 per cent by the end of last year. Its outlook was choppy, de Lavigne said in his working paper, “The future of biodiesel in uncertain markets”.He was sharing his views with conference delegates at the annual Palm and Lauric Oils Conference and Exhibition (POC) in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.
De Lavigne said that history would repeat itself as palm oil prices were expected to rise, especially in the next two years, which would result in the commodity being too expensive to be used as biodiesel.He said the price uptrend would be caused by several things happening at the same time.However, he added that biodiesel was here to stay as numerous research and development activities were going on to make the renewable energy source attractive again in the future.He also said that the biodiesel sector needed the support of consistent and coordinated government policies, low raw material but high energy prices, improved feedstocks and advances in technology.

RBS is not funding ‘climate chaos’ – it has excellent green credentials

We are ranked in the top five global lenders to renewables, well ahead of all other British banks

Andrew Cave
The Guardian, Thursday 11 March 2010
Kevin Watkins’ article linking RBS to tar sands developments in Canada was highly misleading and ignored the billions of financing RBS has provided to renewable power projects (A fund for climate chaos, 5 March).
Watkins states: “Since recapitalisation, [RBS] has been bankrolling some of the world’s most ecologically destructive investments. RBS is a global leader in underwriting loans for companies such as Shell and Conoco Philips, exploiting oil tar sands in Canada’s Alberta province. Detailed analysis by People and Planet, the environmental organisation, documents a tar sand portfolio that has grown by $2.7bn since the government bailout.”
We carefully assess the environmental credentials of the companies we do business with. RBS has no such portfolio and has not provided any finance directly to tar sands projects in the last three years – contrary to Watkins’ assertion that large parts of our energy financing go directly to tar sands. Watkins also states that RBS’s record in this area is an “open and shut case” – a surprising claim given his lack of discussion with us or consideration of our role in renewables financing.
Watkins declares that “RBS could be gearing its lending towards support for a low carbon transition strategy for Britain”. If he had investigated further he would have found that over the past five years we have been ranked consistently in the top five lenders globally to renewables, well ahead of any other UK bank.
In response to Watkins claim that RBS is “subverting national policies on climate change”, I want to make it completely clear that RBS fully understands the problem and we are contributing to the solution. Since 1998 we have financed over 8,800MW of wind generation globally – more than twice the total installed UK wind generation capacity.
At the end of last year, we were chosen as one of three banks to participate in a wind financing scheme backed by the European Investment Bank that will make up to £1.4bn available to onshore wind power projects in the UK over the next three years. These are not the actions of a bank intent on “funding climate chaos”, as Watkins puts it.
But there are other issues to contend with. If we could treble our renewables financing overnight, we would. Unfortunately there are just not enough viable projects needing finance because of issues over planning, grid connections, cost and technology risks. We are closely involved in helping to remove these barriers, as highlighted in our submission to the recent Environmental Audit Committee.
The reality is that, whether we like it or not, our society is currently dependent on hydrocarbons. The transition away from them will require co-operation between governments, power companies, local communities and ultimately the end consumer. We are determined to play our part but oversimplification of the issues will take us nowhere.