Sylvia Bleeker: 'Sided with the underdog'

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Dick Fraser: 'He remained a : ommitted socialist till the end' International Viewpoint is a biweekly magazine published under the auspices of the Fourth International. A one-year subscription costs only $47 To order write to: International Viewpoint, 2 rue Richard Lenoir, 93108 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 1989 • 17 Sylvia Bleeker, a product of the 1917 Russian Revolution and an early adherent and lifelong advocate of Trotskyism in this country, died on Nov. 23, 1988, at her home in New York City. She was 86 years Old.

Born on Dec. 25, 1901, in a small town in Byelorussia, Russia, Sylvia became a part of the revolutionary movement at age 16.

She left Russia during the civilwar period and in 1920 sailed for the United States. During the voyage she met her future husband, Morris Lewit (Morris Stein), also a Bolshevik partisan. They remained lifelong companions and political collaborators.

Their first problems were to find work and learn the language. Morris became an apprentice plumber, and Sylvia found work in the garment industry as a milliner. They both joined the Communist movement and soon became prominent within Dick Fraser, a longtime socialist, died of cancer in Los Angeles on Nov. 27. He was 75 years old.

I first met Dick in the late 1930s, when I was visiting my sister Goldie in Minneapolis. Max Geldman, Goldie's husband, had arrived from a Socialist Workers Party (SWP) convention in New York a few days earlier. As we sat down to eat, the doorbell rang.

In walked a smiling young man. He announced he had just arrived from the same convention. He didn't have money for bus or railroad fare so, as he explained, "I took a free ride on box cars."

That was Dick Fraser. In true IWW spirit, he found a way to get where he was needed. I remember his gentle nature, his quiet manner, his youthful smiles and laughter as he described his trip from New York to Minneapolis.

Dick was an accomplished the New York section.

One of their first political projects was the organization of a Jewish language club, the Sunrise Club. It offered discussions on the meaning of the Russian Revolution, and gave classes in language studies and work opportunities for immigrants. It also recruited members to the Communist Party.

During the next several years, Sylvia and Morris developed their natural affinity for the trade-union working-class tendency in the party, the Cannon-Foster faction.

Expelled for "Trotskyism"

When Cannon, Schactman, and Abern were expelled in 1928 for "Trotskyism," it did not take Bleeker and Lewit long to discover the real meaning of Trotskyism. Hardly more than a year after the first expulsions, they were both summarily expelled on the same spurious charge.

Sylvia was a candidate for Congress in New York on the violinist in his youth. He had already played with the San Diego symphony. But when Dick became convinced of the need to build a revolutionary socialist party, he put his violin in its case and became a professional revolutionist.

Dick was a recruiter, an agitator, a socialist writer, and a party builder. He served four years as a merchant seaman.

When 1 came to Los Angeles, Dick was the organizer of the SWP branch. If it was a matter of cleaning up the headquarters, hitchhiking to meet a contact in some distant city, or making a major speech, Dick was there. He was a kind and gentle comrade with his friends and hard as nails with class enemies.

Dick left the SWP in 1966 and for a time was a supporter of the Freedom Socialist Party. Although we had our political differences over the past years, he remained a committed socialist until his death. Sylvia Bleeker Communist Party ticket when she was expelled in 1930 as a supporter of the Communist League of America-the Trotskyist organization founded by Cannon and other expellees. By this time, she had become a prominent figure in the union movement, identified as a leader of the left wing.

With the rise of fascism in Germany, Sylvia and Morris began in 1932 the publication of a Trotskyist newspaper in Yiddish, Unser Kamf (Our Struggle), to explain the danger of fascism and how to fight it.

She was a constant agitator, always on the side of the underdog. This was her role both inside and outside the party, and she curried favor with no one. A popular streetcorner speaker in the years before World War II, she became especially well-known in the Jewish communities, where she spoke in Yiddish.

She was a small woman with bright red hair and a freckled face, and she could be sad or glad to suit the occasion. But on the speakers' stand she was full of fire and quick with an answer to all questions that were fired at her.

A leader in defense work During the war years, Sylvia served as an alternate member of the Socialist Workers Party national committee and was active in defense work of the party-making use of her wide connections in the New York labor movement. After the indictment of the SWP leaders and Minneapolis Teamster officials and supporters in 1941, their defense against the spurious chafges of "seditious conspiracy" became the most urgent work of the party.

In 1946, Sylvia and Morris went to Mexico to visit and help reorganize the household at Coyoacán [several years after Leon Trotsky was assassinated there]. Morris was then assigned to try and help reorganize the secretariat of the Fourth International in the aftermath of World War II. In 1947-48, he and Sylvia spent about a year in Paris on this assignment.

In 1956, Sylvia attended the SWP's Trotsky School at Mountain Spring Camp in New Jersey. She firmly believed then and for all the remaining years of her life that those who stop learning stop Montreuil, France. living-one of her favorite themes.

By the end of the 1950s, both she and Morris were to suffer ill health and began to withdraw from active party work. For the remaining quarter-century of her life, from the early 1960s until she died, Sylvia remained a constant supporter of the Trotskyist movement and the Socialist Workers Party.

True to the convictions of her youth, she was an outspoken supporter of the Trotskyists who were purged from the SWP in 1983-84, and especially outraged by the calumny against her close friends and comrades of many years, George Breitman and George Weissman. She endorsed and supported the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism from the first issue five years ago.

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newsbytes assessesen ************************** By Hayden Perry )

NILKSOMES YASSERChildren as young as 14 have been dying as troops in the Iran-Iraq war. A proposal before the United Nations would raise the minimum age for combat to 18.

The U.S. government has vetoed this resolution. A State Department spokesman pointed out that an American boy can enlist at 17— with his mother's permission.

Chevron stockholder Jeremy Garchik called for the oil company to quit naming its ships after living persons. He argued that a catastrophe involving a ship, such as an oil spill, would always be "associated in the public mind with the now unfortunate honoree, who clearly ill deserves such infamy."

The hunt is on for a new national chairman of the Democratic Party. A prime candidate is Ron Brown, the big-time lawyer who helped to head up Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign.

Besides Jackson, candidate Brown has another client of renown in his portfolio. Beginning in 1982, he was a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., for Baby Doc Duvalier of Haiti.

Brown says that he did have some "apprehensions" about working for the former dictator, but thought he could "do more good than harm." Besides, Baby Doc paid him $12,500 a month for his services.

The Northern California Psychiatric Society has condemned the CIA for practicing on "unsuspecting patients." The CIA has been forced to pay $750,000 to eight Canadians who had been subject to brain-washing experiments in the 1950s and '60s.

The experiments were designed to see whether an intelligence agency could program its own assassins, among other things. They didn't produce assassins (as far as is known), but victims suffering bouts of memory loss, anxiety, depression, and wild mood swings.

"If we hear of these things happening again, we will not stand by idly," declared Dr. Maurice Rappaport, the society's president.

Brother Paul Johnson, who works with the homeless in Miami, told The New York Times how some of the wealthy respond to the problem. He said he attended a cocktail party with very prosperous guests.

After praising the good work he was doing for the unfortunate, a wealthy matron asked, "What one measure would you propose to solve the problem?" He answered, "Raise the minimum wage to $5 an hour."

At this, warm admiration was replaced by frosty rejection. Impossible! " At $5 an hour I could not afford my maid," she exclaimed.

In view of the homeless problem, the state of California has urged every community to erect a minimum number of low-cost apartments. This presented a problem to the super-rich community of Tiburon, on San Francisco Bay. Low-income housing would bring in low-income people-and there goes the neighborhood.

But happy solution! Someone pointed out that low-rent apartments could be built on Tiburon estates to house the cooks and maids who now have to commute long distances to make life pleasant for the wealthy.

Three Alabama judges ordered defendants with AIDS not to appear in their courtrooms, but to enter their pleas and receive their sentences by telephone.

Despite the Surgeon General's assurances that AIDS is not easily spread, the learned judges did not believe it. "Call me paranoid if you want to," said Judge Jack Montgomery in Birmingham.

A huge burial ground consisting of about 50 common graves has been discovered in the neighborhood of Minsk, in the Soviet Union. According to the Oct. 9 Moscow News, an estimated 100,000 bodies were buried there.

The victims had been slaughtered by Stalin's secret police, the KGB. The Soviet weekly reported: "That factory of death functioned daily from 1937 to June 1941. Particularly disturbing are the large number of women found buried."

After the discovery, more than 20,000 people demonstrated in Minsk, capital of Byelorussia, to condemn the crimes and the hesitation of the authorities to shed more light on the massacres.