*From The Archives-In Defense Of The POUM In The Spanish Civil War-Andy Durgan's View

Click on title to link to an important article from the theoretical journal of the International Communist League, "Spartacist-English Edition", Number 61, Spring 2009 (Yes, I know the wonders of technology). For those who seriously want to understand the role of the POUM (Party Of Marxist Unification), either as defender or critic, and Leon Trotsky's characterization of that party as the key roadblock to revolution in Spain this article will serve as the modern pole of controversy around that issue. Read on.

Commentary

This year marks 70th Anniversary of the decisive turning point in the Republican military struggle against Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War. I have elsewhere argued, as orthodox Trotskyists before me have argued, that in the final analysis the POUM, the most honest revolutionary organization in Spain at the time, was the decisive road block to unleashing a revolutionary struggle that could have changed the course of that war. In short, the POUM did not act like a revolutionary organization in a revolutionary situation. Some militants, however, then and now have tried to alibi the POUM's policies. Andy Durgan's article culled from the "Marxist Internet Archives" and the British journal "Revolutionary History" is one such effort. Read and judge for yourselves.

I would also use this space to note that this is also the 70th Anniversary of the withdrawal of the International Brigades from the Republican side. That, in itself, tells volumes about the fate of the Republican side at that point. Nevertheless, as always, all honor to the memory of the heroic International Brigade fighters.



The Spanish Trotskyists and the Foundation of the POUM- Andy Durgan

In September 1935 the Spanish Trotskyist group, the Communist Left (ICE), fused with the Workers and Peasants Bloc to form the POUM. Both at the time and retrospectively, this decision was widely criticised within the international Trotskyist movement. Whilst the political development of the POUM, or at least Trotsky's criticisms of it, are relatively well known [1], the history of the Spanish Trotskyists and their reasons for helping to found this party are far less known. [2]

The Left Opposition in Spain

The Communist Opposition of Spain (OCE), as it was first called, was founded in Liege, Belgium, on 28 February 1930 at a meeting of Spanish Communist exiles resident in that country, Luxembourg and France. The leader of this group, a founder member of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), was 'Henri Lacroix' (Francisco Garcia Lavid). Lacroix, a house painter by trade, had spent some years in the Soviet Union, at least between 1925 and 1927, before living in Luxembourg and Belgium. It was here where he had entered into contact with French oppositionists. Inside Spain a number of former leading members of the PCE also sympathised with the Left Opposition, and soon formed part of the OCE. The most important of these was Juan Andrade in Madrid, a founder member and leader of the PCE and editor of its paper La Antorcha until 1926. Andrade had opposed the increasingly bureaucratic tendencies inside the PCE, and had been expelled from the party in 1927.

Following the fall of the dictator Primo de Rivera in January 1930, many political exiles, including the Trotskyists, returned to Spain to take advantage of the relative liberalisation. During 1930 the OCE was able to establish groups in a handful of centres, and probably had some 50 militants at this time. [3]
The group was strengthened by the return of Andreu Nin to Spain from the Soviet Union in September 1930. Nin, originally a teacher, had first entered into organised political activity in 1911 at the age of 19 as a member of a left wing Catalan nationalist group, but his concern for social issues led him to join the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) barely two years later. In 1918, under the impact of the postwar revolutionary upsurge, both in Spain and the rest of Europe, he joined the Anarcho-Syndicalist trade union federation, the CNT, becoming one of its leaders in its stronghold of Barcelona. A sympathiser of the Russian Revolution, he had been fully won over to Communism after attending the founding congress of the Red International of Labour Unions in 1921 as part of the CNT delegation. Unable to return to Spain because his name was connected, unjustly, with the assassination of the Prime Minister, Eduardo Dato, he stayed in the Soviet Union. He became the Assistant Secretary of the RILU, joined the CPSU, and was elected onto the Moscow Soviet. Nin sided with the Left Opposition, probably in 1926, and consequently was stripped of all his official responsibilities. He was expelled from both the CPSU and PCE in 1928. Until 1930 he lived precariously in the Russian capital, and only his status as a foreigner saved him from arrest. [4]

Over the next few years the Spanish Trotskyist group included in its ranks many talented militants, most of whom were later to play a leading role in the POUM. Apart from Nin and Andrade, the other principal intellectuals of the group were Esteben Bilbao, the Basque doctor Jose Luis Arenillas, and Enrique Fernandez Sendon ('Person'). Bilbao, like Lacroix and another leading Trotskyist militant, Gregorio Ibarrondo ('Carnicero'), had been founding members of the Basque PCE. Other militants of note were the lawyer of the CNT miners' union in Asturias, Jose Loredo Aparicio; the Catalan journalist, Narcis Molins i Fabrega; the group's organiser in Estremadura, Luis Rastrollo; and a founding member of the Madrid PCE and former leader of the Communist Youth, Luis Garcia Palacios.

The group's many working class cadres included such militants as the petroleum workers' leader in Astillero (Santander), Eusebio Cortezon; Emilio Garcia, a leading member of the CNT woodworkers' union in Gijon, and like Cortezon a founder member of the PCE; Julio Alutiz, the railway worker from Pamplona, Emiliano Diaz in Seville, and Manuel Sanchez in Salamanca.

Among the many outstanding younger activists were Ignacio Iglesias, a former Socialist Youth leader from Sama de Langreo (Asturias); Enrique Rodriguez and Jesus Blanco, recruited from the Madrid Communist Youth; G. Munis (Manuel Fernandez Grandizo) from Llerena (Estremadura), who was also active in the Mexican Trotskyist movement, and Julio Cid, recruited from the Socialist Youth of Gerena (Andalusia) in 1933. £5]

Although the OCE was small, it was able to take advantage of the complete disarray of the PCE and the new political opportunities opened up by the collapse of the dictatorship and the subsequent rise in mass struggle. The PCE had barely 500 members during the late 1920s, and most of these had either been in jail or exile. [6] Moreover, many of its leaders, albeit for different reasons, were in opposition to the official party line.

The establishment of the Republic on 14 April 1931 led to a further extension of political freedoms, a massive strike wave, and the growth of all working class organisations, including the PCE. Despite being relatively few in number, the Trotskyists" level of analysis was in stark contrast with the general theoretical poverty of Spanish Marxism at this time. In particular, their monthly theoretical journal Comunismo, which was published from May 1931 through to October 1934, stands out as the most serious Marxist journal published in Spain during the years prior to the Civil War. [7]

Organisationally, however, the Spanish Trotskyists were less successful. The domination of the Spanish workers' movement by Anarcho-Syndicalism and reformist Socialism was a problem for all the Communist factions. Despite all its weaknesses, the PCE, as the defender of official orthodoxy, proved more attractive to most workers sympathetic to Communism than the much maligned and generally isolated Trotskyists. Only the Catalan dissidents, the Workers and Peasants Bloc (BOC), were able seriously to challenge the PCE at an organisational level.

But although small, the Spanish group compared favourably with Trotskyist organisations elsewhere in the world. According to Pelai Pages, by 1934 the ICE (as the OCE had become in March 1932) had around 800 members. [8] They were mostly in small groups scattered throughout the country. The exception was in the province of Badajoz (Estremadura), where nearly half their membership was concentrated in and around the town of Llerena. [9] This was the only area where the Trotskyists won a real mass base, mainly among farm workers, in part thanks to their leadership of peasant strikes between 1932 and 1934, and the efforts of Luis Rastrollo and the peasant leaders Jose Martin, Felix Galan and others. Elsewhere, there were relatively important Trotskyist nuclei in Madrid, Asturias, Galicia, Seville, Salamanca and Astillero (Santander), as well as scattered groups in Northern Castille, the Basque Country and in and around Barcelona. In contrast, the PCE probably had some 10 000 members by 1934, and the BOC around 4000, mainly in Catalonia. [UJ]

Notes

1. It is not the aim of this article to comment on Trotsky's extensive and generally excellent writings on Spain between 1930 and 1940.

2. References to much, although not all, of the material cited in this article can also be found in P. Pages, El movimiento trotskista en Espana 1930-1935, Barcelona 1977, and Pierre Broue's extensive notes and appendices to the Spanish edition of Trotsky's writings on Spain, La revolution espanola, two volumes, Barcelona 1977.

3. V. Alba, Dos revolucionarios, Madrid 1975, p.358. We know of the existence of OCE groups at this time in Madrid, Bilbao, Asturias and, perhaps, Valencia.

4 On Nin's life in Moscow at this time, Cf. V. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Oxford 1975, pp.275-6.

5. Munis and Cid were members of the Spanish Bolshevik-Leninists during the Civil War, Cid being killed during the 'May Days' in Barcelona in 1937. Biographies of most of the leading militants of the OCE can be found in Trotsky, op. cit, Volume 2, pp.529-43.

6. According to one Communist International leader at the time, Piatnitsky, the PCE had only 120 members by 1930 (Communist International, 20 February 1934).
L An anthology of the most important articles from Comunismo was published in Madrid in 1978.
7.JLP. Pages, op. cit, pp.70-94.

9. La Batalla, 5 June 1936, states that the POUM had 122 members in Llerena at this time.

10. The PCE's own membership figures are notoriously unreliable. According to its own figures, the party grew from around 3,000 members in May 1931 to 8,800 by the end of that year. By February 1936 there were supposedly 20,000 members, and 83,967 in July, on the eve of the Civil War.

The Trotskyists and the Workers and Peasants Bloc 1931-32

The relationship between the Spanish Trotskyists and the international movement of which they were a part was never very harmonious. The first of various disputes arose in early 1931 over how the OCE should be built. Nin was initially against an exclusive orientation towards the PCE, of which the Trotskyists considered themselves a faction, proposing instead that the OCE should also work inside the various dissident Communist groups, in particular the Workers and Peasants Bloc in Catalonia.

This disagreement with the official line of the Left Opposition at an international level was reflected in the correspondence between Nin and Trotsky during the first half of 1931. £11] Trotsky urged his supporters in Spain not to waste their time trying to influence the BOC, which he considered as a confused and rightist organisation, but to direct their energies to strengthening their own independent organisation with its own publications, and to orientate themselves towards the PCE. The official parties, despite all their manifold weaknesses, still represented the political 'centre' of the international Communist movement, unlike 'national' and 'opportunist' groups like the BOC.

The BOC had been formed as a result of the fusion in March 1931 of two groups: the former Catalan Federation of the PCE and the Catalan Communist Party. The majority of the Catalan Federation's leaders had been members of a pro-Communist grouping inside the CNT in the early 1920s, which had included Andreu Nin. Led by Joaquim Maurin, this group had not formally joined the PCE until October 1924.
Due to its Syndicalist origins and the more or less complete disorganisation of the PCE during the mid-1920s, the Catalan Federation had never been fully integrated into the party. The bureaucratisation of the PCE, in line with developments on an international level, was vigorously opposed by Maurin, who was in prison from 1925 to the end of 1927, and then in exile in France.

The opposition of the Catalan Federation's leaders came to a head in 1929-30. Not only did they oppose the bureaucratic methods of the party leadership, but also its general analysis of the situation in Spain and its call, inspired by the Communist International, for a 'workers' and peasants' democratic dictatorship'. The Catalans claimed that the forthcoming revolution in Spain would be democratic, although given the political weakness of the middle classes, it could only be completed under proletarian leadership, thus leading to a Socialist revolution. The Catalan Federation also opposed the PCE's attempts to split the CNT. A similar position was taken by the PCE's Madrid and Levante Federations, as well as an important part of the party's organisation in Asturias.

The Catalan Federation was finally expelled from the PCE in June 1930 as "bourgeois agents", "counter-revolutionary elements" and for its relations with the "petit-bourgeois" Catalan Communist Party. The latter had been formed in November 1928 by young militants, some from a left wing nationalist background, and others from the Catalan Federation itself, although most of them were new to political activity. They were attracted to Communism mainly on the basis of the Soviet Union's apparent solution of the national question.

Rather than join the PCE, which they saw as bureaucratic and unsympathetic to the national liberation movement in Catalonia, they decided to form a new party. The PCC was fairly loosely organised, and by 1930 it was working closely with the dissident Catalan Federation. At the unification congress it was decided to keep the name Catalan-Balearic Communist Federation (FCC-B), and also to form a broader organisation of sympathisers, the Workers and Peasants Bloc (BOC). In practice the FCC-B and the BOC were the same organisation, having the same press, the same leaders and, more often than not, the same membership.

Like other opposition groups in Spain, with the exception of the Trotskyists, the Catalan dissidents initially blamed the PCE leaders, rather than the Communist International, for the party's disastrous policies. In fact, until Maurin was formally expelled from the Communist International in July 1931, they appealed to it to intervene in Spain and throw out the party leadership. In the face of the divisions inside the Soviet party, the Catalans adopted an abstentionist position, describing themselves as "neither Stalinists nor Trotskyists but Communists". Events were to force them to clarify their views of the international Communist movement, and to adopt an increasingly anti-Stalinist stance.

Nin favoured working inside the BOC basically for two reasons. Firstly, by early 1931 the majority of Spanish Communists were outside the PCE, and the formation of an independent Communist grouping appeared as a real possibility. During early 1931 Nin favoured forming part of such a grouping rather than maintaining the fiction of the OCE being a faction of the PCE. Perhaps more significant was Nin's friendship with the BOC's undisputed leader, Joaquim Maurin. Outside the ranks of the Trotskyists, Maurin was the most able Communist leader and theoretician in Spain. His writings on the historical development of the Spanish revolution alone testify to that. [12]
In December 1930 Maurin, Nin and other Catalan Communists found themselves in prison together following the failure of a revolutionary uprising against the monarchy. Whilst in prison Maurin read Trotsky's letters to his Spanish followers and appeared to be in general agreement with his analysis. Moreover, Nin wrote for the Federation's press andhelped Maurin to draft the BOC's first political thesis - the general line of which was practically identical with that of the Trotskyists. £13]

Nevertheless, Nin does not seem to have taken into account the general nature of the BOC, Maurin apart. Although in opposition to the PCE leadership, the BOC's leaders had yet to question the Stalinist leadership of the international Communist movement. Despite Nin's influence on its first political programme, the FCC-B/BOC soon reverted towards more 'official' positions, because of its continued aim to avoid a final rupture with the Communist International. Thus in April 1931, only two months after the publication of its political thesis, the BOC stood candidates in the local elections under the Third Period slogan of "class against class". £14]

And despite breaking from the Communist International as a result of Maurin's expulsion in July 1931, references to "Social Fascism" continued to appear in the BOC's press until early 1932. In addition, as Trotsky himself had feared, [15] the Federation's leaders were not prepared to tolerate open factional work by the Trotskyists inside their organisation. Once this work started, Nin's apparently cosy relationship with the BOC came to an end. In May 1931 Nin's formal request to join the BOC was turned down, and mutual attacks soon began to appear in the press of both groups. However, the formal constitution of the OCE in Barcelona did not take place until September 1931. [16] A tiny group of Trotskyists continued to try and defend their ideas inside the BOC, but they were expelled in October 1931 for "factional activity aimed at destroying the party". £17]

Thus by late 1931 the OCE finally appeared to be taking a more orthodox position, presenting itself unequivocally as a faction of the official party, and submitting the BOC's "confused" and "vacillating" politics to the "pitiless and incessant criticism" that Trotsky had advocated. "Maybe it would not be possible", one Spanish Trotskyist leader wrote in April 1932, "to find in today's working class movement an organisation crippled by a more unhealthy opportunism than that from which the Catalan Federation suffers." £18] The OCE's attacks were centred on the BOC's initial refusal to take up a position in relation to the Communist International, its organisational structure, its nationalism, its confusion over the question of revolutionary power, and its trade union policy.

Maurin's party, because of its "national" outlook, was seen by the Trotskyists as being on the right, close to the politics of Bukharin or Brandler. Lacroix argued, as he had in 1930, that the real aim of the leaders of the Catalan Federation was to replace the current PCE leadership, hence their refusal to differentiate themselves openly from the Stalinist line of the Communist International. £19] The relationship between the FCC-B and the BOC was far from clear. Was the latter a broad front, or was it a party? The OCE reminded the Federation of a similar confusion that had been made by the Chinese Communists in 1927, with terrible results. In reality the two organisations were increasingly one and the same, as was later admitted by the BOC leaders themselves [20], although Nin had already pointed this out as early as January 1932. [21]

Even more disturbing was the FCC-B's position on the national question. Rather than just defend the right to self-determination of existing national movements, the BOC went much further. In June 1931 Maurin declared himself in favour of "separatism", albeit not fromSpain but from the Spanish state, the disintegration of which could give way to genuine Iberian unity. It was not sufficient, the BOC argued, to win over the leadership of existing national liberation movements, it was actually necessary to participate in their formation. Thus, where national movements did not exist, be it in Andalusia, Aragon, Castille or elsewhere, it was necessary for Communists to help create them.

Maurin believed that "the prospects for Socialist revolution were greatly favoured by the presence of a national problem", so much so that "if it did not exist, it would be necessary to create it". [22] Not surprisingly, the Trotskyists were scathing in their attacks on what they described as the FCC-B's predilection for "separatist rather than class politics", and even described it as "more Catalanist than the Catalan Republican Left", the principal petit-bourgeois nationalist party in Catalonia. [23]

Equally alarming was the FCC-B's position on revolutionary power. After initially adopting a fairly benevolent attitude towards the new Republican regime, in June 1931Maurin's party, influenced by the increasingly radicalised strike movement led by the Anarcho-Syndicalists, suddenly lurched to the left. The FCC-B/BOC now called on the CNT itself to "take power", arguing that the illusions of the masses in the bourgeois Republic were "burnt out". Maurin defended his party's position by claiming that the hegemony of the CNT in the strike movement, coupled with the radicalisation of its rank and file, meant that the Anarcho-Syndicalist unions could perform the role which Soviets had played in Russia. The BOC leader argued that in the same way that a soviet system had developed in Russia, a "Syndicalist system" could develop in Spain. He predicted that his position would "horrify the mimics of fossilised Marxism" with their "grotesque equation of Spain with Russia". [24]

The BOC leaders recognised, however, that the CNT, given its Anarcho-Syndicalist principles, was not interested in "taking power". Thus the BOC's task was to "create an atmosphere" through its propaganda whereby the leadership would be swept aside, and the unions would pass into the hands of the Communists. Parallel with this call for "power to the CNT", the BOC still defended the need to form workers', peasants' and soldiers' councils.

Understandably, the Trotskyists attacked the position of the FCC-B/BOC on a number of levels. [25] To call for the CNT unions to take power was pure Syndicalism, and appeared to show that the BOC had forgotten all the most basic lessons of the Russian Revolution. In addition, the exact role of the unions in the revolutionary process was hardly clear when Maurin and his comrades continued to call for councils to be set up through a "congress of all working class organisations".[26] Moreover, by talking of a revolutionary movement based solely on the CNT, the BOC was ignoring the great mass of workers, especially outside of Catalonia, who were in Socialist or other unions, or, as in the case of the majority, still unorganised.

The Trotskyists also argued that despite the strike wave, the majority of workers and peasants still had illusions in the Republic. In order to dispel these illusions, Communists had to continue to call for partial demands and for the Socialists to end their collaboration with the bourgeois parties, and not to reject such agitation, as the BOC had done, in favour of generalised calls for "the proletariat to take power".

The abortive Anarchist uprising in the Alt Llobregat region of Catalonia in January 1932, and the increasing persecution of Communists inside the Catalan CNT, led the BOC to drop its calls for the unions to take power. But the Trotskyists now saw another error arising in that the BOC saw itself as being forced to leave the CNT altogether. The ICE considered that whilst the BOC formally opposed any splits in the unions, many of its trade unionists did little to fight to stay in such a hostile environment. The Trotskyists, in contrast, recognised the importance of trying to remain at all costs within the CNT. The BOC's decision in 1933 effectively to build a separate trade union federation would render later attempts to influence the Anarcho-Syndicalists that much more difficult. [27]

The confusion and opportunism that characterised the FCC-B/BOC's politics, especially in 1931-32, was not merely due to its lack of programmatic clarity in relation to a Stalinised international Communist movement. As the Catalan Trotskyist and future POUM leader, Narcis Molins i Fabrega, was to point out, it was also a reflection of its social base. [28] In the towns the BOC related to a "section of the working class which feels itself to be above the rest of the proletariat, and closer to the petit-bourgeoisie". Most of its urban members were not factory workers, Molins claimed, but shop assistants and clerks. In the countryside the BOC was based on medium peasants, "who had no argument with the bourgeoisie other than over the right to land". This social composition, he concluded, had led the Catalan Federation "to break its links with Communism", and it was now in "the front line of the extreme left of the petit-bourgeoisie".

After 1932 the attacks of the Trotskyists on Maurin's party became less frequent and more moderate in tone. This was partly due both to changes inside the BOC itself and changes within the Trotskyist movement after 1933 in relation to the need to build parties independent of the Communist International. By mid-193 3 the Trotskyists recognised that some sections of the BOC's rank and file believed that there was little between themselves and the ICE on most major issues. However, "nothing could have been further from the truth". The BOC may have made similar criticisms to the Trotskyists of other sections of the workers' movement, but there was "no continuity in their politics". [29] Even as late as June 1934, when the two organisations were working quite closely, the ICE press described the BOC as "opportunist" and "lacking any clear programme". It was, the Trotskyists concluded, repeating Trotsky's prediction of three years previously, "doomed to collapse". [30]

If the Trotskyists were harsh in their criticism of the BOC, the latter was even more so in its treatment of Trotskyism. Maurin himself had been accused of "Trotskyism" by the PCE leadership during the late 1920s, and this had been one of the reasons given for his eventual expulsion. Maurin and other Federation leaders were, however, quite contemptuous of Trotskyism, and dismissed the OCE as a divisive and irrelevant sect condemned to the sidelines of the working class movement, from where it "would blindly follow the positions handed down by Trotsky". They even accused the Trotskyists of being the "mirror image of Stalinism" whose same "mechanical centralist methods" they had copied.

Nin, in an obvious reference to his stay in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, was accused of having deserted the Spanish workers' movement in its "most difficult moments", and of having at first sided with the PCE leadership against the Catalans. "Experience has shown", the FCC-B stated in September 1931, that Nin could easily change his position, and that he would soon be "knocking on the door of the BOC". [31] The BOC's attitude towards the Trotskyists remained basically unchanged over the next three years, although attacks on them became less frequent. At the end of 1933 Maurin described Trotskyism as "the antithesis of organisation" which introduced "civil war" wherever it intervened in the workers' movement.{32]

Whilst the FCC-B/BOC were totally dismissive of Trotskyist organisations, they were less so when it came to Trotsky himself. Articles by Trotsky still occasionally appeared in the BOC press, and the former Bolshevik leader was even defended from Stalinist slanders, being described as "Lenin's best comrade ... the man of the October Revolution ... a great fighter for the Communist cause" and "one of the most extraordinary brains of world Socialism". {33} More contradictory was the BOC's treatment of the speech which Trotsky gave to young Social Democrats in Copenhagen in December 1932. Whilst its weekly, La Batalla, praised his speech and printed extracts from it, Maurin was talking elsewhere of Trotsky's "definitive political failure". [34]

Notes

11. Cf. L.D. Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, New York, 1973 pp.370-400.

12. J. Maurin, La revolucion espanola, originally published in 1931, and republished in Barcelona, 1977; Hacia la segunda revolucion, originally published in 1935, republished as Revolucion y contrarrevolucion en espafia, Paris 1966.

13. La Batalla, 12 February 1931. The demands in the FCC-B's first Political Thesis are similar to those contained in Trotsky's pamphlet The Revolution in Spain (Cf. The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, op. cit, pp.67-89). Nin mentioned his participation in writing the Thesis in a letter to Trotsky dated 17 January 1931 (ibid., pp.3 71-2). Molins i Fabrega speaks of how Maurin and other BOC leaders read Trotsky's letters whilst in prison with Nin, Cf. Una linea politica: el Bloque Obreroy Campesino, Comunismo, April 1932.

14. La Batalla, 19 and 26 March 1931.

15. Cf. Trotsky's letter to Nin, 15 March 1931, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, op. cit., p.386.

16. According to Molinier the Catalan group had a dozen members at this time. Cf. R. Molinier, Rapport sur la delegation en Espagne, 21 September 1931.

17. La Batalla, 12 November 1931. The Trotskyist faction's own account can be found in the document Organization Comunista de Izquierda, For la unidad de todos los comunistas de Espana, Barcelona, December 1931.

18. L. Fersen, Acerca del congreso de la FCC-B, Comunismo, April 1932.

19. La Verite, 13 June 1930; El Soviet, 15 October 1931.

20. Cf. for example the BOC's Organisation Thesis, La Batalla, 11 May 1933.

21. A. Nin, iBloque, partido u organization de simpatizantes?, Comunismo, January 1932.

22. La Batalla, 4 July 1931; J. Maurin, La revolution espanola, op. tit., p.128.

23. Tesis sobre las nacionalidades, Comunismo, April 1932; N. Molins i Fabrega, La position politico yfuerzas del Bloque Obrero y Campesino, Comunismo, December 1931.

24. J. Maurin, La revolution espanola, op. tit., p. 168.

25. See the article by Nin, Los comunistas y el momenta presents. A proposito de unas declaraciones de Maurin, El Soviet, 22 October 1931; ^A donde va el Bloque Obrero y Campesino?, Comunismo, September 1931; La huelga general de Barcelona, Comunismo, October 1931. Cf. L. Fersen, Elcongreso delBOC, Comunismo, March 1932.

26. La Batalla, 30 July 1931.

27. Underestimation of the Catalan CNT became widespread on the Spanish Marxist left. Nin claimed in May 1936 that the Anarcho-Syndicalists had "definitely lost their hegemony" over the region's labour movement (La Batalla, 15 May 1936). The CNT's dramatic loss of members in Catalonia between 1931 and 1936 - from 300,000 to 140,000, according to its own undoubtedly inflated figures - led many to believe mistakenly that the Anarcho-Syndicalists were losing their grip over the Catalan workers' movement. Such a view is also expressed by a member of the Bolshevik-Leninist group during the war, Cf. G. Munis, Jalones de derrota, promesa de victoria, Madrid 1977, first published in Mexico in 1948, p.l 18.

28. N. Molins i Fabrega, La position politico y las fuerzas del Bloque Obrero y Campesino, Comunismo, December 1931.

29. Comunismo, July 1933.

30. La Antorcha, 30 June 1934; L.D. Trotsky, A Narrow or a Broad Faction, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, op. tit., p. 165.

31. La Batalla, 17 September 1931.

32. J. Maurin, La quiebra del trotskismo, La Batalla, 26 October 1933.

33. La Batalla, 22 and 29 December 1932, 27 April 1933 and 26 October 1933.

34. La Batalla, 22 December 1932; J. Maurin, Trotsky alpais d'Hamlet, Front, 17 December 1932. 28.7.2003

The ICE and the International Trotskyist Movement 1932-34

Given the sharp tone of the polemic between the OCE and the BOC, it may seem surprising that barely three years later the two groups would fuse, apparently quite happily, into one united party. Changing political circumstances - both nationally and internationally - were to play an important part in preparing the way for unification, as would changes inside both of the organisations. The distancing of the ICE from the international Trotskyist movement was to be another contributing factor in the group's move towards an agreement with Maurin's organisation.

The Spanish opposition had been criticised by Trotsky from the outset, initially over Nin's slowness in establishing the OCE's own press and his illusions in being able to influence the FCC-B/BOC. More direct contacts with the International Left Opposition [ILO], in the shape of Raymond Molinier, who visited the OCE in 1931, [35] did not improve matters. Nin was soon to blame Molinier for the dire economic situation in which the Spanish group found itself, and for its consequent inability to sustain its newspaper, El Soviet. [36]

These differences, particularly with Molinier, probably discouraged the OCE from condemning Rosmer's group immediately when it was expelled from the French section at this time. This in turn led Trotsky to berate Nin over the lack of involvement of the Spanish group in the ILO - a criticism that was to be repeated over the coming months.

But it was the OCE's third National Conference in March 1932 that was to mark a more important turning point in the Spanish group's relations with the international movement. Faced with what it described as the "experience of the practical impossibility of changing the line of the Communist International", and the danger of the Opposition appearing only to favour reforming the PCE, the OCE opted to adopt a more independent stance. Whilst still claiming to be a faction of the PCE, the Spanish group decided to project itself as a more open alternative to the official party. This change took the form of renaming the group as the Communist Left of Spain (ICE) and agreeing to the possibility of intervening in elections in certain circumstances. [37] The change in name also reflected the group's relative consolidation both organisationally (it now claimed 1,000 members) and politically.

Despite their insistence on not having established themselves as an independent party as such, the Spanish Trotskyists' decision appeared to the ILO to be just that. [38] Moreover, the ICE, with the aim of posing this tactical change on an international level, called upon the International Secretariat to call a conference as soon as possible. The ICE also called for both the expelled Rosmer and Landau groups to be represented at the proposed conference, although not as official delegates, so that they could present their case.

This new crisis in the relations between the Spanish Trotskyists and the ILO was further complicated by the 'Lacroix case'. At the third conference Lacroix had resigned as General Secretary of the Spanish Opposition, supposedly for "health reasons". [39] His subsequent factional activity gave his resignation a political character - although he did not state this explicitly until a year later. [40] In fact Lacroix's role in the growing crisis both inside the ICE and in its relations with the ILO is highly suspect. With hindsight, Lacroix's activities were at least opportunist, if not, as Georges Vereeken has argued, a deliberate provocation.
[41]

Internationally, the German and French sections were particularly incensed by the ICE's apparent defence of Landau and Rosmer. In late 1932 first the Germans and then the French Trotskyists produced documents criticising the position of the Spanish group. [42] Apart from attacking the latter's change of name, and its positions on elections and the Rosmer and Landau cases, both groups spoke of the ICE's lack of a concrete programme for the Spanish revolution and of not wanting to pose its differences openly with the International Secretariat. Basically similar criticisms were made by the International Secretariat and by Trotsky himself.

The ICE replied to these attacks by pointing out that it still considered itself to be a faction of the PCE and not a new party.[43.] In fact in both the Catalan elections of November 1932 and the general election a year later, the Trotskyists not only called for a vote for the PCE (and not the BOC), but also distributed the PCE's propaganda, and in a few areas held joint meetings with its local branches. The Spanish Trotskyists argued that they were obliged by circumstances to counter the influence and the tactics of the PCE in a more positive fashion. Moreover, both the French and US sections had changed their names from "Opposition" to the "Communist League". The ICE insisted on its complete "loyalty to the ILO, the International Secretariat and comrade Trotsky". It had differences over questions of "detail and organisation but not fundamental political questions". According to the Spanish section, the fact that it had defended the right of the Rosmer and Landau groups to put their case did not mean that it supported these groups in any way.

In retrospect, Trotsky's criticisms of the ICE at this time seem particularly harsh. In August 1933 he was to describe the "struggle of Nin and company against the ILO [as] ... violating every fundamental principle of Marxism". The ICE's position on the independence of its group with regard to the PCE would soon differ little from that adopted by the international Trotskyist movement during 1933. The severe tone of Trotsky's polemic with the Spanish section was probably due to his fears that Nin would form a bloc with his old friend Rosmer. The choice of Communist Left as the Spanish group's new name, denounced by Trotsky as "an obviously false name from the standpoint of theory", appeared particularly significant because it was the same as Rosmer's group, the Gauche Communiste. Nin had, in fact, initially supported Trotsky and the International Secretariat over the question of Landau and Rosmer, only to change his attitude in late 1931. The failure of Molinier, one of Rosmer's principal opponents in France, to provide the OCE with the financial support he had promised, may well have contributed to Nin's change of position.

Parallel to these criticisms of the ICE inside the ILO, Lacroix formed an opposition faction, which in the first edition of its bulletin accused the ICE leadership of being opposed to the international movement, and of using "Stalinist practices". In addition, it accused Nin, who had replaced Lacroix as General Secretary, of being a "petit-bourgeois opportunist", and called on the International Secretariat to intervene inside the Spanish section. [44] However, it was not until January 1933, that is after the International Secretariat and the French and German groups had attacked the ICE's positions, that Lacroix came out with an identical line of argument. The ICE leaders initially tried to counter Lacroix's opposition by inviting him to take up the post of General Secretary once more. This being refused, the Spanish section moved the headquarters of its Executive Committee to Barcelona to avoid the disruptive activities of Lacroix's group in Madrid.

Meanwhile the International Secretariat had begun to talk of the "profound differences" in the Spanish section, speaking of the "Lacroix current" and the "Nin current", thus giving each equal credibility. In fact, Lacroix's group was based upon six or seven militants in Madrid. [45] What is more, throughout this crisis the ICE Executive Committee received numerous motions of support from local branches. Thus when the ILO organised a pre-conference in Paris in February 1933 and called on both tendencies to send delegates, the ICE leadership angrily refused to comply, and denounced the International Secretariat for "wanting to give a political character to Lacroix's dishonest and intolerable campaign against the Executive Committee". [46] In the event both tendencies were represented at the pre-conference, the official ICE delegate, and a delegate from Lacroix's group who was invited without the knowledge of the Spanish group's leadership.

The pre-conference referred to the situation inside the ICE, and demanded that disciplinary measures against Lacroix be stopped. [47] It also condemned the ICE for supporting "confusionists and deserters" such as Landau, Rosmer and Mill, and, seemingly oblivious of its recent campaign in favour of the PCE in the Catalan elections, of "tail-ending the petit-bourgeois nationalist and provincial phrasemonger Maurin" and of favouring participation in parliamentary elections in a manner contrary to the policy of the ILO.

In reply, Fersen, the official Spanish delegate, agreed to the establishment of an internal bulletin open to "all tendencies", and that nobody would be excluded from the organisation until a national conference could be held. Nevertheless, Fersen defended the measures already taken against Lacroix's group as "necessary to maintain discipline and avoid the degeneration of the organisation's progress". The ICE later bemoaned the "frank support" of the pre-conference for "comrade Lacroix's campaign of sabotage and disorganisation". [48]Relations between the Spanish section and the international organisation were further undermined by the ICE's criticisms of some of the decisions of the pre-conference. In particular, the Spanish section rejected as "totally exotic" the imposition of the title "Communist Left Opposition - Bolshevik-Leninist" on all national sections. For the ICE, the title Left Opposition already gave the impression both inside and outside the Communist movement that the differences of the Trotskyists with the Stalinists were only an "incomprehensible and harmful internal struggle". Instead, the ICE advocated that there should not be one name applicable to all national sections, but that each national section should include the name of the international organisation.
The ICE also criticised the International Secretariat's manner of dealing with internal problems, particularly in relation to the Rosmer group. Finally, the Spanish group claimed that the decision of the pre-conference that following events in Germany, the Opposition "should work systematically in all proletarian organisations ... without modifying its attitude towards the [Communist] party", was identical to the position adopted in Spain 11 months previously. [49]

Immediately following the pre-conference, the International Secretariat initiated a campaign against Nin and the ICE leadership. Trotsky based his attacks, although not explicitly, firstly upon the arguments of Lacroix and then on those of two other dissidents, "Arlen" and Mariano Vela - both of whom had already left the Spanish section. [50] The International Secretariat also published Nin's correspondence with Trotsky of 1930-32 in order to illustrate Nin's continued divergences from the international organisation. In April 1933 a long extract from a recent article by Lacroix attacking the ICE leadership was published without the slightest comment in the International Bulletin. [51]

Whilst it appeared that the International Secretariat was siding with Lacroix against Nin, Trotsky himself pointed out in a letter to Lacroix at the time that he had no intention of favouring one group against the other, and even accused Lacroix of having the "same ideas and methods" as Nin. [52] However, it remained the case that the statements of the International Secretariat on the internal crisis of the Spanish section were directed almost exclusively against Nin. This campaign culminated in August 1933 in a scathing attack by Trotsky on the "inadmissible conduct" of Nin "and his friends" whose policies had been "condemned by all sections of the International Left Opposition ... without exception" at the pre-conference in February. Nin's "radically incorrect policy" had prevented the Spanish section from "winning the place opened up to it by the conditions of the Spanish revolution" and had led to the weakening of the ICE. [53]

Meanwhile, the ICE Executive Committee accused Lacroix of misusing party funds and of systematic obstruction of its work. Evidence relating to these accusations was sent to the International Secretariat, which in turn had to admit that Lacroix had "falsified official documents". [54] The whole ignominious affair finished in June 1933 with the expulsion of Lacroix and the disintegration of his faction. [55]
Subsequent events would shed more light on Lacroix, and thus seemingly vindicate the position of the ICE leadership. In September 1933 he joined the PSOE and in a letter to its daily, El Socialista, renounced his Communist past and recognised his mistaken role as a"sniper against Socialism". [56] Prior to this, however, Lacroix had attempted to rejoin the PCE. His total lack of scruples are revealed in his letter of 15 July 1933 to the PCE Central Committee, which has recently been found in the party's archives in Madrid. [57] According to this letter, only lack of money prevented Lacroix from returning to Madrid (he was in Tolosa at the time), as the PCE leadership had asked him to, in order to explain his recent "evolution back towards the party". Lacroix concluded that "rapid action could put an end to the residues of Trotskyism in Spain, and win back the good, if mistaken, workers who still follow... the masked counter-revolution of Trotskyism".

This letter leaves little doubt as to Lacroix's dubious (to say the least) activities inside the revolutionary movement, and gives some credence to Vereeken's claim that Lacroix was a "Stalinist agent". £58J However, the fact that he was not allowed back into the PCE undermines Vereeken's thesis; nor was he known to have sided with the pro-Stalinist wing of Spanish Socialism during the Civil War. Indeed, according to Pierre Broue, Lacroix, having led a division in the Republican army, was recognised by Stalinist troops whilst crossing into France at the end of the Civil War, and was lynched on the spot. [59]

The Lacroix affair only served to strain relations even further between the ICE and the ILO. Once he had joined the PSOE, the International Secretariat denounced Lacroix for his "violent and poisonous struggle ... against the International Left Opposition and a number of leading comrades", and described him as always having been "an alien element among the Bolshevik-Leninists, alien to their ideas and their methods". [60] This belated recognition of Lacroix's role inside the Trotskyist movement was not very convincing, given the International Secretariat's recent attacks on Nin and its effective support for this "alien element".

The desertion of Lacroix must have been a blow to the Trotskyist movement; to the ICE, of which he had been a founder and one of its principal leaders, and to Trotsky, to whom he had always proclaimed his "total loyalty and agreement". Whilst undoubtedly there were real differences between the ICE and the International Secretariat, particularly over the degree of political independence to be maintained in relation to the official Communist movement prior to August 1933, and over the differences around the Rosmer and Landau cases, the Lacroix affair was marred not only by its personal overtones, but also by the confusion surrounding its exact nature. Any examination of the documents of the ICE, Lacroix and the International Secretariat on the Spanish crisis, along with Trotsky's writings of the time, confirms this confusion. The contradictory nature of the later statements of the International Secretariat on the question and on Lacroix's subsequent betrayal serve to cloud the issues at stake even further.

The decision that the ILO took in August 1933 to form new independent parties and to establish the International Communist League (ICL) as the first step towards the establishment of a new International, was welcomed by the ICE. The Spanish group pointed out, however, that it had been the first to move towards more independent activity, and it criticised the "mechanical way" in which the ILO's change of line had been adopted, as if "obeying a military order", and for its lateness. [61] There was also some opposition inside the ICE during the autumn of 1933 to the idea of creating a Fourth International. [62] Relations between the ICE and the (by now) ICL appear to have been relatively calm during the first half of 1934, until a new dispute broke out over the tactic of entrism. This tactic appeared particularly relevant in Spain, where, due to the disenchantment with their party's participation in the Republican government between 1931 and 1933, many Socialist militants had turned sharply to the left. The threat of Fascism - both at home and abroad -reinforced this tendency. By mid-1934 the left wing of the Socialists controlled the trade union federation (the UGT), the Socialist Youth and many local and provincial sections of the party. Moreover, its language was increasingly revolutionary in tone.
The importance of the radicalisation of the Spanish Socialist movement was not missed by the ICE, but it baulked at following the example of the French Trotskyists of actually entering the Socialist Party. A national plenum of the ICE voted unanimously in September 1934 to reject the new tactical turn of the ICL. Whilst recognising the importance of the new mood in many countries in favour of united action, the ICE warned that this should not lead to "organic confusion". The plenum concluded:

The guarantee of the future lies in the United Front, but also in the organic independence of the vanguard of the proletariat. In no way can we immerse ourselves in an amorphous conglomerate merely because of circumstantial utilitarianism ... However sad and painful it may be for us, we are prepared to maintain the principled positions that we have learnt from our leader, even at the risk of having to separate from him on the road to victory. [63]

The ICE also proposed the formation of a faction inside the international organisation to fight against the new turn.

The growing distance between the Spanish Trotskyists and the ICL is clearly illustrated by the resolution at the plenum. Not surprisingly, their rejection of entrism has sometimes been cited as the principal reason for their break from the international movement. Nevertheless, the final break would not take place for another 16 months, and the ICE's refusal to enter the Socialist Party would be only one of several contributory factors.

Notes
35. R. Molinier, op. cit.

36. Cf. Nin's letter to Trotsky, 7 November 1931, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, op. cit., p.380.

37, P. Pages, op. cit., p. 127.

38. There is no known documentary evidence of the immediate reaction of the International Secretariat, except the testimony of Ignacio Iglesias of the Asturias ICE many years later, Cf. P. Pages, op. cit., p. 128, but, given the subsequent development of relations between the International Secretariat and the ICE, Iglesias' version seems very plausible.

39, Comunismo, April 1932.

40. Informs sobre el caso Lacroix, Boletin interior de la Izquierda Comunista de Espana, 15
July 1933.

41. G. Vereeken, The GPU in the Trotskyist Movement, London 1976, pp.48-67.

42. Both documents were published in the Lacroix faction's bulletin, Boletin interior de discusion del Comite Regional de Castilla la Nueva y del Comite Nacional de Jovenes de la Izquierda Comunista Espanola, 3 January 1933.

43. La Izquierda Comunista Espanola y los grupos de Rosmer y Landau, Comunismo, September 1932.

44. Boletin interior de discusion ..., 2 December 1932.

45. Both the Regional Committee of New Castille and the National Committee of the ICE Youth consisted of the same six militants, and were effectively set up by Lacroix to fight the Executive Committee. Cf. P. Pages, op. cit., p. 134.

46. Ante una grave situacion de la ICE, Boletin interior de discusion ..., February 1933.

47. Informe sobre el caso Lacroix, op. cit..

48. P. Pages, op. cit., p. 145.

49. Ibid.

50. 'Arlen' was the pseudonym of an army officer who had joined the OCE from the PCE. Although he maintained correspondence with Trotsky during 1933, he had left the ICE at the end of 1932. In 1936 he refused to accept the command of the POUM militia in Madrid, leading a Socialist unit instead. Cf. L.D. Trotsky, La revolucion espanola, Volume 2, pp.530-1; P. Pages, op. cit, p.135.

51. P. Pages, op. cit., p. 148.

52. L.D. Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, op. cit., p. 194. A copy of this letter was also sent to Nin.

53. op. cit, pp. 198-201.

54. P. Pages, op. cit., p. 147.

55. According to Broue (L.D. Trotsky, La revolucion espanola, Volume 1, p.269n) most of Lacroix's group stayed inside the ICE. One member, Grandizo Munis, became a leader of the Spanish Bolshevik-Leninists during the Civil War; another, Gomila, joined the Falange. Cf. P. Pages, op. cit., p. 148.

56. El Socialista, 29 September 1933.

57. It has been possible to verify Lacroix's signature. The letter, dated 15 July 1933, can be found in the Archive of the Central Committee of the PCE in Madrid. The previous day (14 July) Lacroix had written to the party complaining that he had yet to receive an answer to his request of "some days before" to "rejoin" the PCE, the "only true Communist organisation" that existed in Spain. He added that there were "many honourable workers' in the "so-called opposition", with whom he could put the PCE in contact, who were waiting for the decision of the party leadership on his case before joining the party.

58. G. Vereeken, op. cit., p.66.

59. L.D. Trotsky, La revolucion espanola. Volume 2, op. cit., p.536. 6JX G. Vereeken, op. cit, pp.59-60.

61. Al plena international de la Oposicion de Izquierda, Boletin interior de la ICE, 5 September 1933.

62. Boletin interior de la ICE, 20 November 1933

63. Comunismo. September 1934.

*The Crisis Of World Capitalism- A Guest Commentary By Alan Woods

Click on title to link to article by Alan Woods concerning the crisis of the world capitalism economic order. This article is presented for informational purposes, some of Woods' conclusions I agree with, some not. The main point, in any case, for our purposes today is to not only analyze what the particular breakdown of the international capitalist order is at the moment but how to overthrow that order and create a more rational socialist order. As we now know from painful experience there is no economic crisis that the capitalists can not "solve". Economic analysis helps but organizing the labor movement is critical.

*The Fog Of War, Indeed!

Click On Title To Link To "New York Times" July 6, 2009 Obituary For Robert S. McNamara.

DVD REVIEW

The Fog of War, starring former Secretary of War Robert Strange McNamara, 2003

In the normal course of events former high level bureaucrats in American presidential administrations usually save their attempts at self-justification for high ticket published memoirs or congenial `softball' speaking tours and conferences. In short, they prefer to preach to the choir at retail prices. Apparently, former Kennedy and Johnson Administration Cold Warrior extraordinaire Secretary of War Robert Strange McNamara felt that such efforts were not enough and hence he had to go before the cameras in order to whitewash his role in the history of his times. Despite an apparent agreement with his interviewer not to cover certain subjects and be allowed to present his story his way it is always good to catch a view of how the other side operates. It ain't pretty.

After a lifetime of relative public silence, at the age of 85, McNamara decided to give his take on events in which he was a central figure like dealing with the fact of American imperial military superiority in the post- World War II period, dealing with the Russians and the fight for American nuclear superiority during the Cold War, the ill-conceived Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the later Cuban Missile crisis and above all his role in the escalation of the wars in Southeast Asia, primarily Vietnam.

Very little here focuses on his time at the World Bank, a not unimportant omission that would highlight my point that he might have changed his clothing in the course of his career but not his mindset. While those of us interested in learning the lessons of history have long understood that to know the political enemy is the beginning of wisdom one will not find much here that was not infinitely better covered by the late journalist David Halberstam in his classic The Best and The Brightest.

McNamara has chosen to present his story in the form of parables, or rather, little vignettes about the `lessons' to be drawn from experiences. Thus, we are asked to sit, embarrassingly, through McNamara's Freshman course in revisionist history as he attempts to take himself from the cold-hearted Cold Warrior and legitimate `war criminal' to the teddy-bearish old man who has learned something in his life- after a lifetime of treachery.

In the end, if one took his story at face value, one could only conclude that he was just trying to serve his bosses the best way he could and if things went wrong it was their fault. Nothing new there, though. Henry Kissinger has turned that little devise into an art form. Teary-eyed at the end McNamara might be as he acknowledges his role in the mass killings of his time, but beware of a wolf in sheep's clothing. Yet, you need to watch this film if you want to understand how these guys (and gals) defend their state.

*The 1960s Folk Fringe- The Rise And Fall And Rise Of The Holy Modal Rounder

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of the trailer for "The Holy Modal Rounders: Bound To Lose".

DVD Review

The Holy Modal Rounders: Bound To Lose, The Holy Modal Rounders, Bad Bird Productions, 2007

Okay, let’s go through the geography of this seemingly endless review of folk revival of the 1960’s tour that I have been conducting over the past year or so. I have gone down the byways and back alleys of Bleeker Street. I have tipped my hat to McDougall Street and its “mayor” (the late Dave Van Ronk an interviewee in this work). I have been positively 4th Street more times that I can shake a stick at (Bob Dylan’s old haunts). So now, once again, I am looking at a group, the Holy Modal Rounders, whose core musicians Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber, roamed those same few square blocks of lower Manhattan and made some off-hand (and off-the-wall) musical history in the early 1960’s. In this case, however, the DVD review of this film documentary poses a question, in the negative, mainly, about those who aspired to make their own niche in that world.

The name Holy Modal Rounder, exotic sounding as it was in my youthful novice days of late Sunday night listening to a local folk music show on the radio, was very familiar to me as an exemplar of what I would call “novelty” folk. Taking the standard Harry Smith (or John and Alan Lomax) American folk music songbook and placing their own twist on it, sometimes to fill out a missing aspect of a more traditional work, sometimes just working off their own humor or hubris. Later they would add a psychedelic rock-oriented embellishment to that basic musical approach. These adaptations has a long and honorable history in those genres, although I must admit that my own tastes did not run to that irreverent place, as far as folk music went. Thus, while I had heard of them and had a few laughs at some of their lyrics I was not particularly a fan. Thus, their subsequent fates, that form the substance of this documentary, were not known to me.

One of the things that I have tried to do in reviewing many of the more or less well known figures of the 1960s folk revival has been to ask a question about why others never dethroned the “king” and “queen” of the folk scene, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. In some cases it was purely a question of being lesser talents. Everyone with a guitar and knew three chords, had some cash or friends with cash (it disn't take much) and some wanderlust tried to get to New York in those days. In others it some personal quirk or idiosyncrasy. A fear of failure or success, some psychological problems, family responsibilities and the like. Or, as in many cases in the rock 'n' roll milieu, took the downward spiral into drugs and alcohol dependence. All creative endeavors are, unfortunately, littered with such cases. A weird combination of those factors drove Stampfel and Weber down.

The best part of this film, however, describe that demise but also their reemergence as grey eminences as the part of the revival of the folk revival in more recent times out on the lesser known 'cult' musical venues. Some of this material presented here is gripping concerning the destructiveness of the drug problems, the ‘recovery’ and the aftermath. But also about the commitment to the music. So if you were part of the 1960s folk/rock scene, or want to know about that Greenwich Village part of it, or if you are just interested in a cautionary tale about the pitfalls, personal and otherwise, in the way of musical success this is a good view.

"Romping Through The Swamp"

Lyrics to Romping Through The Swamp :


Throw away your pomp
Romping through the swamp
Romping through the swamp in the month of May
Wading through the slimy ooze
You can drive away your blues
Romping through the swamp

Toking on your womp
Lying in the swamp
Looking at the ways glaze haze can raise
You can be a muddy satyr
Wrestling with an alligator
Romping through the swamp

You can spend your time
Covered up in slime
Saying I love you to the rot and goo
Lurching through the quagmire
Head aflame with swamp fire
Romping through the swamp

Lyrics to Low Down Dog :

Don't you take me for no low down dog
Low down dog!
Don't you know I got my pride
I just want to walk beside you, baby
But you say
But you say
I must walk behind?
Well, I ain't holding still for none of that stuff!

Who will keep your bed warm when I'm gone?
When I'm gone?
If you let the fire go out
Better know what you're about, my baby
But you say
But you say
My bed's warm enough?
Well I ain't holding still for none of that stuff!

Who will mind the children when I'm gone?
When I'm gone?
When you want to get away
Who will take them out to play, my baby?
But you say
But you say
Kids are my whole life!
Well I ain't holding still for none of that stuff!

Who will feed you peaches when I'm gone?
When I'm gone?
Your new lover may be cute
But will he bring home the fruit, my baby?
But you say
But you say
Peaches make me fat
Well I ain't holding still for none of that stuff!

Don't you treat me like no Viet Cong!
Viet Cong!
Don't you know I'm from Da Nang
I just want to let it hang my baby
But you say
But you say
We gonna drop the bomb!
Well I ain't holding still for none of that stuff!

Well, on a wagon traveling down your road!
Down the road!
Well, you say I'm just one more
That it really ain't a bore, my baby
But you say
But you say
Your road's worn and rough
Well I ain't holding still for none of that stuff!

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- The Fight For School Integration In Boston -A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a "Workers Vanguard" article, dated September 26, 2008, concerning the historic struggle to achieve school integration in America, and in Boston in particular.

Markin comment:

I will defer to the commentator in the linked article for now. I have my own memories and comments on this subject which I will place in this space when I get a chance. Overall though, as to the tasks necessary for the defense of the black school children in Boston, and the responses of most of the left to those tasks, it is pretty accurate.

Another Walk On The Wild Side with Nelson Algren

BOOK REVIEW

A Walk on the Wild Side, Nelson Algren, The Noonday Press, 1984

As I have mentioned in other reviews of Nelson Algren's work, such as The Man With The Golden Arm and The Neon Wilderness, I am personally very familiar with the social milieu that he is working. Growing up in a post-World War II built housing project this reviewer knew first hand the so-called `romance' of drugs, the gun, the ne'er do well hustler and the fallen sister. And I also learned the complex mechanisms one needed to develop in order to survive at that place where the urban working poor meet and mix with the lumpen proletariat- the con men, dopesters, grifters, drifters and gamblers who feed on the downtrodden. This is definitely not the mix that Damon Runyon celebrated in his Guys and Dolls-type stories. Far from it.

Nelson Algren has once again, through hanging around Chicago police stations (does anyone describe that milieu, cops and criminals, better?), other nefarious locales and the sheer ability to observe, gotten that sense of foreboding, despair and the just plain oblivion of America's mean streets down pat. In this, probably his best literary endeavor in that vein, Algren has gotten down to the core of existence for the would be world-beater hustler Dove Linkhorn a character who symbolizes a certain aspect of American life in his way, as say, Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby or Hemingway's Robert Jordan do in theirs.

Several factors make this an exceptional work. Not the least is the beginning section’s description of the antecedents of the "white trash" phenomena, as exemplified by Dove, that as always been something of a hidden secret about the American experience. In short, what happens when the land runs out, or in Professor Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis-the frontier ends. Nobody has put this in literature better than Algren, even Steinbeck. Furthermore, he has moved the story line here back in time from his usual 1940's and 1950's to the 1930's when some cosmic shifts were occurring in American life.

Algren has also moved the geography from Chicago to New Orleans and integrated some of his short story characters and story lines found in his collection Neon Wilderness into this project. Changes in time, place and characters there may be but that raw struggle for survival for those down almost below the base of society is still the same. The only objection that I have is that the portrait of Linkhorn, as described here by Algren, gives me an impression that old Dove could never ever make it in his `chosen' world unlike, say, Frankie Machine who has that urban grit almost genetically build into him in order to survive. Frankly, I do not believe that Dove could have survived in my old housing project. Frankie Machine would have been the `king of the hill'. Read this valuable book about an America that, then and now, is hidden in the shadows.

*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-"Silkwood"-A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Karen Silkwood

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Spring 1984 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

**********

Silkwood. Directed by Mike Nichols. Written by
Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen. ABC Motion Pictures.
A Twentieth Century-Fox release, 1984.

By Amy Rath

The long-standing controversy over the death of Karen Silkwood is being debated yet again, as the release of the movie Silkwood brings the case into the public eye. Silkwood has long been embraced by feminist and ecology groups as a heroine and martyr to the atomic power industry—the "no-nuke" Norma Rae; many believe she was deliberately poisoned with radioactive material and murdered to shut her up. Now, the movie, starring Meryl Streep and directed by Mike Nichols, has been seized upon by such bourgeois mouthpieces as the New York Times and the Washington Post to propagandize for the nuclear energy industry and smear her name.

"Fact and Legend Clash in "Silkwood'," cired the Times' science writer William J. broad, masquerading as a movie critic in the Sunday Arts and Leisure section. "Chicanery," "meretricious," "a perversion of the reporter's craft," blasts a Times (25 December 1983) editorial. That same day the Washington Post printed a piece by one Nick Thimmesch, a free-lance journalist with ties to Silkwood's employer, the Kerr-McGee corporation, charging "glaring discrepancies between the known record and the film's representations."

These are lies. In fact, Silkwood sticks remarkably close to the documentary record. If anything, it is surprisingly devoid of politics for such an alleged propaganda tract. Frankly, it's a little dull. It includes a lot of material (some of it made up, presumably for dramatic interest) about Karen Silkwood's unremarkable personal life. Like most people, she had problems with her lovers and roommates, didn't get along with her ex-spouse, was often troubled, and drank and took drugs. The bulk of the movie is a retelling of the last few weeks of her life, and raises more questions than it answers. How were Karen Silkwood's body and home contaminated with plutonium? Was Kerr-McGee deliberately covering up faulty fuel rods, which could lead to a disastrous accident at the breeder-reactor in Washington state where the rods were to be shipped? What happened on that Oklahoma highway on 13 November 1974, when Karen Silkwood was killed in a car crash, en route to an interview with a New York Times reporter?

The ending of the movie shows Silkwood blinded by the headlights of a truck on the highway, then her mangled body and car, seeming to imply that she was run off the road, as indeed independent investigators have concluded from an examination of her car and the tire tracks on the road and grass. Then a written message on the screen reports that Oklahoma police ruled her death a one-car accident and found traces of methaqualone (Quaalude) and alcohol in her blood¬stream. The conclusion is left for the viewer to decide We may never know the answers to these questions. As we noted in Workers Vanguard (No. 146,25 February 1977) in an article titled "Conspiracy and Cover-Up in Atomic Industry: FBI Drops Inquiry in Karen Silkwood Death":

"The abrupt cancellation of the second Congressional investigation into FBI handling of the case of Karen Silkwood has added to a widespread belief that the facts surrounding the death of the young trade unionist two years ago are being covered up at the highest levels of industry and government.

"...her documentation of company negligence and falsification of safety records was damning to powerful interests and as long as the bourgeois courts and commissions are running the investigations of her death, the only results will be successive cover-ups of the cover-ups."

In the fall of 1974 Karen Silkwood had been working for two years as a laboratory technician at the Cimarron, Oklahoma plutonium processing facility owned by Kerr-McGee, one of the largest energy conglomerates in the U.S. She became interested in health and safety issues at the plant. She brought her worries to the union, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW), and was elected as a union safety inspector, the movie makes this appear to be her first interest in the union. In fact, she had been one of the few die-hards in a defeated strike the previous year; she never crossed the picket line and she remained in the union even when its membership went down to 20. Along with fellow unionists, she traveled to union headquarters in Washington, D.C., where officials assigned her to gather documentation of company cover-ups of faulty fuel rods, as well as other safety violations.

Early in November 1974, Silkwood was repeatedly contaminated with plutonium, one of the deadliest materials known to man, in circumstances which have never been fully explained. In the Hollywood movie Meryl Streep ends up with raw pink patches over her face from decontamination scrubdowns. Her panicked expression when she knows she has to face a second one imparts the horror of it. Yet it is only a pale image of the reality. Silkwood's first scrubdown was with Tide and Clorox; the two others which, occurred over the next two days employed a sandpaper-like paste of potassium permanganate and sodium bisulfate. De¬spite this chemical torture (try scrubbing yourself with Ajax sometime), her skin still registered high levels of radiation. Worse yet, three days of nasal smears (to monitor inhaled radioactive contamination) increased to over 40,000 disintegrations per minute (dpm)— normal background radiation from cosmic rays and naturally occurring isotopes is roughly 30 dpm.

Silkwood's house was contaminated as well; it was stripped and her belongings were sealed and buried— one scene poignantly portrayed in the movie. An examination conducted at the medical facility at Los Alamos showed that she had received internal contami¬nation possibly as high as 24 nanocuries of plutonium (about 50,000 dpm). The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC, now Nuclear Regulatory Commission) has set a lifetime limit of 16 nanocuries; many specialists consider this hundreds of times too high. The fact is that plutonium is an extremely potent carcinogen, inhalation of which is virtually certain to induce lung cancer at levels where other radioactive nuclides can be tolerat¬ed. And Silkwood was particularly susceptible—she was female, had lung problems (asthma) and was small, under 100 pounds. In short, the plutonium she received chained her to cancer and a painful, slow death.

It is for this contamination, which an Oklahoma jury ruled the responsibility of Kerr-McGee, that $10.5 million in punitive damages was assessed against the company for the Silkwood estate. On January 11 the Supreme Court ruled the court had a legitimate right to assess this penalty; however, the case has been returned to a Jower court where Kerr-McGee may challenge the award on new grounds. Kerr-McGee has held that the contamination was "by her own hand," as a plot to discredit the company, a contention repeated by the New York Times in its editorial, which doesn't even mention that a jury had ruled this imputation not proved.

Since then, theories about Silkwood's contamination have included such slanderous tales as that put forth by alleged FBI informer Jacque Srouji, who claimed that Silkwood was deliberately contaminated by the union, to create a martyr. This is a telling indication of how far the capitalists will go to discredit the only thing that stands between the workers and total disregard for any safety. In the movie the International union representatives are made to appear as a bunch of slick bureaucrats who push Silkwood way out front without anywhere near sufficient backup. Certainly the OCAW is as craven before the capitalists as any other union in the U.S. But it has fought, however partially, for safer conditions for the workers it represents.

In the movie, Silkwood posits that someone purposely contaminated her urine-specimen jar with plutonium while it was in her locker room, a jar she later accidentally broke in her bathroom at home. This explanation is plausible, but we can't know for certain. We do know that Silkwood had been a straight A student in school, the only girl in her high school chemistry class, a member of the National Honor Society. She had studied medical technology. She knew that tampering with plutonium was death. The idea that she would deliberately contaminate herself could originate only in the sick and vicious minds of a profit-mad industry like Kerr-McGee.

Even the New York Times had to admit that Kerr-McGee was "a hellish place to work." Between 1970 and 1974 there were 574 reported exposures to plutonium. Dr. Karl Morgan, formerly a health physicist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, testified at a Congressional investigation that he had never seen a facility so poorly run. The plant was constructed in a tornado alley; the tornado warnings were so frequent that the company never bothered to remove the plutonium to a safe place. Yet the hazards of the plant get barely a nod in the film. Only one other instance of contamination is shown, Silkwood's friend Thelma. But when Silkwood is shown leaving off her urine sample at the lab for analysis, the audience sees many such samples lined up, thus many more contaminations.

Yes, nuclear power is dangerous. An accident such as almost happened at Three Mile Island could kill thousands of people. But the only "solution" to this problem provided by the movie Silkwood—and shared in real life by the OCAW union tops—is, ironically enough, the New York Times! Get the Times to publish the damning evidence, and the AEC will make Kerr-McGee straighten things out. The crusading press will save America by publicly exposing wrong, and the government will step in and perform justice. Sure. This is a liberal pipedream: the AEC serves the interests of power conglomerates like Kerr-McGee, and the New York Times worships money, not justice.

The "no-nukers" hail the name of Silkwood in their campaign to abolish nuclear power. But the problem is that you have to replace it with something, and in this capitalist society there is no such thing as a danger-free source of energy. For generations workers have died miserably in coal mines and suffocated to death with black lung disease. Like any technology, nuclear power can be used and abused. It is not so much a question of a special technology, but the irrationality of the capitalist economy which makes all industry in the U.S., including the nuclear industry, hazardous. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan threatens to blow up the world hundreds of times over to save American profits. Over 90 percent of the nuclear waste in this country is military. And that's nothing compared to the global nuclear holocaust plotted in the Pentagon. That is the real danger of nuclear power.

The no-nuke movement is part of a middle-class ecological concern that the disastrous conditions which workers have faced for generations might spread to the suburbs, perhaps even onto a college campus. Anti-nuke groups actively publicize and collect funds for the Silkwood lawsuit but not a peep is heard in protest against the murder of Gregory Goobic during a two-week strike by OCAW Local 1-326 in Rodeo, California last January. Goobic, a 20-year-old union member, was run down by a scab truck while picketing a Union 76 oil refinery. A company boss, with arms folded, stood in the dead striker's blood as cops kept the other picketers away. The capitalists and their government are not interested in the lives of their employees, particularly when adequate wages, work¬ing conditions and safety precautions stand in the way of profits. Obviously one thing militants in unions such as OCAW must do is fight for safety committees with the power to close down plants. But equally necessarily is the struggle to replace the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy with a leadership that will break with both bourgeois parties and build a workers party. The world will be safe to live in when the ruling class has been expropriated by a workers government that runs society for the benefit of all, not the profits of a few.

Silkwood has been denounced by corporate spokesmen at the New York Times for portraying Karen Silkwood as "a nuclear Joan of Arc" when she was really "a victim of her own infatuation with drugs"; it has been denounced by anti-nuke fan Anna Mayo of the Village Voice for portraying her as a dope-smoking "bad girl" when she was really "beloved daughter, sister, friend, union martyr and heroine of the largest, most viable grass-roots force in the U.S. and Western Europe, the anti-nuclear movement."

Actually, Karen Silkwood was simply a union militant fighting the best she could for a better life for herself and her coworkers against one of the least safe, most powerful, biggest price-gouging capitalist enterprises in the country. And we think the movie did a nice job showing it."

Inventing Elvis

Commentary

Elvis-The First Year-1954, narrated by Jack Perkins, 1992

Elvis Presley a rock and roll hero of my youth, if not to me personally then to many I knew especially girls, is the subject of this in-depth look at the first year that Elvis began inventing himself as the 'King'. Jack Perkins’s somber narration and idiosyncratic style sets the tone for a thoughtful look back at Elvis’s trials and tribulation on the road to stardom. We have the full ‘talking head’ treatment here from Elvis’s surviving band member, Scotty Moore, to ex-sweethearts, motel owners, agents, radio producers and announcers, cooks, bakers and candlestick makers. Basically anyone who crossed his path in 1954 in that first tough year out on the road.

And what a road it was. Playing small clubs, high school auditoriums, the Louisiana Hayride and every where he could get his foot in the door Elvis stretched and clawed his way to success, and apparently was not a bad guy to hang around with then either. He, moreover, exhibited all the virtues that small town white Southerners liked in the 1950’s, except maybe those sideburns and, just maybe, swinging that pelvis just a little too much when their daughters were around.

An interesting part of this presentation is an attempt to place the roots of Elvis’s music in the context of his time and place. And, as has been expressed elsewhere as well, that included black musical influences in the deeply segregated South. Sun Records Sam Phillip’s old adage comes true through Elvis- finding a white boy who could sing black. This segment only adds to something that I have been arguing for the past few years- the roots of rock and roll owe more than a little to black blues musical influence – think in this regard of the importance of Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle and Roll, also produced in 1954. But Elvis certainly rode the wave to great effect and this little valentine to him is good for those who like musical history with their music. For those who need just the music look elsewhere.

Elvis's Sun Sessions Commemorative CD, Elvis Presley, 1990

As to this present compilation of Elvis's Sun sessions that give flesh to the above DVD review some comments are worth mentioning. As with all such compilations there is some unevenness in the quality of performance, even in the case of Elvis. Some of this is calculated with the use of alternative takes to beef up the size of the compilation. However, any way you cut it these Sun sessions and that studio played to Elvis’s strengths musically. Starting with the classics It’s All Right, Mama, Blue Moon of Kentucky and Good Rockin’, Tonight and through such ballad covers as Blue Moon and Harbor Lights Elvis demonstrates his versatility in song style and that distinctive intonation that no one else in the Sun stable could duplicate (and they tried, believe me). Elvis fanatics will want this one just like every other thing that has been put out in his name. But the real reason to get it is to hear pure Elvis when the man, the moment and the environment all came together when Rock 'n' Roll was young.

The following is a comment made in connection with the Public Broadcasting System's documentary about Sun Records entitled Good Rockin' Tonight. I have added it to all comments on Sun Records artists that I have reviewed over the past several months

A note on sound- no, not of this American Masters production which like virtually all PBS productions is technically of high quality. No, I am referring here to the sound in Sun Studio. I do not believe in ghosts or other such things but tell me this. Why, for example, does Johnny Cash in his Sun Records days sound like god’s own creation when on work from other recordings I can take him or leave him? And that goes for Elvis, Carl, Jerry Lee and the others as well. The gods and goddesses of Rock and Roll were smiling on that joint- thanks.

Let Them Eat Cake- No To Government Bailout of Financial Institutions

Short Note

Build a Workers Party That Fight For A Workers Government!

Centralized planning, anyone? Yes, that fundamental principle of the socialist transformation of society should look pretty good right now, even in its old threadbare Stalinist bureaucratic form, as the height of rationality now even to hardcore plebeian anti-communists. Those old grey Soviet bureaucrats (and today’s Chinese bureaucrats) had at least to mouth some phrases about the interests of the working class. No such need here in the heart of imperial society as the capitalists have just taken the money and run- and now are back for a hand-out. The world financial markets have exploded as a result of their own overweening hubris, to speak nothing of garden variety greed, but they are nevertheless looking to be bailed out by their respective governments, in the first instance the American government.

Hell, these Wall Street guys and their hangers-on (and their international compatriots in the London Exchange, the French Bourse and elsewhere) obviously missed that class at the Harvard Business School about the relationship between actual capital on hand in a business and borrowing the bejesus out of someone else’s money. That is called, in other than polite society, larceny by fraud- grand larceny in this instance. The lowliest Soviet bureaucrat had more understanding, if less scope for his or her actions, than that. In fact, I recently read an article where some American high school business class students had, a couple of years ago, called this meltdown as it was forming- without an MBA. Go, figure. I have never aspired to be a financial officer but I do believe that I could have done as well in screening out the creditworthiness of the applicants that flowed in these institutions. Being able to breath in order to receive a big loan doesn’t seem all that difficult to figure out. Heck, sign me up for one. Oops, too late.

That is the nut here. Many commentators have waggled their fingers at those who were forced to face foreclosure on their homes and other credit instruments when pay-up time came. Yes, it is always easier to blame the guy or gal down at the bottom of the chain for the in-your-face greed exhibited by financial institutions and their expert staffs over the last decade or so. Look though, even in my poor bedraggled family the desire to have one’s own home in the 1950’s drove my parents’ imagination to distraction. That the house we lived in was not as good as the apartment in the public housing project where we had previously resided is beside the point. The dream, one way or another, was single family home ownership for that generation. Why should it, all things being equal, be different now? The wisdom of the struggle for that dream to the exclusion of other dreams is a debatable point, as Friedrich Engels the old socialist and companion of Karl Marx pointed out long ago in his essay On The Housing Question. But we need not get into that here as I will address that later in a longer commentary when the dust settles over this whole episode.

Here is the bottom line for now. The “invisible hand” of the market has been exposed for all to see. The relationship between the capitalists on Wall Street and elsewhere and THEIR government has been exposed for all to see. The usually do-nothing and lethargic Congress has stepped all over itself to do the masters’ bidding. Obviously their time to run society in some rational form is objectively over and has been for a very long time. Capitalists, financiers, their agents, sycophants and hangers-on- move over. Let working people run this society to fit their needs. And from the look of things it better be sooner rather than later. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government!

The Adventures of Augie March- Saul Bellow's Chicago

BOOK REVIEW

The Adventure of Augie March, Saul Bellows, Penquin Press, New York, 2002

These seem to be Chicago days for this reviewer. He has just done some reviews of Chicago’s Chess Records that essentially defined the sound of the electrified blues in what would be old Augie’s old neighborhood. Furthermore, I have reviewed the work of Chicago’s Nelson Algren who takes more than one look at the downside of Chicago life in the raw - what happens to the Augies when they do not break out of that place between the working poor and the lumpen proletariat. And this is a good place to set up the fundamental difference in Bellow’s take on life as compared to Algrens’s. Both describe lives and milieus that can expose the nasty, short and brutish side of life but unlike Algren’s Frankie Machine in The Man With the Golden Arm Augie is smart (and clean enough) to make the break.

To that extent Bellow’s Augie, his pals and his town are a celebration of the possibilities that the immigrants to this country believed was possible (and on too many occasions were dashed to pieces). A nice little devise that Bellow uses to highlight this contrast is the tension between the career paths of Augie and his brother. Both face the existential crisis of being left to one’s own devices in the world but the brother survives by creating wealth for himself and forgets, in fact scorns, the idea of intellectual reflections about man’s fate. Poor Augie though wants to know the meaning of life once he has finally broken out of the working class milieu- but travel, a rich lady friend and a whole different set of adventures do not satisfy that hunger to know that meaning.

I would argue, and here I go back to Augie’s days as a Trotskyist, that he might have cut against the grain of that modern day sense of self-isolation in a heartless world if he had organized others to create an alternative society where that alienation from productive labor could have been diminished. But, that is just this reviewer pontificating against Bellow’s facile early literary Trotskyism. Although I read this book initially about 25 years ago the first half still is gripping. The second half meanders a little more than I recall from the first reading. This is an early work though. Bellow gets better as a writer later, if not better in resolving humankind’s existential crisis.

From The Archives- The Struggle Against The Iraq War At The Base

Commentary

From The Archives- on the struggle in the lead up to the Iraq War in 2002

IT IS DESPERATELY NECESSARY TO WIN THIS BATTLE AGAINST BUSH’S WAR DRIVE….AND THE FIGHT BEYOND

Make no mistake Bush intends to go to war in Iraq despite the rational objection of the anti-war peoples of the world. We have, however, in rather short order been able to build an anti-war movement of massive proportions through shear determination. Now is the time to draw the lessons from the past about how to continue build this movement and lead it to political power so that we can end war once and for all. If we fail we may not soon have another chance. The following program can serve as a basis for such a change.


FOUR POINT PROGRAM FOR AN EFFECTIVE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT

1. .TURN THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT INTO AN ANTI-IMPERIALIST MOVEMENT- THE MAIN ENEMY IS AT HOME

One of the lessons drawn from the Vietnam anti-war movement was to demonstrate that the actions of the American government were not just a result of bad policies but were endemic to the nature of capitalism in the modern era. If we do not draw that same analysis now and bring it to those who can at least see that something is desperately wrong with this system then we never will. The pacifist mood of the masses while commendable is mainly unformed and directionless. We must draw the lessons of history. In that regard the lessons of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the only successful anti-war movement in history, must be absorbed. We must make our own the slogans stated by Karl Liebknecht the German socialist in voting against war credits to the German government in World War I. The main enemy is at home. Not one penny, not one person for this war.

2. STAND IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE IRAQI PEOPLE. DEFEND IRAQ AGAINST IMPERIALIST ATTACK.

The disparity between the mightiest military power the world has ever known and semi-colonial Iraq is apparent. It is the duty of every internationalist to understand that in the coming war we must stand in solidarity with the Iraqi people. The main danger to the peoples of the world today is not Saddam but the American government and its allies. We give no political support to Saddam and call for the people of Iraq to overthrow him. However, when war starts we must defend the Iraqi people DESPITE Saddam.

3. SUPPORT AND INITIATE ACTIONS THAT UNDERMINE U.S. AGGRESSION AGAINST IRAQ.

All actions to now, mainly demonstrations, against an invasion are helpful, However, as the anti-war movement against Vietnam demonstrated these actions are not enough. It is necessary in your schools, labor unions, workplaces and in your activist groups to raise the question of concretely stopping the war. Call for student strikes, political strikes, labor strikes and other actions such as “hot-cargoing" military goods. Develop actions that undermine the government’s ability to carry out their war plans. Speak to soldiers and their families about actions to stop their participation in the war effort.

4. BREAK WITH THE DEMOCRATIC AND REPUBLICAN PARTIES. FIGHT FOR A WORKERS PARTY.

The essential unity of the traditional parties in this country the Republicans and Democrats on the question of Iraq and other social questions makes it clear that they do not represent the fundamental interests of working people and minorities in this country. We must build our own party centered on the workers and minorities of this country to fight against imperialism abroad and for a workers government at home

BRING THESE IDEAS TO YOUR SCHOOL, YOUR WORKPLACE, YOUR UNION AND YOUR ACTIVIST GROUPS-------FORWARD

CONTACT: THE BOSTON COMMITTEE FOR AN ANTI-IMPERIALIST UNITED FRONT

LABOR DONATED

*Preserving The Roots Anyway We Can- The Saga Of Roots Music Preservationist Joe Bussard

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of the trailer for "Desperate Man's Blues".

DVD Review

Desperate Man's Blues: Discovering The Roots Of American Music, Jose Bussard and a cast of thousands of old 78 speed records, Cubic Media, 2006

Recently I went to great lengths, and rightly so, to tout the “Antone’s: House Of The Blues” DVD that was about the trials and tribulations of the late Austin, Texas blues club owner Clifford Antone in order to keep the blues tradition alive by keeping old time Chicago blues legends like Hubert Sumlin, Eddie Taylor, Sunnyland Slim and Jimmy Reed gainfully employed. Also his remarkable sense of talent-spotting in showcasing the new talent of the likes of Sarah Brown, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and most famously the Vaughn brothers, Jimmie and later Stevie Ray. Well, apparently running music clubs is not the only way to go in preserving American roots music, as this ‘reality’ film documentary of the saga of a fifty plus years journey by record collector Joe Bussard rather strikingly points out.

Joe Bussard‘s trial and tribulations are of a different order than Clifford Antone’s. Joe had taken on the task of traveling many a mile to find rare old roots music wherever he could find it. In short, he has some of the same obsessive, traits that we saw in the ‘Antone” film. And that is to the good. Plus old Joe has an engaging, if definitely old-fashioned, sense of collecting. Nevertheless when he ‘played the platters’ of Clarence Ashley, Robert Johnson, Son House , Uncle Dave Mason, and a few I really didn’t from some obscure parts of the American songbook I was right there with him. That may say more about me than about him.

The only problem I have, a big problem I must confess, is old Joe’s dismissal of “rock and roll” music. Part of that is generational, to be sure. But part is a different understanding of the nature of American roots music. Jerry Lee Lewis when he was in high jump jitterbug form, Elvis when young and hungry, Carl Perkins and on and on in the rockabilly and rhythm and blues traditions that served as the foundation of the best of rock. No, I do not agree with Joe that that was all junk. For the rest though, Joe I am right with you.

Good Rockin' Tonight, Part II

CD REVIEW

Good Rockin’ Tonight: The Legacy of Sun Records, various artists, London-Sire Records, 2001

I have already commented elsewhere in this space about the Public Broadcasting Service’s American Masters 2001 production of Good Rockin’ Tonight: The Legacy of Sun Records. Here we have a CD produced in tandem with that effort. And not just any old CD but a CD that has material covered by artists who either are in, will be in or are on a short list to be included in, some musical Hall of Fame. Strangely, when I first heard this CD I was put off by it because I thought, correctly, if stupidly that covers of these Sun classics could not possibly measure up to the originals, even if done by extremely competent musicians. Well, on a second hearing I got over that little personal problem and while the originals still set the standards there are some very good, and in at least one case, better covers of the classics.

So who is good here? Well, start with a nice cover by Paul McCartney (you know him) and the Elvis classic That’s All Right, Mama. Jeff Beck with a fair rendition of another Elvis classic Mystery Train. A nice upbeat cover of My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It. An excellent Blue Suede Shoes by Johnny Halladay. A passable Whole Lot of Shaking Going On by Elton John. Okay covers of Blue Moon of Kentucky by Tom Petty and Sittin’ On Top Of The World by Van Morrison and Carl Perkins. A right on cover of Don’t Be Cruel by Brain Ferry. A surprisingly good cover of the little known Red Cadillac and Black Mustache by the endlessly surprising Bob Dylan. Classic throwback performances of Just Walking In The Rain by Eric Clapton and Lonely Weekend by Matchbox Twenty. A so-so performance of Jerry Lee’s (who can do it better) Who Will The Next Fool Be by Sheryl Crow. A stand up performance of Johnny Cash’s Walk The Line by Live. Another classic throwback performance by Mandy Barnett on You Win Again. The biggest surprise and the one that clearly is done better than the original is Kid Rock’s cover of the Jerry Lee covered Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee. I have taken the time to evaluate each song in this collection to both do penance and to give just a whiff of what this masterful album holds in store for you. These are serious artists paying their dues to artists who played Rock and Roll for keeps. Kudos.