"Bread, Land And Peace"- Figting Slogans For Obamian Times

Commentary

Earlier this year (see archives, dated May 29, 2008) in an entry with a theme similar to that headlined above I mentioned the strong similarities between the propaganda slogans that militant workers had to fight under now and those which formed the core agitational political program of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution in 1917, obviously taking all historical proportions and differences taken into consideration.

In thinking through some of the points that militant workers will have to fight for in Obamian times I re-read that entry and found that in the intervening months the points made there retain their relevance and can serve to form the axis of our left oppositionist program for the impeding Obamiad. Naturally, there are other slogans that we will need to fight under but we might as well prepare now, especially on that peace point when Obama pulls the hammer down in Afghanistan and escalates the war there. More, much more later. For now here is a repost of that May 29, 2008 entry ([ ] indicates comment added today).

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Has Markin gone senile on us with the headline slogans above? Has Markin been in a time warp and gone back to the spring and summer of 1917 in Russia to appropriate the day-to-day slogans that the Bolsheviks grafted onto their program and which led to their success in the October revolution? No, Markin is not senile nor has he gone back in a time machine to the glory days of 1917. Markin has just taken a glance at some recent daily headlines and ‘creatively’ encapsulated those stories. Hear me out.

Bread- In Russia in 1917 the initial sparks that set off the February revolution that overthrew the Czar were the demonstrations of working women, housewives and soldiers’ wives for bread. Literally. A look, on any given day, today at the worldwide rise in prices of basic foodstuffs due to a myriad of factors but mainly caused by the anarchy of the “free” market place brings that old fight against starvation in stark relief. Literally. Add to that food crisis the lunatic increase in the price of fossil fuels [even if temporarily abated at present] and other forms of energy needed to produce the world’s goods and the situation cries out today for a fundamental change in the way the world’s finite resources are apportioned. Conclusion: propaganda centered on the need for a rationalization of the world economy through centralized planning under workers’ control is on the order of the day.

Land- In Russia in 1917 the peasants cried out for resolution of their land hunger after centuries of near starvation tilling of their tiny plots and their serf-like subservience to the landed interests. Today that land hunger has taken a different form, at least in America- ownership of single family homes. The current and ongoing housing, crisis with its foreclosures and steep declines of prices in the housing market, has placed working people up against the wall. Whether working people were right or wrong in their desire for private home ownership they are the ones taking it in the neck today. An immediate long moratorium on foreclosures and restructuring of mortgages is called for. No evictions for those renters affected by the turmoil. Conclusion: Again, fighting propaganda on the question of rationalization of the housing market under the central planning principal through local workers councils is called for.

Peace- In Russia in 1917 the slaughter of World War I had finally hit home and the peasant-based army was falling apart under the direct military thrust of German imperialism, the inane goading of the Western imperialist powers, especially Britain and France, and the sheer madness of continuing the war by a broken army. Today Iraq and Afghanistan, to speak nothing of a plethora of other localized wars and disputes like the still far from resolved Palestinian question, have made the world an extremely dangerous place where war-like conditions can set off an explosion in an instant. [Most dramatically, President-elect Obama had made it clear from the beginning of his candidacy and since the elections has taken actions to ensure that Afghanistan is HIS war. I have mentioned elsewhere in this space that that he has taken a very calculated risk to, above all other issues, stake his presidency on this question.] Conclusion: Short and sweet- it is time to make class war on the warmongers, and in the first instance, the American military goliath. The beginning of wisdom for today’s propaganda fight is the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all American/ Allied troops and their mercenaries from Iraq and Afghanistan!

These three slogans point to the more general conclusion implicit in their exposition. All of this is merely a pipe dream or a Markin delusion if the fight does not include the fight for an independent working class party of our own that fights for a workers government so we can begin to fight like hell to turn things around. In short, and here is where the 1917 analogy really comes into focus- we have to start talking Russian, circa 1917, to the bosses. Pronto!

A "Fantasy" Musing On The Auto Bailout- Ford, GM, Chrysler Workers Seize The Factories

Commentary

Everybody is now familiar with the heart-rending plaintive cries of the cash-starved Big Three automakers whose heads have recently come to Washington (via their private jets- very definitely a bad public relations move, but par for the course), hats in hand, looking for a $25 billion dollar bailout from the government. That means public tax money (you and me, radical or conservative, it does not matter) for their private use. We have become inured to the facts behind this increasingly familiar scene over the past few months as it has become patently obvious that the capitalist lineup that runs the corporations of America has run out of steam, ideas and anything else except the capacity to beg for alms. The hard reality though is that, frankly, we as workers, don’t (or shouldn’t) give a damn. Let these behemoths go under, along with their museum piece historical curiosities-the SUV’s and over-sized trucks that have clogged the highways the past few years.

But wait a minute. What about the fate of the auto workers who will be unemployed and left to dangle in the wind if the American auto industry closes down? Well, here is my “fantasy” solution. The worker militants in the auto industry have no interest in the capitalist nationalizing of this bankrupt industry any more than we had an interest in the de facto nationalizations of the banks and credit markets that have occurred in the recent past. Worker militants also have no interest in some bogus “worker control” of industry under the current capitalist regime that we have no hope today of having lead to a workers government. Therefore the only alternative is for those who produced the wealth, productively used or squandered, should seize the factories and other auto assets, sell them off and distribute the proceedings among the workforce. Preposterous, you say. Well let me give you the capitalist “alternative” scenario-one or more of these monsters goes belly up and either some other auto company buys into the mess or THEY sell the assets for themselves, their creditors and their stockholders. I believe that the expression is carpe diem, which seems about right under the circumstances.

Welcome To Thalia- The Early Work of Larry McMurtry

BOOK/DVD REVIEW

The Eyes of Texas

Hud, starring Paul Newman, Patricia Neal and Melvyn Douglas, directed by Martin Ritt, UA, 1963

The last time I have had a chance to mention the work of Larry McMurtry, whose novel this movie is adapted from, was a recent review of his The Last Picture Show trilogy (a must read, by the way) concerning the coming of age, mid-life crises and struggles with mortality of a cohort of small town Texas characters, especially one Duane Moore. As usual when I get ‘high’ on an author I like to run through most of his or her work to see where he or she is going with it. Thus, this review of a lesser work turned into an exceptional film is something of an introduction to themes that McMurtry likes to give a work out in his literary efforts. Apparently, when it comes to bring to life the Texas of the 1950’s and 1960’s either cinematically or in book form your first (and maybe last stop, although I would give Horton Foote some play) is at Mr. McMurtry’s doorstep.

Okay, so what is the big deal? Take one young, world weary, cynical handsome and well-built ne’r-do-well 1950’s cowboy Paul Newman, complete with Cadillac and cowboy hat (and an eye for the ladies, needless to say). Take one old-time rancher father of said Hud, Melvyn Douglas giving the performance of his life as a man out of step with the times as oil-rich Texas is passing him by. Take one sultry (yes, sultry in a country sort of way) substitute mother as the household cook and drudge. Add, for generational purposes, a young teenage grandson the prototype for later characters that we shall see again in other Texas scenarios by McMurtry. Put them all together with all kinds of family, personal and social tensions and a ranch crisis brought on by an epidemic of cattle hoof and mouth disease. Film it in black and white (a natural medium for 1950’s- 1960’s modern cowboy movies-think the Misfits) and place it in small town Texas with all its pride, prejudices and customs. Then take a couple of hours to see how a well-written novel and a well-thought out film can mesh as one. This is the Texas of Larry’s dreams and ours. Kudos.

Horseman, Pass By, Larry McMurtry, University of Texas Press, 1961

I will concede that I have been on something of tear concerning the works of Larry McMurtry lately. That is just the way I operate when I find that rare novelist that “speaks” to me. Gore Vidal, the great American historical novelist, is another whose works you will be seeing reviewed more in this space. That said, the particularly purpose here is to compare McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By with Hud, the cinematic version of this novel, that starred the recently deceased Paul Newman as a misbegotten, angry modern cowboy, a very talented actor from my youth. I, frankly, like to make such comparisons to see how close the film comes to the novel.

Some films, as I recall from an article that Joan Didion wrote in the New York Review of Books concerning one of her books, move very far away from the author’s intent. That happened in her case and she had to abandon the screenwriting of the film version of one of her books in the interest of her own artistic integrity. Some cinematic presentations, even more egregiously, pay bare homage to their source. That occurred in Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and To Have Not. Here the situation is something of a happy mix between the need to highlight the 1960’s blue-eyed heart throb Newman’s role as the errand, self-centered cowboy “angel” Hud and the coming of age story of his teenage nephew Lonnie that McMurtry is trying to portray here.

Naturally, as McMurtry’s intent is to show not only the ruthless way that the modern cowboy, Hud, has to deal with the world in order to survive but the vagaries of his nephew Lonnie’s coming of age in rural West Texas in the 1950’s (in the mythical town of Thalia the scene of more than one of his efforts) the screenwriting must reflect director Martin Ritt’s concerns to keep the story moving. Thus the book, unlike the movie, concentrates not on the action of the various events in ranch (the problem with the cattle that have to be destroyed) and small town life (the booze, dances and Last Picture Show movie house) that drive the film but the sheer struggle against loneliness and meaningless that every teenager goes through but more so here. Those feelings, described so well here (and in The Last Picture Show) do not translate well onto the screen.

There are a number of other characters and events in the book that do not make it to the screen. The family relationship between Grandpa Homer Bannon and Hud is different (although the generational tensions are still present). Grandma Bannon is still alive (as Homer’s second wife and Hud’s mother) and the housekeeper is black not white like in the film. Needless to say Newman’s sexual assault of the housekeeper (played by Patricia Neal) in the early 1960’s era film subject to more taboos than today is much less graphic than in the book. But a good suggestion here is to watch the film for the performances of Newman, Neal and Melvyn Douglas (as Homer) AND read this novel. This is McMurtry’s first effort at being the “king” of Texas story tellers (New West version and Old West version, as well). The pair of efforts compliment each other. That is a rare feat.

*The Real Question Of The Day- Who Will Win The National College Football Championship?

Click on title to link to the "USA Today" pre-season college football ratings for 2008

*The Real Question Of The Day- Who Will Win The National College Football Championship?

Commentary

This running commentary was started on August 29, 2008 and will continue until January 2009. Each week I am making my comments on the previous week and making my selections for the upcoming week in the comment section. Of course, using the power of the Marxist scientific method (or maybe dumb luck) to enlighten one and all on this earth shaking struggle.

Well, folks now is the lead-up to the first real weekend of college football and time once again for this unrepentant Marxist to use his materialist concept of history to predict the trends of the season. But let us back up for a moment to last year’s (yes, I know ancient history but with blog history available, such as it is in this case, it can be pulled up in an instant) zany season and this forecaster’s ill-advised choices. One knows things are not right when upstart Appalachian State takes Michigan in the first week. It went downhill from there. The next couple of paragraphs taken from a review of Hunter Thompson’s Hey, Rube and a postscript tell the tale when the deal went down.


A run through the ups and downs of Thompson's previous seasons' (2000-2003) gambling wins and loses, however, does not date well. Hell, I can barely remember last week's bets. But the real problem is that, as in politics, we listen to different drummers. I am a long time fan of `pristine and pure' big time college football and would not sully my hands to bet on the NFL so his whining about the San Francisco 49'ers or the Denver Broncos is so much hot air. However, I will take Ohio State and 3 points against LSU in the 2007 college championship game. That's the ticket. I miss Hunter and his wild and wacky writing that made me laugh many a time when I was down and needed a boost but not here. Enough said.

Postscript: May 15, 2008. Needless to say there is a strong difference between my uncanny powers of political prognosis and the rather mundane ability to pick college football champions. Obviously, only a fool would have bet on the Buckeyes of Ohio State against a real SEC team like those Cajun boys from LSU. Right?


...Obviously, at the end of this year’s football season I will have to make better use of the delete key. But all of that is so much hot air and ancient history. Today we start as fresh as new born babes. That, after all is the beauty of this kind of madness. Here goes.

A Democratic convention with a historic black candidate for a nominee. Ho hum. A Republican convention coming up with the same old same old. Yawn. Today, or at least the time it takes me to write up this commentary, all that ‘real’ news is so much hot air. Why? This weekend marks the first serious collegiate football Saturday and the time to make my predictions about who will win this year’s coveted national championship (Jesus, I better stick to politics, this line sounds like something out of the late legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice. Somebody please stop me if I start writing about the 'mythical' national championship). I admit that I got waylaid last year when LSU seemingly came out of nowhere at the end to deliver Ohio State its second consecutive national championship lost. But that was last year. This year is as fresh as the driven snow.

On the first weekend of September it would be pointless (and foolhardy, as well) to name the winner. One of the virtues of following the Top 25 in the college football ratings is that, more so than in professional sports, the most precise calculations can blow up in your face. Witness last year’s unlikely defeat of Michigan by Appalachian State. So with that precaution in mind here is my Top Four which reflects the strength of the top conferences in the scheme of things. Pac-10- Southern California (no-brainer out West). Big 10-Ohio State (here I finally like them so they probably will tank out on me). Big 12- Oklahoma (although I like that quarterback McCoy from Texas, if he ever stops throwing interceptions) and the home conference of last year’s national champion’s, the SEC- Georgia who came on like gang busters at the end of last season (no, no repeat for LSU. Yes, I like Florida's Heisman Trophy Tebow but is the team around him strong enough?). For all you Clemson(ACC) and/or West Virginia fans (Big East). Get real-again!

I promise to do better updating the weekly commentary. Hell, all there is as an alternative is this misbegotten presidential campaign so I should have plenty of time on my hands.

Blue Suede Shoes- Carl Perkins

Commentary

How About Them Blue Suede Shoes

Carl Perkins- King of Rockabilly and Friends, Carl Perkins, 1985

Everyone who cares now knows that the roots of rock and rock came from a few sources, country blues, city blues, and rhythm and blues of the Big Joe Turner sort and from the white South rockabilly from the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis and the artist reviewed here- Carl Perkins. Over the long haul I believe that the key is that Turner rhythm and blues on Shake, Rattle and Roll that defines the roots of rock and roll but that is just for argument’s sake. Carl Perkins can lay claim to a piece of that magic with Blue Suede Shoes (latter covered by Elvis, adding a great deal to his career, of course).

Whether Perkins is a key figure is the history of rock and roll beyond that initial contribution is also an open question. However, no one can question that here in a 30th Anniversary show in London to an audience that was perhaps more appreciative than a home-grown one at that time no one can doubt that he rocks the rockabilly with the best of them. As usual with this format we have the guests- and quite good ones in the likes of Roseanne Cash, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and George Harrison as well as a nice traveling band. Additionally there were some serious dancers, dressed in appropriate 50's style, in the audience kicking up a storm. The hit here is, without a doubt, the finale with a collective all out rendition of Blue Suede Shoes.

"I'd Rather Be The Devil Than Be That Woman's Man"-Some Random Notes On The Obama Transition

Commentary

As always when I use the headline above, courtesy of the legendary old time country blues singer Skip James (who apparently had been unhappy in love, among other personal problems), in order not to offend my feminist friends who attempted to do “great and grievous bodily harm” to me the first time I used it, in a commentary concerning former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. I have placed two versions of that thought below. Needless to say after reading some of the points listed below one will not have to guess which version is appropriate for this commentary.

“I’d Rather Be The Devil Than That Woman’s Man”- “Devil Got My Woman”, old time country blue singer Skip James’ version

“I’d Rather Be The Devil Than To Be A Woman To That Man”- “Devil Got My Woman”, modern feminist blues/folk singer-songwriter Rory Block’s version

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For those who regularly read the commentaries in this space, as at least one reader has informed me, there has been a glaring lack of commentary from this blogger about the bourgeois election process now that the misbegotten 2008 American presidential campaign has run its course. Well, I confess, and do so willingly, that I have suffered from Post Election Deprivation Syndrome (PEDS). Although it is a curable disease with time the symptoms are a result of too closely following political events that is then followed by “ennui” that can only be described as “don’t give a damn”. That last phrase basically sums it up, however, since I am getting back on my feet and am going to need to sharpen my claws (as we all must) after this Obamian transition period is over let me offer a few random points for your perusal.

Obama And The Question Of Political Incest

Look, I was up late on the night of Tuesday November 4, 2008 just like every other political junkie in the known universe. Why? Well, to find out about the fate of some local referendum questions on the Massachusetts ballot, for one thing. However, after two years of following this bizarre American presidential campaign, from outside the process to be sure, I always have an interest, if only a sporting one as here, in such outcomes. Long gone are the days when I would sit up until the wee hours to see whether so-and-so won the 28th Congressional District in California to insure a Democratic majority in that body. But, damn Electoral College counting, that hoary old undemocratic beast which should be abolished posthaste, is still interesting.

So what did I learn from this experience? Well, the top thing immediately is that America will have its first black imperialist commander-in chief. As a veteran of the old civil rights movement and a keen observer of the racial atmosphere in this country for half a century that fact alone is significant. I, along with a myriad of others, if asked by you whether such an event would occur in America by the political year 2008 would have dismissed you out of hand and called for your immediate medical assistance.

In the long haul, given Obama’s publicly stated positions and based on my “feel” for his personal demeanor that means that we leftists will have a little more room to maneuver and can breath a little easier after eight hard Bush years of having had these Nazi manqués try to shove every thing that they could at us and expect us to like it. Moreover, from the “feel” of the Obama campaign and what it generated among the young the expectations of positive change are palpable. I commented in some earlier blogs posted this summer that a little fresh wind, like that of my youth around the campaign of John Kennedy in 1960, seemed to be blowing. In the final analysis, that experimental atmosphere cannot do anything but help us when the hard realities of capitalist politics get hammered down on them. While history does not repeat itself exactly and we, in any case, do not need (or want) a repeat of the 1960’s (if for no other reason than we lost that battle) the capitalist system itself will force the issues.

In the short haul, though, we leftists will be isolated, especially in the foreign affairs arena as Obama will be given at least here a very long “honeymoon” period both because of the utter destructive nature of the Bush years and because, frankly, he is black. Among the black population that “honeymoon” will, as should be expected, last a very much longer time. By analogy, in the old days those of us who grew up Irish Catholics always gave the Kennedys plenty of room and plenty of support, especially when the WASPs got on their cases.

Of course, this is all by way of preface to the “real” news of the transition period- the impending announcement that one New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, former Democratic presidential contender, and a woman whom I believe still has plenty of “fire in her belly” to be president is to be named Secretary of State. This is only the tip of the iceberg of Obama appointments of former Clinton (Bill, that is) Administration personnel. This “team of rivals” is going to be more like a cathouse by the time this thing is over.

I will finish this section with two points on this for now. First, in several blogs in 2007, well before this election cycle was in focus I mentioned that any country that could not come up with a better political combination than alternating the Clinton/Bush quinella deserves all the trouble that it gets. I will stand on that statement here. As for the second, I refer the reader back to that comment made at the start of this commentary about my motivation for the headline of this blog. Enough said (for now)


Iraq and Afghanistan and always Iraq and Afghanistan

On noon of January 20, 2009 one Barack Obama will be swore in as the 44th President of the American imperial state. Although this may be my ham-handed way of putting the description of that event it underscores the point that I want to make in this section. On that day we will start our opposition to the start of the Obama Administration’s responsibility for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Get use to the idea now because the news out of Washington, Chicago, Baghdad and Kabul does not promise any quick ending to our now seven year opposition to this madness. Here’s why.

Obviously, the selection of the unrepentant “hawk” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to be the next American Secretary of State does not portent well for withdrawal from Iraq. More ominous still are the recent “shotgun” negotiations between the Bush Administration and the Al-Maliki government in Iraq. Those negotiations posit a three year extension of American (and Allied, if there really is such a thing there now) troop presence. With that safety valve in place expect that an Obama first term will move very cautiously and despite all previous avowals to the contrary keep troops there to the bitter end under one pretext or another. The joker in the deck is Sadr and his Madhi Army who have been making some noise on the “Arab street” to get the Americans out now. Some of that is grandstanding for the home crowd but, to the extent that popular opinion in Iraq is moved by that slogan, we, of course, support THEIR efforts to get the American imperial army out.

More threatening though is the situation in Afghanistan. This IS Obama’s war and he may wind up staking his presidency on the issue. Obama is publicly and unequivocally committed to “beefing” up the American troop presence in Afghanistan. He never claimed to be a pacifist or some sappy “peace at any price” monger so we best take him at his word. In this regard we best take seriously his commitment to Afghanistan escalation, as exemplified by the rumored selection of ex-Marine Commandant James Jones as his national security advisor. General Jones has commanded troops in Afghanistan. General Jones is a ‘true believer’ that the situation in Afghanistan can be pacified by increased troop levels. The best thing that we can do now is get out the old banners, get out the old posters and write this on them for January 20, 2009- OBAMA- IMMEDIATE UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF ALL AMERICAN TROOPS FROM IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN! That is the new political reality. Be ready

Once Again, Cops Are Not Workers

Commentary

The following is a letter published in Workers Vanguard August 28, 2008 that addresses the always thorny and ill-understood question of the role of police in capitalist society. That role is not as the vanguard of the working class but the rearguard of the bourgeois class. This lesson has to be constantly addressed to avoid problems when we get on the barricades. (Hell, you don't have to wait that long, just check out the strike lines - then you will know what all orthodox Marxists know almost instinctively. They are on the other side.) Read, once again, as an example, Trotsky's comments on the Bolshevik (and most militant Mensheviks, as well) attitude toward the police in 1917 in his classic History Of The Russian Revolution. Their role has gotten no better since that time. (One could argue that they have actually become more like para-military forces). I find that political people who have an equivocal attitude toward the police and their role in society have usually never been confronted by that force personally. It ain't pretty.

Northern Ireland

Socialist Party Champions Former H-Block Warden Turned Security Guard

Security Guards Out of the Unions!

We reprint below a letter published by the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League, in Workers Hammer No. 203 (Summer 2008).

Dublin
26 May 2008

Dear Workers Hammer,

Over the last few months a number of articles have appeared in the newspapers of both Irish and British reformist organisations about a hunger strike by “airport workers” in a legal battle against the leadership of UNITE, the trade union that organised them. The articles describe how these “workers” have been betrayed by the union leadership, and now face legal bills arising from the period when they were being organised into the union. This all sounds like the sort of fights workers have faced time and time again. However, it is only further on into the articles that the reader finds out these are not “workers” but security guards from Belfast airport demanding the union pay their £70,000 legal bills. Security guards are not workers but hired company thugs! It is an outrage that UNITE was organising these thugs in the first place. It would also be an outrage to use genuine workers union dues to pay their bills!

The most vocal defenders of these security guards in their battle against UNITE is Peter Taaffe’s Socialist Party. The Socialist Party has long proclaimed these guards “workers,” in fact it played a central role in organising them into the trade union. To add insult to injury, these reformists are now calling on trade unionists around the world to support the bosses’ hired thugs. Knowing full well that security guards are not necessarily popular with workers, they have been circulating a petition which simply refers to them as “workers” and “shop stewards,” omitting what they really did for a job. Lying and hiding basic truths is nothing new to social democrats like the Socialist Party, who are committed to trying to convince workers that the capitalist state can be made to act in their interests.

Even more disgusting, they and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), have also completely disappeared the fact that, prior to patrolling Belfast airport, one of these “workers” was a prison warden at the infamous H-Block/Maze prison! According to the Belfast Telegraph (13 April), Madan Gupta was for years part of the murderous regime that beat and tortured [Irish] Republicans. He was an overseer during the Hunger Strike in 1981! By championing such thugs, the Socialist Party and SWP are spitting on the memory of heroic men like Bobby Sands and the nine others who died on hunger strike that year.

The Socialist Party’s support to security guards is of a piece with their notion that cops and prison guards are part of the workers movement. This includes elements of the Northern Irish security apparatus such as H-Block prison wardens. As Marxists we have a duty to expose and politically combat these cowardly frauds. This is part of the struggle to achieve clarity in the workers movement, in particular on the nature of the capitalist state, which at its core consists of cops, prisons and courts. Prison guards and cops in capitalist countries are not workers, but the hired thugs of the capitalist state. The state is not some neutral arbiter above all classes, as the reformists would like to portray it, but simply the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Cops and security guards are used against workers during class struggle, beating pickets and protecting scabs. Indeed, around the world airport security is at the very front-line of the imperialists’ ongoing “war on terror” targeting, in particular, Muslims. As usual, the Socialist Party cares little for the plight of the besieged Asian communities in Britain or the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, seeking instead to rally the working class to the defence of the very cops, security and prison guards that are used to beat, torture and imprison them.

There are few places in the Western world where the precise nature of the state and its “special bodies of armed men” is clearer than in Northern Ireland. Since its inception in 1921 as an Orange statelet, the local capitalist class and their British imperialist masters in London maintained their rule through naked anti-Catholic terror. The heavily armed RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary] and “B-special” auxiliaries tortured and murdered with impunity, in particular targeting Republicans or anybody that dared question Orange rule. When a mass civil rights movement, supported both by the majority of Catholics and many Protestants, erupted in 1968 demanding an end to the daily discrimination of the Catholic minority, the Orange state and their Loyalist terror groups responded with increasing violence. By 1969 the British government decided to “stabilise” the situation by pouring in thousands of imperialist troops onto the streets of Belfast and Derry. Soon, the army and the RUC were filling internment camps with hundreds of “suspected Republicans” without even the facade of a trial. Innocent civilians were gunned down on the streets—on one day alone paratroopers murdered thirteen in Derry, the infamous Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972.

In contrast to the reformists, the ruling capitalist class makes no apologies for its state and the actions it takes to defend it. To this day, the British ruling class has refused to admit that the troops murdered innocent civilians on Bloody Sunday. The fact that the slaughter of the unarmed civilians is on film, and dozens of eye witnesses have testified, is irrelevant to the arrogant imperial masters. Their message to the population is quite clear: we rule! This is the same message sent out when cops executed Jean Charles de Menezes in July 2005 in London, and repeated in every denial of any wrongdoing. And it was the gruesome message that Thatcher’s government sent to the world when it provoked the Hunger Strikes in 1981. After years of protests against the brutal and demeaning regime under vicious wardens, Republican prisoners led by Bobby Sands insisted on regaining the status of political prisoners, as indeed they plainly were, including the simple rights to wear their own civilian clothes and to organise educational pursuits. The British state saw an opportunity to provoke the threatened hunger strike. It not only refused to listen to the demands, calling Bobby Sands and the others “common criminals” but began reneging on earlier agreements. Thatcher looked on gleefully as Bobby Sands, aged 27, and the others suffered slow, painful deaths.

At the height of the hunger strike, Sands was elected to the House of Commons and, fellow hunger striker, Kieran Doherty to the Dáil [Irish Parliament] as part of mass protests against the system slowly killing them. Both the British and Irish states quickly introduced new laws banning prisoners from running for election—making it clear to all that bourgeois “democracy” is nothing more than a veneer. A veneer that the likes of the Socialist Party hold in the highest of regard.

Because reformists hold that the capitalist state can change its spots and that socialism can be achieved without any need for a workers revolution, i.e., the smashing of the capitalist state and the need to establish a workers state, they must deny the very class nature of this state. By lying to workers that their interests can be served within capitalism, they provide cover for the bourgeoisie. The Socialist Party holds that once the reformists win a majority vote in Britain, laws can be passed in Her Majesty’s Parliament bringing about workers rule. That is, a bourgeois government—for any government administering the capitalist state is bourgeois—will bring workers rule to Britain! The idea that the gentlemen from the City [London financial district], and their friends in Sandhurst [military officer academy], will simply step aside because of a plebiscite and a piece of legal paper, is muck the Socialist Party consistently tries to rub in the eyes of the working class.

It is their reformist programme that inevitably leads the Socialist Party to become craven apologists for cops and prison guards. Their disgustingly chauvinist line on members of the brutal security apparatus in Northern Ireland is nothing new. They have rightly earned themselves the title “Her Majesty’s Socialists” among leftists and Republicans in Belfast and Dublin. The Socialist Party on both sides of the Irish Sea has for decades been proud to refuse to call for British troops out! They defend the “right to march” of the Orange Order, whose annual “marching season” consists of months of anti-Catholic provocations. In 1995, the Socialist Party infamously hosted Loyalist UVF killer Billy Hutchinson, who had been convicted of the murder of two innocent Catholics.

Of course, the Socialist Party is not so “touchy-feely” when it comes to the Catholic minority and Republicans in the North. [Socialist Party leader] Joe Higgins, ex-TD (MP) in Dublin, regularly used the Irish Dáil to denounce Republicans and anybody standing up to Loyalist terror. Higgins seized on the brutal killing of a young Catholic father, Robert McCartney, by members of the IRA, to compare the IRA to Hitler’s SS (see Workers Hammer No. 190, Spring 2005)! And when working-class youth and Republicans bravely fought off riot cops for hours to prevent a Loyalist mob marching through the streets of Dublin, Higgins was quick to join every bourgeois politician in the Dáil to denounce the anti-Loyalist protest as a “sectarian riot” (see Workers Vanguard No. 866, 17 March 2006).

The Socialist Party is the antithesis of the revolutionary workers party, that is a Bolshevik party, that the Spartacist League is fighting to build. We demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of the 5,000 British troops in Northern Ireland. We stand for the defence of the viciously oppressed Catholic community in Northern Ireland against Loyalist/state terror. At the same time, we oppose Sinn Féin’s nationalist perspective of a capitalist united Ireland in which Protestants would become an oppressed minority, a prospect that only serves to consolidate the Protestants behind Loyalist bigots, laying the basis for communalist terror, which is antithetical to a polarisation along class lines. In this situation of interpenetrated peoples and fratricidal nationalism, there can be no equitable solution short of the destruction of capitalism and the institution of workers rule. Our perspective is proletarian and internationalist: for the revolutionary overthrow of British imperialism and the clericalist state in the South—which is hideously oppressive of women, Travellers and workers—and the sectarian Orange state.

At a recent Socialist Party meeting in Dublin hosting Peter Taaffe, a speaker for the ICL laid out our perspective while exposing the anti-revolutionary programme of their international, the Committee for a Workers’ International, from their support for “workers in uniform”—including an ex-H-Block prison warden—to their scabbing on the Chinese deformed workers state (see Workers Hammer No. 202, Spring 2008). Many Socialist Party members in the audience, including one who was a security guard, vented their fury at our insensitivity to the plight of these thugs, in particular the lowly security guard, and our call to oust them from the unions. Taaffe’s summary, in particular in response to the ICL, was a ten-minute lesson in just how dirty a business reformism is. After explaining that, as a result of the betrayals of New Labour, it is the task of the Socialist Party to build a “new mass workers party” which is explicitly not revolutionary (i.e., Old Labour), he went into a long rant on the glorious struggles of the British prison officers. He painted a picture of the Socialist Party’s new mass workers party: column after column of uniformed prison officers at the head of the working class! The Socialist Party actually dreams of building a “workers party” based on the brutally racist, BNP [fascist]-ridden, thugs from Wormwood Scrubs and the Metropolitan Police!

Such a reactionary, Labourite perspective, and such deadly illusions in the capitalist state need to be vigorously combated within the workers movement! Cops, prison wardens and security guards out of the unions! The Spartacist League seeks to build a multiethnic revolutionary workers party, a party that will act as a tribune of the people, fighting to mobilise the working class against every manifestation of injustice, racist oppression and state tyranny: Down with the racist war on terror! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! For free abortion on demand! What is necessary is a revolutionary party that fights for the understanding that, as Lenin explained, “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”; that the liberation of the working class cannot come about “without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class” (The State and Revolution). These words were written on the eve of the Russian Revolution, the first, and to date, only successful proletarian revolution. Under the leadership of the Bolshevik vanguard party, the working class smashed the capitalist state and established a workers state, consisting of the “special bodies of armed men” necessary to defend the revolution against the deposed ruling class. That revolution makes clear the kind of party the working class needs to once-and-for-all throw off their chains. And it is our task to build this vanguard party!

Comradely,
Derek M.

*The Last Word- Studs Terkel Tells His American Story

Click On Title To Link To Studs Terkel’s Web Page.

BOOK REVIEW

Touch and Go, Studs Terkel, The New Press, New York, 2007

I have been running through the oral histories collected by the recently departed Studs Terkel, the premier interviewer of his age. As is my habit when I latch onto a writer I want to delve into I tend to read whatever items comes into my hands as soon as I get them rather than systematically or chronologically. Thus, I have just gotten my hands on a copy of Terkel’s “Touch and Go”, a memoir of sorts but more properly a series of connected vignettes (with a little off-hand celebrity name dropping along the way), that goes a long way to filling in some blanks in the life story of one Louis “Studs” Terkel (including information on that the nickname “Studs” - from the 1930’s Chicago-based trilogy “Studs Lonigan” by James T. Farrell, another author who will be reviewed here in the future). For those unfamiliar with Terkel’s work this little book acts as glue to understanding a long life committed to social justice, giving “voice” to ordinary people and expanding our knowledge of various musical traditions like jazz, folk music and the blues. Nice work, right?

And what of that life? The more famous second half of it is fairly well-known in Studs role as the ubiquitous interviewer and oral historian. That part is extensively covered through the materials in his various books such as “Working” and the “The Good War” and others that I have or will review elsewhere in this space and therefore will not spend much time on here. The less familiar first half of his life forms a fairly well-trodden exemplar of a life story from the early part of the 20th century but which today’s readers are nevertheless probably totally unaware of. Naturally enough, for an early 20th century American story, it begins with immigration of Studs parents to America, New York City as the first port of call, from the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe. Then, later, the also familiar internal migration that landed them in Chicago in search of more promising prospects and, ultimately assimilation by Studs (and his two brothers) into the life of the heartland, including the old traditions of hard work, hard striving and hard inquisitiveness.

Studs, like many of the members of his generation, was formed, permanently it would seen, by the hardships and cruelties of the Great Depression that, as exemplified by his oral histories of the times, are his special contributions to the history of that period. I do not believe that those of us from later generations can get a full sense of that history without Studs’ work as companion pieces to the academic histories. That was a time, as a glance at today’s’ current dire economic and social events may be foreshadowing, where one was forced to get by one’s wits, cleverness and sheer “guts”.

After a stint at law school Studs did odd jobs around the theater trying catch on a performer. But not just any theater and not just any performer. This is the period of the Theater Guild and of the WPA which gave cultural workers or those who aspired to such a chance. In short, an engaged and leftist political theater. Needless to say Studs got caught up with the international politics of the period. The struggle against fascism as a “pre-mature” anti-fascist, the fight to save the Spanish Republic and at home the struggle to aid those who were decimated by the Depression. Name a progressive social cause, he was there.

For his efforts, then and later, Studs had some success in his career as a performer first in the ubiquitous field of radio that formed the mass consciousness of the so-called “greatest generation” as a disc jockey and interviewer of various musical figures like Billie Holiday on his shows, the Wax Museum and the Eclectic Disc Jockey. Later, after truncated service in the Air Force in World II, Studs got in on the ground floor of the television with the local Chicago success of Studs’ Place.

Then the roof caved in as the ‘’red scare’ hit home and hit home hard. This was not a good period for those “pre-mature” anti-fascists like Studs mentioned in the last paragraph. In any case Studs survived by “doing the best he could” and by one means or another got hooked onto his career as an interviewer that one really should get a taste of first hand by reading one of the dozen or so books of his dedicated to that art form.

I have not mentioned thus far much about the specifics of Studs’ politics. I believe that he was formed, and ultimately was stuck in, that ‘progressive’ (and capitalism-saving) politics that came to life with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and was given highest expression by former FDR Vice-President Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party run for the presidency in 1948. A perusal of Studs later works, including comments in this memoir only confirm my impression that his worldview, formed in the 1930’s, remained about the same to the end.

That, however, is not why Studs has an honored place in the halls of the allies of the working class. His commitment to the “good fight” throughout a long life was commendable. We are always in need of those are willing to sign something, to speak to some pressing social issue and who do not squawk about it. No movement can survive without those kinds of publicists. The real tribune to Studs, however, will come when those myriad working class people that he interviewed- those downtrodden Chicago people, those poor white mountain people, those poor black migrants from the South get the society they desire and NEED. Kudos, Brother Terkel.


Studs At His Craft

The Spectator, Studs Terkel, The New Press, New York, 1999

As is my wont, I have been running through the oral histories of the mainly average citizens of America collected by the recently departed Studs Terkel, the premier interviewer of his age. When I latch onto a writer I want to delve into I tend to read whatever comes into my hands as I get it rather than systematically or chronologically. Thus, I have just gotten my hands on a copy of Terkel’s “The Spectator”, a professional actor’s memoir of sorts, that goes a long way to filling in some blanks in the life story of one Louis “Studs” Terkel (including information that the nickname “Studs” is from the Chicago trilogy “Studs Lonigan” by James T. Farrell, another author who will be reviewed here later). For those unfamiliar with Terkel’s work other than his seemingly endless capacity to interview one and all this little book acts as glue to understanding a life-long commitment to his craft as an actor, his appreciation of those who gave memorable performances, his fantastical recall of such moments in the theater and on film and his creating of a wider audience appreciation for various musically traditions like jazz, folk music and the blues. Nice work.

Studs, like many of the members of his generation, was formed by the hardships and cruelties of the Great Depression that I believe in his oral histories are his special contribution to insights into that period and that is reflected here. That was a time, as today’s’ current economic and social events seem to replicating, where one was forced to get by on wits, cleverness and sheer “guts”. Studs himself did odd jobs around the theater trying catch on a performer. But not just any theater and not just any performer. This is the period of the Theater Guild and of WPA which gave cultural workers or those who aspired to such a chance. These early efforts formed the lifelong interest that he has in the theater, playwrights, directors and the tricks of the trade in order to make the audience “believe” in the performance. I found, personally, his probing and informed interviews with Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams , two of my own favorite playwrights, the most interesting part of a book filled with all kind of interesting tidbits.

For his efforts, then and later, Studs had some success in his career as a performer first in the ubiquitous radio that formed many a consciousness of the so-called ‘greatest generation” as a disc jockey and interviewer of various musical figures like Billie Holiday on his shows, the Wax Museum and the Eclectic Disc Jockey. It is the combination of the radio as a format and the in-depth interview that sets Studs apart. Today we have no comprehension of how important these little extended interviews are as a contribution to the history of our modern culture. Will the ubiquitous mass media sound bites of the 21st century or even the unfiltered presentations on “YouTube”, or its successors, tell future generations what that culture was all about? I don’t even want to hazard a guess. But for now, savor, and I do mean savor, Studs going one-on-one with the above-mentioned Miller and Williams or songwriter Yip Harburg, come-back actor James Cagney, culture critics Harold Clurman and Kenneth Tynan and many, many more actors, actresses, playwrights, impresarios, directors and other cultural gadflies. Kudos and adieu Studs.

On The Slogan-Independence For Kosovo

Commentary

Last month as part of my commemoration piece on the anniversary of the great Chinese Revolution of October 1949 (See The Heroic Age Of The Chinese Revolution, October 26, 2008.) I mentioned that the thorny question of militants supporting and raising the call for the right of national self-determination in the pre-revolutionary period in China before 1949 was filled with potholes. Clearly up until 1941 this question was fairly simple in the fight against Japanese imperialism that had been waged for most of the 1930’s. That situation got much dicier once the Chinese fight became a part of the inter-imperialist war in the Pacific between American and Japan. More so when Chiang Kai-shek (old style) and his KMT forces subordinated themselves under American military command. (The question of the Chinese Red Army organized as the Fourth and Eight Route Armies that did not do so is a separate question).

I also mentioned in that commentary that I believed, and still believe, that in light of my readings on the Chinese application of the right to national self-determination under conditions of military subordination to imperialist policy the question of whether we should have raised the slogan of independence for Kosovo earlier this year, given its still virtual position as a UN protectorate, has to be reevaluated. I repost that part of my commentary here believing this to be a still open question although I am more inclined today to say, at this preliminary point, that militants should not have raised nor today should raise this call. Comments, please.

From “The Heroic Age Of The Chinese Revolution, October 26, 2008.”

“Finally, while we are discussing the question of the national right to self-determination in its Chinese application I should mention that our support for, or call for that right is not absolute. The right to national self-determination is one of the more important rights associated with the bourgeois revolutions. Thus it is a democratic rather than an explicitly socialist demand. Our approach, as least as I have come to look at it in going over the checkered history of this question in the international working class movement, is to take the national question off the table and put the class question to the fore. Sometimes that axis does not come into play. In the Chinese context the early self-contained struggle against Japanese imperialism made it applicable.

Once the war in the Pacific turned into an inter-imperialist rivalry with the entry of the United States into the equation as de facto leader of Chinese military forces (through the personal agency of General Stilwell as symbolic figure of that transference) then for socialist purposes the national question was off the agenda. At that point one gets into a choice of which imperialist camp one wants to support. No thank you. In a further twist to the Chinese situation revolutionaries COULD support the CCP’s New Fourth Route and Eight Route Armies (essentially red armies) which were independently fighting the Japanese despite the formal arrangements with the KMT government.

All of this is by way of saying that this thorny question of the national right to self-determination is, with the delays and defeats of the socialist revolution, still with us. Case in point- Kosovo. Earlier this year I called fro independence for Kosovo as a reflection of that right to self-determination. After thinking about that situation in light of my recent reading of the Chinese situation in 1941, I am not at all sure that that was a correct call under the circumstances. In the abstract Kosovo certainly qualifies as a nation. Certainly, unless it separated from Serbia, the national question would trump the class question (and that does not exclude the national rights of those Serbians still in Kosovo). Thus, while it is not out of the question for revolutionaries to support the same national rights as the Western imperialists do (as is clearly the case here) the NATO factor as the de fact guarantor of Kosovar independence makes me extremely uneasy about that earlier call for independence. I think the better course is right now to support the “real” right to national self-determination in combination with a call for ALL NATO troops out of Kosovo now!”

Big Bill Broonzy Is In The House

CD Reviews

Big Bill Broonzy, Chicago, 1937-1940 (four CD set), Big Bill Broonzy, ISP Records, 2005

I am in the process of reading and re-reading many of the books of oral history interviews collected by the recently departed Studs Terkel. As part of that process I have read his last work (published in 2007), a memoir of sorts but really a series of connected vignettes, that goes a long way to putting the pieces of Studs’ eclectic life together. A fact that I did not know is that Studs’ had radio and television music shows in the Chicago of the 1950’s. On one of those shows he performed with the blues/jazz folk artist under review here, Big Bill Broonzy. That long ago reference was enough for this reviewer to scamper back to give a listen to the melodious voice of one of the best in these traditions. But that begs the question where to start?

That is not merely a rhetorical question here. My first exposure to Big Bill, back in the mists of times, was as a performer on a Sunday night folk program here in Boston. In that format he was presented as a folk singer in the style of a black Pete Seeger, including singing many leftist political songs dealing with the pressing questions of race and class. Later I found some more jazzy works by him and some more raucous material in the old country blues tradition. So I hope you can see my dilemma.

The hard fact is that certain musicians, certain very talented musicians, can work more than one milieu or can transform themselves (for commercial or other reasons) into more than one genre. Moreover, in Big Bill’s case, the confluence of folk, blues and jazz at some points is fairly close. That surely is the case here on this CD compilation. So give a listen to that voice, that guitar and those wonderful songs. I might add that, although it seemed to be a given at the time, some of Big Bill lyrics are on point on racial segregation and other social issues. Think of the songs like “Brown, Black and White” or his version of “This Train” (that whipsaws Jim Crow very nicely). That is the real connection with old Studs, that is for sure.


Do That Guitar Rag 1928-1935, Big Bill Broonzy, Yazoo, 1991

The hard fact is that certain musicians, certain very talented musicians, can work more than one milieu or can transform themselves (for commercial or other reasons) into more than one genre. Moreover, in Big Bill's case, the confluence of folk, blues and jazz at some points is fairly close. That surely is the case here on this CD compilation. So give a listen to that voice, that guitar and those wonderful songs. At this time Big Bill was influenced by (and in turn influenced) the country blues mania then sweeping the black enclaves of the South (and not just those enclaves either- think about Jimmy Rodgers) and the songs here reflect that origin. What's good? "Guitar Rag", of course. "Down in the Basement" and "Bull Cow Blues" deserve a listen but for my money "Operation Blues" is tops here.

Added note: I "forgot" to add that on many of these tracks Big Bill has company. On some tracks that company is none other than the legendary Tom Dorsey (who also played behind Blind Willie McTell and many others in those days before going on to a gospel music career). On other tracks, in addition to Dorsey, the very, very bluesy voice of Jane Lucas is heard. Listen to "Leave My Man Alone". Nice, indeed.

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- Full Democratic Rights For Gays- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a "Workers Vanguard" article, dated November 21, 2008, concerning the current struggle to obtain full democratic rights for gays, including the right to marry (and divorce).

Markin comment:

This one is a "no-brainer"- down with restrictions against the right of gays and lesbians to marry (and divorce). Even in sunny California, or maybe, especially in that state.

*From The Archives- The Struggle Against The Iraq War

Click on the title to link to the Lenin Internet Archive for an article from 1914 (the start of World War I), "The Tasks Of The Revolutionary Social-Democracy [The future Communists] In The European War".

Commentary

This is a leaflet that a group of us put out locally here in Boston prior to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is on the one hand of historical interest, on the other a possible harbinger of things to come in Afghanistan if President-elect Obama has his way.

********


A CALL TO ALL ANTI-IMPERIALIST WORKERS/YOUTH: HAVE NO ILLUSIONS- WAR AGAINST IRAQ IS COMING!!!

THIS IS NOT OUR WAR -DEFEND IRAQ AGAINST U.S./UN AND ALLIED IMPERIALIST ATTACK!

SUPPORT EFFORTS BY IRAQI LEFTISTS, WORKERS, PEASANTS, KURDS AND OTHERS TO OVERTHROW THE HUSSEIN REGIME!

DOWN WITH THE UN STARVATION BLOCKADE!

As the United Nations Security Council vote on November 8, 2002 graphically points out the war-crazed Bush-led United States government is leading the world to war. Tens of thousands of American and British troops are getting positioned for a full-scale attack on Iraq, while other powers from Australia to Turkey elbow each other for a role in the slaughter and share of the loot. The White House has already revealed plans for a post-Saddam military occupation of Iraq. One look at the war chest of nuclear weapons that the United States has and threatens to use today and it is clear that the fate of life on this planet is threatened by the continued existence of this American led “ world disorder”. We must act.

In the coming war against Iraq working people and anti-imperialist youth in the United States and elsewhere we must stand for the military defense of Iraq without giving any political support to the Hussein regime. Hussein is a bloody oppressor of Iraqi workers, leftists, Shiite Muslims, the Kurdish people and others. As such he was in the past a close ally and client of the American government for a full two decades before he made a grab for Kuwait in 1990. Now the American government wants a more pliant regime and tighter control of the oil spigot, not the least to put economic rivals like Japan and Germany, who are more dependent on Near East oil, on rations. However, every victory for the American government and its allies in their predatory wars encourages further military adventures, every setback serves to assist the struggles of the working peoples and the oppressed of the world.

Historically, in wars between the imperialist predators and plunderers and their colonial and semicolonial victims anti-imperialists have a side. As Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 which stands as one the greatest antiwar movements ever, stressed in his 1915 pamphlet SOCIALISM AND WAR: “If tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Tsarist Russia, and so on, these would be ‘just,’ and ‘defensive’ wars irrespective of who would be the first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependent and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding and predatory ‘Great Powers.” We must continue that tradition.

The tremendous military advantages of the United States against neocolonial Iraq- a country that has already been bled white through 12 years of United Nations sanctions which have killed more than one and one half million civilians- underscores the importance of class struggle in the imperialist centers as the chief means to give content to the call to defend Iraq. Every strike, every labor mobilization against war plans, every mass protest against attacks on workers and minorities, every struggle against domestic repression and against attacks on civil liberties represents a dent in the imperialist war drive. To put an end to war once and for all, the capitalist system that breeds war must be swept away. However, our immediate task is to stop the imperialist war drive.

The American ruling class manipulated the grief and horror felt by millions at the criminal and demented attack on the World Trade Center to wage war on Afghanistan. But the patriotic consensus in the United States is wearing thin and elsewhere there is massive opposition to a war against Iraq. War demands civil peace and from Los Angeles to London the imperialist war makers are revealed as vicious union-busters and strikebreakers. Declaring that a strike could “threaten national security,” the Bush administration has brought down the force of the capitalist state to coerce the powerful American dockers union, the ILWU, to work under the dictates of the union-busting employers association. Across the seas, British firefighters are threatened with strikebreaking by the army. Plunging stock markets rob millions of workers of their pensions while public scandals expose insatiable corporate greed. Tens of thousands of working people, including the entire workforce at a number of Fiat auto plants in Italy, face a future of crisis. Civil liberties have been shredded and the capitalists have intensified their assault on social welfare and other gains wrested through decades of workers struggles.

In the United States, not even the dizzying flag-waving or the heavy fist of state repression has induced the masses to embrace war with Iraq. In Europe, hundreds of thousands of workers and anti-imperialist youth have demonstrated their opposition to this war. The problem is that the anti-war protests in Europe have generally l been channeled into a national-chauvinist direction of getting one’s “own” rulers to stand up to the Americans. In America, many antiwar liberals and leftists plead, “Money for jobs, not for war” and so fuel the notion that fundamental priorities of the capitalist rulers can be altered to serve the interests of working people. The time for such illusions ran out long ago.

The truth is that this whole capitalist system is based on the extraction of profit for the owners of the means of production through the exploitation and subjugation of the workers who produce the wealth of society. War is a concentrated expression of this, as competing capitalist ruling classes scramble to steal natural resources and to carve out new markets for export of capital and fresh sources of cheap labor. Therefore, it is necessary to draw a distinction between bourgeois pacifism, which lulls the masses into passivity and embellishes capitalist democracy, and the yearning for peace of the masses.

Over the past period there have been opportunities to organize class struggle in opposition to imperialist war and for the international workers movement to break out of narrow nationalist and economist limits. During the 1999 U.S./NATO war against Serbia, Italian COBAS unions organized a one-million-strong political general strike against that war. Fiat workers, who today battle plant closings in Italy, organized a campaign of material aid- a campaign supported by all partisans of the international working class- for the workers of the Yugoslav Zastava auto plant, which had been bombed by the imperialists. In 2001, Japanese dockworkers at Sasebo pointed the way forward by “hot-cargoing” (refusing to handle) Japanese military goods for the war in Afghanistan. These types of actions here can concretize our opposition to this war.

Moreover, U.S. military bases across Europe and Asia, as well as high-tech spy installations such as Australia’s Pine Gap, have become deserving targets of antiwar protests by leftists and trade unions. It would be a good thing if the U.S. were deprived of its international launching pads for war against Iraq. For all of German chancellor Schroder’s electioneering against war in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that he will interfere in any way with the key American air bases and military installations across Germany which house some 70, 000 American troops. What we need is not an “antiwar movement” of social-chauvinist support to one’s own ruling class but an internationalist working class opposition to U.S./NATO bases

What is essential is to draw the class line and unshackle the working people and anti-imperialist youth from capitalist politicians, their agents in the trade unions and others who channel their justified hatred of war into illusory calls for parliamentary reforms of the profit-driven system that breeds war and, in West Europe, into support for their own ruling classes against the Americans. Here, in the heart of the beast the workers and anti-imperialist youth united front can point the way forward building an internationalist perspective in the antiwar protests. Our demands should be: Struggle against the bosses and their government here at home- “the main enemy is at home”! Defend Iraq against imperialist attack! Down with the United Nations starvation blockade! All U.S./ UN and allied troops out of the Persian Gulf and Near East!

JOIN AND BUILD THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST WORKERS/ YOUTH UNITED FRONT AGAINST THE COMING UNITED STATES/ UNITED NATIONS ATTACK ON IRAQ!

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON ORGANIZING: E-MAIL afjohns@earthlink.net

THE COMMITTEE FOR AN ANTI-IMPERIALIST WORKERS/ YOUTH UNITED FRONT AGAINST UNITED STATES/ UNITED NATIONS ATTACK ON IRAQ

CHECK BOSTON. INDY MEDIA. ORG CALENDAR MA-ACT SECTION FOR ANNOUNCEMENTS OF MEETINGS AND EVENTS

Labor Donated

*The Great Divide-The Class Struggle in America, Part I- The Studs Terkel Interview Series

Click On Title To Link To Studs Terkel’s Web Page.

Book Review

The Great Divide: Second Thoughts On The American Dream, Studs Terkel, Pantheon Books, New York, 1988

As I have done on other occasions when I am reviewing more than one work by an author I am using some of the same comments, where they are pertinent, here as I did in earlier reviews. In this series the first Studs Terkel book reviewed was that of his "The Good War": an Oral History of World War II.

Strangely, as I found out about the recent death of long time pro-working class journalist and general truth-teller "Studs" Terkel I was just beginning to read his "The Good War", about the lives and experiences of, mainly, ordinary people during World War II in America and elsewhere, for review in this space. As with other authors once I get started I tend to like to review several works that are relevant to see where their work goes. In the present case the review of The Great Divide serves a dual purpose because not only is the book a rather remarkable work of oral history but also serves as political prognosis about the emergence of a trend in the American working class in the late 1980's toward downward mobility and the abandonment of the "American Dream" as a harbinger of things that have come to pass today, twenty years on. In short, with the exception of the then already decimated family farmer who is, sadly, not a factor today and the then rampant deindustrialization of Middle America that continues unabated, many of the interviews could have been done today, twenty years later.

Once again Studs Terkel is the master interviewer but I am still put off by the fact, as I was in "The Good War", of his rather bland and inadequate old New Deal political perspective, as much as a working class partisan as he might have been. Notwithstanding that shortcoming his reportage is, as usual, centered on ordinary working people, or those who came from that milieu. These are my kind of people. This is where I come from. These are people I want to know about, especially the Midwesterners and Chicagoans who dominate this book. Being from the East, although some of their life stories, to use the current favored term, "resonate" with me other values like ardent heartland-derived patriotism, admiration for the late President Ronald Reagan, strong religious values and inordinate respect for law and order do not. Terkel, to his credit, heard the particular musical cadence of their lives and wrote with some verve on the subject, especially that old Chicago melody he has embraced that I also noticed from my reading of "The Good War" (Musically, Robert Johnson's "Sweet Home, Chicago" fits the bill here, right?).

One thing that became apparent to me immediately after reading this book, and as is also true of the majority of Terkel's interview books, is that he is not the dominant presence but is a rather light, if intensely interested, interloper in these stories. For better or worse the interviewees get to tell their stories, unchained. In this age of 24/7 media coverage with every half-baked journalist or wannabe interjecting his or her personality into somebody else's story this was, and is, rather refreshing. Of course this journalistic virtue does not mean that Studs did not have control over who got to tell their stories and who didn't to fit his preoccupations and sense of order. But, so be it.

What were Stud's preoccupations in this book? He clearly wanted to contrast the old Midwestern industrial blue collar values with the then emergence Yuppie values that were eroding that old sense of neighborly social solidarity. Moreover, he wanted to contrast various approaches to, let us call it, the need for spirituality as various religious experiments started to flourish (mainly, but not exclusively, varieties of Protestant fundamentalism) from the mega-mall churches to the lonely vigils of the Central American Sanctuary movement. Terkel gives full expression to the ambiguities of the Reagan years from the lassiz faire governmental deregulation (that we are now forced to cope with) to the various foreign policy initiatives, especially in Central America and against the Soviet Union. Also full expression to the failures of the 1960's to bring about dramatic progressive social change (a problem we still have to live down) leaving many participants bewitched and bewildered.


And what stories are being told here? Well, certainly this book is filled with interviews of the lives, struggles and fate of the rank and file blue collar workers displaced by "globalization" and the deindustrialization of America. A few stories of conflict between pro-union and anti-union forces (most dramatically in a husband and wife interview where they were on opposite sides of the class line in a long labor dispute, the husband being a "scab"). Several stories concern the quest for religious fulfillment in a world that has left more than its fair share of people isolated and bewildered by the rapid advances of technology without a commensurate sense of ownership. Many stories tell of the hard, hard life of the city, especially in "the projects", black and white. A few of the same kind of problems in the countryside, especially concerning the fate of the 'hillbillies', the people that I come from (on my father's side). All in all most stories will not seem alien to those who are struggling today to make sense of a world that they, after a quick look at their assets, surely do not own. Once again kudos to Studs for hitting the mother lode. Thanks, Brother Terkel.

A Walk On The Wild Side with Nelson Algren

BOOK REVIEW

The Neon Wilderness, Nelson Algren, Seven Stories Books, 2002

Parts of this review were used in a review of Algren’s classic Man With The Golden Arm. These short stories reflect the same milieu, that hard-hearted place where the lumpen proletariat and the working poor meet, that Algren worked in that novel. Algren throughout his literary career was working that same small vein- but what a mother lode he produced.

*****

Growing up in a post World War II built housing project this reviewer knew first hand the so-called ‘romance’ of drugs, the gun and the ne’er do well hustler. And also the mechanisms one needed to develop 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. Just read “A Bottle of Milk For Mother”.

Nelson Algren has gotten, through hanging around Chicago police stations and the sheer ability to observe, that sense of foreboding, despair and of the abyss of America’s mean streets down pat in a number of works, including this collection of his better stories. Along the way we meet an array of stoolies, cranks, crackpots and nasty brutish people who are more than willing to put obstacles in the way of anyone who gets in their way. Read “A Face On The Barroom Floor”- that will put you straight. But to what end. They lose in the end, and drag others down with them.

We, of late, have become rather inured to lumpen stories either of the 'death and destruction' type or of the 'rehabilitative' kind but at the time that these stories were put together in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s this was something of an eye-opener for those who were not familiar with the seamy side of urban life. The dead end jobs, the constant run-ins with the ‘authorities’ in the person of the police, many times corrupt as well. The dread of going to work, the dread of not going to work, the fear of being victimized and the glee of victimizing. The whole jumbled mix of people with few prospects and fewer dreams.

Algren has put it down in writing for all that care to read. These are not pretty stories. And he has centered his stories on the trials and tribulations of gimps, prostitutes and other hustlers. Damn, as much as I knew about the kind of things that Algren was describing these are still gripping stories. And, if the truth were told, you know as well as I do that unfortunately these stories could still be written today. Read Algren if you want to 'walk on the wild side'.

The Eyes Of Texas Are Upon You- The Work Of Larry McMurtry

BOOK REVIEWS

As mentioned previously I have developed a strong interest in the literary works of Larry McMurtry the Texas bibliophile, Western aficionado and pack rat. At the time I had only read The Last Picture Show part of his trilogy on small town oil boom (or bust)Texas. In the interest of completeness I have in included that first review along with the two other volumes that make up this work.

DVD/BOOK Review

The Last Picture Show, Larry McMurtry, Orion Mass Market Publications, 2000

There has been no shortage of coming of age stories in modern American literature. J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye is merely the most famous and probably widely known of the genre. Here Larry McMurtry, the Texas bibliophile, Old West aficionado and pack rat gives us his take on growing up absurd in a faded semi- boom town Texas during the Korean War era of the early 1950's.

Although the locale is different from Catcher in the Rye the issues raised by the teenagers who drive the story and those of their perplexed and clueless parents are the same. And what do those issues entail? Sex, the meaning of existence, sex, what to do on Friday night, sex, what to do on Saturday night, sex- well you get the drift. And those dilemmas of youth and its fight for recognition as presented through the main characters Sonny and Duane are in McMurtry's hands well thought out and, at times, poignant. The attention to detail that McMurtry is noted for is on full display in the interplay between the 'jock' students, the nerds and the 'in' crowd. High school football, the whys and wherefores of the high school classroom and the shear fight to find one's own identity in this mix all contribute to a very strong trip down memory lane for this reader.

From my own personal experience I know how tough it was to grow up in the 1950's and it is good to see that there are indeed some universal ailments that are common to the 'tribal community' called youth in America. Moreover, read this book because it also has a few things to say about the adults, especially Sonny's lover the older woman and the football coach's wife Ruth, and their dilemmas as well. Damn, McMurtry is singing my song.

The film version of this book strongly evokes visually the points that McMurtry tries to make in the book. It helps that he was the screenwriter in this effort. Fine performances were turned in by the young Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges and Cybil Sheppard as the object of Sonny and Duane's attentions . Also by Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman, as Sonny's older woman lover.

Boom or Bust?

Texasville, Larry McMurtry, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1987

In the blink of an eye it seems we can go from a coming of age story to a mid-life crisis story. Or maybe it is just changing from one book to another. Ya, right? There may be a space of thirty years between the action in The Last Picture Show and Texasville but it hardly a blink of the eye. It takes effort to build up to the mid-life crisis (or better crises) that form the central idea of this novel as those of the generation of '68 and older are painfully aware. But so be it.

The last time we saw the characters who people these novels was Duane getting on the bus in Thalia to go off to basic training in 1954 and ultimately, he thinks, to Korea after a fight with his best friend Sonny over, who else, the flirty local femme fatale Jacy. They are both bewitched by her. The result of that fight was that Sonny lost the sight in one eye. That, however, after a thirty year interval was not the worst of it as a read of this book will confirm. Here, in any case, we have the old gang Duane, Sonny, the sultry Jacy and some new arrivals- Karla, Duane's wife, a slew of kids, a beloved dog Shorty and a cast of a score of locals some who have been resurrected from The Last Picture Show, others who have drifted in with the oil boom that is ready to bust in the 1980's. In any case, for those who are interested, if you read the whole book, you will find out what happened to every character from the Last Picture Show. That is the good part.

The bad part is that this thing is just too long. Duane's, Karla's, Jacy's, and the whole host of 40-somethings who are going through the storms of mid-life crisis stories are not enough to warrant a five hundred plus page book. Hell, this book took longer to read that some mid-life crises, especially Duane's. Even if you add in celebration of a town centennial to `liven' things up the thread is not there. The marital problems and infidelities of small town Texas, the bust up of a man's life work due to the international oil glut and assorted other problems from the 1980's when oil was only about fifteen dollars a barrel pale in comparison with $100 a barrel oil now. Those are `real' problems. That little difficulty of length aside, which keeps this from being a five-star review, McMurtry cannot write a bad novel, at least to these eyes thus far. Larry, just make this kind of story 400 pages or so, you know as long as it would take to tell of your own mid-life crisis. Okay?

In Search Of Lost Time

Duane’s Depressed, Larry McMurtry, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1999

In the blink of an eye it seems we can go in this The Last Picture Show trilogy from a coming of age story in the Last Picture Show to a mid-life crisis story in Texasville to the struggle against mortality during old age story here. Or maybe it is just changing from one book to another. Ya, right? There may be a space of thirty years between the action in The Last Picture Show and Texasville and another fourteen between Texasville and Duane's Depressed but it hardly a blink of the eye. It takes effort to build up to the mid-life crisis (or better crises) and then apply those lessons to the struggle against mortality that form the central idea of this novel as those of the generation of '68 and older are painfully aware. But so be it.

By one of life's little quirks this reviewer is the same age as Duane in this phase of his life's story, 62. Therefore the reviewer can sympathize, understand and relate to the struggle against the vicissitudes of mortality that, in the final analysis, Duane is struggling against. Duane's whole life has been consumed by the notion of duty, doing the right thing and keeping his own counsel to the exclusion of having any close personal relationships, including with his wife Karla. One day he decides, rightly by this reviewer's lights, to chuck his old life, at least the symbols of it. The tale told here revolves around that break out, the effect on his marriage and the subsequent lost of his dear wife Karla in a fatal automobile accident and his struggle to find a new place in his world without her. Along the way Jacy and Sonny, the companions of his youth in what seems like an eternity ago in the Last Picture Show also pass from the scene. In an odd sense Duane is the last one standing.

Needless to say all of this introspection is going to take a lot out of a very stoic man like Duane. Moreover, a review of his whole life means a look at lots of things that are not obvious. Probably the best little literary trick that McMurtry uses here is to link Duane up with a sexually unattainable woman psychiatrist who recommends reading Marcel Proust's Remembrances of Things Past as a form of discovery. This, as some readers may know, is a monumental work that has baffled more than one intellectual as to its meaning. Hell, on reflection, it probably baffled Proust. The trick is that uneducated but intrepid Duane actually struggled to read it over the course of a year. I suggest that the alternate translation of Proust's book is more appropriate to what Duane was looking for in this novel-In Search Of Lost Time. That, my friends, is what we all face as we face mortality. If you are going to read anything by Larry McMurtry read this trilogy. That's the ticket.


Duane’s World, Part IV

When The Lights Go Out: A Novel, Larry McMurtry, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2007

I have recently fulsomely praised Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show trilogy (The Last Picture Show; Texasville: Duane’s Depressed) a saga centered on the coming of age, mid-life crisis and struggle with mortality of one small town Texas oilman and good old boy Duane Moore. Frankly, I thought with the review of Duane’s Depressed concerning Duane’s struggle to find relevance in his life as he hovers around old age and faces the grim reaper that I was done with this series. Needless to say that was not the case. Although I wish it were so.

I mentioned in my review of The Last Picture Show that the coming of age story described there boiled down to what to do on high school Friday night-the search for sexual companionship. What to do on high school Saturday night-the search for sex- you get the drift. Apparently in his dotage Duane is hung up on that same aspect of the tragedy behind that human drive except he has included weekdays. That, however, is not enough to sustain this slim novel. Moreover, I believe that Mr. McMurtry knows that as he has tried to spruce up his plot and characters with every current sociological trend known to the American scene- the search for a trophy wife, daughter Nellie’s gayness, daughter Julie’s nunnery prospects, his lesbian psychiatrist’s off-hand desire to throw away all her profession ethics for a chance to go to bed with Duane and the South Asian invasion of the mom and pop business marketplace, reliance on sexual aids, etc. Come on now, Larry this is not even Austin.

I once commented in a review of Howard Fast’s Immigrant series set in California over a couple of generations that during the course of the work his characters intersected every possible leftist political impulse in pursue of filling out the story line. I mentioned, at some point well before the last book, that the series had run out of steam. That, sad to say, has happened to Mr. McMurtry here. His story has run out of steam. What is left? Duane as the “stud” at his Thalia (or Wichita Falls) assisted living facility. He deserves better. Larry, put out the light. Please.

An Anti-War Slogan Preview For January 20, 2009- U.S Hands Off The World!

Commentary

This is one of those short and sweet commentaries because frankly it has all been said before and merely bears repeating here:

Okay, now the “anti-war” Democratic presidential candidate has won and on January 20, 2009 will succeed to the office of American imperialist president-in-chief. That means, well-intentioned or not, Senator Barack Obama will be the new sheriff in town, and will act accordingly. So, I frankly want to steal a little of the Senator’s thunder, for surely the election of a black person to the highest office in historically racially tense America is significant, if for no other reason that to not forget what this struggle is all about. First and foremost- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal From Iraq and Afghanistan. Hands Off Iran. Hands Off Pakistan, and just to be on the safe side- U.S. Hands Off The World! Sorry, Senator but there are no “100 day” honeymoons on this front. More importantly, anti-warriors are you listening? And are you ready to fight Obama under those slogans when he comes up short?

The Birth Of Rock 'n' Roll

One For The Money: The History Of Rock And Roll, Bill Haley and various artists, Intrepid, 2005

Over the past several months I have spend some time reviewing recording artist from my youth, the 1950’s, the youth of the Generation of ’68 that is now taking a certain political beating once again from those who cringe at the notion that we could have fundamentally changed the way we do the collective business of running this society. But that is a story for another day. What I want to do here is recommend this very nice DVD that in capsule form addresses all the issues, or at least all that I think are important, about the genesis of rock 'n' roll, its meaning for my post-World War II generation growing up in the 1950’s and how the forces of social reaction put, or tried to put, a cap on the natural rebelliousness of the original rock 'n' roll sound.

This documentary addresses affirmatively the issue of the roots of rock and roll as deriving from the blues and later in the early 1950’s rhythm and blues from the likes of Louis Jourdan and Big Joe Turner. It further pays, as it must, tribute to the early efforts of the likes of Sam Phillips and his Sun Record operation in Memphis and that of the Press Brothers Chess Records in Chicago to create breakout music with a distinctive sound that was not Frank Sinatra or Doris Day, the music of our parents’ generation. It also pays tribute to the promoters of rock like Alan Freedman who was a key in popularizing rock for the wider white audience that was necessary to make it a national and international phenomenon. Most importantly, this film documents the very conscious attempt by parents, religious and governmental figures abetted by the record industry to bring rock under control with the creation of the “teen idols” like Ricky Nelson Fabian, Bobby Vee, etc. at the end of the 1950’s. As I have pointed out elsewhere we had to go through that experience to really appreciate the difference when groups like The Rolling Stones hit the scene in the 1960’s. We were waiting to exhale, and none too soon.

Probably the most important reason to view this DVD though is to get, under one roof, a look at all the various performers who made up the original rock ensemble. Big Joe, Bill Haley, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Buddy, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and on and on. Like I say if you want a quick one hour overview of an important cultural phenomenon of our collective history this is the one for you. Then branch out to review the individual performers. Fifty years later a lot of this stuff still sounds good. And that is not just me saying that but young kids, desperate for a sound that jumps at them, that I have run into lately as well. Kudos.

California Dreamin'- Berkeley In The 1960's

DVD REVIEW

Berkeley in the Sixties, various interviewees, performers, etc., 1990

For those us of the Generation of '68 the political actions of the 1960's were essentially a youth-led effort. To the extent that anyone though about the situation as a separate political matter young students, mainly from the traditionally elite campuses, were the vanguard of those youth. And the vanguard of the vanguard? At least until 1969 a very strong case could be made, and is made in this documentary under review, that the University of California at Berkeley held that role. The whys and wherefores of that role are what makes this above-average documentary, complete with the inevitable `talking heads' that populate this kind of film, a very good source for what actually happened in the 1960's there for those who were around at the time and a primer on radical politics at the base of society for those who were not.

The disruption of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) meetings in San Francisco in 1960, various anti-racial discrimination actions in support of the growing national civil right movement in the early 1960's, the historic and well-known Mario Salvo-led Free Speech Movement of 1964 along with its trials an tribulations, the early anti-Vietnam War and anti-draft actions of 1965 and 1966, the drift toward an apolitical counter-cultural experience in 1967, the romance with the next door neighbor Black Panthers and the Free Huey Movement in Oakland and ending with the militarily defeated People's Park efforts in 1969. They are all resurrected here. All these events are, moreover, discussed from various later viewpoints by participants, adversaries and flat out ill-wishers. If you want a two hour capsule commentary of the highs and lows of the political and counter-cultural struggles as they occurred at Berkeley and spread to the East this is a very good documentary to bring you up to speed.

Some of the rhetoric may seem odd to today's cyberspace-driven youth. Some of the costumes, especially during the height of the Haight -Ashbury era and the Summer of Love in 1967, may be perplexing to today's fashion-conscious youth. Most of the politics may seem obscure. But know this- it may have not lasted long, we may have made every mistake in the political book, we certainly went off on more tangents that one could shake stick at but there was a fight going on then to change the nature of the way we do business in this society. Call us utopian, if you will, but we fought. A little of that spirit would come in very handy right about now. Many of the lessons of that time may be lost now. However, I sense a little of that same 1960's breeze starting to blow again in 2008 so look here for a guidepost.

I would not be a proper leftist politico if I did not mention that of all the scenes presented, all the discussions taped, all the `talking heads' giving their, seemingly sincere, takes on meaning of those times there was virtually no commentary on one very fundamental problem. Students, from elite universities or otherwise, cannot independently without joining up with some other social agency create the kind of just society that students were fighting for then. In no instant that I can recall during the course of this documentary did anyone attempt to draw the lesson that the working class, whatever its then current organization (or more correctly lack of it) and political consciousness came into play as a factor in history.

The closest anything came to understanding the need for an additional agency was the unequal, uncritical `alliance' with the Black Panthers. That is why, in the end, after the military defeat of the People's Park experiment Berkeley fell off the political map. But, my friends, the story did not end there for the 1960's. Some youth, although not nearly enough, drew that lesson about the lack of political power of students if left to their own devises and got serious about political theory and the working class. Some of us are still at that fight. From the later careers of the Berkeley interviewees credited at the end of this film that did not include most of them. They mainly people the "politically correct" professorariat of our university system. That tells the tale.

*Down With The California Same-Sex Marriage Ban ( Proposition 8)!

Click On Title To Link To July 2, 2009 "New York Review Of Books" Article Entitled "The Same-Sex Future" By David Cole That Gives An Update On This Struggle And A Capsule Of The Various Positions On The Issue.

Commentary

Sometimes the fight for a simple democratic right is not so simple. Moreover, sometimes it’s kind of messy when the issues get drawn up to the razor’s edge like the hot-button question of same-sex marriage. That is clearly the case with the recent electoral victory of Proposition 8 by a slim majority in California. That proposition, placed on the ballot after the California Supreme Court earlier this year correctly held that the ban against legalization of same-sex marriages was a denial of equal protection under the state constitution, has now embedded inequality into that constitution. Fortunately, there has been push-back on the part of pro-gay rights forces, both on the streets and in the courts.

Here is the part where it gets messy. In the normal course of events militants, as part of their fervent defense of democratic rights, are very much in favor of using initiative and referendum processes in order to get a hearing on particular issues. And, as a general premise, we still are in California and the other places where such procedures are in place. On this issue, however, we have a conflict. A basic substantial right-simply to get married- if the parties so desire. Against that, we have an inflamed, although possibility shifting majority, that wants to deny this right. The simple right trumps that inflamed desire to deny the right. Case closed. Now that may not accord with the beauties of democratic theory, such as it is, but there you have it. In a class-bound society, driven many times by irrational or thoughtless politics, we do not always get to choose our issues or have them presented by others in a manner that we can uphold. This should be one of my classic “no-brainer” issues. Oh well, our day will come.

In these quarters it is not clear whether the California Supreme Court will uphold its own correct initial impulses and strike down the amendment. (There is a legal question on the procedure followed by the Proposition 8 initiators about whether the matter should have been brought before the legislature first and then placed on the ballot or whether it could be placed directly on the ballot- the ‘amendment vs. revision’ argument). That is nether here nor then for our purposes. We, as always, will use the courts as best we can without having any illusions that justice will out. What is more important is to continue that pressure in the streets to keep the issue public.

On that question it is noteworthy that one of the central targets of the California demonstrators has been the Mormon Church, a key backer of the proposition (the other being the Roman Catholic Church). I am always reminded of a poster at a pro-gay marriage demonstration here in Boston when the reactionary forces here tried to overturn the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s gay marriage decision- Mitt (Romney, then governor of Massachusetts and subsequently a 2008 Republican presidential contender) Your Great-Grandfather Had Five Wives- I Only Want One! (The main Mormon Church group permitted polygamy until 1890.) That, my friends, says it in a nutshell. We defend either social arrangement and deny the state the right to interfere with those preferences. Down With California's Proposition 8 Ban! Defend The Right To Same-Sex Marriage!