This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Saturday, April 18, 2015
As The 100th
Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars)
Continues ... Some Remembrances-Artists’ Corner-Gustav Klimt
In say 1912, 1913,
hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war
clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed
their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing
business in the world. Yes the artists of every school the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists/Constructivists,
Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements (hell even the
Academy spoke the pious words when there was sunny weather), those who saw the
disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint,
sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that
building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems;
writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish
theory of progress,humankind had moved
beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty
would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling
cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes
and hidden gazebo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing
words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to
denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin,
neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose
muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress
and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets,
ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing
on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before
touching the hair of another man, putting another man to ground or lying their
own heads down for some imperial mission. They all professed loudly (and those
few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting
their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war
drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish,
Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in
quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the
course.
And then the war
drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out
their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets,
beautiful poets like Wilfred Owens who would sicken of war before he passed
leaving a beautiful damnation on war, its psychoses, and broken bones and
dreams, and the idiots who brought humankind to such a fate, like e. e.
cummings who drove through sheer hell in those rickety ambulances floors
sprayed with blood, man blood, angers, anguishes and more sets of broken bones,
and broken dreams, like Rupert Brooke all manly and old school give and go, as
they marched in formation leaving the ports and then mowed down like freshly
mown grass in their thousands as the charge call came and they rested, a lot of
them, in those freshly mown grasses, like Robert Graves all grave all
sputtering in his words confused about what had happened, suppressing, always
suppressing that instinct to cry out against the hatred night, like old school,
old Thomas Hardy writing beautiful old English pastoral sentiments before the
war and then full-blown into imperium’s service, no questions asked old England
right or wrong, like old stuffed shirt himself T.S. Eliot speaking of hollow
loves, hollow men, wastelands, and such in the high club rooms on the home
front, and like old brother Yeats speaking of terrible beauties born in the
colonies and maybe at the home front too as long as Eliot does not miss his high
tea. Jesus what a blasted night that Great War time was.
And do not forget
when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and
buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of
ordinary human clay as it turned out
And then the war
drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out
their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out,
artists, beautiful artists like Fernand Leger who could no longer push the
envelope of representative art because it had been twisted by the rubble of
war, by the crashing big guns, by the hubris of commanders and commanded and he
turned to new form, tubes, cubes, prisms, anything but battered humankind in
its every rusts and lusts, all bright and intersecting once he got the mustard
gas out of his system, once he had done his patria duty, like speaking of
mustard gas old worn out John Singer Sargent of the three name WASPs forgetting
Boston Brahmin society ladies in decollage, forgetting ancient world religious
murals hanging atop Boston museum and spewing trench warfare and the blind
leading the blind out of no man’s land, out of the devil’s claws, like Umberto
Boccioni, all swirls, curves, dashes, and dangling guns as the endless charges
endlessly charge, like Gustav Klimt and his endlessly detailed gold dust
opulent Asiatic dreams filled with lovely matrons and high symbolism and
blessed Eve women to fill the night, Adam’s night after they fled the garden,
like Joan Miro and his infernal boxes, circles, spats, eyes, dibs, dabs,
vaginas, and blots forever suspended in deep space for a candid world to fret
through, fret through a long career, and like poor maddened rising like a
phoenix in the Spartacist uprising George Grosz puncturing the nasty
bourgeoisie, the big bourgeoisie the ones with the real dough and their overfed
dreams stuffed with sausage, and from the bloated military and their fat-assed
generals stuff with howitzers and rocket shells, like Picasso, yeah, Picasso
taking the shape out of recognized human existence and reconfiguring the forms,
the mesh of form to fit the new hard order, like, Braque, if only because if
you put the yolk on Picasso you have to tie him to the tether too.
And do not forget
when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and
buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of
ordinary human clay as it turned out sculptors, writers, serious and not,
musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for,
well, for humankind, of course, their always fate ….
In
Honor Of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (April 1870-Janaury 1924)-The
Struggle Continues-Ivan Smilga’s Political Journey-Take Three
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman For a number of years I have been
honoring various revolutionary forbears, including the subject of this birthday
tribute, the Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin architect (along with
fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky) of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917
in each January under the headline-Honor
The Three L’s –Lenin, Luxemburg , Liebknecht. My purpose then was (and
still is) to continue the traditions established by the Communist International
in the early post-World War I period in honoring revolutionary forbears. That
month has special significance since every January Leftists
honor those three leading revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of
Russia in his sleep after a long illness in 1924, and Karl Liebknecht of
Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered in separate incidents after
leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin. I have
made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary
fight against the German war budget in World War I in which he eventually wound
up in prison only to be released when the Kaiser abdicated (correctly went to
jail when it came down to it once the government pulled the hammer down on his
opposition), on some previous occasions. The key point to be taken away today,
still applicable today as in America we are in the age of endless war, endless
war appropriations and seemingly endless desires to racket up another war out
of whole cloth every change some ill-begotten administration decides it needs
to “show the colors”, one hundred years later in that still lonely and
frustrating struggle to get politicians to oppose war budgets, to risk prison
to choke off the flow of war materials. I have
also made some special point in previous years about the life of Rosa
Luxemburg, the “rose of the revolution.” About her always opposing the
tendencies in her adopted party, the German Social-Democracy, toward reform and
accommodation, her struggle to make her Polish party ready for revolutionary
opportunities, her important contributions to Marxist theory and her willing to
face and go to jail when she opposed the first World War. This
month, the month of his birth, it is appropriate, at a time when the young
needs to find, and are in desperate need of a few good heroes, a few
revolutionaries who contributed to both our theoretical understandings about
the tasks of the international working class in the age of imperialism (the
age, unfortunately, that we are still mired in) and to the importance of the
organization question in the struggle for revolutionary power, to highlight
thestruggles of Vladimir Lenin, the
third L, in order to define himself politically.
Below
is a third sketch written as part of a series posted over several days before
Lenin’s birthday on the American Left
History blog starting on April 16th of a young fictional labor
militant, although not so fictional in the scheme of the revolutionary
developments in the Russia of the Tsar toward the end of the 19th
century and early 20th century which will help define the problems
facing the working-class there then, and the ones that Lenin had to get a
handle on.
*************
Ivan
Smilga was persona non grata in
Moscow after his sojourn to bloody Siberia and that was the one and only reason
he had crossed the country to Saint Petersburg. That and the feeling that he
needed a new start, a fresh start. That bloody Siberia sojourn was the result
of an unwise decision to right the wrongs of this world, or at least of his
world, by conspiring with known radical students and worker militants in Moscow
to kidnap various high officials for ransom in order to gain some small rights
in return. The whole thing exploded in his face (in their faces) when one of
the workmen “snitched” to save his own neck and Ivan got a two year sentence
for his mistake (since he was late in on the conspiracy and the idea had come
from that workman snitch he was given a lenient sentence. They others received
ten to twenty years at hard labor, including ten to Suslov who had expected
only two like Ivan. Perfidious Okhrana). After that Ivan swore, swore off of
politics as a way to change the world, to change his world. Now that he had
applied for and had been taken on as a blacksmith apprentice in the Putilov
Ironworks he vowed to keep his hands busy and his head away from the world’s
woes. Again Ivan got the job due to his size and strength which the head
blacksmith noticed right away when he saw in him in the superintendent’s office
and told the metal work foreman to grab him with both hands. Fortunately,
fortunately for Ivan (and the revolution) he was able to cover up his two years
in Siberia by saying he had gone back to the farm after being dismissed by
Smythe and Son and unlike later under Stalin the legal “paper trail” behind him
never caught up in sprawling Saint Petersburg where the foreign concessions
were not as concerns about paperwork as by ability to adjust to the factory
system.
Then
Elena Kassova entered, or rather re-entered, his life. He had known her as a
fellow-worker, a machine-tender, in the John Smythe and Son textile factory in
Moscow where he worked taking the rolls of fabric off the machines, her machine,
before he became a gang boss. Since in those days before he was finally laid
off as “redundant” by the company he was well respected as a worker and had not
taken to drink he was eyed by many young women as a possible “catch.” He had
caught Elena’s eye as well although as a pious country girl she had refrained
from flirting with Ivan like some of the other girl machine-tenders who
practically threw themselves at the giant of a man. Through the vagaries of
commerce Smythe and Son had closed their Moscow plant and relocated to Saint
Petersburg. Elena had followed having no other recourse or resources in Moscow.
While in Saint Petersburg she had applied to the Putilov works in order to
better herself. After some time she was employed in the foundry doing small
piecework. Ivan and Elena met one evening coming out of the plant, had greeted
each other, and Ivan had walked her home.
That
story about Elena moving on to the Putilov Works to better herself was just
that though, a story. While in Moscow, Elena had joined a readers’ circle not
just any readers’ circle, but a Workers Benefit Circle. These circles met
ostensibly to read, but were actually organizing committees for establishing Tsarist-banned
trade unions. Some had imbibed the new socialist ideas coming from Europe,
especially Germany and especially the Marxist wing of that movement. (Other
trends the Bakunin and Kropotkin tendencies in anarchism, workers
co-operatives, social reformism, Christian socialism translated through the
Orthodox religion held by most Russians got some play as well.) Elena had been
drawn into the work by some students at Moscow University and had shown so much
promise that she was “ordered” to go to Saint Petersburg in order to establish
circles in that metropolis where there were many plants, including the
expanding Putilov, that needed to be organized.Her task at the time that she met Ivan was thus to help organize a
strike at the Works for higher pay and only half a day’s work on Saturday.
After several weeks she tried to recruit Ivan to the work knowing that he was
well respected among the apprentice blacksmiths, knowing that he had been the
organizer of the “Luddite” operation one Saturday night which wreaked hauling
machinery at the Smythe factory in Moscow (it had become common knowledge among
the tight-knit working class neighborhoods), and knew he had served “time”
(that knowledge coming one night after Ivan had had too much vodka and was
trying to impress Elena with his manly prowess).
Ivan
turned Elena down cold, told her whatever she thought, that he had learned the
error of his youthful ways and was looking to make no waves so that he could
concentrate his energies on his dream of becoming a master blacksmith and
eventually opening his own shop. Elena, wise to the ways of the world and
trained to keep her full motives in check, continued to work on Ivan. Of course
unknown to Ivan who thought it was just a matter of gaining higher wages and
more time off that drove Elena was the hard fact that she had become a
revolutionary, had come to see the trade union struggle as just an organizing
tool to a grander scheme.
Then
one day the workers on the night shift at the Putilov factory called a strike
over the firing of several workers, including a couple of apprentice
blacksmiths. The next morning Elena called out the workers in her section on
the day shift, mainly women. She then cornered Ivan as he was about to walk
into his work shed and told him to join the strike. She said it in such a way
that Ivan knew that if he crossed the line that would be the last that he saw
of Elena. And he was not finished with Elena, not by a long shot. And so he
said this to her, “I will fight to get more money, I will fight for a shorter
day and I will fight to get my brothers rehired but that is it. No more
politics for me, no more.” Now due to some weaknesses of organization, and some
crossing of the lines and increasing police menacing they did not get any more
money or less time after that strike but after three days they were able to get
those fired brothers back. And Ivan had thought they had done a fine thing.
Elena had just scowled.
Please, Please, Please Mister
Brown-The James Brown Story- Get On Up
DVD Review
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Get On Up, starring Chadwick Boseman,
a Jagger Production, yeah Mick Jagger the guy with the James Brown moves on the
concert stage so you know the James Brown we are talking about, 2014
Hear Me Out. In the beginning was the
word. Hear me out. Yeah, probably it was the gospel word, but in certain
quarters, in certain off-beat corners that word needed fortification, needed
something (besides Eddy’s home-made liquor come Saturday night, that would come
later) to sanctify it up good and so some very high heaven gospel songs
praising high holy Jehovah and begging him (assuming it was/is a him) to come
and free his benighted people. Good old gospel singing getting through the
rough spots of slavery and then Mister James Crow’s go heres and go theres. And
from the gospel out in the country, out in the Delta (and not only the Delta
but let’s use that example here), came the first inkling of the blues, the
blues to put a man-make name to the miseries, Mister’s plantation miseries (or
really his Captain’s, the overseer), that James Crow thing, a good woman on a
man’s mind, or a bad man or woman who done somebody wrong. Then the blues got
dragged to the cities in the great migration, got some electricity to reflect
the faster pace and from there it was only a short haul to rhythm and blues and
its off-shoot, now called the classic age of rock and roll. All of this to
introduce the subject of this biopic, Mister James Brown, in the Mick Jagger
production of Get On Up.
See I needed to trace the roots, the
roots of what James Brown was all about, all about what for lack of better name
became the genre of soul music. No just because he was the “godfather” of that
type of music but because when he came on the scene in the 1950s with Please, Please, Please he brought
something new to the American songbook. Not classic rock and roll, no way it
was a different beat that we grabbed onto, surely not folk, not be-bop jazz then
in its heyday, none of those things but something more primitive, good roots primitive,
going back to some mist of time Mother Africa beat that got passed on through the
generations to Mister James Brown. So that was how rooted he was, that roots
stuff was the stuff that was running through his brain as he tried to take that
beat in his head and make people jump, to celebrate, at first mainly blacks
down South and then once white kids got hip to his sound the whole freaking
world, the world that counted anyway.
From the biographical flash-back scenes
interspersed with the music presented in the film it was a very close question
about whether an uneducated (formally anyway) black kid growing up in the post-
World I South, out in the country, in the countryside outside of Augusta, Ga,
an Army town (oh yeah, and the town where the then very white Masters Golf
Tournament only is held), to a derelict wife and child beating father and a
ill-fit mother would make it to twenty-one never mind becoming a world famous
celebrity. But see Mister Brown carried that beat in his head, carried it right
to the end and he never let go of that notion. Of course there are many stories
about musical performers who almost had it but for some ill-omened reason fell
short so some luck was involved. Finding a big time friend, Bobby Byrd, who got
him out of jail and a guy who knew enough to latch onto James’ wagon and go as
far as he could with him despite his own considerable lead singer dreams. Being
at the right place at the right time when the first record producer insisted to
his bewildered boss that he knew what he was doing by letting James let it rip
his own way on Please, Please, Please
and the rest is history.Although not
without the problems of keeping high-strung musicians satisfied, drugs, financial
difficulties, martial problems, and loss of friends and fellow performers for
lots of reasons, mainly because he was number one and there was no number two
really in his company. No question Mister James Brown had a very clear
perception of who he was, how he wanted to handle everything from finances to
his image and stage presence that came through in Chadwick Boseman’s
performance.
A couple of personal points not
directly connected to the film but since James Brown is part of the scenery of
the life of my 1960s generation they can be tacked on here. First a few years
after James Brown released his Please, Please,
Please in the 1950s I was at a high school dance where the DJ played that
song and I, spying a girl I had been eyeing all night until my eyeballs were sore,
when over to her and lip-synched James’
song and it worked. Second, after Eddie Murphy had started his “Free James”
campaign when Brown was in jail I was working with a group of young college
students who I had assumed would not necessarily know who he was when I shouted
out “Free James” to see if I would get any reaction. Jesus, all of a sudden
there was a hall full of kids shouting back “Free James.” Yeah, get on up.
I Did It My Way-With Bob Dylan’s Shadows In The Night In Mind
Recently I did a review of Bob Dylan’s latest CD brought out in 2014, Shadows In The Night, a tribute to the king of Tin Pan Alley songwriter fest Frank Sinatra. In that review I noted that such an effort was bound to happen if Dylan lived long enough. Going back to the Great Depression/World War II period that our parents, we the baby-boomers parents slogged through for musical inspiration. Going back to something, some place that when were young and immortal, young and thinking that what we had created would last forever we would have, rightly, dismissed out of hand. And since Dylan has lived long enough, long enough to go back to some bygones rootshere we are talking about something that let us say in 1970 I would have dismissed as impossible, dismissed as the delusional ravings of somebody like my brother who hated almost everything about the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s, had been ready to spill blood it seemed to cut off the heads of anybody who wanted to breathe a new fresh breath not tinged with our parents’ worn out ways of doing business in civil society.
Strange as it may seem to a generation, the generation of ’68, today’s AARP generation, okay, baby-boomers who came of age with the clarion call put forth musically by Bob Dylan and others to dramatically break with the music of our parents’ pasts, the music that got them through the Great Depression and slogging through World War II, he has put out an album featuring the work of Mr. Frank Sinatra the king of that era in many our parents’ households. The music of the Broadway shows, Tin Pan Alley, Cole Porter/Irving Berlin/ the Gershwins/Jerome Kern, have I mssed anybody of important, probably, probably missed some of those Rogers and Hart Broadway show tunes teams, and so on. That proposition though, at least as it pertains to Bob Dylan as an individual, seems less strange if you are not totally mired in the Bob Dylan protest minute of the early 1960s when he, whether he wanted that designation or not, was the “voice of a generation,” catching the new breeze a lot of us felt coming through the land. (In the end he did not want it, did not want to be the voice of a generation, although he liked and wanted to be king of the hill in the music department of that generation, no question. Wanted too to be the king hell troubadour entertaining the world for as long as he drew breathe and he has accomplished that.)
What Dylan has been about for the greater part of his career has been as an entertainer, a guy who sings his songs to the crowd and hopes they share his feelings for his songs. As he is quoted as saying in a recent AARP magazine article connected with the release of his Frank Sinatra tribute what he hoped was that like Frank he sang to, not at, his audience. Just like Frank did when he was in high tide around the 1940s and 1950s. That sensibility is emphatically not what the folk protest music ethos was about but rather about stirring up the troops, stirring up the latter day Gideon’s army to go smite the dragon. Dylan early on came close, then drew back, and it is hard to think of anybody from our generation except maybe Joan Baez and Phil Ochs who wrote and sang to move people from point A to point B in the social struggles of the times.
What Dylan has also been about through it all has been a deep and abiding respect for the American songbook that he began to gather in his mind early on (look on YouTube to a clip from Don’t Look Back where he is up in some European hotel room with Joan Baez and Bob Neuwirth singing Hank Williams ballads or stuff from the Basement tapes where he runs the table on a few earlier genres). In the old days that was looking for roots, roots music from the mountains, the desolate oceans, the slave quarters, along the rivers and Dylan’s hero then was Woody Guthrie. But the American songbook is a “big tent” operation and the Tin Pan Alley that he broke from when he became his own songwriter is an important part of the overall tradition and now he has added his hero Frank Sinatra to his version of the songbook.
I may long for the old protest songs, the songs that stirred my blood to push on with the political struggles of the time like With God On Our Side which pushed me into the ranks of the Quakers, shakers, and little old ladies and men in tennis sneakers in the fight for nuclear disarmament, songs from the album pictured above, you know Blowin’ In The Wind which fit perfectly with the sense that something, something undefinable, something new as in the air in the early 1960s and The Times Are A Changin’ stuff like that, the roots music and not just Woody but Hank (including an incredible version of You Win Again, Tex-Mex (working later with George Sahms of the Sir George Quintet, the Carters, the odd and unusual like the magic lyric play in Desolation Row, his cover of Charley Patton’s Highwater Risingor his cover of a song Lonnie Johnson made famous, Tomorrow Night, but Dylan has sought to entertain and there is room in his tent for the king of Tin Pan Alley (as Billie Holiday was the queen). Having heard Dylan live and in concert over the past several years with his grating lost voice (for me it was always about the lyrics not the voice although in looking at old tapes from the Newport Folk Festival on YouTube his voice was actually far better then than I would have given him credit for) I do wonder though how much production was needed to get the wrinkles out of that voice to sing as smoothly as the “Chairman of the boards,” to run the pauses and the hushed tones Frank knew how to do to keep his audience in his clutches. What goes around comes around.
The Latest From The United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Website- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc. From Afghanistan! -Hands Off Syria! No New War In Iraq- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Arms Shipments To The Kurds And Shia-Stay Out Of The Civil War! No Intervention In Ukraine! Defend The Palestinians! No U.S. Aid To Israel! No One Penny, Not One Person For Obama’s War Machine!
Click below for link to the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) website for more information about various anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist actions around the country.
Markin comment: A while back, maybe last year as things seemed to be winding down in the Middle East, or at least the American presence was scheduled to decrease in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and before Ukraine, Syria, Gaza and a number of other flash points erupted I mentioned that every once in a while it is necessary, if for no other reason than to proclaim from the public square that we are alive, and fighting, to show “the colors,” our anti-war colors. I also mentioned at the time that while endless marches are not going to end any war the imperialists decide to provoke the street opposition to the war in what appeared then to be the fading American presence in Afghanistan or whatever else the Obama/Kerry cabal has lined up for the military to do in the Middle East, Ukraine or the China seas as well as protests against other imperialist adventures had been under the radar of late.
Over the summer there had been a small uptick in street protest over the Zionist massacre in Gaza (a situation now in “cease-fire” mode but who knows how long that will last) and the threat of yet a third American war in Iraq with the increasing bombing campaign and escalating troop levels now expanded to Syria. Although not nearly enough. As I mentioned at that earlier time it is time, way beyond time, for anti-warriors, even his liberal backers, to get back where we belong on the streets in the struggle against Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama’s seemingly endless wars. And his surreptitious “drone strategy” to "sanitize" war when he is not very publicly busy revving up the bombers and fighter jets in Iraq, Syria and wherever else he feels needs the soft touch of American “shock and awe, part two.”
The UNAC for a while now, particularly since the collapse of the mass peace movement that hit the streets for a few minutes before the second Iraq war in 2003, appears to be the umbrella clearing house these days for many anti-war, anti-drone, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist actions. Not all the demands of this coalition are ones that I would raise, or support but the key ones of late are enough to take to the streets. More than enough to whet the appetite of even the most jaded anti-warrior. And as we hit the fall anti-war trail: As Obama, His House And Senate Allies, His “Coalition Of The Willing”Beat The War Drums-Again- Stop The Escalations-No New U.S. War In Iraq- No Intervention In Syria! Immediate Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops And Mercenaries!Stop The U.S. And Allied Bombings! –Stop The Arms Shipments …
Frank Jackman comment:
As the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama, abetted by the usual suspects in the House and Senate as well as internationally, orders more air bombing strikes in the north and in Syria, sends more “advisers” to “protect” American outposts in Iraq, and sends arms shipments to the Kurds, supplies arms to the moderate Syrian opposition if it can be found to give weapons to, guys who served in the American military during the Vietnam War and who, like me, belatedly, got “religion” on the war issue as a kneejerk way to resolve the conflicts in this wicked old world might very well be excused for disbelief when the White House keeps pounding out the propaganda that these actions are limited when all signs point to the slippery slope of escalation. And all the time saying the familiar (Vietnam era familiar updated for the present)-“we seek no wider war”-meaning no American combat troops. Well if you start bombing places back to the Stone Age, cannot rely on the Iraqi troops who have already shown what they are made of and cannot rely on a now non-existent “Syrian Free Army” which you are willing to get whatever they want and will still come up short what do you think the next step will be? Now not every event in history gets exactly repeated but given the recent United States Government’s history in Iraq those old time vets might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners, placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case. No New War In Iraq –Stop The Bombings- No Intervention In Syria!
*** Here is something to think about:
Workers and the oppressed have no interest in a victory by one combatant or the other in the reactionary Sunni-Shi’ite civil war. However, the international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to the world’s working people and downtrodden.
Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc. From Afghanistan! Hands Off Syria! No New War In Iraq- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Arms Shipments To The Kurds And Shia-Stay Out Of The Civil War! No Intervention In Ukraine! Defend The Palestinians! No U.S. Aid To Israel! Not One Penny, Not One Person For Obama’s War Machine!
As The 100th
Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars)
Continues ... Some Remembrances-Artists’ Corner-Otto Dix
In say 1912, 1913,
hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war
clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed
their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing
business in the world. Yes the artists of every school the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists/Constructivists,
Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements (hell even the
Academy spoke the pious words when there was sunny weather), those who saw the
disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint,
sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that
building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems;
writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish
theory of progress,humankind had moved
beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty
would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling
cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes
and hidden gazebo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing
words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to
denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin,
neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose
muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress
and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets,
ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing
on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before
touching the hair of another man, putting another man to ground or lying their
own heads down for some imperial mission. They all professed loudly (and those
few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting
their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war
drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish,
Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in
quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the
course.
And then the war
drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out
their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets,
beautiful poets like Wilfred Owens who would sicken of war before he passed
leaving a beautiful damnation on war, its psychoses, and broken bones and
dreams, and the idiots who brought humankind to such a fate, like e. e.
cummings who drove through sheer hell in those rickety ambulances floors
sprayed with blood, man blood, angers, anguishes and more sets of broken bones,
and broken dreams, like Rupert Brooke all manly and old school give and go, as
they marched in formation leaving the ports and then mowed down like freshly
mown grass in their thousands as the charge call came and they rested, a lot of
them, in those freshly mown grasses, like Robert Graves all grave all
sputtering in his words confused about what had happened, suppressing, always
suppressing that instinct to cry out against the hatred night, like old school,
old Thomas Hardy writing beautiful old English pastoral sentiments before the
war and then full-blown into imperium’s service, no questions asked old England
right or wrong, like old stuffed shirt himself T.S. Eliot speaking of hollow
loves, hollow men, wastelands, and such in the high club rooms on the home
front, and like old brother Yeats speaking of terrible beauties born in the
colonies and maybe at the home front too as long as Eliot does not miss his high
tea. Jesus what a blasted night that Great War time was.
And do not forget
when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and
buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of
ordinary human clay as it turned out
And then the war
drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out
their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out,
artists, beautiful artists like Fernand Leger who could no longer push the
envelope of representative art because it had been twisted by the rubble of
war, by the crashing big guns, by the hubris of commanders and commanded and he
turned to new form, tubes, cubes, prisms, anything but battered humankind in
its every rusts and lusts, all bright and intersecting once he got the mustard
gas out of his system, once he had done his patria duty, like speaking of
mustard gas old worn out John Singer Sargent of the three name WASPs forgetting
Boston Brahmin society ladies in decollage, forgetting ancient world religious
murals hanging atop Boston museum and spewing trench warfare and the blind
leading the blind out of no man’s land, out of the devil’s claws, like Umberto
Boccioni, all swirls, curves, dashes, and dangling guns as the endless charges
endlessly charge, like Gustav Klimt and his endlessly detailed gold dust
opulent Asiatic dreams filled with lovely matrons and high symbolism and
blessed Eve women to fill the night, Adam’s night after they fled the garden,
like Joan Miro and his infernal boxes, circles, spats, eyes, dibs, dabs,
vaginas, and blots forever suspended in deep space for a candid world to fret
through, fret through a long career, and like poor maddened rising like a
phoenix in the Spartacist uprising George Grosz puncturing the nasty
bourgeoisie, the big bourgeoisie the ones with the real dough and their overfed
dreams stuffed with sausage, and from the bloated military and their fat-assed
generals stuff with howitzers and rocket shells, like Picasso, yeah, Picasso
taking the shape out of recognized human existence and reconfiguring the forms,
the mesh of form to fit the new hard order, like, Braque, if only because if
you put the yolk on Picasso you have to tie him to the tether too.
And do not forget
when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and
buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of
ordinary human clay as it turned out sculptors, writers, serious and not,
musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for,
well, for humankind, of course, their always fate ….
In
Honor Of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (April 1870-Janaury 1924)-The
Struggle Continues-Ivan Smilga’s Political Journey-Take Two
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman For a number of years I have been
honoring various revolutionary forbears, including the subject of this birthday
tribute, the Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin architect (along with
fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky) of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917
in each January under the headline-Honor
The Three L’s –Lenin, Luxemburg , Liebknecht. My purpose then was (and
still is) to continue the traditions established by the Communist International
in the early post-World War I period in honoring revolutionary forbears. That
month has special significance since every January Leftists
honor those three leading revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of
Russia in his sleep after a long illness in 1924, and Karl Liebknecht of
Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered in separate incidents after
leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin. I have
made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary
fight against the German war budget in World War I in which he eventually wound
up in prison only to be released when the Kaiser abdicated (correctly went to
jail when it came down to it once the government pulled the hammer down on his
opposition), on some previous occasions. The key point to be taken away today,
still applicable today as in America we are in the age of endless war, endless
war appropriations and seemingly endless desires to racket up another war out
of whole cloth every change some ill-begotten administration decides it needs
to “show the colors”, one hundred years later in that still lonely and
frustrating struggle to get politicians to oppose war budgets, to risk prison
to choke off the flow of war materials. I have
also made some special point in previous years about the life of Rosa
Luxemburg, the “rose of the revolution.” About her always opposing the
tendencies in her adopted party, the German Social-Democracy, toward reform and
accommodation, her struggle to make her Polish party ready for revolutionary
opportunities, her important contributions to Marxist theory and her willing to
face and go to jail when she opposed the first World War. This
month, the month of his birth, it is appropriate, at a time when the young
needs to find, and are in desperate need of a few good heroes, a few
revolutionaries who contributed to both our theoretical understandings about
the tasks of the international working class in the age of imperialism (the
age, unfortunately, that we are still mired in) and to the importance of the
organization question in the struggle for revolutionary power, to highlight
thestruggles of Vladimir Lenin, the
third L, in order to define himself politically.
Below
is a second sketch written as part of a series posted overseveral days before the anniversary of Lenin’s
birthday on the American Left History
blog starting on April 16th (see archive) of a young fictional labor
militant, although not so fictional in the scheme of the revolutionary
developments in the Russia of the Tsar toward the end of the 19th
century and early 20th century which will help define the problems
facing the working-class there then, and the very problems that Lenin had to
get a handle on.
******
“Big
Ivan” Smilga (called such for obvious reasons, well over six feet tall, well
over two hundred pounds and thus big for a Ukrainian farm boy) had been out of
work, steady work anyway, the best part of a year after he (along with his work
crew) had been laid off by John Smyte and Son, the English textile firm working
under license from Tsar in Moscow. He had been called “redundant” (and of
course the crew as well) after the job he held as lead-man on a work crew that
took the rolls of finished fabric off the bobbing machines for further
processing and transport had been replaced by a machine which did the task
automatically. Ivan and that crew in “Luddite” fashion had one Saturday night
after a heavy day of drinking had smashed the machine in expectation that that
action would get their jobs back. That course of action pursued, a Luddite
caper, in which he and his crew snuck into the closed Smiley factory one
Saturday night and wreaked the hauling machinery only to find that next Monday
morning that it was replaced by an exact replica. Fortunately he and the crew
were never discovered and nobody snitched to the Okhrana or he/they would be in
Siberia just them. (Luddite being an English moniker well known to the Smythes
as a moniker used for “anarchists” who went around smashing machines in England
in the early part of the Industrial Revolution for the same reasons as Ivan and
his crew and with the same results. Ivan had been befuddled by the term when it
had appeared in the pro-Smythe Moscow
Gazette until the term was explained to him and he responded with a big
laugh saying something like there really wasn’t anything ne win the world.) He
had sulked and drunk himself silly for a while (a man who before the trek to the
city had been a very modest vodka drinker by Ukrainian standards) and then
grabbed any work he could find as he was running out of funds. Grabbing
whatever work he could find entailed moving down the working-class scale as his
once substantial stash of cash was dwindling and as he came in contact with
more nefarious types at the workingmen’s taverns that he then more frequently
hung out at to kill time.
One
night at the Golden Eagle Tavern (rough Russian translation and allegedly named
in honor of the Tsar but maybe just named to curry favor with the police
inspectors who were prowling around such working-class haunts ever since labor
agitation not unlike in the rest of Europe had started in the Saint Petersburg
factories) Ivan ran into some workmen whom he knew and a few who were not
working men but students, maybe from Moscow University, who were talking in the
back room, talking quietly although not attempting to cover their voices or the
door which led into the back. One of the workmen, Vladimir Suslov, known to him
from his time at Smythe and Son, motioned him to come join the group. This
Suslov knew of Ivan’s ill-fated attempt to wreak the machinery at Smythe from
one night when Ivan had been too talkative and he had overheard Ivan speaking
of the attempts. What Vladimir, and one of the students, Nicolas Kamkov as he
found out later, had to say was that things had become intolerable in Russia,
that the sons and daughters of the land needed a reprieve, that the growing
working- class needed relief and that the students (they called themselves the
“intelligentsia” and maybe they were but around the peasantry, and those who
had roots in the peasantry like Ivan, using that term was quickly squashed once
they found out that the peasantry associated all intellectuals with the court
and government) needed to be able to breath and say whatever they wanted. And this
motley group of students and workmen had a plan to solve this problem.
Nicolas
let Suslov tell the broad outline of the plan. The idea, like something out of
the People’s Will movement of blessed if now distant memory, was rather than
try to assassinate governmental officials like in the wild old days, instead to
take them hostage, hostages to be returned for various grants of relief for
peasants, workers and students. Suslov looked directly at Ivan when he asked
who was in and who was out. Ivan nodded, or half-nodded, that he was in. (He later
said he feared some Suslov indiscretion more, especially if he was caught, more
than the very real doubts he initially expressed about the plot). Since
everybody in the room expressed an interest they began to plan. The main idea
for hostage number one, the Tsar’s finance minister who was in an entourage
along with foreign investors and factory owners headed on a train into Moscow
within the next few days according to some inside information the group had,
was that Ivan was to do the strong-arm work one evening at the minister’s hotel
disguised as a hotel employee. So the planning went on over the next few days. Then
just as quickly it was over as a knock came on Ivan’s door one night and when
he opened it there was Daniev, the local Okhrana official with Suslov in tow.
Suslov had betrayed him (and the others), in order to get out from under his
own hard time as a ring-leader. Ivan was thereafter banished to Siberia for two
years, a hard two years, for even thinking about the idea of kidnapping the
Tsar’s minister.
From The Marxist Archives On The Communist International (1919-1943) -A View From The Left
German Novelist Gunter Glass Passes
Frank Jackman comment:
All kinds of people, personally good or
bad, hypocrites or truth-tellers, have created great world literature. And that
accrues to the benefit of humankind. Leon Trotsky, the great Russian revolutionary
and no mean man with a literary pen noted that someone like Celine had written a
great book in the case of Journey To The
End Of The Night even though his abhorred his politics. That is the case with
Gunter Grass and The Tin Drum and his
other works. His late revelation that he was a member of the Waffen SS, an elite
organization that you just did not walk into off of the street and join without
being vetted is another matter. Perhaps they should have made more room in Nuremburg
for those like Grass and his ilk who did the dirty deeds of war and then walked
away scot-free. History will not be kind to his memory.
The Fight For $15 Continues In Boston
The Struggle For Black Liberation Continues In Boston
No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power-The Struggle Continues
A lot of people, and I count myself among them, see the new movement against police brutality and their incessant surveillance of minority youth, mainly black and Latino, that seems to be building up a head of steam to be the next major axis of struggle. The endemic injustices are so obvious and frankly so outrageous that the pent-up anger at the base of society among we the have-nots is so great that it needed visible expression. The past six months have given us that. Read on:
The Day Of The Jackal, Indeed-Frederick
Forsyth’s Day Of The Jackal
DVD Review
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Day of the Jackal, starring Edward
Fox, from the novel by Frederick Forsyth, 1973
One of the interesting things about
having a healthy regard for the history of cinematography is to be able to date
the films from a look at their production values, at least since the close of
the silent era. Those early black and white films with their grainy flickering
quality later refined to some very dramatic and story enhancing shadowing that
made many a film better than its story line or acting. A bit later the
surprisingly liquid-ish quality of the first color films (I still am amazed
though by the purity of that dazzling snow-drenched mountain in the Paramount
logo when one of their products hits my screen) and how the digital age has
refined that process to a greater sharpness. We can also, and the film under
review, The Day Of The Jackal, is a
prime example of this, pretty much date the time when a film took place by such
things as the cars used, the kinds of travel, the fashions, and technology used
at the time.
And in the case of political
thrillers like Jackal the police
procedures. While the film was released in 1973 the time line of the story is
set in 1963 in France just after then President Charles de Gaulle agreed,
reluctantly agreed, to Algerian independence (the massive resistance led by the
Algerian National Liberation Front had a lot to do with that fact as did the
ferocity of the struggle they lead and the French reaction as poignantly shown
in a film like Battle of Algiers).
Naturally, as we witnessed in the United States in the wake of our own
Algeria-like fight in the former French possession of Vietnam not everybody was
happy about that outcome, especially among some elements of the French military
who had actually fought and bled in those battles. I have never seen or heard
of anything similar here by the military around the defeat in Vietnam, at least
that has been exposed, but in France some elements decided to do something
about the matter and formed a secret organization, the OAS, to overthrow the de
Gaulle government.
In the normal course of events such
operations usually are exposed, are usually thwarted in their attempts and that
is that. For the most part that is what happened with the OAS using its own personnel
to create chaos in due course and the leaders and ranks were rounded up. So
those still left on the outside of prison or of the country decided to hire a
professional, a “hit man,” somebody outside the organization to assassinate de Gaulle.
The thread of the rest of the story goes on from there.
Of course to hire the services of hit
man (we will use “hit man” here because as we find out in the end who knows
what his real name was), a man of such specialized skills who would need to
retire after such a kill means providing enough dough to do that. And that is
really where the whole project comes unglued since OAS agents are forced into a
series of large scale bank robberies to finance the caper, some getting caught
and if not informing then the police had an idea that something was being
planned by the organization. Those actions set off the various police agencies
under the direction of the Ministry of Interior who were monitoring OAS
activities to try to find out what they were up to, why they needed so much money.
It is that old-fashioned process of tracking down the hit man (played by Edward
Fox) which dates this film. The almost painful use of registries and other
archival documents to trace who might have come into the country at a certain
point and where, where he might have stayed, who he might be once the police
decided it was not a French national, to speak of the untold number of man
hours in such searches almost seemed comical some fifty plus years later. Today
all that could have been gleaned from some international centralized computer
base in about an hour and that would be that. Or maybe a quick check of the NSA
vacuum cleaner operation.
Well not quite because old-fashioned
paper hunts or digital speed our hit man is quite the professional, knows
enough to keep ahead of the police through most of the two hours of the film and
the remake does that with a more modern hit man (Bruce Willis). One would think
our hit man would also have competing technologies to keep himself in the game.
What our hit man, our hit man, needed to be then, or now, is a ruthless
stone-cold killer to carry out his mission and along the way use and discard
(kill) anybody and everybody who could possibly identify him. So our hit man had
good run but as we know, or should know by now, President de Gaulle died in his
bed so you know stone-cold killer or not he ran out of luck. All in all though
still a pretty good film.
For The Frontline Defenders Of The Working Class!-Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up!”
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The International Working Class Everywhere! ******** Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule! ******** A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force, although it is admittedly down from the Great Recession highs. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.
The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions, is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.
Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” –with the no reduction in pay proviso, although many low –end employers are even now under the “cover” of the flawed Obamacare reducing hours WITH loss of pay-so that to establish this work system as a norm it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy. Support the recent militant efforts, including the old tactic of civil disobedience, by service unions and groups of fast-food workers to increase the minimum socially acceptable wage in their Fight For 15.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Hey, nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of company-owned trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. The key here is to organize the truckers and distribution workers the place where the whole thing comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of retail stores. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more defeats like in Wisconsin in 2011, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 and 2012 labor, organized labor, spent over 450 million dollars respectively trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The “no show, no go” results speak for themselves as the gap between the rich and poor has risen even more in this period. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea in those elections was that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the-back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example that I can recall- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks in the summer of 2011 when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections against individual reactionaries, like in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle (and which was overwhelmingly unsuccessful to boot-while the number of unionized public workers has dwindled to a precious few).
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reached its final stages back in 2011, the draw- down of non-mercenary forces anyway, I argued that we must recognize that we anti-warriors had failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006).As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other proxy wars) continue now with a new stage against ISIS (Islamic State) in Iraq we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the U.S. troop escalation we know is coming before that fight is over. Not Another War In Iraq! No Intervention In Syria! Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East! Stop The Bombing Campaign! Defend The Palestinian People-End The Blockade of Gaza. And as always since 2001 Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran! Hands Off Syria!- American (and world) imperialists have periodically ratcheted up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner on this issue, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in Iran in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World! And Keep Them Off!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that in 1915 in the heat of war and paid the price unlike other party leaders who were pledged to stop the war budgets by going to prison. The only play for an honest representative of the working class under those conditions. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now no new funding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people! Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs. Be clear Obamacare is not our program and has been shown to be totally inadequate and wasteful however we will defend that program against those who wish to dismantle it and leave millions once again uninsured and denied basic health benefits.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle-class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students from broken homes and minority homes in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money if you want to find the money quickly to do the job right), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while low-cost aid has not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures and aid underwater mortgages now! Although the worst of the crunch has abated there are still plenty of problems and so this demand is still timely if not desperately timely like in the recent past. Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers’ party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
******** Bob Marley Get Up, Stand Up Lyrics
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights! Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!
Preacher man, don't tell me,
Heaven is under the earth.
I know you don't know What life is really worth. It's not all that glitters is gold; 'Alf the story has never been told: So now you see the light, eh!
Stand up for your rights. come on!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights! Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights! Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!
Most people think, Great god will come from the skies,
Take away everything And make everybody feel high. But if you know what life is worth, You will look for yours on earth: And now you see the light, You stand up for your rights. jah! Get up, stand up! (jah, jah! ) Stand up for your rights! (oh-hoo! ) Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! ) Don't give up the fight! (life is your right! ) Get up, stand up! (so we can't give up the fight! ) Stand up for your rights! (lord, lord! ) Get up, stand up! (keep on struggling on! ) Don't give up the fight! (yeah! )
We sick an' tired of-a your ism-skism game -
Dyin' 'n' goin' to heaven in-a Jesus' name, lord. We know when we understand: Almighty god is a living man. You can fool some people sometimes, But you can't fool all the people all the time. So now we see the light (what you gonna do?), We gonna stand up for our rights! (yeah, yeah, yeah! )
So you better: Get up, stand up! (in the morning! git it up! )
Stand up for your rights! (stand up for our rights! ) Get up, stand up! Don't give up the fight! (don't give it up, don't give it up! )
Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! )
Stand up for your rights! (get up, stand up! )
Get up, stand up! (... )
Don't give up the fight! (get up, stand up! )
*************
We Don’t Want Your Ism-Skism Thing- Dreadlocks Delight- “One Love: The Very Best of Bob Marley And The Wailers”- A CD Review
One Love: The Very Best of Bob Marley And The Wailers, Bob Marley And The Wailers, UTV Records, 2001
Admit it, back in the late seventies and early eighties we all had our reggae minute, at least a minute anyway. And the center of that minute, almost of necessity, had to be a run-in with the world of Bob Marley and the Wailers, probably I Shot The Sheriff. Some of us stuck with that music and moved on to its step-child be-bop, hip-hop when that moved on the scene. Others like me just took it as a world music cultural moment and put the records (you know records, those black vinyl things, right?) away after a while. And that was that.
Well not quite. Of late (2011) the Occupy movement, the people risen, has done a very funny musical thing, at least funny to my ears when I heard it. They, along with the old labor song, Solidarity Forever, and, of course Brother Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land , have resurrected Bob Marley’s up-from-under fight song, Get Up, Stand Up to fortify the sisters and brothers against the American imperial monster beating down on all of us and most directly under the police baton and tear gas canister. And that seems, somehow, eminently right. More germane here it has gotten me to dust off those old records and give Brother Marley another hear. And you should too if you have been remiss of late with such great songs as (aside from those mentioned already) No Woman, No Cry, Jamming, One Love/People Get Ready (ya, the old Chambers Brother tune), and Buffalo Soldier. And stand up and fight too.