Happy, Happy Birthday
Karl Marx, On The 200th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts
A link to NPR’s Christopher
Lydon’s Open Source 2018 program on the meaning of Karl Marx in
the 21st century on the 200th anniversary of his birth:
http://radioopensource.org/marx-at-200/
By Seth Garth
Normally Frank Jackman
would be the natural person to do his take on the name, the role, the legacy of
one German revolutionary exiled to London after the revolutions of 1848 faded away,
Karl Marx on the 200th anniversary of his birth in 2018. And Frank at
first fought me a little on this and mentioned it to site manager Greg Green.
Greg had both of us come in to his office to discuss the issue. My frame of reference
and what amounted to the winning argument was that I had been Peter Paul Markin’s
closest friend in high school, forever known as Scribe for obvious reasons, and
so I knew the details of how Frank, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon and
maybe a couple of others first heard about the name and ideas of one Karl Marx and
later would act on them a little. (Some of the other guys who hung around with
Scribe and the rest of us like Ricky Rizzo and Dave Whiting, both who would lay
their heads down in hellhole Vietnam and wound up on the town monument and
Washington black granite, Red Riley and even Frank Jackman almost lynched him
when he started talking favorably about Karl Marx and the idea of red revolution
in those dead ass red scare Cold War nights. All they wanted to hear about was whatever
intelligence Scribe had on some girl they were interested in of which he had
been plenty or what his next plan was for the “midnight creep” which I assume
needs no further explanation except he planned the capers but no way would
Frankie Riley or the rest of us let him lead the expeditions-hell we would still
be in jail.)
Others, including Frank
Jackman, have now seemingly endlessly gone over the effect Scribe had on them a
little later when the turbulent 1960s we all got caught up in blew a gasket in
the Summer of Love, 1967 as the culmination of what he also had been talking about
for years on those lonely forlorn weekend nights when we hung around good guy
Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in the growing up Acre section of North
Adamsville. What most guys did not know, or did not want to know, was that a
little of what Scribe was thinking at the time was that maybe Karl Marx might
be proven to be right, might have been onto something when he spoke about the
working classes, us, getting a big jump ahead in the world once things turned
upside down. He held those views pretty
closely then, especially when he was practically red-baited into silence by
those guys who were even more hung up, as was Scribe in many ways, on normal
American propaganda about Russia, Communism, and Karl Marx.
Like I say a glimmer
then in high school, not at all thought out like it would be more so later in
the late 1960s and early 1970s when we got back to the “real” world from ‘Nam
and knew we had been fucked over by our government. That the “reds” in Vietnam
were poor folk, peasants, with whom we had no quarrel. But that was later. I
remember one night Scribe told me that he had had to stay after school one day for
Mr. Donovan, the World History
teacher and football coach which tells you what he was about, when Scribe had
given a surly answer about some question Mr. Donovan had asked not about
Marxism but something else and Donovan had asked him if he was a “Bolshevik.” Scribe
recoiled in horror he said knowing that to say yes would get him in some trouble
(probably more after school time at least) and for the simple fact that he could
not say truthfully whatever teen angst and alienation he was feeling was driven
by that kind of understanding of the world-then.
What this confrontation did
do was get Scribe looking again at his dog-eared copy of Karl Marx’s (and his co-thinker
and financial “angel” Friedrich Engels) classic statement of his views The Communist Manifesto to confirm whether
he was a “Marxist,” “Communist,” whatever and he came away from that re-reading
knowing that he was not one of those guys, a red. That was the kind of guy
Scribe was when he was confronted with something he didn’t understand. The rest
of us would have said “fuck it” and let it go at that or have challenged old
Donovan with a spurious “yeah, what about it.” Maybe some silly remark like “better
red than dead” or “my mommy is a commie,” expressions making the rounds in that
dead air time.
To finish up on this
though I should say that the way Scribe got his copy of the Manifesto back when he was fourteen or
fifteen and had heard that it was a cool document or something, who knows with Scribe
was kind of strange. He couldn’t find the book in either the school or town
libraries for the simple fact that neither had the document not wanted to have
it in circulation. Yeah it was that kind of time. A young librarian suggested that
he try the Government Printing Office which might have a copy if somebody in
Congress (like the red-baiter par excellence Senator Joseph McCarthy) or some governmental
agency had ordered it printed for whatever reason. He got the address in
Washington and the GPO sent back a brochure with their publications for sale.
And there it was. He ordered a copy and a few weeks alter it came in the mail.
Here’s the funnier part, funnier that the government providing copies on the cheap
(or maybe free I forget on that point) of such a notorious document the document
had been placed on the publication list because it was part of the record for
the raucous House Un-American Activities Committee meeting in San Francisco in
1960 when they were practically run out of town by protestors as the Cold War
began to thaw in certain places. Of course that was a recollection later when
we were deep into the Summer of Love out in that very town.
Yeah, Scribe was a piece
of work and he would eventually drag some of along with him in his good days
like the Summer of Love and later after Vietnam time running around with
radical students in Cambridge when checking out Marx and Marxism was all the
rage. Like I said old Marx has had his up and downs, has taken his beatings but
some things he said were spot on. Worse, in a way, some of the stuff reads like
it could have been written today. How about that.
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