From The Pages Of Workers Vanguard-A Dissenting View- “Occupy Wall Street”: Rebels for Liberal Reform-For Workers Revolution to Expropriate the Capitalist Class!

Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League (ICL) website.

Workers Vanguard No. 988
14 October 2011

“Occupy Wall Street”: Rebels for Liberal Reform

For Workers Revolution to Expropriate the Capitalist Class!

Below we print excerpts from an October 8 forum by Spartacist League spokesman Irene Gardner in Oakland.

This past Wednesday my comrades and I were at the mass demonstration in downtown Manhattan with the Occupy Wall Street protesters, roughly 700 of whom were arrested by the NYPD at a march over the Brooklyn Bridge a few days earlier. I think the scale and popularity of these protests have surprised the New York City ruling class somewhat. It’s another indication of how much anger is out there.

Each day we open up the paper and discover another set of horrible statistics about the effects of the capitalist crisis on poor and working people. The reality is a lot worse than the numbers. Back in 2008, the con men on Wall Street, whose financial swindles were central to the economic collapse, were bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars. But the working class, black people, Latinos and the growing mass of the poor have been made to foot the bill, losing jobs, homes, pensions and just about anything else that makes life livable.

Today, one in six people of working age in the U.S. are unemployed, with long-term unemployment the highest since the Great Depression. The Census Bureau now reports that 46.2 million in the U.S. live under the poverty line, and of those, 2.6 million fell into poverty just in the last year alone. Those who still have a job are being squeezed to work harder, faster and longer for lower pay. And there are plenty of people who have given up even looking for a job altogether. A new census report also shows that one in five New Yorkers now live in poverty, the highest level in a decade. Another astounding figure: in New York City the number of homeless students in public schools has quadrupled since 2008, to almost 43,000 as of last October.

Meanwhile, during the past two years, corporate profits have broken all historic records. The government’s “welfare for the rich” schemes have boosted financial speculation, artificially driving up the price of stocks, while the manufacturing and productive capacity of the U.S. has dropped significantly. And now we’re in a global financial crisis with Europe ready to implode.

Even billionaire New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg mentioned that riots could happen if job prospects don’t improve. It is the fear that the masses might revolt that concerns union-hating Bloomberg and other multibillionaires like Warren Buffett. President Obama has now been pushing a new tax rate for millionaires (the so-called “Buffett Rule”) in exchange for Democrats’ support to more cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. In reality, this token “tax the rich” scheme is meant to be sugarcoating on another round of anti-working-class austerity.

Obama and the Democrats want to appear as if they care about “the little guy,” but in reality Obama championed the same austerity agenda as the Republicans all summer long, pushing for massive budget cuts. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are a political party of the capitalist class. As one Verizon striker put it, “The Democrats are doing the job of the Republicans, only with a smile.”

Economic crises, booms and busts, are nothing new—they are endemic to the capitalist mode of production. A key contradiction that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identified is that under capitalism production is socialized. But the means of production remain the private property of a few, who appropriate the wealth that is produced by workers’ collective labor. Those who own the means of production—the factories, mines, railroads, banks—constitute the capitalist class, also known as the bourgeoisie. Those who subsist only on their labor power—their mental and physical ability to work—constitute the working class, the proletarians. Between these two classes lies a variety of merchants, independent professionals and others known as the petty bourgeoisie. But the main, decisive classes are the capitalist class and the working class.

Consciously or not, labor seeks to resist exploitation. It comes into constant conflict with the uncontrollable drive of capitalist production, which is the drive for the accumulation of more and more capital, and the production of more and more profit. This is the basis for class struggle—the irreconcilable class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

The Imperialist Epoch

V.I. Lenin, leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, described how capitalism in the late 19th century reached its highest stage—imperialism. He described how the means of production came to be monopolized by fewer and bigger conglomerates with ever-growing needs for investment funds and other financing, leading to the dominance of finance capital, centrally the giant banks. As the capitalists in the advanced industrial countries strove for newer markets to exploit, they carried out wars to redivide the world and secure spheres of exploitation in less-developed countries. In their competition for world domination, the imperialist powers engulfed people around the world in the barbarism of World Wars I and II and waged countless bloody wars in colonial and semicolonial countries.

The way out of the endless cycle of capitalist economic crises and imperialist wars was shown by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, when workers took power in their own hands, expropriating the bourgeoisie and establishing the Soviet workers state. It is high time that working people, who create the wealth in this society, run this society! We need an all new ruling class—the workers! Fight, don’t starve! Labor must rule!

In a climate conditioned by the imperialists’ proclamations that the destruction of the Soviet Union proved Marxism to be a “failed experiment,” the prospect of proletarian socialist revolution might appear implausible. But the collectivized economy in the Soviet Union worked! Despite its isolation in a world dominated by imperialism, the Soviet Union, arising from deep backwardness and the destruction of world war, civil war and imperialist intervention, became an industrial and military powerhouse, even under Stalinist bureaucratic misrule.

When the capitalist world was in the midst of the Great Depression, the Soviet Union actually increased its industrial output. As Leon Trotsky pointed out in The Revolution Betrayed in 1936:

“Even if the Soviet Union, as a result of internal difficulties, external blows and the mistakes of its leadership, were to collapse—which we firmly hope will not happen—there would remain as an earnest of the future this indestructible fact, that thanks solely to a proletarian revolution a backward country has achieved in less than ten years successes unexampled in history.”

Now, two decades after counterrevolution destroyed the Soviet degenerated workers state, many in Russia long for the days when they were guaranteed a job, education, housing, health care and vacations, regretting that they were taken in by the myth of capitalist “democracy.” What undermined the collectivized economy, and ultimately laid the basis for the destruction of the Soviet Union itself, was the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy, which robbed the workers of their political power and vainly sought to appease the imperialists by selling out workers struggles in other countries.

Today, the deep economic crisis in the capitalist countries contrasts sharply with the situation in China, where the industries central to production are collectivized. Beijing has massively channeled investment into developing infrastructure and productive capacity. However, China’s Stalinist regime also undermines the social gains of the 1949 Revolution by conciliating imperialism and promoting “market reforms” that strengthen internal counterrevolutionary forces. In its “partnership” with world capital, the Beijing bureaucracy is subsidizing American imperialism through its huge investment in U.S. treasury bonds, which, among other things, are used to finance the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As Trotskyists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state against imperialism and internal counterrevolution. At the same time, we call for proletarian political revolution to replace the Stalinist bureaucrats with a revolutionary internationalist leadership and a regime of workers democracy.

From Spain’s Indignados...

I want to talk a bit about Europe and in particular Spain, where I visited this past summer. Along with the wild roller-coaster ride of the stock market, Europe has been in the news just about every day with the imperialist rulers desperately trying to keep the economies afloat. In Europe, the financial crisis has sharply accentuated the contradictions inherent in the European Union (EU), an unstable consortium of rival capitalist states, some richer, some poorer. At the heart of the EU’s contradictions is the fact that the maintenance of a common currency requires a common state power. That is simply not possible under capitalism. As proletarian internationalists, we have always opposed the EU as an imperialist trade bloc. We say that only the conquest of state power by the working class can lay the basis for a socialist United States of Europe and a rationally planned economy.

In Spain, youth unemployment is around 45 percent. Factories are closing, hospitals are cutting back, and evictions during just three months of this year numbered over 15,000, more than 150 a day. When I was in Spain I got to discuss with some of the “Indignados” (“the indignant”) at their encampment in Puerta del Sol, the central square in Madrid. The Spanish Indignados are essentially a petty-bourgeois movement that arose in response to the austerity measures being enforced by the social-democratic Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) before its huge defeat in the municipal and regional elections in May. The PSOE in power has carried out a relentless capitalist austerity drive.

Those who started the Indignados movement were inspired by the best-selling book Indignez-vous! (Be Indignant!) by Stéphane Hessel, a French anti-communist bourgeois ideologue. They were also inspired by the protests in Egypt and Iceland. They occupied squares in major cities throughout Spain, numbering in the tens of thousands, mostly youth, calling on people to “stand up against indifference in a peaceful uprising.”

Their main organizers, around a group called Real Democracy Now, put out a manifesto calling for an end to corruption and an end to the dictatorship of the markets, “real democracy.” But what is democracy in a class-divided society? Under capitalism, it is democracy for the ruling class, those wealthy few who own the means of production and carry out laws to defend their private property. There are no laws that will establish equality between the capitalists and the working class. The capitalists have a state apparatus, armed bodies of men (cops, courts, prisons) to keep the bourgeoisie in power and repress any challenge to their rule.

So how do the Indignados propose to change society? By endless protests and encampments? You can be indignant all you want, but to really make a change you have to ally with the social power of the working class, the only class that has the power to stop production and has the historic interest to overthrow capitalism. But the leadership of the Indignados movement is anti-union and therefore anti-working-class, because unions are the basic defense organizations of the working class. In Spain early on, the Indignados assemblies would not allow any union or political organization to join with them, “in order to guarantee the political neutrality of this citizens’ movement”! Their so-called “non-political” stance is actually very political—in the direction of anti-communism. This is shown by their exclusion of left groups from speaking at assemblies and attempts to censor left groups from distributing their literature.

Even their anti-leadership emphasis on “consensus” decision-making is undemocratic. Instead of using majority votes to make decisions, people are supposed to debate endlessly until they all agree. Then, of course, a non-elected clique usually makes the decisions in the background.

While the Indignados leadership pushes anti-union politics, it seems that many of the youth don’t necessarily buy into it. One example is that there have been large teachers strikes in Madrid recently, and some Indignados have put out a statement in support.

Many of these youth hate the effects of capitalism but do not see socialism as an alternative. The whole “death of communism” ideology pushed by the bourgeoisie following the fall of the Soviet Union is reflected in such low-level protest movements. This is also a reflection of the betrayals of the Social Democracy and the Communist parties, which have engaged in decades of class-collaboration—the Spanish labor union bureaucrats work hand in hand with the Socialist Party government! We fight to win youth over to the side of the working class, to the program of international socialist revolution, and to the understanding that you need a Bolshevik vanguard party to accomplish this.

...To “Occupy Wall Street”

The new Occupy Wall Street encampment, which has been gaining steam around the country, is in solidarity with the Spanish Indignados, raising similar demands against corporate greed and for a “leaderless resistance movement.” As one columnist put it, it’s like a “festival of frustrations” and people are plenty mad. They also look for inspiration from the “Egyptian Spring.” But look at what has happened in Egypt—the workers continue to get screwed under a renewed military dictatorship. What’s needed is not endless protests and occupations of squares but workers to power!

For many of the youth in the encampment, this is their first protest. Many are pro-union, but they view the working class as just another base of support for their all-inclusive “movement.” We’ve been intervening into the Occupy Wall Street protests, distributing lots of Workers Vanguard, looking to win over those who are open to a Marxist perspective of international socialist revolution.

Many of you have seen the video of the Wall Street protesters getting viciously attacked by the NYPD during a march to Union Square, where 80 people got arrested. The videos show several young women being corralled inside a movable police pen and pepper-sprayed by cops. Others were kicked, bruised and thrown over barricades by the police. And then last weekend 700 were arrested when the police trapped them on a march over the Brooklyn Bridge. According to a recent New York Times article, the NYPD is geared up to deal with “unrest.”

Many of the protesters are saying that the problem with the cops is that they were “unprofessional.” But these cops are as “professional” as they come! They are precisely carrying out their “profession” as the capitalist state’s armed bodies of men. There are massive illusions that “the cops are workers, too,” with slogans like “NYPD is a layoff away from joining us” and “The 99 percent includes cops.” No, the cops are not a part of the working class—they have a special role to play as part of the capitalist state apparatus. We say cops, prison guards and security guards out of the unions!

What we are seeing in the Occupy Wall Street protest is lowest-common-denominator politics, which does not at all challenge the rule of the bourgeoisie. An example of this was seen in the attempt to create a General Assembly declaration: Somebody objected to using the phrase “redistribution of wealth” because it sounded “dangerously similar to theft”! So it was decided, via consensus, to remove this phrase altogether. If you look at their final declaration posted on the Web, it does not even oppose capitalism, it just raises the same appeals for classless “democracy.” This is not new. A lot of these same themes were put forward during the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s, here and in Europe, which did not go anywhere.

Many of the slogans raised, like “We are the 99 percent,” are totally compatible with the Democratic Party’s line. In fact, the Democrats are working to get on top of these protests as a way of invigorating Obama’s campaign for the next election and to counter the Tea Party. Not only has Obama empathized with the protests, but yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reported that even Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke have expressed sympathy! You also have celebrities like Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon there—one of the first things she asked was if people were registered to vote. And there are the left-talking Democrats like Charles Barron, all looking to corral youth toward the Democratic Party.

As I mentioned at the start, several unions have called for joining the Occupy Wall Street protests. A recent article noted, “The decision by organized labor to join the demonstrations has given them an extra jolt of numbers and credibility, since unions have historically played an important, but waning, role in mobilizing voters on the left” (New York Times, 6 October). The labor bureaucrats’ program is not about class struggle. It’s about pressuring the Democratic Party to go a little easier on their membership during a period of union-busting austerity.

One of the more vocal unions in support of the protests has been the New York City Transport Workers Union (TWU). Like other unions, the TWU is under heavy attack by the bosses. TWU members showed real social power when they went on strike in December 2005, defying the state Taylor Law banning public workers strikes. But the workers were stabbed in the back by the leaders of other NYC unions and the TWU International, and in the end were sold out by their own local union misleaders.

TWU bureaucrats and the rest of the AFL-CIO officialdom are pushing impotent “tax the rich” schemes along with reformist left groups like the International Socialist Organization, the Workers World Party and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. These “tax the rich” demands are tailor-made to fit in with the current Obama administration and Democratic Party platform. The corporations and banks are sitting on mountains of cash, but you aren’t going to get your hands on it by appealing to the tax authority of the capitalist state, whose purpose is to guarantee and defend the interests of the bourgeoisie.

This past spring, tens of thousands of unionists and their supporters (including students) came out to occupy the Wisconsin State Capitol to protest Republican governor Scott Walker’s union-busting law tearing up collective bargaining for public workers unions. But the bureaucratic misleaders of the AFL-CIO worked overtime to squelch any move toward actually using labor’s strike weapon. Instead they channeled the anger of the ranks into support for the Democratic Party with a petition to recall Walker and a number of Republican state legislators, which failed miserably. Wisconsin public employee unions have been dealt a real defeat.

Within the labor movement, the proletariat is saddled with a pro-capitalist union bureaucracy that promotes the lie that the interests of labor and capital are compatible. They tie working people and the oppressed to the capitalist system, especially through support to the Democratic Party. The trade-union misleaders poured a whopping $450 million into the 2008 elections, backing capitalist politicians like Obama as “friends of labor.”

It is absolutely necessary to forge a new leadership of the unions to mobilize labor in struggle for its class interests, to fight against all forms of discrimination and for full citizenship rights for immigrants. A strategic question for the American workers revolution is the fight against black oppression, which is rooted in the very foundation of capitalism in the U.S. If the unions are to fight for their very existence, they must take up the defense of the ghetto and barrio poor by fighting for jobs, quality housing, education, health care and more.

The decades of betrayals by the labor bureaucracy have encouraged the U.S. rulers in the arrogant belief that they can get away with doing anything to the working class, the poor and most everyone else without provoking any social struggle. But the rulers and their labor lieutenants cannot eliminate the class struggle. The same conditions that grind down the workers can and will propel them into battle against the capitalist class enemy. Right now International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 21 in Longview, Washington, is in a battle for its life, fighting against the union-busting of the EGT multinational conglomerate. They have been facing court injunctions, arrests and police assaults, including pepper spray and cops in full riot gear, in a fight to defend their union.

Renewed labor battles will lay the basis for reviving and extending the unions, with a new, class-struggle leadership coming to the fore. It is crucial that we build a revolutionary vanguard party that will bring the critical element of consciousness to the proletariat, to transform it from a class in itself to a class for itself, fighting to do away with this entire system of wage slavery. Join us in the fight for a socialist future for humanity!

The General Strike In Greece- Make The Bosses Pay-Victory To The Greek Workers!

Click on the headline to link to a BBC online report of the events surrounding the two-day General Strike in Greece.

Markin comment:

The international working class movement and its allies, including in the Occupy movement, needs to support the Greek workers in their General Strike. The line is drawn in the sand. Make the bosses (in Greece, and internationally) pay. The bosses created the mess, let them pay. If not, move aside and let the workers rule. As for the Greek workers, who today stand as the vanguard of the international working class offensive against the bosses austerity drive-Build workers councils in order to prepare to take power and create a workers government. The time is now. Labor must rule

The General Strike In Greece- Make The Bosses Pay-Victory To The Greek Workers!

Click on the headline to link to a BBC online report of the events surrounding the two-day General Strike in Greece.

Markin comment:

The international working class movement and its allies, including in the Occupy movement, needs to support the Greek workers in their General Strike. The line is drawn in the sand. Make the bosses (in Greece, and internationally) pay. The bosses created the mess, let them pay. If not, move aside and let the workers rule. As for the Greek workers, who today stand as the vanguard of the international working class offensive against the bosses austerity drive-Build workers councils in order to prepare to take power and create a workers government. The time is now. Labor must rule

*From The Blogosphere-From The "Renegade Eye" Blog-Campaign for a Mass Party of Labor

Click on the title to link to the blog mentioned in the headline.

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- Greece: Mass Anger Over Savage Austerity-Workers Must Rule!-For a Socialist United States of Europe!

Markin comment:

As always in such general strike and possiblly pre-revolutitonary situations a call by communist propagandists for independent working class organizations to take power is in order. For A Greek Communist Party-Greek Trade Union Federations (and whoever else of the up-against-the-wall middle class and student elements they can bring in) government!
*********
Workers Vanguard No. 983
8 July 2011

European Crisis and the Bankruptcy of Capitalism

Greece: Mass Anger Over Savage Austerity-Workers Must Rule!-
For a Socialist United States of Europe!

On June 29, as a two-day general strike virtually shut down the country and tens of thousands protested outside, the Greek parliament approved a new round of brutal austerity measures demanded by the Greek bourgeoisie and its imperialist overlords. The demonstrators—who included, in addition to workers, a broad range of the population from students and other youth to professionals and retirees—were viciously attacked by club-wielding riot police. More than a year of unrelenting attacks on the living standards of the Greek population has resulted in seething unrest across broad layers of society. In the last year alone, there have been at least a dozen one-day general strikes and massive protests. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost, homelessness has skyrocketed and many people, especially pensioners, are reliant on soup kitchens for their survival.

Video footage of the wanton violence meted out by the cops has provoked widespread indignation, as has another video documenting collusion between the police and hooded provocateurs who infiltrated the protesters. Police fired endless volleys of tear gas and stun grenades and pummeled protesters with chunks of masonry. At least 38 were reportedly arrested in what was blatantly a cop riot. We demand that all charges be dropped against the anarchists and other anti-austerity protesters, including those arrested during the earlier general strikes!

It is clear for all to see that working people are being fleeced to pay for a crisis they are not responsible for. The economic crisis gripping Greece—a particularly severe expression of the world capitalist crisis—was triggered in the spring of last year as global financial capitalists, fearing that the heavily indebted Greek government would default on its loan obligations, began spurning Greek government bonds. The plummeting price of those bonds threatened European banks, especially in France and Germany—foreign financial institutions are exposed to some 340 billion euros in Greek public and private debt.

To try to head off the crisis, at least temporarily, the European Union (EU) and the IMF agreed last year to a 110 billion euro “rescue package” on condition that Athens impose draconian austerity measures on Greece’s working people. The October 2009 elections replaced the right-wing New Democracy (ND) regime with the bourgeois-populist Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) of George Papandreou, with the bourgeoisie calculating that the masses would more readily accept “sacrifice” if demanded by PASOK. The PASOK government answered the EU and IMF’s ultimatum with a year-long campaign of slashing public sector workers’ wages, gutting pensions and ramping up taxes. These attacks hit hardest at the poorest in society, including immigrant workers. In addition, Greek officials, in response to EU/IMF demands that they raise cash by privatizing a host of state-owned enterprises, have launched what the bourgeois press describes as a “fire sale,” auctioning off airports, ports and prime land.

European capitalists fear that a default by Greece could immediately pose a similar collapse by other heavily indebted countries such as Ireland and Portugal, which have already received bailouts from the EU and IMF, and Spain, whose economy is larger than that of Greece, Ireland and Portugal combined. Fearing the potentially catastrophic effects of such contagion, the EU/IMF hastily agreed last month on a second “rescue package” for Greece, amounting to a further 120 billion euros. Yet hardly anyone believes that these bailouts will do more than delay the inevitable default.

Everyone can see that the fate of the Greek working class, and much of the petty bourgeoisie, will be ever more dire without a radical solution. The working masses have demonstrated their combativity time and again. But the workers’ leaders, whether the despised PASOK-loyal tops of the General Confederation of Workers of Greece (GSEE) and the Confederation of Public Servants (ADEDY) or the far more militant-sounding Greek Communist Party (KKE) and its PAME labor front, have thus far succeeded in channeling workers’ anger into what amounts to militant parliamentary lobbying. In effect, they appeal to the Greek capitalists to stand up to their senior partners in Germany and France. This nationalist class collaboration is a recipe for demoralization and defeat.

The allies of the Greek proletariat are to be found not among its “own” exploiters but among the workers elsewhere in Europe and beyond. A proletarian upheaval in Greece could trigger a wave of class struggle throughout Europe against the ever more brutal and incessant attacks of the capitalists against the jobs, benefits and living standards of all workers on the continent. A workers government in Greece would immediately repudiate the imperialist debt. Such an act would require a direct appeal to the proletariat, from Germany and France to Spain and Portugal, to come to the defense of their Greek class brothers and sisters against the combined forces of the European bourgeoisies.

As long as Greek workers are mobilized primarily against the foreign diktats of the IMF and EU, they will be unable to see that opposing the imperialists is intertwined with overthrowing the Greek bourgeoisie. The Greek government is not simply a tool of the European and other imperialist powers, as some signs in the Athens demonstrations suggest, but of the Greek bourgeoisie that has always exploited, suppressed and bled the working class in the pursuit of profit.

The question that is objectively posed is the need for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist order and the establishment of working-class rule. Yet there is a huge disparity between the objective needs of the Greek working class and oppressed on one side and the political program of their leadership on the other. The repeated strikes and protests are designed to dissipate the anger of workers, whose militancy is clearly not the issue. The problem is that the working class is hamstrung by a leadership that accepts the need for the working class to bear some degree of austerity to “bail out” capitalism, while objecting that the terms and conditions dictated by the IMF and the European Central Bank (ECB) are too severe.

The program of the labor bureaucracy—defined by what is “practical” under capitalism—has led to disaster for the working class. To overcome the gulf between the workers’ present consciousness and the necessity for a workers government based on organs of proletarian power, a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party would put forward a series of transitional demands, starting from the felt needs of the masses and pointing the way toward the seizure of state power by the working class and the expropriation of the rapacious capitalist class.

To combat mass unemployment, it is necessary to demand the sharing of available work, with no loss of pay, and a massive program of public works. To protect even their current living standards—already among the lowest in Europe—workers must demand that wages be indexed to inflation. To unmask the exploitation, robbery and fraud of the industrialists and bankers, workers should demand that the capitalists open their (real) books. With the imperialists demanding the dismantling of state enterprises, the proletariat must fight for the expropriation of the productive property of the capitalist class as a whole and the establishment of a planned economy under workers rule, where production would be based on social need, not profit.

Combat National Chauvinism!

Throughout Europe, the capitalist press and politicians have been whipping up a chauvinist frenzy against Greeks, who are portrayed as lazy, ungrateful scroungers. Last year the right-wing German Bild (27 October 2010) screamed: “Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks…and the Acropolis too!” A recent London Financial Times (9 May) editorial demanded: “Athens must be put under the gun.” For all the talk of bailing out Greece, the only “bailout” that is taking place is that of Europe’s banks. Columnist Martin Wolf noted in the Financial Times (21 June): “It is far less embarrassing to state that one is helping Greece when one is in fact helping one’s own banks.”

With chauvinist arrogance, the European imperialists, led by Germany, are seeking to impose on Greece, an EU member state, the kind of diktat they are accustomed to issuing to neocolonial countries in the Third World. The Financial Times (17 June) reports that officials of the “troika”—the IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission—are demanding that “outsiders” be brought in “to make Greece’s privatization program happen,” adding that “because Greece seemed incapable of collecting taxes, international experts would come in to do that, too.” The article further reports that Finnish officials were insisting that “Athens assets should be securitised so they could be used as collateral. If Greece defaulted, lenders would gain an airport or some other utility.”

The imperialists’ dismissive attitude to Greece’s sovereignty has in turn fueled national chauvinism in Greece. Right-wing opponents of the EU/IMF’s bailout include New Democracy, Greece’s main opposition party. ND represents Greek business interests that have no intention of paying the imperialists’ extortion themselves and fear, as BBC economics editor Paul Mason put it, “a tax bill the like of which they have never dreamed, nor indeed paid.” However, ND and PASOK are united in the determination that Greek working people pay for the country’s economic crisis.

Recent months have seen the explosive growth of a new movement, the so-called “indignant citizens” movement. The “Indignados” placed themselves at the head of the mass mobilizations outside parliament, where Greek flags proliferated, the Greek national anthem was sung and anti-American and anti-German sentiment was rife. Protesters have waved EU flags with a swastika at the center—equating “German” with “Nazi” and invoking the spectre of World War II, when Greece was occupied by German imperialism (followed by rampaging British troops).

In Spain, the Indignados movement arose in response to the austerity measures that were being enforced by the social-democratic Spanish Socialist Party government before its huge defeat in the last elections. In Greece, the petty-bourgeois Indignados emerged in the context of the abject failure of the trade-union bureaucracy to present any way forward for the struggles of the working masses. The two main trade-union federations, the GSEE and ADEDY, representing the private and public sectors respectively, are controlled by PASOK, which is imposing the austerity measures. Despite the “socialist” reference in its name, and the credentials given to it by opportunist left groups, PASOK is a capitalist party.

Broad layers of the middle class that could be rallied behind an insurgent proletariat struggling for power are instead being drawn into virulently chauvinist, anti-immigrant and anti-working-class movements. Displaying overt hostility to the organizations of the working class and the left, the Indignados present themselves as a “pro-democracy” movement of all classes. As in Spain, all leftist political parties and trade unions, as well as red flags and banners, were banned from the Greek protests at first. Not surprisingly, given the nationalist fervor whipped up by the Indignados, Golden Dawn and other fascist outfits have been seen at the protests.

There has been an ominous rise in racist attacks, as desperately impoverished immigrants are used as scapegoats for the economic devastation. Earlier this year, fascist thugs rampaged through a heavily immigrant area of Athens, killing one person and wounding many more. Golden Dawn got over 5 percent of the vote in municipal elections in Athens late last year. According to the London-based Institute of Race Relations, Golden Dawn’s Nikos Michaloliakos, accompanied by eight apparently armed bodyguards, gave a Nazi salute at a council meeting in Athens in January.

The fascists are emboldened by the racist policies of the government. Greece’s border with Turkey is one of the front lines of “Fortress Europe,” with EU border patrols employed to keep immigrants out. The Greek government has announced plans to build a razor-wire fence, equipped with sonar systems and thermal sensors, along the border. The workers movement must fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and to unionize foreign workers. For union/minority mobilizations to stop fascist provocations! For integrated workers defense guards to protect immigrant neighborhoods!

Communist Party: Left Face of Greek Nationalism

The Stalinist KKE adopts a posture of militant opposition to the PASOK government and promotes PAME as a class-struggle alternative to what it calls the “government- and employer-led” trade unions. But the Greek Stalinists present no fundamental alternative to the betrayals of the GSEE/ADEDY union misleaders. Despite its occasional verbal radicalism, the KKE is hostile to the program of workers revolution to overthrow Greek capitalism.

The KKE’s political bankruptcy is evident in regard to the Indignados. In an article in Rizospastis (5 June), the KKE correctly noted that “the ‘anonymous’ leaders of the ‘movement of the squares,’ the ‘non-partisan,’ ‘spontaneous,’ ‘non-politicized’ citizens, appear to be politicized, declaring themselves ‘anti-left’.” The article adds that with their slogans “Out with the left,” “Parties out” and “Trade unions out,” the Indignados are “not that democratic, or, to be more accurate, they are undemocratic.” What the KKE cannot challenge, though, is the virulent nationalism of the Indignados, which the KKE itself shares.

Indeed, the KKE has made defense of “national sovereignty” its own calling card, and is particularly virulent in espousing Greek nationalism in relation to Turkey, the traditional enemy of its “own” bourgeoisie. For example, in a speech last year, KKE general secretary Aleka Papariga complained that the EU was not taking account of “our national sovereignty rights” when considering Turkey’s bid for membership. She went on to chastise Papandreou for “trying to cover up the issue by dividing the Aegean, something that will have an adverse effect on the islands’ defense.” Nationalism within the workers movement is the chief obstacle to constructing a genuine revolutionary workers party in Greece.

It is a travesty that the KKE retains a reputation as militant fighters against capitalism based on the Resistance against the Nazi occupation and the subsequent Greek Civil War of 1946-49. In pursuit of its program of class collaboration with the Greek bourgeoisie, the KKE handed power back to the bourgeoisie following World War II. The working class, backed by the peasantry, was the decisive force in the anti-Nazi Resistance, mounting massive strikes and demonstrations from late 1942 until the withdrawal of German troops in 1944. The working class, arms in hand, had state power in its grasp. But its leaders, the treacherous KKE, actually welcomed the arrival of British troops into Greece, enabling the imperialists to stabilize the situation, bring back the hated monarchy and massacre the workers.

The Greek Stalinists lived up to the terms of the secret Tehran agreement, whereby Stalin granted the imperialists the “right” to preserve capitalist rule in West Europe and Greece. Politically disarming the proletariat, the Stalinists went so far as to join a “national” government of the bourgeoisie. In February 1945, they signed the Varkiza agreement, which physically disarmed the KKE-led Resistance forces as British troops and the Greek National Guard were preparing to unleash a full-scale wave of terror against the masses. Only in February 1946 did the KKE finally abandon its suicidal policy and take up the “armed struggle” again. In October 1949, after ferocious repression, the Civil War was ended. The KKE ranks had fought heroically. But needless to say, the KKE learned nothing from the tragic consequences of its treachery and continues to pursue its bankrupt program of subordination to the Greek bourgeoisie.

What the Trotskyists wrote at the end of World War II holds true for the role of the Stalinists throughout the Civil War:

“The Greek masses were burning with revolutionary determination and wished to prepare the overthrow of all their oppressors—Nazi and Greek. Instead of providing the mass movement with a revolutionary program, similar to the Bolshevik program of 1917, and preparing the masses for the seizure of power, the Stalinists steered the movement into the blind alley of People’s Frontism. The Stalinists, who enjoyed virtual hegemony of the mass movement, joined with a lot of petty bourgeois politicians, lawyers, professors, who had neither mass following nor influence, and artificially worked to limit the struggle to the fight for capitalist democracy.”

—“Civil War in Greece,” Fourth International, February 1945

The social-democratic reformists in Greece—such as the Socialist Workers Party (SEK), which is affiliated to the British group of the same name, and Xekinima, the Greek affiliate of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI)—stand to the right of the KKE in their enthusiasm for the anti-Communist, anti-working-class Indignados. For example, Xekinima calls to “Extend the movement to all work places, workers’ neighbourhoods, and the youth” (socialistworld.net, 27 June). The notion of classless “democracy” that these groups promote has long been an anti-Communist code word that actually means support to bourgeois class rule. Thus, both the SEK and Xekinima supported capitalist restoration in the former Soviet Union in 1991-92 and hailed counterrevolutionary forces such as Polish Solidarność and Boris Yeltsin’s Russian “democrats.”

For Workers Revolution!

The Trotskyist Group of Greece fights to forge a Leninist-Trotskyist party capable of leading the working class to power. Above all, this means breaking the workers from nationalism and winning them to a revolutionary internationalist perspective. During Round One of the present crisis, the TGG issued a 28 April 2010 leaflet that opposed the widespread Greek nationalism as “poisonous to class consciousness.” Any effective struggle against the bosses’ attacks must begin with the understanding that the workers have no country, until they seize the one they’re in. Our comrades insisted: “What is needed is international workers solidarity across the EU against capital” (see “Down With PASOK Government’s ‘Stability Program’!” WV No. 959, 21 May 2010).

The Greek financial crisis has increased the seething national antagonisms in Europe, as seen in the diplomatic spats between France and Germany. German chancellor Angela Merkel, unpopular at home and with a shrinking majority in the Bundestag (parliament), has clashed with French officials and with the ECB over whether the bankers have to accept some losses. Following pressure from the IMF, Merkel agreed to a new bailout package while the French banks have offered to roll over Greek debts for 30 years. Whatever divisions there may be within bourgeois circles over how to deal with the catastrophic financial situation, in Germany, France, Britain and Europe as a whole, each government is determined to make the working masses pay for a crisis that is caused by the capitalist system itself.

The EU is an imperialist trade bloc, centered on a pact between the French and German capitalist rulers to ratchet up the exploitation of the working classes at home while trying to gain advantage over their imperialist rivals as well as the smaller European states. At the same time, the EU is an unstable formation that intensifies national antagonisms and fuels chauvinism.

We Marxists oppose the EU from the perspective of proletarian internationalism. The comrades of our German section, the Spartakist Workers Party, last year published an article titled “Solidarity with the Greek Workers! For Class Struggle Against the German Capitalists!” (Spartakist No. 183, May 2010), which noted:

“The chauvinist campaign against Greece is being set in motion so as to prevent the German working class from hitting on the idea of placing blame for the crisis at the feet of the capitalist system and its own rulers. The workers movement in Germany must mobilize in solidarity with Greek workers and all the other victims of the EU imperialists—after all, they’ll be confronted with similar attacks in the immediate future. The witchhunt against Greece also serves to split and weaken the multiethnic working class in Germany.”

Today, despite the relentless bleeding of the Greek working people, the country remains mired in deep recession. The bankrupt capitalist class manifestly does not have any crumbs that it is willing to throw to dampen workers’ anger. Short of a struggle for working-class power, the workers’ struggles will continue to be frustrated. The perspective for Greek workers must be that of common class struggle with their class brothers and sisters—from Turkey to Germany and elsewhere around the world.

As the TGG wrote in its leaflet: “What’s needed is a socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist state and replace it with a workers state that will lay the basis for building a socialist society. For that, you need to build a revolutionary workers party—a party like Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks—which will fight for a workers government. The TGG, Greek sympathizing section of the ICL, seeks to build such a party” (our emphasis).

* From The Voice Of NPR's Legal Reporter- The 2008-09 United States Supreme Court Session- 3 Key Decisions

Click on title to link to National Public Radio(NPR) Legal Reporter Nina Totenberg's take on some important legal decisions from the 2008-09 sessions. Let's make it easy-get rid of their capitalist 'injustice' legal system by getting of their whole system. Right?

*From The "SteveLendmanBlog"- Global Sweatshop Wage Slavery

Click on the headline to link to a "SteveLendmanBlog" entry, a report on the world wage scale, aptly termed sweatshop.

Markin comment:

Karl Marx said it long, too long ago- not a fair day's wage but abolish wages. He spent his life also saying, and more to the point for us- don't just analyze the world, do something about it. And you know what that means.

From The Pages Of Workers Vanguard-Democrats, Republicans: Parties of Capital-“Occupy Wall Street”:Capitalist Crisis Sparks Populist Protests-For Workers Revolution to Expropriate the Bourgeoisie!- A Critique Of The "Occupy" Movement

Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League (ICL) website.

Markin comment November 3, 2011:

We have won a tremendous victory in Oakland. No, no the big dent in the capitalist system that we are all looking for but the first step. And that first step is to put the words “general strike” in the political vocabulary in our fight for social justice. This is Liberation Day One. From now on we move from isolated tent encampments to the struggle in the streets against the monster, the streets where some of the battles will be decisively decided. Yes, our first day was messy, we took some casualties, we took some arrest, we made some mistakes but we now have a road forward, so forward. No Mas- The Class-War Lines Are Being Drawn- There Is A Need To Unite And Fight-We Take The Offensive-Liberation Day One-Defend The Oakland Commune-Drop All Charges Against The Oakland Protesters!


P.S. (November 4, 2011) I noted above some of the actions were messy in Oakland. This was so partly because it was seen as a celebration as much as demand-ladened, hard-nosed general strike started as a prelude to anything immediately bigger (like the question of taking state power and running things ourselves) but also because people are after all new at this way of expressing their latent power. 1946 in Oakland, and anywhere else, is a long political time to go without having a general strike in this country. Even the anti-war mass actions of the 1960s, which included school-centered general strikes, never got close to the notion of shutting down the capitalists where they live-places like the Port Of Oakland. There are some other more systematic problems that I, and others, are starting to note and I will address them as we go along. Things like bourgeois electoral politics rearing its ugly head, keeping the thing together, and becoming more organizationally cohesive without becoming bureaucratic. Later.
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Workers Vanguard No. 989
28 October 2011

Democrats, Republicans: Parties of Capital

“Occupy Wall Street”:Capitalist Crisis Sparks Populist Protests

For Workers Revolution to Expropriate the Bourgeoisie!

OCTOBER 25—An amorphous group of protesters, ranging from student youth and jobless workers to veteran liberal activists, has now been camping out in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park under the banner of “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) for over a month. With its rallies and marches in New York City drawing from a few hundred to over 10,000 people, OWS has tapped into widespread anger over corporate profit-gouging, mass unemployment and stark economic inequalities.

Similar occupations have spread to Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and many other cities and towns across the country, even as police have repeatedly attacked and arrested large numbers of protesters. On October 15, hundreds of thousands turned out across Europe and elsewhere for solidarity demonstrations with OWS, which itself has drawn inspiration from the “Indignados” (indignant ones) in Spain and Greece. Today, hundreds of riot-equipped cops wielding flash grenades, tear gas and billy clubs surrounded the “Occupy Oakland” tent city at Frank Ogawa Plaza in the early morning hours. With helicopters hovering overhead shining a spotlight on the scene, the cops moved in, ripping apart the encampment and arresting more than 75 people. Drop all charges against the protesters, from Oakland to NYC!

The OWS protests have touched a real nerve in large sections of the population three years into the deep, ongoing economic crisis. Homeless shelters are filled to capacity. College students and recent graduates are choking under a mountain of debt, facing an increasingly bleak future. Many workers who have managed to hold on to their jobs have been made to swallow lower wages, with their benefits shredded and their pensions looted by the bosses and bankers. With the trade unions taking it on the chin, many workers have greeted the OWS protests as an outlet for their own anger. Meanwhile, the bulk of the capitalist ruling class has made out like bandits, with the Obama White House, following George W. Bush, showering hundreds of billions in bailouts onto the banks and auto companies. Fed up with government lies, foreign wars, the ban on marijuana and worsening unemployment, one protester in Phoenix said, “All the world’s problems run downhill, and I’m at the bottom.”

Many young occupiers are participating in their first political protest, and most enthusiastically embrace its democratic pretensions and “grassroots” origins, seeing the potential to do something, anything about what’s happening to themselves and so many others. While the OWS organizers pride themselves on not having a clear political agenda, affiliation or even a fixed set of demands, they do have a program: liberal reform of capitalism’s financial sector. Issuing patriotic appeals to this country’s purported democratic values, they raise slogans like: “We are the 99 percent,” “Tax the rich,” and “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.” Like the populists of more than a century ago, their program amounts to seeking to elect a government that would defend the interests of the little man against the “robber barons” of Wall Street.

It is false that “99 percent” of the population share common interests. There is a fundamental class divide in society between the capitalists—the tiny group of families that own industry and the banks—and the working class, whose labor is the source of the capitalists’ profits. The working class is not just one more victim of capitalist austerity within the “99 percent.” It is the only force with the potential power and historic interest to sweep away the capitalist system and rebuild society based on a centralized, planned economy.

In our interventions in NYC and around the country, the Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Clubs are fighting to win militants to the Marxist understanding that the capitalist state cannot be reformed to serve the interests of workers and the poor, but must be shattered through proletarian revolution. Ending poverty, oppression and imperialist war requires workers rule internationally, opening the road to a world socialist society. We Trotskyists are dedicated to the task of building a revolutionary workers party to organize and lead that fight. Our model is the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, which led the workers to power in the October 1917 Russian Revolution.

Our Marxist outlook is diametrically opposed to the OWS program of liberal, bourgeois populism, which comes wrapped up in red, white and blue, as seen in the number of U.S. flags flying in Zuccotti Park. At a recent OWS General Assembly meeting, a Spartacist League spokesman drew opposition when he denounced the presence of U.S. imperialism’s banner, saying: “This is the flag that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki! This is the flag that bombed and attacked Vietnam! This is the flag that represents oppression to the people of the world!”

Whatever the claims of the OWS organizers to the contrary, the dominant politics of the protests point straight to support to the Democratic Party, which no less than the Republicans is a party of the capitalist exploiters. One Democratic official recently observed of the protests, “Sure, there’s been some crazy anarchy stuff, but overall, the Democrats like their message about Wall Street and accountability,” adding that “it overlaps with our own message.” In fact, with Obama channeling OWS grievances in his stump speeches, Democratic Party stalwarts like MoveOn.org are involved in organizing OWS actions for the purpose of bringing disenchanted voters back into the fold. Meanwhile, some Democratic Party strategists worry that signing on to the protests will alienate some of their financial backers. Key to mobilizing the workers in class struggle against the decaying capitalist order is the fight for their political independence from all bourgeois parties—Democrats, Republicans and Greens.

Protest organizers propound the “belief that the American dream will live again” (as one OWS Web site posting said) and argue that the government, which is the executive committee of the ruling class as a whole, should do something good like regulate banks. This is a dead end for youth looking for revolutionary answers. American democracy is the democracy of the capitalist class, whose rule is based on brutal exploitation of workers, murderous oppression of blacks and other minorities and imperialist marauding around the world. As the 1960s militant Malcolm X remarked, “I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy.... I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare” (“The Ballot or the Bullet,” 3 April 1964).

American Populism and the Democrats

Appealing to the common man against the financiers has a long history in American bourgeois politics. The 1892 platform of the Populist Party strongly indicted the “Gilded Age”: “The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few unprecedented in the history of mankind.” The Populists did not desire to abolish but to moderate the despotism of the “few,” to curtail the powers and reduce the privileges of the magnates of industry and finance. The movement reached the peak of its influence in 1896, when the Democrats ostensibly adopted its aims and Populist leader William Jennings Bryan won the Democratic presidential nomination, losing in November to Republican William McKinley.

The Populists were initially a multiracial movement, encompassing poor white and black farmers as well as small businessmen. But the heroic efforts of its organizers in the South were defeated when the local ruling class launched a wave of racist demagogy and violence. Many Populist leaders, such as Tom Watson in Georgia, turned against impoverished blacks and openly embraced racism. Many did this to carve out a niche in the Southern Democratic Party, which ruled over the Jim Crow system of entrenched racial segregation through police-state terror supplemented by the KKK’s extralegal violence. On the other hand, the Populist movement also included people who would become key figures in the labor and socialist movements.

The Populist movement emerged in the period when the U.S. was preparing to enter the world stage as an imperialist power, one of a handful of advanced capitalist countries whose competition for spheres of exploitation around the world would lead to the devastation of two world wars and countless colonial wars. As Lenin described, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism: the economy is dominated by monopolies, with the capital of the large banks combining with the capital of industrial corporations.

This crucial understanding is completely blurred by populist ideology. As we wrote in our 1997-98 series “Wall Street and the War Against Labor”:

“Central to the liberal populist outlook is a belief that the capitalist class is divided into two classes, so to speak: those directly involved in producing and marketing goods and services, and those whose incomes derive from financial dealings. The former are regarded as at least relatively progressive, while the latter are deemed outright reactionary....

“The common interests of all elements of the American capitalist class—whether Wall Street investment bankers, Midwestern manufacturers, Texas oilmen or California agribusinessmen—are qualitatively greater and more important than their differences. All want to maximize the exploitation of labor and to minimize the overhead costs of government social programs.”

— reprinted in the 2009 Spartacist pamphlet, Karl Marx Was Right: Capitalist Anarchy and the Immiseration of the Working Class

At the core of populist protest, yesterday and today, is the petty bourgeoisie, which is a heterogeneous and highly stratified social layer comprising, among others, students, professionals and small businessmen. Lacking social power and its own class perspective, the petty bourgeoisie is incapable of offering an alternative to capitalism. As the Trotskyist James Burnham wrote in the 1930s, during an earlier period of economic crisis and mass discontent, “The middle classes are seeking a way out of their impasse. But they have no possible way out of their own. And at last they must, in whole or in a division, face the ultimate choice: to line up behind one of the two basic classes and its program, to swing to the side of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat” (The People’s Front: The New Betrayal, 1937).

A case in point is Adbusters, the Canadian magazine that issued the original call for a Wall Street occupation. This “anti-corporate” outfit has received funds from the Tides Foundation—a clearinghouse for the Ford and Gates foundations. But Adbusters doesn’t just take money from fat cats; it also runs its own “grassroots capitalism”—the production of sneakers, which they hail as “ethical.” Ask the workers in Pakistan getting the pitiful local minimum wage as they produce these “no logo” kicks if it feels more humane to slave over hemp rather than nylon.

The capitalist rulers have unleashed their police thugs on the “occupy” protests, even though this movement does not hinder the functioning of the profit system. It is an altogether different matter when workers cut off the flow of profits through strikes and other labor actions. When auto workers occupied plants in Flint, Michigan, in 1936-37, winning recognition of the United Auto Workers, they were part of a militant wave of labor struggle that gave rise to the CIO industrial unions. Those struggles were pitched battles between the workers on one side and the cops, company thugs and capitalist courts and government on the other.

After decades of defeats for labor, most young activists view the working class as irrelevant to struggles for economic justice. Setting the stage for those defeats, the bureaucratic misleaders of the labor movement by and large abandoned the class-struggle methods that built the unions. In their role as the capitalists’ labor lieutenants, they tie workers to their class enemy by promoting the interests of U.S. imperialism and supporting the Democratic Party.

The occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol earlier this year ended in defeat precisely because the union leadership refused to use labor’s strike weapon, instead diverting protest into a (failed) campaign to recall Republican politicians. The result is that the state’s public sector unions have been decimated. Facing a great deal of disillusion with President Obama, who is a Wall Street Democrat, a good section of the trade-union officialdom has endorsed the OWS protests, seeing in them a means of re-energizing liberal support for Obama in the 2012 elections. The same purpose drives pseudo-socialists like the International Socialist Organization and Workers World Party, whose hailing of the OWS protests is but the latest chapter in their history of reformist pressure politics.

The Fraud of Bourgeois Democracy

No protest movement will convince the capitalist ruling class and its government to change their stripes and begin acting in the interests of the “people.” This country’s “democracy” was founded on the enslavement of black Africans, and to this day black oppression remains a fundamental underpinning of the American capitalist system. The “American way” has meant the genocidal extermination of Native Americans, waves of deportations of immigrants, bloody battles with striking workers and a long list of savage wars the world over, most recently the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and this year’s bombing of Libya.

As opposed to the OWS organizers who endlessly speak about restoring democracy, Marxists understand that there is no “pure” democracy. As Lenin observed: “Even in the most democratic bourgeois state the oppressed people at every step encounter the crying contradiction between the formal equality proclaimed by the ‘democracy’ of the capitalists and the thousands of real limitations and subterfuges which turn the proletarians into wage-slaves” (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918).

In a speech to the OWS crowd, liberal ideologue Naomi Klein hailed the 1999 anti-globalization protests for condemning corporations that were supposedly “becoming more powerful than governments,” saying that this was “damaging to our democracies.” The fact that capitalist governments the world over have been bailing out failing industries and banks during the current economic crisis exposes the fallacy that corporations have superceded the nation-state.

Klein sows illusions in a mythical golden age of “democratic” accountability. The reality is that for the capitalists, “democracy” serves as a veil to hide their class dictatorship, which they enforce through their state apparatus—armed forces, cops, courts and prisons. Cop brutality and the arrest of protesters are almost daily occurrences, giving a small taste of the terror daily meted out to ghetto and barrio residents. Yet the OWS organizers have continued to call on the “blue-collar police” to “join our conversation” and “speak of the crimes of your supervisors.”

Neither is the problem simply one of “police misconduct.” All cops, whatever their background and rank, are the attack dogs of the capitalist class. An SYC speaker stressed at a recent OWS General Assembly, “Cops are not workers. They beat strikers, kill black people and arrest protesters.”

Apostles of “Democratic” Counterrevolution

Liberal ideologue Naomi Klein and pseudo-Marxist academic Slavoj Zizek—leading lights at the OWS protests—like to rail against China as an affront to “democracy.” In this, they are providing ideological service to Wall Street.

The 1949 Chinese Revolution overthrew capitalist rule, liberating the country from imperialist subjugation and leading to massive advances for workers, peasants and deeply oppressed women. However, the peasant-based revolution was deformed from its inception, putting into power a bureaucratic nationalist regime akin to that of the Soviet Union after its degeneration under Stalin. Today, despite major inroads by both foreign and indigenous capitalists, the core elements of China’s economy remain collectivized. State ownership of the banking system has promoted massive economic growth in China, mainly through investment in infrastructure. This stands in stark contrast to the profit-driven world’s dominant capitalist economies, which have been mired in crisis. As Trotskyists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of China against imperialism and internal counterrevolution. At the same time, we fight for proletarian political revolution to replace the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy with a regime of workers and peasants soviets (councils) committed to the fight for world socialist revolution.

The current protests against Wall Street are deeply stamped with the “death of communism” ideology that has been propounded by the bourgeoisie and its ideologues since the restoration of capitalist rule in the former Soviet Union in 1991-92. Zizek, who sometimes spouts “revolutionary” verbiage when it serves his “bad boy” image in academia, lectured OWS protesters about how “Communism failed absolutely.” The core of his politics was seen when he hailed Obama’s 2008 election as “a sign of hope in our otherwise dark times.”

A measure of the bourgeois politics that define the OWS protests is the invitation offered by one organizer to former Polish president Lech Walesa to speak at Zuccotti Park. Walesa was the principal leader of Solidarność, which originated in 1980 out of workers strikes in the Polish deformed workers state but rapidly adopted an openly counterrevolutionary program for the restoration of capitalist rule. This was the only “union” beloved by the likes of right-wing U.S. president Ronald Reagan and his British counterpart, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. With the backing of the U.S. and European imperialists, the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracies and the Catholic church, Solidarność became the principal force for capitalist counterrevolution in Poland. We denounced Solidarność at the time as a company union for the CIA, bankers and the Vatican.

The government led by Walesa that took power in 1989 dismantled Poland’s collectivized economy and implemented an economic “shock treatment” that destroyed the bulk of the social gains Poles had enjoyed under the deformed workers state—from virtually free health care to cheap, subsidized housing to pensions one could live on. In line with Catholic “family values,” the right to a safe and free abortion was abolished. Inviting Walesa to speak at Zuccotti Park was to invite a Wall Street stooge to…“Occupy Wall Street”!

Today the basic premises of authentic Marxism must be motivated against the false and prevalent misidentification of the collapse of Stalinism with the failure of communism. Against those who purvey “death of communism” and illusions in capitalist “reform,” we revolutionary Marxists tell the truth: the only road to eliminating economic scarcity is the fight for new October Revolutions. We have no illusions that this is an easy road. But the destructive anarchy of the capitalist mode of production will, if not overthrown, plunge all humanity into barbarism. The key task is the forging of a Leninist vanguard party, the necessary instrument for bringing revolutionary consciousness to the proletariat.

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- The Tattered, Battered Generation of '68-With The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter Redux In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- The Tattered, Battered Generation of '68-With The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter Redux In Mind 

Introduction By Allan Jackson

[Not everything that came out of the 1960s was pure gold not by a long shot. Nor did everybody was got washed, clean or otherwise, get religion on the new world a-borning. Couldn’t go the distance and as we can see now as the baby-boomer population settles into twilight we can see that we are very far from having changed enough of the world for enough people to be the least bit complacent about the matter. A lot of it got ground down in person stuff, in not being able to stand alone a bit-to seek shelter from the storm-the clarion call from the Rolling Stones once the forces that were unleashed by the 1960s began to get frayed around the edges and the massive counter-attack on the cultural and about a million other fronts sent us reeling. It is a long, long way although maybe a very short time from Street Fighting Man to Gimme Shelter. Leave it to the Stones to bookend the damn thing for us. Allan Jackson]

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James Jordan usually a stable, steady guy who rolled with the punches, maybe rolled with then too much, was in a fix. James wasn’t sure what to make of the feelings long suppressed about his youth, about the place where he grew up, about his turbulent high school days in the early 1960s, about his problems with girls, about his problems with his mother, about his problems with “Uncle” all of which in the end drove him into what amounted to permanent exile, exile on Main Street he liked to say cribbing from a Stones’ album title. Those mumbo-jumbo broth of feelings that had suddenly simmered and then exploded into a great desire to work through after almost thirty years of statutory neglect what had happened back then.

A couple of years before James started simmering (his term) he had been searching for a couple of old neighbors from the old working class neighborhood where he grew up, Jack Jenkins and Johnny Silver, a couple of guys who he had hung around with, a couple of what they called then, maybe still do, corner boys, corner boys around Be-Bop Benny’s Diner over on Main Street in his growing up town of Clintondale  where the caught hell, caught mischief, and occasionally a stray girl not afraid of corner boys or looking down her nose at them. Both these guys had done their time in ‘Nam when they place was the hellhole for their generation, for him too, although he dodged the draft, did almost two years in Allentown down in Pennsylvania for his troubles when “Uncle” called him on the matter and that was that. That act alone caused big riffs between the three. and not just the three but a couple of other of the corner boys who were not called up, Rats McGee and Clipper Harris, and especially the acknowledged corner boy leader, the late Red Riley who had some bronze star and other ribbons to show for his valor. (Red later got caught up in some bad stuff, drugs James had heard which kind of figured, and was cut down in some unexplained shoot-out with the cops at a White Hen store down in some hick town in South Carolina where he allegedly was in the process of committing armed robbery on the place.)

The last James had heard, this about twenty years before, Jack and Johnny were looking for him to tell him that they finally figured out what he was trying to do by resisting the draft, just trying to keep himself in one piece like they were but just in a different way. But in that twenty years back time James had been in a deep freeze about anything that smacked of the old town, of the old places, of the old days. He had even denied to both his first and second wives, both since divorced, that he was from Clintondale claiming that he had been born in more upscale Hullsville near the water. They had both been both big on “upscale” having come from some new money and thus he did himself no harm by mentioning Hullsville, until they found out otherwise when his first wife, Anna, found out he was fooling around with the woman who would be his second wife, Joyce, when she started looking to find out who he really was. Joyce thereafter did the same thing when he took up with his present companion (no more marriages), Laura. So he was in deep denial, or something like that.         

Maybe if James had tried to locate Jack and Johnny back those twenty years he would have needed the services of some private detective agency, or something like that but the new technology, the new ways of gathering information in the age of the Internet had saved him much time and money. In the process he had, unintentionally, found some other people from his high school class who helped him in his search. (He had done a straightforward Google search for the Clintondale Class of 1962 and had come up first with a commercial high school site which led him to a site which had been established by a committee formed for the 50^th anniversary reunion of that class).

To show how much he had mellowed since those trying youthful days, or maybe showing the extent of his simmering (remember his term) in the process of looking for his former brethren he had gotten caught up in what he, innocently, thought was a simple effort to help out one particular classmate on the committee, a former class officer, Melinda Loring. He agreed to answer some questions for a project that the class, the Class of 1962, was doing in preparation for the next year’s 50^th class reunion. Apparently, from Melinda’s frenzied requests every time he answered one question thinking that was the end of it, this was to be an endless series of questions that seemed to him to start to make the run of the mill entries in that space by others in the class about kids, grandkids, vacations, travel and such who had seen fit to comment but who were not under Melinda’s sway seem like child’s play by comparison.

James finally having figured out Melinda’s mad plan told her (and obviously everybody else on the class website once she placed all his previous answers on-line for all the candid world to see) that he was placing the answer to the question below that she had asked him to write about on the site on his own unmediated by her, as he thought it might be of interest to those who, long of tooth now, had come from that time in question. Here is what one James Jordan formerly in permanent exile from his past on Main Street had to say to the following question:   

Question: Do you consider yourself a member of the Generation of ‘68?

"In that time, twas bliss to be alive, to be young was very heaven"- a line from a poem by William Wordsworth in praise of the early stages of the French Revolution.

“I mentioned in the Tell My Story section of my profile page that while we were all members of the Class of 1962 some of us were also members of the Generation of ’68. I guess to those of us who considered themselves part of that experience no further explanation is necessary. However, if you are in doubt then let me give my take on what such membership would have entailed.

This question had actually prompted by an observation made by my old friend, and our classmate, the legendary track and cross-country runner Bill Collier. Part of my motivation for joining in this work on this site (answering the ten thousand Melinda questions) was to find him (and Jack Jenkins and Johnny Silver my old estranged corner boys who I am still looking for, Melinda is helping and maybe you can too). I have found him and we have started to keep in touch again via the amazing technology that has produced this class site for the computer-able. At one of the bull sessions that we have had I asked him whether he had gone to any class reunions. I had not done so and therefore I was interested in his take on the subject.

Bill said that the only one that he had gone to was the 5^th anniversary reunion in 1969. Of course that year is the high water mark for the Generation of ’68. A key observation that Bill related, as least for my purpose here, was that when he went to that reunion and people came up to him to introduce themselves he had trouble identifying people, especially the guys, because of all the beards and long hair that were supreme tribal symbols at the time. So that is one, perhaps superficial, criterion for membership (for guys anyway).

Frankly, dear classmates, among the reasons that I turned my back on the old hometown right after high school was that it seemed like a ‘square’ (remember that tribal term from our youth meaning not hip) working class town that did not fit in with my evolving political and cultural, or rather counter-cultural, interests. Thus, Bill’s comments rather startled me. My assumption would have been that the ‘squares’ would have gotten a job after high school (or gone to college and then gotten a job), gotten married, had kids, bought a house and followed that trail, wherever it led. This new knowledge may tell me something different.

Is it possible that there were many other kindred spirits from our class who broke from that pattern, as least for a while? Who not only grew their hair long (male or female) or grew beards (male) but maybe dressed in the symbolic Army/ Navy store fashions of the day (male or female) or burned their bras (female)? Or did some dope (Yes, I know we are all taking the Bill Clinton defense on this one. Now) and made all the rock concerts? Or hitchhiked across the country? Or opposed the damn Vietnam War and got tear gassed for their efforts, supported the black liberation struggle and got tear gassed for their efforts, supported an end to the draft, ROTC on campus, etc. and got......well, you know the rest of the line. Or lived in a commune or any number of other things of like kind that were the signposts of the generation of ’68? In short, tried to 'storm heaven'. We lost that fight but these days I sense the storm clouds are gathering again for a new generation that has been beaten down by the hardships of living in this society without succor. Your stories, please (and that includes those ‘squares’ who do not now seem quite that way anymore).

James never did find out what happened to Jack and Johnny despite the best efforts of his and his classmates, especially Melinda who sensed how important it was to him (although she had told James that back in the day she would not go to Be-Bop Benny’s Diner because she was afraid and looked down her nose at corner boys). Seems the trail got cold when either one of them, or both, they were definitely travelling together, had serious problems adjusting to the real world after ‘Nam although the symptoms didn’t get bad until about a decade later around the time that James had heard they were looking for him. They, or one of them since the files were guarded by privacy laws, had been suffering, suffering badly from what a Veterans Administration counsellor at the hospital in Boston (the Jamaica Plain one not the one in West Roxbury) called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and had taken off to the west, maybe California where a lot of guys with troubles tried to get a fresh start but the trail got cold, went dead, on Laramie Street in Denver. James told the whole class on the site when things seemed hopeless about finding their whereabouts that he hoped Jack and Johnny  had found what they were looking for, looking for like the rest of that tattered, battered generation of’68 who tried to turn the world upside down and got knocked down for their troubles.          

An Encore Salute To The Untold Stories Of The Working- Class 1960s Radicals-“The Sam And Ralph Stories”- The 40th Anniversary Of The Fall Of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)(2015)-An American Ex-Soldier’s Story.

An Encore Salute To The Untold Stories Of The Working- Class 1960s Radicals-“The Sam And Ralph Stories”- The 40^th Anniversary Of The Fall Of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)(2015)-An American Ex-Soldier’s Story. 

Greg Green, site manager Introduction 

 [In early 2018, shortly after I had taken over the reins as site manager at this on-line publication I “saw the light” and bowed to the wisdom of a number of older writers who balked at my idea of reaching younger and newer audiences by having them review films like Marvel/DC Comics productions, write about various video games and books that would not offend a flea unlike the flaming red books previously reviewed here centered on the now aging 1960s baby-boomer demographic which had sustained the publication through good times and bad as a hard copy and then on-line proposition. One senior writer, who shall remain nameless in case some stray millennial sees this introduction and spreads some viral social media hate campaign his way, made the very telling observation that the younger set, his term, don’t read film reviews or hard copy books as a rule and those hardy Generation of ’68 partisans who still support this publication in the transition from the old Allan Jackson leadership to mine don’t give a fuck about comics, video games or graphic novels. I stand humbled.

Not only stand humbled though but in a valiant and seemingly successful attempt to stabilize this operation decided to give an encore presentation to some of the most important series produced and edited by Allan Jackson-without Allan. That too proved to be an error when I had Frank Jackman introduce the first few sections of The Roots Is The Toots Rock And Roll series which Allan had sweated his ass over to bring out over a couple of years. Writers, and not only senior writers who had supported Allan in the vote of no confidence fight challenging his leadership after he went overboard attempting to cash in on the hoopla over the commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the Summer of Love in 1967 but also my younger writer partisans, balked at this subterfuge. One called it a travesty.

Backing off after finding Allan, not an easy task since he had fled to the safer waters of the West looking for work and had been rumored to be any place from Salt Lake City to some mountainous last hippie commune in the hills of Northern California doing anything from pimping as press agent for Mitt Romney’s U.S. Senate campaign in Utah to running a whorehouse with Madame La Rue in Frisco or shacking up with drag queen Miss Judy Garland in that same city, we brought Allan back to do the introductions to the remaining sections. That we, me and the Editorial Board established after Allan’s demise and as a guard against one-person rule, had compromised on that gesture with the last of the series being the termination of Allan’s association with the publication except possibly as an occasional writer, a stringer really, when some nostalgia event needed some attention.      

That was the way things went and not too badly when we finished up the series in the early summer of 2018. But that is not the end of the Allan story. While looking through the on-line archives I noticed that Allan had also seriously edited another 1960s-related series, the Sam and Ralph Stories, a series centered on the trials and tribulations of two working-class guys who had been radicalized in different ways by the 1960s upheavals and have never lost the faith in what Allan called from Tennyson “seeking a newer world” would resurface in this wicked old world, somebody’s term.

I once again attempted to make the mistake of having someone else, in this case Josh Breslin, introduce the series (after my introduction here) but the Editorial Board bucked me even before I could set that idea in motion. I claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that Allan was probably out in Utah looking for some residual work for Mitt Romney now that he is the Republican candidate for U.S. Senator for Utah or running back to Madame La Rue, an old flame, and that high- end whorehouse or hanging with Miss Judy Garland at her successful drag queen tourist attraction cabaret. No such luck since he was up in Maine working on a book about his life as an editor. To be published in hard cop y by well-known Wheeler Press whenever he gets the proofs done. So hereafter former editor and site manager Allan will handle the introductions on this encore presentation of this excellent series. Greg Green]                   

Allan Jackson, editor The Sam And Ralph Stories -New General Introduction

[As my replacement Greg Green, whom I brought in from American Film Gazette originally to handle the day to day site operations while I concentrated on editing but who led a successful revolt against my regime based on the wishes of the younger writers to as they said at the time not be slaves to the 1960s upheavals a time which they only knew second or third hand, mentioned in his general introduction above some of the series I initiated were/are worth an encore presentation. The Sam and Ralph Stories are one such series and as we go along I will try to describe why this series was an important testament to an unheralded segment of the mass movements of the 1960s-the radicalized white working- class kids who certainly made up a significant component of the Vietnam War soldiery, some of who were like Sam and Ralph forever after suspicious of every governmental war cry. Who also somewhat belatedly got caught up in the second wave rock and roll revival which emerged under the general slogan of “drug, sex and rock and roll” which represented a vast sea change for attitudes about a lot of things that under ordinary circumstances would have had them merely replicating their parents’ ethos and fate.        

As I said I will describe that transformation in future segment introductions but today since it is my “dime” I want to once again clear up some misapprehensions about what has gone on over the past year or so in the interest of informing the readership, as Greg Green has staked his standing at this publication on doing to insure his own survival, about what goes on behind the scenes in the publishing business. This would not have been necessary after the big flap when Greg tried an “end around” something that I and every other editor worth her or his salt have tried as well and have somebody else, here commentator and my old high school friend Frank Jackman, act as general introducer of The Roots Is The Toots  rock and roll coming of age series that I believe is one of the best productions I have ever worked on. That got writers, young and old, with me or against me, led by Sam Lowell, another of my old high school friends, who had been the decisive vote against me in the “vote of no confidence” which ended my regime up in arms. I have forgiven Sam, and others, as I knew full well from the time I entered into the business that at best it was a cutthroat survival of the fittest racket. (Not only have I forgiven Sam but I am in his corner in his recent struggles with young up and coming by-line writer Sarah Lemoyne who is being guided through the shoals by another old high school friend Seth Garth as she attempts to make her way up the film critic food chain, probably the most vicious segment of the business where a thousand knives wait the unwary from so-called fellow reviewers.) The upshot of that controversy was that Greg had to back off and let me finish the introducing the series for which after all I had been present at the creation.               

That would have been the end of it but once we successfully, and thankfully by Greg who gave me not only kudos around the water cooler but a nice honorarium, concluded that series encore in the early summer of 2018 he found another way to cut me. Going through the archives of this publication to try to stabilize the readership after doing some “holy goof” stuff like having serious writers, young and old, reviewing films based on comic book characters, the latest in video games and graphic novels with no success forgetting the cardinal rule of the post-Internet world that the younger set get their information from other sources than old line academic- driven websites and don’t read beyond their techie tools Greg found another series, the one highlighted here, that intrigued him for an encore presentation. This is where Greg proved only too human since he once again attempted an “end around,” by having Josh Breslin, another old friend whom I meet in the Summer of Love, 1967 out in San Francisco, introduce the series citing my unavailability as the reason although paying attention to the fact that I had sweated bullets over that one as well.      

This time though the Editorial Board, now headed by Sam Lowell, intervened even before Greg could approach Josh for the assignment. This Ed Board was instituted after my departure to insure the operation would not descend, Sam’s word actually, into the so-called autocratic one-person rule that had been the norm under my regime. They told Greg to call me back in on the encore project or to forget it. I would not have put up with such a suggestion from an overriding Ed Board and would have willingly bowed out if anybody had tried to undermine me that way. I can understand fully Greg’s desire to cast me to the deeps, have done with me as in my time I did as well knowing others in the food chain would see this as their opportunity to move up.  

That part I had no problem with, told Greg exactly that. What bothered me was the continuing “urban legend” about what I had done, where I had gone after that decisive vote of no confidence. Greg continued, may continue today, to fuel the rumors that not only after my initial demise but after finishing up the Roots Is The Toots series I had gone back out West to Utah of all places to work for the Mormons, or to Frisco to hook up with my old flame Madame La Rue running that high-end whorehouse I had staked her to in the old days, or was running around with another old high school pal, Miss Judy Garland, aka Timmy Riley the high priestess of the drag queen set out in that same town whom I also helped stake to  his high-end tourist attraction cabaret. All nonsense, I was working on my memoir up in Maine, up in Olde Saco where Josh grew up and which I fell in love with when he first showed me his hometown and its ocean views.          

If the reader can bear the weight of this final reckoning let me clear the air on all three subjects on the so-called Western trail. Before that though I admit, admit freely that despite all the money I have made, editing, doing a million pieces under various aliases and monikers, ballooning up 3000 word articles to 10,000 and having the publishers fully pay despite the need for editing for the latter in the days before the Guild when you worked by the word, accepting articles which I clearly knew were just ripped of the AP feed and sending them along as gold I had no dough, none when I was dethroned. Reason, perfectly sane reason, although maybe not, three ex-wives with alimony blues and a parcel of kids, a brood if you like who were in thrall to the college tuition vultures.

Tapped out in the East for a lot of reasons I did head west the first time looking for work. Landed in Utah when I ran out of dough, and did, DID, try to get a job on the Salt Lake Star and would have had it too except two things somebody there, some friend of Mitt Romney, heard I was looking for work and nixed the whole thing once they read the articles I had written mocking Mitt and his white underwear world as Massachusetts governor and 2012 presidential candidate. So it was with bitter irony when I heard that Greg had retailed the preposterous idea that I would now seek a job shilling for dear white undie Mitt as press agent in his run for the open Utah United States Senate seat. Here is where everybody should gasp though at the whole Utah fantasy-these Mormons stick close together, probably ingrained in them from Joseph Smith days, and don’t hire goddam atheists and radicals, don’t hire outside the religion if they can help it. You probably had to have slept with one of Joseph Smith’s or Brigham Young’s wives to even get one foot in the door. Done.              

The helping Madame La Rue, real name of no interest or need to mention,  running her high-end exclusive whorehouse out in Half Moon Bay at least had some credence since I had staked her to some dough to get started after the downfall of the 1960s sent her back to her real world, the world of a high class hooker who was slumming with “hippies” for a while when it looked like our dreams were going to be deterred in in the ebbtide. We had been hot and heavy lovers, although never married except on some hazed drug-fogged concert night when I think Josh Breslin “married” us and sent us on a “honeymoon” with a fistful of cocaine. Down on dough I hit her up for some which she gave gladly, said it was interest on the “loan: she never repaid and let me stay at her place for a while until I had to move on. Done

The whole drag queen idea tells me that whoever started this damn lie knew nothing about my growing up days and had either seen me in The Totem, Timmy Riley’s aka Miss Judy Garland’s drinking with a few drag queen who worked and drew the wrong conclusions or was out to slander and libel me for some other nefarious reason. See Miss Judy Garland is the very successful drag queen and gay man Timmy Riley from the old neighborhood who fled to Frisco when he could no longer hide his sexual identity and preferences. To our great shock since Timmy had been the out-front gay-basher of our crowd, our working-class corner boy gay-bashing crowd. I had lent, after getting religion rather late on the LGBTQ question, Timmy the money to buy his first drag queen cabaret on Bay Street and Timmy was kind enough to stake me to some money and a roof before I decided I had to head back East. Done.

But enough about me.  This is about two other working- class guys, Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris, met along life’s road one from Carver about fifty miles away from where Seth, Sam, Timmy and a bunch of other guys grew up and learned the “normal” working-class ethos-and broke, tentatively at times, from that same straitjacket and from Troy, New York. Funny Troy, Carver, North Adamsville, and Josh’s old mill town Olde Saco all down-in-the-mouth working class towns still produced in exceptional times a clot of guys who got caught up in the turmoil of their times-and lived to tell the tale. I am proud to introduce this encore presentation and will have plenty more to say about Sam and Ralph in future segments.]

Allan Jackson Introduction To Sam and Ralph-The Wild Boys of Cambridge When Cambridge Was Jammed Full Of Wild Girls And Boys    

[Some guys from the old days, from the old growing up poor in the working-class Acre section of North Adamsville, I still have contact with over fifty years later. Guys like Seth Garth who is now in a “battle” along with his new protégé Sarah Lemoyne who looks for all the world to be an up and coming contributor to this publication against his, and my, old time friend Sam Lowell who promised me he would retire, especially after he provided the key last and decisive vote when the younger writers rose up against my editorship and forced me to retire. Forced me West seeking another job to keep myself solvent causing all kinds of rumors and fairy tales to enter the world which only muddied up the already murky waters. Other guys like beautiful Si Lannon and generous benefactor to this publication Jack Callahan also come to mind. Of course the elephant in the room has always been, and probably always will be, one Peter Paul Markin, who taught us many things before his sadly untimely demise caused by his own hubris many years ago. I honored his memory for years using his name as my moniker in various publishing efforts and will detail the genesis of that decision in the memoir of my time in the publishing industry which I am working on and expect to complete by next year.     

I am proud to have had the chance to keep so many friendships from the old neighborhoods days as I am a man who puts a great deal into things like loyalty and camaraderie. Of course those relationships do not exhaust the number of long friendships and close working relationships. Josh Breslin met in the Summer of Love, 1967, Zack James, youngest brother of my closest friend in high Alex, and Lance Lawrence come readily to mind. Then there are guys, I am only talking guys today as I will deal with gals in an up-coming introductory segment, like fellow Vietnam veteran Ralph Morris from over in Troy, New York whom I met I believe down in Washington, D.C. in 1971 a few weeks before we, Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW), did our part to try to shut down the government to shut down the war on May Day -and failed. Guys like his friend Sam Eaton from Carver about fifty miles from North Adamsville,  not a veteran since he was exempted from the draft as the sole support of his mother and four sisters after his father passed away suddenly of a heart attack, whom Ralph “met” after both had been arrested in those May Day actions in “jail” at the RFK football stadium. They, Sam and Ralph, and I have stayed in contact over the years and have worked on many political projects mostly against war together.    

That brings me to the idea behind having Sam and Ralph as the central characters in a series I helped plan around the story- and fate- of some working- class radicals who for the most part had kept the faith, had not retreated to self, had not given up the mist of change we were struggling for in those halcyon and heady 1960s upheaval days. At the cost of over-generalization the thing that united the North Adamsville remnant, including me, guys like Josh Breslin and guys like Sam and Ralph was our working-class backgrounds. While the road to new understandings of the ways of the world were different we all arrived at some similar conclusions and since then have seen no reason to dramatically change them if in the aging process we are less able to stir the old energies. Have been ready to “pass the torch” for a while. The stories of the old North Adamsville corner boys had by 2012 or so been done to death as had the stories centered on other working-class guys like Josh Breslin from places like Olde Saco up in Maine and so the natural place to turn was the long-time relationship between Sam and Ralph. Things seemed right in the universe doing the series then-and now with this encore.]          

Allan Jackson’s Encore Introduction to “An Ex-American Soldier’s Story”

Some generations are driven by events that have world historic importance-Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941 the day of infamy according to President Franklin Roosevelt, maybe not so to others but that is for the historian to decipher and 9/11 2001 come readily to mind. For the Generation of ’68 Peter Paul Markin’s designation for the generation, or the best part of it that rose up to try and slay the dragon of the Vietnam War that fateful April 30, 1975 when with a puff of air the North Vietnamese Regulars and the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front waltzed int to Saigon, now rightfully Ho Chi Minh City after the great national liberation leader, after a 10,000 day world, the bloodiest and most bloodthirsty part the American invasion from say 1964 to that well-known photograph of the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy by helicopter of the last remnant of the America hubris in the area.

Not everybody, soldier or civilian saw, sees that day as cause for some serious contemplation, reflection about the borders of hubris. Some soldiers, some fellow soldiers, and this is what I want to make sure I get clear in this introduction did their duty as they saw it, came home and as best as they could  got back to the real world, that was probably a majority of the roughly two million military personnel who served in that conflict. Another segment, smaller and more troubled never did get back to the “real” world. Drugs, physical maladies, mental problems, and just getting back the nine to five world they had expected to inhabit proved too much. Guys like the guys who famously became the “brothers under the bridge” that I wrote about for the East Bay Other after I had come back from Vietnam and had had my own troubles getting back into that real world. The epitome, the personal known to me epitome of that soldier though was Peter Paul Markin, whose moniker I used for a number of years to honor my fallen hometown neighborhood friend and brother who taught me, us many things before he went under and who had done okay for a while but just couldn’t get rid of the demons in his head, what Seth Garth, using a line from a Patty Griffin song “put out the fire in your head” used to say.        

Then there were the Ralph Morris-types who came back ready to smite dragons, and is still ready to do so, ready to take on all comers who want to get this country into yet another war and who as a sidebar has fought under various banners for social justice ever since. I met Ralph down in Washington in the spring of 1971 when he, I, was red hot to express his outrage at the murderous actions of his government against people with which he had no quarrel.  We were linked up with other ex G.I.s in various actions as veterans, as guys who knew and saw things up close and personal and ready to do something, maybe give up our lives if it came to that to stop the fucking war (that is still the only way I can describe it with the “fucking” in front).  Ralph knew the war was fucked, knew it in his bones but it took the actual experience of going to sort things out. Sure he had his problems coming home but he stayed the course. A guy like Ralph would not have been as happy, if that is the way to put such a thing, as the North Vietnamese Regulars and the South Vietnamese Liberation fighters to have the damn war finished in 1975 but every year he, we reflect on the day and are proud of our small part in helping try to stop the thing from going on forever.]        

Ralph Morris comment:

Yeah, sure I served in Vietnam, served Regular Army, after I kind of panicked when I got my draft notice from my “friends and neighbors” at the Troy, New York draft board in late 1966 and enlisted expecting, based on a foolish belief in the recruiting sergeant, that I would be placed in an electronics MOS by doing so. I can still remember my G.I. dog-tag number RA038341396, that RA in front of the numbers not like a lot of guys, guys who I wished I had been more like who had “U.S.” before their dog-tag numbers signifying that they were draftees, maybe kicking and screaming draftees like a guy I ran into in the G.I. anti-war movement in 1971, Fritz Jasper, who was a big guy in Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and who had served a year in an Army stockade before they let him out for refusing to go to ‘Nam.

But what did I know then. What did I know like Fritz who was one of those kicking and screaming draftees out of New York City, Brooklyn I think, about getting with Quaker-driven draft counsellors or military resistance counsellors once he knew after about three day in the Army in 1969 that he was in the wrong place and every instinct told him that year that he was going to ‘Nam if he didn’t do something quick to get the military’s attention. So he did first by refusing his orders and then by refusing to do a damn Army thing. They put his ass in some damn stockade down South   and were going to throw away the key before some people he was in contact with, some Quaker people or people who worked with Quakers got him some legal help and they went to federal court to spring him. Remind to tell you some more of his story sometime because it is kind of interesting when people ask me about military resisters then.

That’s the big case I tell them about because I know it cold although I know there were plenty of others, plenty that got some coverage. Maybe better I will ask Fritz to tell his story sometime because, guess what, that resistance/stockade experience made a peacenik “lifer” out of him. He is working with Veterans For Peace down in the city just like I am in Troy (really the whole North Country area and in Boston when I visit Sam Eaton who has a big part in this story and the VFP chapter there needs warm bodies for an action.) 

And what if I did know how to make those anti-war connections. What good would it have done me since before ‘Nam I was enthrall to some pretty red, white and blue notions, some ideas it has taken my whole freaking dead ass life to break from, and I still breaking from. All I know is this, bloody, forlorn god forsaken Vietnam changed my life, probably has been the number one experience that has kept me going trying to light the lamp of peace. If I hadn’t I today probably would be like a lot of guys and gals who were waving South Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) flags like I did later on when I got “religion” on the war issue. Waved that flag at the end when the “other side” came down Highway One in Vietnam in the Spring of 1975 like bats out of hell and resolved the whole thing in a couple of months, stuff that had taken thirty years of their blood and over ten of ours to conclude not to count the whole torn apart countries left in the wake. Those others have now long past made their peace with the American empire, made it quick and easy when the deal when down and the American government pulled the hammer down and they flinched when it counted a whole bunch of times since, times like Iraq 2003. Yeah, some people learn the hard way but they learn the lesson well. 

Yeah, what good would all of that knowledge done me then. See my old man, Ralph, Senior, ran a high precision electrical shop doing a lot of work for the big employer in the area, General Electric, a company which had many big contracts with the Department of Defense in those years and I worked for him a couple of years in high school and after I got out so I expected that I could do something useful for the Army with that skill. But see beside that little “error” in believing word one from that damn recruiting sergeant, First Sergeant Riley, a good old boy, a “lifer” ( a very different “lifer” from Fritz Jasper) from Arkansas who had already done two tours in ‘Nam and had blessed the Army each and every day for giving him shoes and three squares a day if I recall, the United States of America under the benevolent guidance of some damn Texan, Lyndon Johnson, LBJ, to be exact in 1967, 1968 was looking for nothing but “grunts” to comb the bushes and jungles of Vietnam. Looking for grunts to flush out every commie from every hut in every hamlet in that benighted country no matter how long it took and how much “collateral damage” ensued so I was trained as an 11B (Bravo), an infantryman, a “grunt,” “cannon fodder” although I didn’t pick up that last term until later, later when I got discharged, when people explained to me in concrete terms what I was, all that I was, to the people who ran the damn war.

That discharge business is important because unlike a couple of guys I heard about who were raising hell about the war, in Vietnam if you can believe that, yeah, raising holy hell, and guys I ran into later at Fort Dix who had joined the G.I. anti-war resistance after I came back to the “real world” I didn’t raise any hell while I was in the Army. (And knew nothing about Fritz’s case even though as he showed me a copy later it was publicized at Fort Dix via a G.I. newspaper, The Morning Report, run out of one of the G.I. coffeehouses that were sprouting up around military bases when the civilian anti-war movement, the radical students mainly, realized they had to get to the grunts if they were going to end the war on their terms not that of the American government.) Didn’t see the percentage in it, didn’t want to wind up in Long Binh Jail, the LBJ as everybody in-country called it, or worse, some long forgotten stretch out in the prairies of Kansas at Fort Leavenworth, the place where they now have the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Private Chelsea Manning doing a hard thirty-five year stretch just for telling the truth about American military atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. [Since has had her sentence commuted by former President Obama before he left office in 2017-AJ] Although this piece is about my own military service and what I did or didn’t about what was going on in Vietnam, mainly didn’t, except a few words to buddies over beers at the PX or over a joint in the barracks or boondocks the Manning case grabbed me, grabbed me hard and I took her case to heart. [For those not in the know or who don’t recognize the case by that name before her conviction and sentencing in August 2013 she was known a Bradley Manning before coming out as “tran” which makes her being at the all-male prisoner Leavenworth that much  harder.] I went to many rallies in her support, raised money for the legal defense, circulated every kind of petition to get her free, still do, and went down to Fort Meade where she was tried by court-martial a few times. Yeah, call it guilt maybe, call it pay back, but I was supporting a fellow soldier in her hour of need, something I didn’t do back then. But enough of this.  

In ‘Nam whatever I did or didn’t do is where I got the “fire in the belly” to see that the whole war was off balance, didn’t make the kind of sense right there in-country that it did in faraway propaganda-drenched America, fighting commies, fighting dominos, picking up on my father’s “my country, right or wrong” mentality or my corner boys looking for some cheapjack glory learned from watching too many Green Beret-type movies. The reality: picking off random peasants who got in the crossfire because we were too scared to go forward if we thought VC was in the area or at night when we knew, not at first but by 1968, that “the night belonged to Charlie” as we called him, first as a term of disrespect but finally after Tet 1968 as an enemy worthy of respect whatever the NCOs and officers said. Jesus. Yeah, that’s the patriotic hogwash what I had to fight against, get rid of from my mind, and frankly it has been a lifelong struggle on some things. (But get this who would have thought that a sixty-something purple heart ex-soldier would be out on the hustings to get a transgender woman, Chelsea Manning, out of hard rock prison back then, now even.)       

But back in Vietnam days, in-country not affected too much by reports of draft resistance in 1967 although I had had heard on Armed Forces Radio the bit about the student radical trying to “levitate” the Pentagon (and thought it a weird thing to do with gunfire all around me) and like I said a little about guys bucking against the military system, mostly blacks who I got along with personally but there was a lot of black nationalism in the air and we didn’t’ mix that much in 1967 (1968 yes after the Tet offensive showed what the hell we were up against we made an “armed truce” to survive) but that was kind of so much air then. I had been progressively getting more and more fed up with the war, with the killing, with what it was doing to me, what it was doing to my buddies, and what the United States of America was turning me and them into, nothing but animals. 

I even extended my tour from the usual year (thirteen months really when you figure in the 30 days of R&R) to eighteen months so if I didn’t get killed I could get out a few months earlier from my three year enlistment (and get as a bonus stationed at Fort Dix at the end of my enlistment on the East Coast only a couple of hundred miles from home). Well I might have had a death wish or something extending my tour of duty but I made it out alive with only a small purple heart wound but when I got out in late 1969 I joined, not right away but soon, that VVAW that I talked about earlier. Yeah wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the main anti-war veterans group at the time. Such a move by me and thousands of other soldiers who had served in ‘Nam is a real indication even today of how unpopular that war was when the guys who had fought the damn thing arms in hand, mostly guys then, rose up against the slaughter. I wound up taking part in a lot of VVAW actions around Albany and New York City mainly.

Nah, I thought I was going to but no I am not going to tell war stories here about what happened in Vietnam, the “dog soldier” stories because you can read about them, or see a movie like The Deer Hunter or Apocalypse Now, films like that to get a flavor of the heat and humiliation of battle or books by guys who did want to tell “dog soldier stories” like Mike Caputo, and Phil Jackson. What I want to talk about in this the 40^th anniversary of the fall of Saigon is the “afterwards” part, the VVAW part, the May Day 1971 part, the “red collectives” in Cambridge part with my old friend and political activist associate Sam Eaton, and the part where I, not without some conflict came to cheer on the DNV/NLF offensive in the Spring of 1975 which led to the fall of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, and left ashes in American governmental mouths (and mine too but for different reasons). 

I didn’t really want to tell any stories, didn’t want to think about Vietnam at all although that experience one way or another touches my soul every damn day I live. I had in fact for some years later denied to strangers that I had even served in Vietnam including one girl, Joyell who I ran into at an anti-war rally on Cambridge Common one time when I went there to visit Sam where she was waving a NLF flag which made me wince at first but she was a beauty and very smart too so I took a run at her and she at me, yeah, Joyell, a radical girl from Cambridge when that was a cool thing to be in say 1972, 1973,  whom I dated for a year and had told that I had been a draft resister and when she found out I was a Vietnam vet, even with the VVAW imprimatur, had left me flat.

But see Sam, Sam Eaton, and I had been talking one night a few months back after having a few high-shelf whiskeys at our favorite watering hole, Jack Higgins’ Grille down just outside the Financial District near Quincy Market when I had come to Boston to see him on one of our periodic visits with each other and he said I “owed it to the movement,” owed it to “the generations that came after” to paraphrase a poem by Bertolt Brecht to tell how an average patriotic guy from a sternly patriotic Cold War “my country, right or wrong” family, neighborhood, city got “religion” on the issues of war and peace, and had kept the faith ever since despite having to swallow some sad truths like that I had fought on the wrong side of history in that fight, that whatever happened later the fight was for the Vietnamese people to figure out without the mightiest military power in the known world and in known history raining hell and damnation on those benighted people.

See Sam, a guy who didn’t go to war, didn’t have to go to war, because his draft board (his “friends and neighbors”) in Carver, Massachusetts had exempted him on the very reasonable grounds that he was then the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after his drunken sot of a father (Sam’s term) passed away of a massive heart attack in 1965 is very keen on his history these days, has been since the days when we got involved in those “red collective” study groups back after the May Day 1971 fiasco. He had read that the United for Justice and Peace (UJP) was hosting a series of events commemorating that fall of Saigon by taking a retrospective look at what the American anti-war movement in general did to aid that decisive event and how the various civilian and military resistance movements, you know stuff like Fritz Jasper did by refusing to go to Vietnam when under military orders to do so, did as well. So he dragged me to that series and then bugged me for a couple of months afterward to write something like a cautionary tale from a guy like me who was not a draft or military resister but who nevertheless got “religion” on the war issue and unlike guys from VVAW like the current Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry [2015]didn’t forget the lessons when the “main chance” came along and he, Kerry, abandoned every decent instinct he ever had.     

So here goes. But like I said I don’t want to, maybe can’t tell war stories except maybe a little to show a point but no blood and gore stuff because all you need to know is 58,000 plus names on black marble down in Washington, D.C., hundreds of thousands injured with small physical wounds like mine or grievous ones like Johnny Jann from my platoon who lost both legs, mostly uncounted thousand with PTSD, a mass of unnumbered suicides, tons of guys who never made it back to the “real” world and wound up homeless living like Bruce Springsteen said like “brothers under the bridge,” Vietnam bombed back practically to the Stone Age maybe before if the Air Force generals had been totally unleashed, countless hamlets, villages, towns blown to smithereens, millions of luckless innocent people who didn’t bother a soul killed, almost as many “enemy” soldiers and “friendlies” too. Yeah, that is all you need to know.          

I remember commenting to Sam during the course of our conversations on the fact that no way, no way in hell, if it had not been for the explosive events of the 1960s, of the war and later a bunch of social issue questions, mainly third world liberation struggles internationally and the black liberation question at home we would not even be having the conversations we were having, not the two of us anyway, talking stuff about the virtues of the “enemy” which would have been treason talk if not legally then emotionally (both of also as we rattled on chuckling a little at using the old time terms, especially the use of “struggle” and “question,” for example the  black, gay, woman questions since lately we have noticed that younger activists no longer spoke in such terms but used more ephemeral “white privilege,” “patriarchy,”  “gender” terms reflecting the identity politics that have been in fashion for a long time, since the ebb flow of the 1960s). 

I (and Sam too) had imbibed all the standard identifiable working-class prejudices against reds, some of those prejudices more widespread than among the working class among the general population of the times, you know, like the big red scare Cold War “your mommy is a commie, turn her in,” “the Russians are coming get under the desk and hold onto your head,” anybody to the left of Grandpa Ike, maybe even him, nothing but communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy; against blacks (I had stood there right next to my father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with my corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people, sometimes to their faces. Sam’s father was not much better, a southerner from hillbilly country down in Appalachia who had been stationed in Hingham no too far from Carver at the end of World War II and stayed, who never could until his dying breathe call blacks anything but the “n” word); against gays and lesbians (me and my boys mercilessly fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and I went to Saratoga Springs where those “creeps” spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other and Sam likewise down in Provincetown with his boys, he helping, beating up some poor guy in a back alley after one of his boys had made a fake pass at the guy, Jesus; against uppity women, servile, domestic child-producing women like our good old mothers and sisters and wanna-bes were okay as were “easy” girls ready to toot our whistles, attitudes which we had only gotten beaten out of us when we ran into our respective future wives (and me with Joyell too but don’t mention that to my wife Laura since all these years later she see red when I mention her name in any content) who had both been influenced by the women’s liberation movement although truth to tell they were not especially political, but rather artistic types.  Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar, were written off in any case as fodder for cowboys and soldiers in blue. But mainly we had been red, white and blue American patriotic guys who really did have ice picks in our eyes for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around my way, my Troy hometown way).      

See I, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war movement for personal reasons at first which had to do a lot with ending the war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking world” (Sam’s term). Like I said my story was a little bit amazing that way, since I had served in the military, served in the Army, in Vietnam. But like I already told you in 1967, 1968 what Uncle needed, desperately needed as General Westmoreland called for more troops, was more “grunts” to flush out Charlie and so I wound up with a unit in the Central Highlands, up in the bush trying to kill every commie I could get my hands on just like the General wanted.  

After I got out I worked in my father’s high precision electrical shop for a while to make some dough and head west, head somewhere not stinking nowhere Troy, not the woe begotten North Country. One day in 1970 I was taking a high compression motor to Albany to a customer and had parked the shop truck on Van Dyke Street near Russell Sage College. Coming down the line, silent, silent as the grave I thought later, were a ragtag bunch of guys in mismatched (on purpose I found out later) military uniforms carrying individual signs but with a big banner in front calling for “Immediate Withdrawal From Vietnam” in big black letters and signing the banner with the name of the organization in red-Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). That was all, and all that was needed. Nobody on those still patriotic, mostly government worker, streets called them commies or anything like that but you could tell some guys in white collars and ties who had never come close to a gun, except maybe to kill animals or something defenseless really wanted to. One veteran as they came nearer to me shouted out for any veterans to join them, to tell the world what they knew first-hand about what was going on in Vietnam. Yeah, that shout-out was all I needed, all I needed to join my “band of brothers.”                               

Let me tell you thought how Sam and I met in Washington on May Day 1971 because that will explain a lot of why I am writing this thing that almost half a century later still hurts my brain. I remember that I had first noticed that Sam was wearing a VVAW supporter button when I saw him on the football field at RFK Stadium and I had asked if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little sheepishly, explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was the sole support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away of a massive heart attack in 1965. (He had also said he had gone to work in Mister Snyder’s print shop where he had learned enough about the printing business to later open his own shop which he kept afloat somehow during the late 1960s with his high school friend Jack Callahan’s help and which became Sam’s career after he settled down when the 1960s ebbed and people started heading back to “normal” in the mid-1970s)

Oh yeah the reason we were in RFK was not for a football game, the NFL Washington Redskins did not play that game in May, but because we both respectively had been arrested along with thousands of others in a massive civil disobedience action that I will tell more about in a minute. Sam told me, since we had plenty of time to talk, the reason that he had joined the anti-war movement after years of relative indifference since he was not involved in the war effort had been that his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in the Central Highlands and that had made him question what was going on. Jeff, who like us had been as red, white and blue as any guy, had written Sam when he was in Vietnam that he thought that the place, the situation that he found himself in was more than he bargained for, and that if he didn’t make it back for Sam to tell people, everybody he could what was really going on. Then with just a few months to go Jeff was blown away near some village that Sam could not spell or pronounce correctly even all these many years later. Jeff had not only been Sam’s best friend but he said was as straight a guy as you could meet, and had gotten Sam out of more than a few scrapes, a few illegal scrapes that could have got him before some judge. So that was how Sam got “religion,” not through some intellectual or rational argument about the theories of war, just wars or “your country right or wrong” wars, but because his friend had been blown away, blown away for no good reason as far as that went.  

May Day 1971 was a watershed for both of us, both of us before May Day having sensed that more drastic action was necessary to “tame the American imperial monster” (Sam’s term picked up from The Real Paper, an alternative newspaper he had picked up at a street newsstand in Cambridge) and had come away from that experience, that disaster, with the understanding that even to end the war would take much more, and many more people, than they had previously expected. I, in particular, had been carried away with the notion that what I and my fellow veterans who were going to try to symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as veterans would cause the government pause, would make them think twice about any retaliation to guys who had served and seen it all. I got “smart” on that one fast when the National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it that day, treated us like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968, treated us like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and treated us just like anybody else who raised their voices against governmental policy in the streets.

I told Sam while were in captivity that I had been working in my father’s shop for a while but our relationship was icy (and would be for a long time after that although in 1991 when Ralph, Senior retired I took over the business). I would take part in whatever actions I could around the area (and down in New York City a couple of times when they called for re-enforcements to make a big splash).

I had, like I said, joined with a group of VVAW-ers and supporters for that action down in Washington, D.C. See the idea, which would sound kind of strange today in a different time when there is very little overt anti-war activity against the current crop of endless wars but also shows how desperate we were to end that damn war, was to on May Day shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. Our group’s task, as part of the bigger scheme, since we were to form up as a total veterans and supporters contingent was to symbolically shut down the Pentagon. Wild right, but see the figuring was that they, the government, would not dare to arrest vets and we figured (“we” meaning all those who planned the events and went along with the plan) the government would not treat it like the big civilian action at the Pentagon in 1967 which Norman Mailer won a literary prize writing a book about, Armies of the Night. Silly us. 

Sam and I after the fall-out from May Day were thus searching for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those few days of detention in D.C. that we had jointly suffered not only started what would be a lifelong personal friendship but an on-going conversation between us over the next several years about how to bring about the greater social change we sensed was needed before one could even think about stopping wars and stuff like that. (The story, in short, of how we got out of RFK after a few days was pretty straight forward. Since law enforcement was so strapped that week somebody had noticed and passed the word along that some of the side exits in the stadium were not guarded and so we had just walked out. And got out of town fast, very fast, hitchhiking back north to Carver first, and me later going back to Troy).

Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red collectives” that were sprouting up then peopled by others who had the same kind of questions. Collectives  which we would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few years before both of us sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s had ebbed. 

Old time high school thoughts even with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back of his brain crossed my mind when I first thought of Marx, Lenin (I, we, were not familiar with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes. Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told me one night after a class and we were tossing down a few at Jack’s in Cambridge before heading home to the commune where Sam was staying. That was the summer of 1972, the year I broke from my father’s business and spent the summer in Cambridge, the summer I first met Joyell, her waving in the breeze NLF flag and her jet black hair and pale blue eyes. 

I had gone out of my way to note in a blog entry for Fritz Jasper’s New York VFP chapter that before I got “religion” on the anti-war and later social justice issues I had held as many anti-communist prejudices as anybody else in Troy, New York, not excluding my rabidly right-wing father who never really believed until his dying days in 2005 that the United States had lost the war in Vietnam. I had realized that all the propaganda he had been fed was like the wind and my realization of that had made me a very angry young man from the time I got out of the Army onward. I tried to talk to my father about it but Ralph, Senior was hung up by a combination “good war, World War II, his war where America saved international civilization from the Nazis and Nips (my father’s term since he fought in the Pacific with the Marines) and “my country, right or wrong.” All Ralph, Senior really wanted me to do ever was to get back to the shop and help him fill those goddam GE defense contract orders. And like I said I did it, for a while.

I had also in that blog entry expressed my feelings of trepidation when after a lot of things went south on the social justice front with damn little to show for all the arrests, deaths, and social cataclysm when me and Sam had gotten into a latter study group in Cambridge run by a “Red October Collective.” That group focused on studying “Che” Guevara and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky after an earlier introduction to the Marxist classics. Sam was constantly trying to figure out why we were spinning our wheels trying to change the world for the better just then and to think about new strategies and tactics for the next big break-out of social activism so he would drag me along half-kicking and screaming. At the end of each meeting we would sing the Internationale before the group broke up. At first I had a hard time with the idea of singing a “commie” song (I didn’t put it that way but I might as well have according to Sam) unlike something like John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance, songs like that. As I, we got immersed in the group I lightened up and would sing along if not with gusto then without a snicker.

That same apprehensive attitude had prevailed when after about three meetings we began to study what the group leader, Jeremy, called classic Marxism strategy, the line from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. A couple of the early classes had dealt with the American Civil War and its relationship to the class struggle in America, and Marx’s views on what was happening, why it was necessary for all progressives to side with the North and the end of slavery, and why despite his personal flaws and attitudes toward blacks Abraham Lincoln was a figure to admire. All of which neither of us knew much about except the battles and military leaders in American History classes.

What caused the most fears and consternation for me was the need for revolution worked out in practice during the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. I could see that it was necessary in Russia during those times but America in the 1970s was a different question, not to speak of the beating that we had taken for being “uppity” in the streets in Washington, D.C. in 1971 when we were not thinking thought one about revolution (maybe others had such ideas but if so they kept them to themselves) and the state came crashing down on us anyway.    

At the beginning in any case, and that might have affected my ultimate decision, some of my old habits kind of held me back, you know the anti-red stuff, Cold War enemy stuff, just like at first I had had trouble despite all I knew about Vietnam, what it had to meant to me and my buddies, that the other side had the better argument in history calling for victory to the Viet Cong.  But I got over it, got in the swing, mostly. Joyell and her energy helped a lot then too. And I still think that was the right outcome. Enough said.  

The Marxism did not come easy, the theory part, maybe for me a little more than Sam who had taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had built from nothing after Mister Snyder moved his operation to Quincy to be nearer his main client, State Street Bank and Trust (although for long periods his old Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his, our anti-war campaigns). We got that the working-class, our class, should rule and be done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind Marxism, that impossible to read Das Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with seven seals for us both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976 when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see we hung around with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation struggles and political prisoner defense work.

Those were really our earnest “socialist years” although if you had asked us for a model of what our socialism looked like we probably would have pointed to Cuba which seemed fresher than the stodgy old Soviet Union with their Brezhnev bureaucrats. Yeah, those were heady times, we made a ton of mistakes but one that we didn’t make was having silent thrills in our hearts when the DNV/NLF troops came swooping down on Saigon April of 1975. Even if I gave the slightest pause at first hearing.