Showing posts with label anti-Vietnam War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-Vietnam War. Show all posts

Friday, June 02, 2017

Ancient dreams, dreamed-The Risen People? May Day 1971- Magical Realism 101-Build The Resistance 2017


Ancient dreams, dreamed-The Risen People? May Day 1971- Magical Realism 101-Build The Resistance 2017






Endless, dusty, truck heavy, asphalt steaming hitchhike roads travelled, Route 6, 66, maybe 666 and perdition for all I know, every back road, every Connecticut highway avoiding back road from Massachusetts south to the capital for one last winner-take-all, no prisoners taken show-down to end all show-downs. And maybe, just maybe, finally some peace and a new world a-borning, a world we had been talking about for at least a decade (clueless, as all youth nations are clueless, that that road was well-travelled, very well- travelled, before us). No Jack Kerouac dharma bum easy road (although there were dharma bums, or at least faux dharma bums, aplenty on those 1971 roads south, and west too) let her rip cosmic brakeman Neal Cassady at the wheel flying through some wheat field night fantasy this trip.

No this trip was not about securing some cultural enclave in post-war (World War II so as not to confuse the reader) in break-out factory town Lowell or cold water tenement Greenwich Village/Soho New Jack City or Shangri-La West out in the Bay area, east or west, but about mucking up the works, the whole freaking governmental/societal/economic/cultural/personal/godhead world (that last one, the godhead one, not thrown in just for show, no way) and maybe, just maybe sneaking away with the prize. But a total absolute, absolutist, big karma sky fight out, no question. And we, I, am ready. On that dusty road ready.

More. See all roads head south as we, my girlfriend of the day, maybe more, maybe more than a day, Joyell, but along this time more for ease of travelling for those blessed truck driver eye rides, than lust or dream wish and my sainted wise-guy amigo (and shades of Gregory Corso, sainted, okay), Matty, who had more than a passing love or dream wish in her and if you had seen her you would not have wondered why. Not have wondered why if your “type” was Botticelli painted and thoughts of butterfly swirls just then or were all-type sleepy-eyed benny-addled teamster half-visioned out of some forlorn rear view mirror.

Ya, head south, in ones, twos, and threes (no more, too menacing even for hefty ex-crack back truckers to stop for) travelling down to D.C. for what many of us figure will be the last, finally, push back against the war, the Vietnam War, for those who have forgotten, or stopped watching television and the news, but THEY, and you knew (know) who they were, had their antennae out too, they KNEW we were coming, even high-ball fixed (or whiskey neat she had the face for them) looking out from lonely balconies Martha Mitchell knew that much. They were, especially in mad max robot-cop Connecticut, out to pick off the stray or seven who got into their mitts as a contribution to law and order, law and order one Richard Milhous Nixon-style (and in front of him, leading some off-key, off-human key chorus some banshee guy from Maryland, another watch out hitchhike trail spot, although not as bad as Ct, nothing except Arizona is). And thus those dusty, steamy, truck heavy (remind me to tell you about hitchhiking stuff, and the good guy truckers you wanted, desperately wanted, to ride with in those days, if I ever get a chance sometime).

The idea behind this hitchhiked road, or maybe, better, the why. Simple, too simple when you, I, thought about it later in lonely celled night but those were hard trying times, desperate times really, and just free, free from another set of steel-barred rooms this jailbird was ready to bring down heaven, hell, hell if it came down to it to stop that furious war (Vietnam, for the later reader) and start creating something recognizable for humans to live in. So youth nation, then somewhat long in the tooth, and long on bad karma-driven bloody defeats too, decided to risk all with the throw of the dice and bring a massive presence to D.C. on May Day 1971.

And not just any massed presence like the then familiar seasonal peace crawl that nobody paid attention too anymore except the organizers, although the May Day action was wrapped around that year’s spring peace crawl, (wrapped up, cozily wrapped up, in their utopian reformist dream that more and more passive masses, more and more suburban housewives from New Jersey, okay, okay not just Jersey, more and more high school freshman, more and more barbers, more and more truck driver stop waitresses, for that matter, would bring the b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s-i-e (just in case there are sensitive souls in the room) to their knees. No, we were going to stop the government, flat. Big scheme, big scheme no question and if anybody, any “real” youth nation refugee, excepting, of course, always infernal always, those cozy peace crawl organizers, tried to interject that perhaps there were wiser courses nobody mentioned them out loud in my presence and I was at every meeting, high or low. Moreover I had my ears closed, flapped shut closed, to any lesser argument. I, rightly or wrongly, silly me thought “cop.”

So onward anti-war soldiers from late night too little sleep Sunday night before Monday May Day dawn in some vagrant student apartment around DuPont Circle (I think, but it may have been further up off 14th Street, Christ after eight million marches for seven million causes who can remember that much. No question though on the student ghetto apartment locale; bed helter-skelter on the floor, telephone wire spool for a table, orange crates for book shelves, unmistakably, and the clincher, seventeen posters, mainly Che, Mao, Ho, Malcolm etc., the first name only necessary for identification pantheon just then, a smattering of Lenin and Trotsky but they were old guys from old revolutions and so, well, discounted) to early rise (or early stay up cigarette chain-smoking and coffee slurping to keep the juices flowing). Out into the streets, out into the small collectives coming out of other vagrant apartments streets (filled with other posters of Huey Newton , George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, etc. from the two names needed pantheon) joining up to make a cohorted mass (nice way to put it, right?). And then dawn darkness surrounded, coffee spilled out, cigarette bogarted, AND out of nowhere, or everywhere, bang, bang, bang of governmental steel, of baton, of chemical dust, of whatever latest technology they had come up with they came at us (pre-tested in Vietnam, naturally, as I found out later). Jesus, bedlam, mad house, insane asylum, beat, beat like gongs, defeated.

Through bloodless bloodied streets (this, after all, was not Chicago, hog butcher to the world), may day tear down the government days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. One arrested, two, three, many, endless thousands as if there was an endless capacity to arrest, and be arrested, arrest the world, and put it all in one great big Robert F. Kennedy stadium home to autumn gladiators on Sunday and sacrificial lambs this spring maypole may day basket druid day.

And, as I was being led away by one of D.C.s finest, I turned around and saw that some early Sunday morning voice, some “cop” voice who advised caution and went on and on about getting some workers out to join us before we perished in an isolated blast of arrests and bad hubris also being led away all trussed up, metal hand-cuffs seemingly entwined around her whole slight body. She said she would stick with us even though she disagreed with the strategy that day and I had scoffed, less than twenty-four hours before, that she made it sound like she had to protect her erring children from themselves. And she, maybe, the only hero of the day. Righteous anonymous sister, forgive me. (Not so anonymous actually since I saw her many times later in Boston, almost would have traded in lust for her but I was still painted Botticelli-bewitched and so I, we, let the moment passed, and worked on about six million marches for about five millions causes with her but that was later. I saw no more of her in D.C. that week.)

Stop. Brain start. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove, these were not such times even with all our unforced errors, and no flame-flecked phoenix raising but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva came a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ would take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart road tramp acting in god’s place could even dream of. But that was later. Just then, just that screwed-up martyr moment, I was longing for the hot, dusty, truck driver stop meat loaf special, dishwater coffee on the side, road back home even ready to chance Connecticut highway dragnets to get there.

Saturday, December 24, 2011

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-1,500 Protest McNamara:Ship Him To Vietnam To Be Tried By His Victims! November (1978)

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
Markin comment:

The question of academic (or other non-governmental) positions for those who have been direct actors in implementing American imperialist policies is a serious one. We Marxists draw a sharpe distinction between those who are "merely" reactionary academics and those whose actions would actually qualify them to stand in front of some international criminal tribunal. No, not the bourgeois ones as constituted now but tribunals of their victims in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else their hubris takes them.

This point was recently brought home when a number of us demontrated against ex-Bush Secretary Of War Donald Rumsfeld when he came to Boston on a "book tour" touting his memoirs. If people want to pay hard cash to buy the book at some book stalland read his gibberish that is one thing. It is another that he be allowed to move freely around to do so when by all that is rational he should be standing front and center in Iraq right now in a place like Baghdad facing some serious criminal human rights violations. Of course, his president Bush (either)and others should be crowding the docket with him.
*******
From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-1,500 Protest McNamara:Ship Him To Vietnam To Be Tried By His Victims! November (1978)

CHICAGO—When University of Chicago president Hanna Gray and the 'U of C trustees smugly announced their intention to award former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara$25,000and the first annual "Albert Pick Jr. Award" for promoting "international understanding," they learned that the memory of U.S. imperialism's campaign of slaughter against Vietnam is not dead. Twenty-five were arrested as 1,500 angry students, teachers and workers rallied on May 22 in one of the largest demonstrations here in over a decade. Highly visible was the largest organized contingent: 50-strong, the Spartacus Youth League and friends demanded: "No Award to Imperialist Butcher McNamara! Keep McNamara Off Campus! Ship Him To Vietnam To Be Tried By His Victims!"

The meaning of the obscene award presentation was clear: yet another fete to bury the ugly legacy of U.S. mass murder in Vietnam. CIA-liberal and Kennedy "Camelot" team member, McNamara helped to bring us the Bay of Pigs, Tonkin Gulf and the escalation of U.S. aggression in Indochina. For seven years Secretary of Defense (1961-68), this former Ford Motor Co. exec currently sits as tsar of the World Bank.

While no longer ordering troops into tie, McNamara is no less a key legist for U.S. imperialism. He presided over the World Bank when the lean economy was strangled by the imperialists in order to "destabilize" the Allende government, paving the way the Pinochet coup and the murder of 30,000 Chilean workers and peasants. The only possible contribution MacNamara could make to" international understanding" would be his trial by Vietnamese workers and peasants.

Why Mac Didn't Get the Knife...

It is outrageous that this war criminal collected his blood money basically without a hitch. Despite the fact that scores of protesters wanted to do more than stand across the street from the banquet hall and be treated to a litany of speeches droning on about the good old days, the organizers of the protest made sure that U of C "discipline guidelines" weren't broken as they provided marshals to police the crowd. They must have been overjoyed when President Gray gave kudos to the University staff, the Chicago cops and the "May 22 Committee, which organized the protest" and was "entirely forthright about its intentions and plans." Indeed, the Committee was quite "forthright" they made it clear from the very beginning that they wanted nothing more militant than a vigil.

The liberals went into a tizzy when the announcement of the award was made. But what they were fretting about was that it might "tarnish" the "image" of U of C. When 280 faculty members "dissociated" themselves from the award because it brought "politics" to the University, the May 22 Committee chirped in that the award was a "violation of the integrity of the University of Chicago."

What claptrap! Started up with the profits extorted by John D. Rockefeller, presided over by Hanna Gray, who smashed a 1977 campus workers strike at Yale, and once home to outright collaborators with the Chilean junta, Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger (see "SYL Campaigns Against Chilean Junta's Collaborators," Young Spartacus No. 37, November 1975)—the U of C is already "political" and has about as much integrity as Bert Lance. Just what do the liberals expect from one of the most elite private universities whose very job is to train the next generation of imperialist ideologues, capitalist administrators and "public servants'"?

A planning meeting on May 15 drew 175 people reflecting real outrage on the campus, especially among undergraduates. The core of the May 22 Committee leadership—a clique of former antiwar activists turned grad students and professors who had met in secrecy earlier—succeeded in voting down the SYL's proposal for a united-front committee open to all organizations and individuals who agreed with the slogans "No Award to Imperialist Butcher!" and "Keep McNamara Off Campus!" To suggest that McNamara should be run off campus was totally anathema to these people. In fact, the Committee was so worried about "tarnishing" their "image" that they even voted down a vague proposal that called for "civil disobedience" at the award dinner.

Joining the liberals in rejecting the SYL's strategy were supporters of several left organizations, among them the Maoists of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (RCYB), the ex-Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), the New American Movement (NAM) and the miniscule International Socialist Organization. NAM and the RCYB were rewarded for their services and were allowed to share the platform at a planned teach-in. The YSA, which had maintained a conspicuous absence from earlier planning meetings, arrived on the scene just in time to argue against the SYL having the right to speak. Instead, they wanted to hear... Eugene McCarthy! While the fake-lefts did their best to out-liberal the liberals, the SYL refused to endorse the bureaucratic, weak-kneed Committee and set about organizing a militant contingent for the demonstration.
I he activities on May 22 began with an "honor the dead" picnic on the quadrangles, complete with protest songs. Dave Dellinger (remember him?) extended his "turn the other cheek" philosophy to include McNamara, saying that he shouldn't be punished for his crimes! He then denounced the SYL's slogan of shipping him to Vietnam to be tried by his victims. Marshall Sahlins—a former antiwar activist—suggested that "next time" the protest movement should drape itself in the "stars and stripes" instead of burning it, as if the American flag could be something other than the symbol of the most brutal imperialist power.

After several hours of nostalgic left-liberal dribble which drove most of the students away in sheer boredom, an SYL speaker finally got to the floor to cut through the "movement is not dead" rhetoric;

"Unlike what many of the liberals have been saying, McNamara's crime is not that he helped deceive the public about a 'mistake' of the U .S. government. The war in Vietnam was no mistake, but part of U.S. imperialism's drive world wide. McNamara's crimes are those of a mass murderer.

"During the Vietnam war the Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth League recognized that there was a class war going on in Indochina and we took a firm stand for the military victory of the NLF/DRV. We called for labor strikes against the war and we said 'All Indochina Must Go Communist'....

Our program was in direct counterposition to the reformists of the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party who sought to limit the movement to peace crawls and tie it to the Democratic Party—the party of McNamara and the war. The liberals and reformists have continued this policy today in their plans for tonight's demonstration

"The Maoists of the RSB and RCYB who today protest McNamara felt fine when Nixon sipped tea with Mao Tsetung in Peking while U.S. bombers rained death and destruction over Hanoi and Haiphong. Now the Chinese deformed workers state plays the role of cat's paw for U.S. imperialism with its invasion of Vietnam in a not-so-veiled attack against the Soviet Union—the main military/industrial powerhouse of the deformed and degenerated workers states.

"While the Maoists grovel in their alliance with U.S. imperialism and the RCYB lines up with imperialism's propaganda offensive against the Soviet Union, the SL/SYL defends all the deformed workers states against imperialism and struggles for a workers political revolution from Moscow to Peking to Hanoi to overthrow the counterrevolutionary bureaucracies.”The SYL is organizing the only contingent in the demonstration which will raise revolutionary politics. This award is an atrocity and McNamara should be kept off campus!"

Just one month after the SYL spokesman asserted that the U.S. invasion of Vietnam was "no mistake," the Carter administration called for military intervention to suppress a popular revolution against a hated rightist dictatorship. At the U.S. colonial bureau, the Organization of American States, Cyrus Vance proposed a "peace-keeping" force to prevent the Nicaragua rebels from overthrowing the Somoza dynasty.

If the day of speeches was frustrating for militant students, the evening's events must have been more so. While McNamara was being whisked into a side entrance by the cops, the protesters were being kept across the street by the May 22 Committee marshals.

The only interesting speech that came booming from the Committee's sound truck was given by Revolutionary Communist Party honcho Clark Kissinger— interesting because it was nuts: "This is the night of the living dead," he raved, "you know that you can't deal with a vampire with just a cross, you deal with him with a stake through the heart!"

Despite the predominant liberal politics, the crowd was in a militant mood. When the Chicago cops stepped in to put out a burning effigy of McNamara, the SYL's chant of "Cops Off Campus" was enthusiastically taken up. The chants of the militant SYL contingent also provided the only alternative to the insipid "McNamara, We Will Not Forget" moral witness politics of the rally organizers. "International Understanding the U of C Way— Butcher 'Honored' by Strike-Breaker Gray!"; "World Bank, CIA: Backers of Videla and Pinochet!" and "No to the Draft and Imperialist Slaughter! Capitalism Wants Us for Cannon Fodder!" echoed off the walls of Hutchinson Commons as McNamara was wined and dined.

... But the Protesters Did

As the evening wore on the crowd began to dwindle away until only one third of the demonstrators were left. In an unsuccessful attempt to intercept McNamara's departure, several hundred protesters broke away and sat down on University Avenue for a "teach-in." As the cops moved in the one in charge got a pie thrown into his face and twenty-five protesters were hauled off to a waiting paddy wagon including a Vietnam veteran dragged off in his wheelchair.

Quickly 200 angry demonstrators marched to Hanna Gray's house where an SYL spokesman demanded that the charges against those arrested be immediately dropped, that there be no administration reprisals and that the cops get off campus. True to form, though, most of the May 22 steering committee members boycotted this rally.

While the 25 were being booked and fingerprinted it turned out that the Committee was busily debating the wording of a statement dissociating it from the sit-in! Some Committee members spoke against bailing out Kissinger and another RCYBer, baiting them for "violence-mongering." It was only after an angry SYLer intervened to condemn this crass anti-communism, to point out that it was the cops who were responsible for any "violence" and to demand that all those arrested be defended that the Committee relented and voted to bail out all the arrestees.

The day after the arrests, however, the wretched Committee made it clear that accolades from Hanna Gray meant more to them than defense of the arrested protesters. After refusing to endorse a rally hastily called by the RCYB, the Committee sent its water- j boy, a YSAer, to read an "official" statement. Applauding the participants who had "rigorously observed the policy of the peaceful and legal discussion and demonstration decided upon -by the Committee and its marshals," the YSAer then shamelessly called upon all those present to disperse! The YSAer could only look on in dismay as 150 demonstrators remained and the continued.

Both at the rally and at a heavily attended meeting that night the SYL exposed the Committee's despicable attempt to distance itself from those arrested, and proposed that a united-front defense demonstration be held. Despite the desire of many of those present to protest the arrests, the motion failed—largely due to the arguments of a number of defendants that the arrests themselves had made the "point" and to the fact that the RCYB preferred to stick with the liberals and thus sabotage its own defense!

In the absence of effective, militant protests, the Chicago courts were able to place 24 of those arrested under one-year "court supervision," which means that it any are arrested again within a year they will face the charges of disorderly conduct. The alleged pie thrower still faces a count of battery on a policeman. These attacks must not go unchallenged! Ten years ago, as soon as widespread student protest died down, the U of C administration expelled 42 students and suspended 120 others. The threat of reprisals still remains.

For a meeting called on May 29 the SYL distributed a leaflet entitled "Drop the Charges! For Militant Protest!" "The question is on everyone's lips. Were the events of May 22nd a victory or a defeat, and for whom? .The SYL says that it was significant and important that 1500 people were drawn from the apolitical mire of the 'me-decade' to protest the award to imperialist butcher McNamara. However, it is no victory that McNamara did receive the award and that 25 people were arrested."

This analysis was clearly shared by many of the frustrated demonstrators. The meeting, called to form a new "progressive" organization voted to hear SL Central Committee member Tweet Carter. As a former regional organizer for SDS she noted that even at its worst, SDS was far to the left of the May 22 Committee and its "left" pals. As the SYL leaflet explained: "There has been a lot of talk about bringing back the student movement of the New Left and creating a new student coalition to deal with the various 'issues.' Don't repeat the mistakes of the sixties! The reason that SDS and the New Left fell apart was because it did not have a leadership with a revolutionary working-class program which could guide the movement beyond student-power illusions and sectoralist politics. As a result, many students got channeled into the Democratic Party reformist politics of McGovern or became disillusioned with politics entirely. The Revolutionary Marxist Caucus, the precursor of the SYL, fought for a working-class perspective within SDS, winning over militants to Trotskyism. What is needed now is not another grab-bag liberal coalition like the May 22 Committee under another name, but a party of professional revolutionaries committed to a socialist future.

"The Spartacist League and its youth group, the SYL, are fighting to build a Trotskyist vanguard party. Such a party would mobilize the labor movement to fight for the establishment of a workers government which would expropriate the capitalists and run society for the working people. Join the SYL!"

Thursday, December 22, 2011

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-Protests Hit Sam Huntington: Vietnam War Criminal Returns To Harvard (Octoer 1978)

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
Markin comment:

The question of academic (or other non-governmental) positions for those who have been direct actors in implementing American imperialist policies is a serious one. We Marxists draw a sharpe distinction between those who are "merely" reactionary academics and those whose actions would actually qualify them to stand in front of some international criminal tribunal. No, not the bourgeois ones as constituted now but tribunals of their victims in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else their hubris takes them.

This point was recently brought home when a number of us demontrated against ex-Bush Secretary Of War Donald Rumsfeld when he came to Boston on a "book tour" touting his memoirs. If people want to pay hard cash to buy the book at some book stalland read his gibberish that is one thing. It is another that he be allowed to move freely around to do so when by all that is rational he should be standing front and center in Iraq right now in a place like Baghdad facing some serious criminal human rights violations. Of course, his president Bush (either)and others should be crowding the docket with him.
*******
From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-Protests Hit Sam Huntington: Vietnam War Criminal Returns To Harvard (October 1978)

BOSTON, September 27—Samuel P. Huntington, one of the principal strategists and apologists for the vicious air war which devastated the countryside of Vietnam, is returning to Harvard this semester. After two years of service with Jimmy Carter's "human rights" crusade, Huntington is returning to wrap himself in the robes of respectable academia. to lecture twice a week on governmental theory. But this facade must not obscure the ugly reality. Samuel Huntington is complicit in mass murder he is a war criminal.

The U.S. air war, against Indochina ranks as one of this century’s most horrible atrocities. Millions of tons of explosives were rained upon the villages in Vietnam in- order to terrorize into submission a people who had been fighting imperialism and colonialism for decades. With calculated savagery, the U.S. unleashed weapons designed solely for their ability to maim, as carcinogenic, fetus-deforming chemical defoliants blanketed half of Vietnam's arable land. Prominent among the academic lackies who braintrusted these genocidal policies was Sam Huntington.

Unfortunately for this war criminal, his Harvard homecoming was not as uneventful as he might have liked. On September 26, a demonstration was staged outside Huntington's class by an ad hoc committee initiated by the Spartacus Youth League to protest his return to academia. While the demonstration was small, having been boycotted by the Harvard divestment "left," the campaign against Huntington certainly had its impact. The Harvard Crimson ran an editorial by two supporters of the SYL documenting Huntington's crimes. And the serenity of the morning air in Harvard Yard was certainly shattered by the loud chants of the demonstrators charging Huntington with complicity in mass murder.

Huntington's "Credentials"

In the late I960's, Huntington headed the Council on Vietnamese Studies of the South East Asia Development Advisory Group, a committee which played an important role in the develop-ment of State Department policy. While much of the work of this committee was cloaked in secrecy, there is strong evidence of its ominous nature. At the May 1969 meeting, for example, Huntington presented a paper entitled "Getting Ready for Political Competition in Vietnam." In this document he advocated electoral manipulation, control of the media and "inducements and coercions."

Huntington's preferred strategy for "political competition" was much more direct. In the July 1968 issue of Foreign Affairs he wrote:

"If the 'direct application of mechanical und conventional power' takes place on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city, the basic assumptions underlying the Maoist doctrine of revolutionary warfare no longer operate... "In an absent-minded way the United States may well have stumbled upon the answer to 'wars of national liberation.' The effective response lies neither in the quest for conventional military victory nor in the esoteric doctrines of counter-insurgency warfare. It is instead forced-draft urbanization and modernization which rapidly bring the country in question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can hope to generate sufficient strength to come to power."

The mere authorship of these sentences indicts Huntington as a cold-blooded vulture. For what Huntington advocated with such antiseptic pedantry was nothing less than the elimination of the rural base of the National Liberation Front by reducing the Vietnamese countryside to corpses, embers and rubble. What Huntington calls "urbanization and modernization" had, in reality, the effect of driving terrified millions into the cities, swelling Saigon's population tenfold and creating a class of homeless and urban poor by pounding the villages with napalm and fragmentation bombs. "Urbanization and modernization" meant the destruction of the fabric of Vietnamese life— begging, prostitution, starvation and disease became the norms of existence.

The sickening apologies in bourgeois journals were only the starting point of Huntington's role in this effort. He did not merely comment on U.S. policy; he helped formulate it. Not only did he serve as chairman of the Council on Vietnam of the South' East Asia Development Advisory Group, but he acted as a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the U.S. Air Force and the Institute for Defense Analysis. Huntington is clearly not just another right-wing academic who supported the war. He is an important member of the imperialist brain trust and a war criminal. The SYL opposes Huntington’s appointment not primarily because of his ideas, but for the unspeakable atrocities for which he bears responsibility.

The "Mad Dog" of "Human Rights"

For the past two years, Huntington has been director of national security planning in the Carter administration, essentially functioning as Zbigniew Brzezinski's chief assistant. The key role of this assistant in the White House dramatically exposes the lie contained in Carter's "human rights" campaign. For two years, the Spartacist League/ Spartacus Youth League have maintained that the Carter crusade is but an attempt to refurbish the moral authority of U.S. imperialism in order to build popular support for a renewed aggressive foreign policy. Both in an immediate and ultimate sense the central targets of this effort are those countries in which capitalism has been overthrown, most importantly the Soviet Union. This campaign represents an ominous threat to the world's working masses. For U.S. imperialism, the major prop of virtually every reactionary tyrant on the face of the earth, will bring "human rights" to the world the way LB.I and Nixon brought "democracy" to Vietnam.

Huntingdon's role in the Carter administration is testimony to the sinister motives at the base of the "human rights" campaign. For in Huntington we see the genocidal maniac turned "human rights" advocate. Hunt-ingot is so strident in his anti-communism that within the administration he was reportedly known as "Mad Dog." It was Huntington who drafted the main Carter strategic assessment last year. Presidential Review Memoran¬dum-10, which heralded the passing of "detente" and mandated a new generation of weapons of destruction.

Huntington's return to the Harvard faculty exposes the hypocrisy behind the
ruckus raised by university president Derek Bok concerning covert CIA recruitment on campus last spring. The administration's insistence that all CIA recruiters on campus reveal themselves to university officials is but a feeble attempt to cover Harvard's obscene complicity with the intelligence agencies with a veil of virginal innocence. Harvard's hypocrisy is so monumental as to be laughable: this is the university that provides the brains that plan CIA "dirty tricks" from alumnus John F. Kennedy to alumnus and professor Henry Kissinger. Harvard graduates, officials and faculty members have masterminded U.S. imperialism's military engagements from the Bay of Pigs to the terror bombings in Vietnam. Bok's only apparent request is that imperialism's hit men inform him of their activities on campus.

Protest Huntington!

A protest directed against the return of a faculty member is almost certain to raise the issue of academic freedom. But .academic freedom is not the point. We do not single out Huntington for his thoughts, but rather for his deeds. While it is certainly true that such universities as Harvard have no shortage of intellectual mercenaries, the Huntingtons and Kissingers are special cases. Hunting-ton's central role in the murder and oppression of millions should provoke outrage and protest at Harvard.

It is significant that the sizable divestment movement on campus refused to participate in the SYL-initiated campaign. More concerned with salving their consciences than actively opposing the representatives and activities of imperialism, these divestment radicals prefer to spend their energies pleading with the Harvard Corporation to develop a more moral investment policy. Those in the divestment movement who tail the "human rights" crusade may have trouble discerning whether this "Mad Dog" cold-warrior is friend or foe.

Many of today's students were quite young during the ravaging of Vietnam and may not even recall the horrible destruction and the nightly body counts that passed across the television screen on the evening news. For them, the liberal assumptions inherent in the demands of the divestment movement are not so naturally repugnant as they might have been to the late 1960's antiwar activist. Campaigns like that initiated by the SYL against Huntington will help to bring about a renewed awareness of imperialism's crimes and the complicity of the bourgeois universities to a new generation of students. It is the task of a communist youth organization to bring the understanding to the campuses that the main reactionary power in the world is the American bourgeoisie. And one way of doing that is to expose the professors turned executors of imperialist reaction and to demand that they not be allowed to peacefully don the robes of academic respectability.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)- March 1971

Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.

*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter

Note on Issue Numbering for

Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus


The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.

They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.

Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.

BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.

Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.

Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.

—Riazanov Library

******
Markin comment:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Markin comment on the Progressive Labor Party evoked numerous times in this issue:

One of the problems for a political person radicalized coming out of the mid to late 1960s although not a revolutionary until the very end of that period was that, as in the case of this writer, he did not see the Progressive Labor Party (PL) in its better days, the days when it came out of the Soviet Stalinized American Communist Party to its left in the early 1960s. Although at the time in solidarity with China, Maoism, and the person of Chairman Mao in the world-wide destructive Sino-Soviet split. I do know this- some of my friends were close to or in Progressive Labor in the early 1970s as I was turning toward Marxism. And they were good and conscious revolutionary people as they saw things, then. The problem for me, or for anyone in the early 1970s in regard to PL, friendships notwithstanding, was that the organization had lose its moorings when Mao decided that it was better to be friends with the main enemy of the world’s people, the United States, than drive the socialist revolution forward. And this writer for lots of reason, lots of personal reasons as well as political, decided just then to delve back into the history of the Russian revolution to see where the revolutionary threads led. And surprise, surprise they led back (and forward) to comrade Lenin, and comrade Trotsky. Not a bad place to land, not bad at all. In any case I will, after finishing this RMC faction of Progressive Labor-led SDS material, try to analyze PL, its strong points and its weaknesses, its weakness beyond is adherence to various Maoist thoughts (and then abandonment of the baby with the bath water).

Wednesday, July 06, 2011

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-“Campus Spartacist”-(Austin, September 1970)

Click on the headline to link to the Campus Spartacist archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Campus Spartacist

Campus Spartacus was published as a stand alone newsletter irregularly in localized version of the SL's national collage network, with issues published in Austin, NYC, and the Bay Area from 1965 through 1971. The list below reflects these local versions.

—Riazanov Library

******
Markin comment:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
******
Markin comment on this issue, addressing the question posed in the second section about the SWP's political defense work, or lack of it in the case described, I will refer to the comment made in another entry, June 9, 2001):

From The Partisan Defense Committee "Class Struggle Defense" Archives- What Defense Policy for Revolutionaries?-"An Injury To One Is An Injury To All" Markin comment:

The several documents presented in this compilation cover a wide range of issues that confront any serious left-wing class struggle defense organization committed to non-sectarian defense based on the old Wobblie (and maybe before the Wobblies, around the time of the Haymarket martyrs if an article that I have read lately is any indication) of “an injury to one is an injury to all.” Most of those issues have been adequately addressed in one form or another by the writers and/or editors of the documents.

There is one point, however, mentioned here that I would like to highlight a little more based on my own long- time experience with legal defense cases, work, given the dearth of more direct class-struggle issues, that has consumed much more of my political time (and that of others who I have spoken to on the matter) lately than I would have expected. That is the question of “hiding” the relationship between the defense organization and the political organization leading up the case, the question of front groups. Most of these radical legal cases from defense of the Panthers back in the 1960s to the latest death penalty cases start with some leftist organization’s impetus.

Those seeking to center their campaigns on beseeching hard-core liberal support (and some vital cash nexus that goes with seeking such support) will “hide’ their “parent” organizational affiliations and “pretend” the cause is a simple democratic one. The Stalinists of the Communist Party, after their short bout with “third period” purity in the late 1920s were past masters of this technique. The clearest example of this that I can give, and that radicals today might either remember or be somewhat familiar with, was the Angela Davis case in connection with her involvement with the Jonathan Jackson (George Jackson’s brother)/Sam Melville Brigade. Now Angela Davis was then, and now, a hard Stalinist and then a leading public member of the party. One would have thought that her party affiliation would have been front and center since everybody knew it anyway.

And, more importantly, that those Communist Party members working on this important campaign would have identified themselves proudly with their fellow comrade. Well, I guess you cannot teach an old dog new tricks as the worn-out adage goes. At least a Stalinist old dog. One meeting that I went to concerning her defense had about fifty people in attendance. Some liberals, known to me. Some unaffiliated radicals, also known to me. And the rest CPers. Except, if you were not politically savvy you would not have known that last fact because not one CPer, not one identified him or herself as such. Oh sure there were representatives from the Croatian Anti-Fascist League, The League For International Peace, Mothers for Peace and the like. Yes, you guessed it all CPers. And to what end? You see, maybe the liberals could be fooled, or wanted to be, and maybe even a few radicals who believe in some “family of the left” notion of politics, as well. But when the deal goes down the bourgeoisie is not fooled, not by a long shot. And then not only are you defending one comrade but the whole organization. So learn a new trick, okay?

Note:

An additional twist on the CP's catering to the liberals in the Angela Davis case was that they left class-war prisoner Ruchell McGee, Ms. Davis' co-defendant, to basically fend for himself. His profile would not have gone down as well with such elements enamored with celebrity Davis. I also note that forty years later I am still calling for Ruchell McGee's freedom as part of my June Class-War Prisoners series. Enough said.

Sunday, July 03, 2011

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-“Campus Spartacist”-(Austin, 1969)

Click on the headline to link to the Campus Spartacist archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Campus Spartacist

Campus Spartacus was published as a stand alone newsletter irregularly in localized version of the SL's national collage network, with issues published in Austin, NYC, and the Bay Area from 1965 through 1971. The list below reflects these local versions.

—Riazanov Library

******
Markin comment:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
********
Markin comment on this issue:

I have noted elsewhere (in the commentaries to the GI Voice archival documents, see archives May 11-18 2011) that I would have given much gold, or at least saved myself some very anxious political wilderness years, if I had run into the writer of this Campus Spartacist polemic in 1969 (or 1970) when I made a dramatic shift left-ward in my political understandings of the world.

Not that I would have adhered to, or even agreed with, what she was saying at the time. Far from it. I had only half-broken form bourgeois society and politics but I was learning, learning fast. I was, frankly, still only “toying around with” Marxist concepts at that time, but I would, as is my wont and had always been my way, made a mental note of who she was, and what political organization she represented. And it was not the CP, SWP, or even PL that even then left me cold.

Although her letter to a friend (a nice touch, a well-honored way to make political points, and a form used by all the revolutionary politicians in the old days when they wanted to ‘talk” serious without evoking their organizational affiliations) is not “high Trotskyism” by any means she has the traditional Stalinist/Maoist analysis down pretty well for someone who probably was fairly new to the world of high Trostkyism. And in the end when you think about it if there could have been fifty or one hundred more like her, not fully formed “Trots” but ardent, a lot of the inner turmoil of the 1969 SDS fight could have been directed toward the main historic (and real) fight in the international working class, Stalinism vs. Trotskyism. A flat-out, no holds barred fight for the heart and soul of those thousands, and maybe tens of thousands, of student and youth radicals who knew the CP, the SWP, and to a lesser extent PL were not the road to revolution. Or, as here, later pretenders like the RU (and the October League).

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Not Read For Prime Time Class Struggle- A Rehash Of “M.A.S.H.”- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link ot a YouTube film clip of the movie trailer for M.A.S.H.
DVD Review

M.A.S.H., Robert Duval, Elliot Gould, Donald Sutherland, Tom Skeritt, directed by Robert Altman, 1970


I have always been a fan of the late Robert Altman’s work as a director. A couple of his films that have withheld the test of time, Nashville and California Split, come readily to mind. Those slice of life films still “speak” to the subjects at hand, the glitter of country music stardom and its underside reality and the fight to get rich quick at the gambling tables. No so this film, M.A.S.H., a film that on first viewing I was very impressed with. On a recent re-viewing I found myself distracted most of the time. Not that the film’s “follies of war” theme in a front-line Army medical unit (then the Vietnam War, although the earlier Korean War is the thinly-veiled locale of the film, and not to be confused with the handful of American wars since then) has lost its significance. If anything that theme is more relevant that ever. What has lost power, and punch, is the notion that through the antics, and frankly this thing is filled with antics, that would embarrass even the lowliest “frat rat”, can draw those lessons about the folly of war. Sex, sacrifice, more sex, some off-hand skilled surgery, more hi-jinks and booze, and then off to home (and presumably a soft, country club life) do not make that same impression that first drew me to the film. Even Elliot Gould, who was great, and still is worth seeing, in California Split and as an understated Phillip Marlowe in the film version of Raymond Candler’s The Long Good-bye got on my nerves. Enough said.