*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Gays And The SWP (American Socialist Workers Party)

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Spring 1982 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

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Seduced and Abandoned: The Politics of Opportunism

Gays and the SWP

"Tinkerbell Meets Trotsky: The Revolution Be¬trayed": With this smirking title as a come-on, Boston's Cay Community News (19 September 1981) reviewed two collections of Socialist Workers Party (SWP) internal documents on gay liberation recently pub¬lished by gay activists to scandalize the SWP. The document collections, Cay Liberation and Socialism (published by David Thorstad) and No Apologies (published by Scott Forgione and Kurt Hill, with an introduction by Thorstad), cover the SWP's gyrations on the gay question from 1970 to 1979. Thorstad, Forgione and Hill are all ex-SWP members who want to expose the SWP's "betrayal" of gay lifestylist politics. In this they certainly succeed. They and the Cay Commu¬nity News reviewer, Scott Tucker, an anarchist/gay liberationist, use the sorry story of SWP hypocrisy to denounce Trotskyism as an enemy of freedom for homosexuals.
But the SWP has not had anything in common with Trotskyism for a long time! The authentic Trotskyist tendency in this country, the Spartacist League, has never wavered in its commitment to opposing anti-gay backwardness and the brutal enforcement of sexual puritanism by the capitalist state. From our very inception as an organization and long before the advent of a "gay liberation movement" (and at a time when the SWP was still forcing gay members to resign!), the Spartacist League has fought against all victimiza¬tion and persecution of homosexuals. But Thorstad & Co. would prefer not to acknowledge our record because their aim is to show that only those who see themselves as gay activists first and foremost can be relied on to defend the democratic rights of homosexuals.
Our commitment to gay rights has never meant patronizing acceptance of gay activists' lifestylist illusions. The Spartacist League has always argued against the dangerously Utopian belief that in this violent, class-divided society "only gays can liberate themselves." On the contrary, only socialist revolution can lay the basis for finally uprooting sick prejudices against "sexual deviance," through providing social alternatives to the stifling monogamous family, the main social institution oppressing women, children and homosexuals. Our aim is not a sectoralist "gay movement" but a revolutionary party based on the working class to lead the struggles of all the oppressed—and in which the best fighters from all sectors of the oppressed will be, not narrow represent¬atives of "their people," but communist revolutionaries.
Lenin's exhortation in What Is To Be Done? (1903) guides our work:
"The Social-Democrat's ideal should not be the trade-union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects... who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat." Our principled approach to these questions has attracted to the Spartacist League some of the best elements of the New Left-derived gay liberation milieu, most notably the Los Angeles-based Red Flag Union (formerly Lavender & Red Union), with whom we fused in 1977 (see W&R No. 16, Winter 1977-78, which discusses the key political issues—defense of the Soviet Union, rejection of lifestylism—which laid the pro¬grammatic basis for the fusion).
By contrast, the SWP documents published by Thorstad, Forgione and Hill are a testament to the proposition that opportunism doesn't pay. The value of the SWP documents is not, as Thorstad maintains, that they are "the most important such debates ever to occur inside any left-wing group" or that they will prove "essential" to resolving the question of the relationship between the fight against homosexual oppression and the fight for socialism. They are, however, useful for the light they shed on the grotesque zig-zags and utter cynicism of the reformist SWP. That today the SWP now dismisses Thorstad and his "North American Man/Boy Love Association"— currently being victimized by a state witchhunt—as virtual child molesters, as part of the current SWP policy of benign neglect of gay rights, is not merely evidence of their adaptation to homophobia.
The method behind this history of flirtation with and abandonment of this specially oppressed sector is the same tailist approach the SWP brought to what they called the "autonomous mass movements" of feminists, black nationalists, Chicano nationalists, etc. With the prolif¬eration of "do-it-yourself liberation" currents in the late 1960s/early 1970s, the SWP with consummate cynicism authored the proposition that "consistent" anythingism equals socialism and jumped on the gay bandwagon. When the lifestyle radical mood receded the SWP backed away from the gay question. Ultimate¬ly, the SWP rediscovered the working class and with predictable opportunist logic decided to "turn" to the unions by pandering to some of the most backward attitudes prevalent among workers, as for example through Barnes & Co.'s despicable defense of anti-homosexual "age of consent" laws.
If we can share the disgust of Thorstad et al. with the SWP's wretched politics, it is for very different reasons. There is a political chasm dividing the petty-bourgeois politics of gay community lifestylism from Marxism. Thorstad at least, has drawn the conclusion from his experiences in and out of the SWP that Marxism has nothing to say to homosexuals: "For years, gay socialists have been trying to develop a synthesis between homosexuality and socialism— After a decade of effort, I am ready to draw the conclusion that the left has failed to meet the challenge of gay liberation." He concludes his introduction to No Apologies by quoting an earlier gay liberationism Kurt Hiller, "The liberation of homosexuals can only be the work of homosexuals
themselves."
Spartacist League/ Spartacus Youth League contingent in Los Angeles march against anti-homosexual Briggs Initiative, July 1978.
Hill and Forgione (now, respectively, a supporter of the social-democratic Workers Power group and a staff member of Cay Community News) still present themselves as Marxists—of a sort. Littering their own documents with dozens of cutesy-poo illustrations (a cartoon of Lenin, Brezhnev and Trotsky in a gay bath), they conclude their foreword to No Apologies with the slogans "For an understanding of Michael Mouse-Lennonism too!" and "In defense of campy socialists as well as the socialist camp!" Is this the sort of treatment they think will serve "to further a Marxist perspective" on the gay question?
Tucker is an, unabashed anti-Marxist, an anarchist whose sense of political reality is best illustrated by his comment, "The SWP leadership has no sense of proportion if it really believes that transvestism is so much more exotic and eccentric to the masses than Trotskyism itself"! The entire point of his lengthy review is to use the SWP in order to write off "all 57 varieties of Marxism-Leninism" as "unfit for human consumption." There is, however, a revolutionary alternative to Tucker's anarcho-lifestylism, Thorstad's advocacy of an autonomous gay movement, and Forgiohe/Hill's Mickey-Mouse "Marxism." To develop this theme, it is necessary to delve a little deeper into the SWP's slimy record and into the politics of gay liberationism.
The SWP in the '60s: "Gay is Good"...Maybe
As part of the SWP's political degeneration in the 1960s the organization adopted an unofficial policy of excluding homosexuals. As SWP honcho Jack Barnes admitted in a report to the Political Committee (the SWP top leadership) in November 1970, "Since the early 1960s the party and YSA [Young Socialist Alliance] have been moving toward a policy which proscribes homosexuals from membership" (quoted in Gay Liberation and Socialism, p. 5).
In its earlier revolutionary days the SWP leadership, in particular founding leader James P. Cannon, had a far different attitude. In his contribution to the commemo¬rative book James P. Cannon As We Knew Him, long¬time SWP leader Sam Gordon recalled the case of "a young leader of the organization ...[who] had fallen afoul of the New York homosexual laws, and was clapped into jail one day early in the thirties." Cannon, Gordon recalled, got the comrade out. "The case was finally quashed. Our comrade continued to be a leading member...." But in the 1960s the SWP was sloughing off simple decency, as well as revolutionary principles, in its pursuit of success on the cheap.
The hallmark of that New Left era was the SWP's vigorous attempt to mimic and adapt to black national¬ism, feminism, Chicano nationalism (the mythical land of "Aztlan") and virtually every other "mass movement"—most importantly the liberal-bourgeois anti-war movement. As Barnes said, "The consistent and irreconcilable liberation struggle of an oppressed nationality is our struggle. If it is irreconcilable and consistent, then it will point toward socialism..." (speech to 1970 SWP convention). As applied to feminism et al. this became "consistent (fill in the blank) will lead to socialism." It was only a matter of time until Barnes & Co. discovered gay liberation. And if "Black is Beautiful" and "Sisterhood is Powerful" became, in the SWP's eyes, "socialist" slogans—then why not "Gay is Good"? Tucker indignantly raises this very point, and indeed, by the SWP's own logic, there's no reason they shouldn't have adopted this equally meaningless slogan as well.
However, there was a layer of SWP "old guard" conservatives, trade-union oriented and socially con¬servative, who, while they dared not challenge feminism and black nationalism so openly, found the gay movement hard to swallow. By the time the SWP got geared up to drop its ban on homosexual members and mount an intervention into the gay movement, that movement itself was already showing signs of dying down. Spring 1971 was the height of the SWP's brief infatuation with gay liberation: they mobilized heavily for gay marches and for a gay contingent in the April antiwar peace crawl in Washington. The Militant ran gay-oriented articles (many authored by Thorstad) in virtually every issue.
But as Thorstad later recalled, "The party's involvement had hardly begun when the brakes began to be applied" (Gay Liberator, December 1974-January 1975). In May 1971 the SWP announced a "probe" into the gay liberation movement that, in hindsight, was really the beginning of a withdrawal from it. The following year saw a lengthy literary discussion in the SWP's internal bulletin, which forms the bulk of the documents in Thorstad's collection. This concluded with the 1973 SWP convention where a "Memorandum on the Gay Liberation Movement" outlined the Barnes gang's intention to drop gay lib politics.
Without rejecting the sectoralist method which had led the SWP to briefly tail the gay movement, the Memo basically concluded that there was not enough of a movement to tail. This reality was covered with some orthodox Marxist phrases about taking no position on whether gay was better,, worse, or just as good as straight. The gay question, the Memo said, was simply a question of democratic rights, not (as gay activists would have it) a broader struggle to liberate everyone's sexual nature. And in a revealing aside on just how far lifestylist counter-culturalism had been allowed to flower inside the SWP, the Memo authors felt obliged to note that male comrades should not wear dresses and that "sexual activities... have no place at party socials." ,
The Memo, although it praised the gay liberation movement (with the exception of its "ultraleft" [sic] sector), naturally enough was seen as a gross betrayal by the gay liberationists recruited during the SWP's Spring fling, and especially by chief gay spokesman David Thorstad. A wave of quits predictably followed. As Thorstad explained in his December 1973 resignation statement: "It [the Memo] has made it impossible for gays to reconcile their commitment to gay liberation with party membership" (Cay Liberation and Socialism, p. 127).
Anita Bryant and "The Turn"
The SWP dumped the gay movement in '73 mainly because there didn't seem to be a lot of recruits to gain. There was also an element of concession to conserva¬tive SWP leaders like Tom Kerry and Nat Weinstein. So it was not unexpected that when, in 1977, Anita Bryant's hate campaign against homosexuals provoked a brief spate of massive demonstrations in U.S. cities, it also provoked a renewed interest in the gay movement in the SWP. SWP leader Doug Jenness authored a "clarification" on the '73 Memo, writing that "...we solidarize with the sentiment of the gay liberation movement that 'gay is good'" interpreting this not as advocacy of homosexuality (which of course it was!) but as a statement that "gay people are just as good as heterosexual people" (SWPDiscussion Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 5, 11 June 1977). An SWP gay oppositionist wrote that "since the June 7 Miami referendum, differences over the party's tactical orientation to the gay move¬ment have been completely superceded by dramatic events—The party has responded in a revolutionary fashion to the latest upsurge of the gay movement" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 11, 9 July 1977).
But no sooner had the mass marches ceased than SWP interest in the gay movement ceased. Simultane¬ously, having watched the black nationalist, feminist, antiwar and other New Left movements die off in the 1970s, the SWP suddenly discovered the working class. That is to say, Barnes & Co. found something new to tail: the liberal wing of the trade-union bureaucracy. The very same people who had been the architects of what they now called the "long detour" from the working class into the various "independent mass movements" of the oppressed now began declaiming the elemen¬tary Marxist concept that the working class alone has the social weight to make socialist revolution and serve as the liberator of all the oppressed. Cynical? Certainly. Dishonest? By all means. This "turn" meant not only the end of the SWP's dabbling with gay lifestylist politics, but an adaptation to the most backward attitudes, not just among the working class, but increasingly to new moods of conservatism being enforced by a reactionary bourgeois backlash against the "permissive" 1960s.
In part in a drive to ingratiate themselves with liberal union reformers like Ed Sadlowski of the Steelworkers and Arnold Miller of the Mine Workers, the Barnes leadership sought to purge the SWP of its more flagrantly non-"proletarian" elements. Flamboyant gay liberationists were on the top of the list. It only remained to find a reasonable excuse to publicly ditch the gay orientation. In February 1979 an excuse was found—age-of-consent laws and the turn of part of the gay movement (Thorstad in particular) to the explosive issue of "cross-generational" sex and rights for gay youth.
At a Philadelphia conference to plan for a national gay march on Washington, SWPers took an active part. One of the demands raised was "full rights for gay youth, including revision of age-of-consent laws" (later watered down to "protection for lesbian and gay youth ..."). Little more than a month later the Militant (13 April 1979) ran a major article, "The Class-Struggle Road to Winning Gay Rights," in order to reject the march on Washington and blast the very existence of a "so-called gay movement defined by sexuality." The most vicious thrust was a direct attack on Thorstad for having "foisted" the issue of "man-boy love" on the gay movement.
"The repeal of age-of-consent laws is a reactionary demand..." proclaimed the SWP; "saying that children have the 'right' to 'consent' to sex with adults is exactly like saying children should be able to 'consent' to work in a garment factory twelve hours a day." The Militant even rejected '"non-abusive consensual' sex by adults with children": "Laws designed to protect children from sexual and economic exploitation by adults are historic acquisitions of the working class and should be enforced." The SWP refused to mobilize for the Washington march they had helped to plan. Forgione and Hill fought a losing battle against the new direction internally while Michael Maggi, a former co-thinker of Thorstad's who had seen the light in 1973 and become a loyal Barnesite, termed Thorstad a "baby-fucker" and ordered gay literature in the SWP's New York City bookstore thrown out, according to No Apologies.
The issue of age-of-consent laws (or rather, the frightening, still socially taboo issue of childhood sexuality) is inflammatory. Nonetheless, opposition to such laws must be elementary for defenders of democratic rights for youth, whatever their sexual orientation. As Young Spartacus (Summer 1979) put it:
"Revolutionaries, unlike the social-democratic SWP,
oppose any and all legal restrictions by the capitalist state
on effectively consensual sexual activity. Get the cops out
of the bedrooms! We know that such measures are not
designed to protect children but to enforce the sexual
morality of the nuclear family, which is at the root of the
oppression of women, youth and homosexuals "Those who, like the SWP, join the reactionary chorus calling for the capitalist state to enforce the sexual codes based on the morality of the bourgeois family only help to prop up a key bastion of child abuse and one of the strongest pillars of capitalist oppression."
"Gay Liberation" and Marxism
While Forgione and Hill were making their last stand for gay lifestylism in the SWP, they attempted to claim that the Barnes leadership was going the way of the "sectarian" Spartacist League. As Hill wrote:
"The party leadership appears to have capitulated to the sectarian-workerist traits which we used to blast in our opponents. We ridiculed the 'class struggle' formalism of the sectarians such as the Spartacist League who charged that our attitude toward struggles such as women's liberation and Black liberation was'petty-bourgeois.'We encouraged the developments of these and other mass movements for social change."
—SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 22,12
July 1979
In some ways Forgione and Hill were simply the most consistent defenders of the SWP's course throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. "Key terms used in the past/' they wrote, "such as 'best builders' of the 'independent mass struggles/ are giving way to the 'worker-Bolsheviks' of 'labor's strategic line of march'....the party is beginning to drift away from the theoretical acquisitions of the past, 20 years" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 22).
Quite so. But what Forgione and Hill cannot comprehend is that what they term "theoretical acquisitions" had been simply opportunist rationales for tailing petty-bourgeois, self-boosting, mutually-conflicting "mass movements" and that Barnes' "turn" was not toward genuine Trotskyism but toward tailing a new "mass movement"—labor reformism.
What unites all the somewhat disparate elements in the "gay community" is a common commitment to the politics of the gay lifestyle. To the gay liberationist, at bottom simply being openly homosexual is in itself a political act. To the "socialist" gay liberationist, it is even revolutionary. As Forgione put it: "It has been through this struggle for self-affirmation as-an equal human being ('coming out') that has led increasing numbers of lesbians and gay men... to become quite convinced that this society is sick and has to be either radically changed or replaced" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 17, 9 July 1979).
"Coming out" is obviously a personal decision—and one which, given the realities of life in this society, has potentially serious consequences. But for the New Left and its various spin-offs, the personal is political. Quoting anarchist Gustav Landauer in his review, Scott Tucker is quite explicit tha%the revolution is accom¬plished by livinga revolutionary lifestyle: "TheState isa condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently."
Would that it were so easy to create a new society! The state happens to enforce its morality and its exploitative form of production, with cops, courts, prisons—internationally with MX missiles and armies— and those who go against it are going to get attacked.

The best proof that gay liberation is a petty-bourgeois ideology is that an openly gay lifestyle in a "gay community" is only possible in severely restricted and largely middle-class "gay ghettoes"—West Hollywood, Castro Street, the West Village. What about gay men and lesbians who do not or cannot move to one of these gay islands in a sea of "patriarchal capitalism"? Cay liberation has no answer.
In fact, Forgione and Hill revealed their own petty-bourgeois biases by their violent resistance to the SWP's "turn" to the working class. They took offense when SWP leaders implied that gays were a petty-bourgeois species, and insisted that there are gay workers too. But when it came time to reach out to their "brothers" in the steel and auto plants, Forgione and Hill seemed strangely reluctant. This is not to give any credence to the Barnes gang's "proletarian" credentials, but Forgione and Hill seem to assume that the only role for homosexual socialists is doing "gay work" in the "gay community."
Can homosexuals, as Thorstad insists, liberate themselves? Here the question of "social weight," referred to ad nauseum in the SWP documents, rears its head. For all that the Socialist Workers Party used this concept simply cynically, nonetheless they have a point—and one on which the Spartacist League insisted while Barnes & Co. were hopping on and off the gay liberation bandwagon. We are for "the sexual libera¬tion of everybody"—however, we certainly do not intend to legislate the sexual behavior of future generations by putting our "seal of approval" on any particular sexual mode in this necessarily deforming society—gay, straight, mixed, whatever. That is why we pose our demands in the sexual-personal area nega¬tively: against moralistic state legislation of sexuality. • But more immediately, changing this society means a struggle for power—which means creating a powerful mass party rooted in the working class, which alone has the cohesiveness and social weight, because it pro¬duces this society's wealth, to make a socialist revolu¬tion. To eliminate the oppression of homosexuals, rooted in the sexual morality of the bourgeois family, it will ultimately be necessary to replace the family with other cooperative institutions in a socialist society. The immediate aftermath of socialist revolution will wipe out all discriminatory laws and criminal sanctions against "deviant" sexual behavior. But a more funda¬mental transformation is required to change deeply-rooted, ancient attitudes toward sex roles and sexuality. We don't think this is an easy, or simply resolved, question by any means. Nonetheless, the ultimate goal of Marxism has always been the creation of a society in which every individual can develop his potential to the utmost, freed of economic compulsion and attendent psychological miseries.
The job of revolutionaries is to forge a revolutionary vanguard party which can, as Lenin said, serve as a "tribune of the people," fighting all forms of oppres¬sion as part of the necessary education of the proletariat in assuming its leading role in the creation of a new society. In the end the "best builders" of rights and freedom for homosexuals will be those who, whatever their sexual orientation, are builders of such a party.

*Activists Chain Themselves to Arizona Capitol to Protest Russell Pearce's SB 1070-Down With The Arizona Immigrant Profiling Bill

Click on the headline to link to a "Green Left News" blog entry concerning an Arizona (on the front lines of the immigration question) piece of anti-immigrant legislation now pending there. Down with this bill, SB 1070. Full citizenship rights for all who make it here!

*From "The Rag Blog"- Professor Bill Ayers On His Right To Free Expression- Let Him Speak Wherever He Wants To- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry by guest blogger, Professor Bill Ayers (yes, that Bill Ayers), on his trials and tribulations trying to exercise his basic right to free expression (and of those who want to hear him). Let him speak wherever he want to and wherever people want to listen to him. This is a no-brainer.

Markin comment:

I have already written about Professor Ayers problems when he came to, or tried to come to, Boston College in the Spring of 2009. I have reposted that entry below.


Tuesday, April 07, 2009

*Hands Off Professor Bill Ayers- Let Him Speak

Click on title to link to "Boston Globe", April 2, 2009, article on Professor Bill Ayers discussed below.

Commentary

Okay, Okay I know that I have invoked the word professor ironically and in a somewhat tongue in cheek manner in discussing controversial Professor Bill Ayers in this space as an object lesson about the career paths of 1960’s ex-radicals once they have reconciled themselves to bourgeois society. Naturally when his name came up prominently in relation to the emergence of then-Illinois Senator Barack Obama I could not resist sticking a few well-deserved barbs Ayers’ way. But they were rather politically pointed barbs from the left about why an ex-Weatherman would be hanging around with a bourgeois candidate on the make like Obama.

But now news (somewhat dated news as I have been out of town and did not pick up the controversy until after it was over) about Boston College’s thinly- veiled slap at academic freedom by refusing to let the good professor speak in person or via satellite has crossed the line, even for the very arbitrary and capricious of so-called “academic freedom”. This is, moreover, is not solely a case of right wing commentators having a field day with the issue, although a local “Rush Limbaugh” wannabe helped fan the flames. I am sure that the right-wingers were more than happy when the Boston College administration decided to keep the academy and the minds of their young charges there “pure” from the taint of any old time radical. However, this is just one more in an ever- growing line of cases (think of Ward Churchill and the Finklestein case) where a college administration was more than capable, as in the past, of putting the clamps on by itself.

Here are the facts. Apparently, Professor Ayers was scheduled to deliver some kind of lecture on urban education (his specialty) at Boston College during the week of March 29, 2009 at the invitation of some student groups, including the College Democrats of Boston College. Such lectures by newsworthy figures are not unknown events on college campuses and moreover are a rather lucrative proposition for professors on the academic lecture circuit. The Boston College administration balked at that invitation citing a groundswell of opposition from local neighbors. Why? It seems that there is some lingering animosity concerning the shooting of a Boston Police officer by people allegedly connected with Professor Ayers’ old organization, the Weathermen. Professor Ayers, however, has never been charged, much less convicted, with any connection to that crime.

Why the furor then? Well, the Boston College administration, bowing to those inevitable amorphous unknown forces (although we can guess what those forces are now, can’t we), expressed its profound concern for the safety of the student community and “respect” for the local community (where it has been busily buying up real estate in order to expand its campus). Well, ho hum we have heard that ‘justification’ before. The kicker here on this bogus ‘safety’ issue is that when a televised Ayers lecture by satellite was proposed that too was deemed too “hot” to handle.

What really gives here though? One of the students in the article I am using for information (“BC won’t air Ayers lecture by satellite”, Boston Globe, Peter Schworm, April 2, 2009) let the cat out of the bag. This Ayers controversy, while an easy one for the administration to raise holy hell over, is not the first time that the BC administration has vetoed speaking engagements for controversial figures on campus. That interviewed student did not state who else had been banned but we can figure that one out also.

Needless to say birthday boy Charles Darwin might find it hard to get invited to this august university what with his oddball quirky theory of evolution (BC is an old-time Jesuit school). Much less the heroic Kansas Doctor George Tiller, one of the few abortion providers in that state (they would probably have a lynch mob out for him). So much for that vaunted “academic freedom”. Fortunately we never took that profession of freedom as anything but a very vulnerable “right”, although we gladly use it to get our socialist message out when we can. We remember the “red scare” of the 1950’s here in America when the academy knuckled under without a whimper. And, left to its own devises, most of the academy would have loved to have clapped down during the anti-Vietnam war movement; it was just too big and got way beyond the ability of campus administrations to effectively curtail it. Let us not kid ourselves on that score.

But what about Professor Bill Ayers? Apparently this Boston College incident is not the first college where some furor that has dogged him. I do not, at this time, have the details of Ayers’ other problems at other campuses. However, I heard him last November, just after the 2008 elections when he was touting his revised memoir, on the “Terry Gross Show” on NPR (as any Boston College student could have done, as well). He seemed none too radical in his presentation of his current politics which were tired garden variety left-Democratic Party ones that we have become all too familiar with from repentant radicals, although to his credit he did not abase himself in denial of his revolutionary past. Nor should he have. We were dealing with serious war criminals then in the Johnson/Nixon wielding the most powerful military machine/police apparatus the world has ever known in case one has forgotten or wasn’t around then. For now though. Hands Off Professor Ayers! - Let him speak on politics, education or whatever the hell he wants to talk about. Anywhere.

*On Coming Of Political Age In The 1960s - A Personal View

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the 1968 Democratic Party nominating convention in Chicago, a seminal event in increasing the leftist political consciousness for many in that generation, including this writer.

Over the past several years I have spent some time, sometimes an inordinate amount of time, thinking through and writing about the course of my political evolution. Hardly a unique pursuit among professional politicians or wannabes of all stripes, except that in America that political evolution is somewhat freakish, if not bizarre. In the land of hard, bitter-hard, at times irrationally and over the top hard, anti-communism, of a frosty post- World War II Cold War that had many believing, including those in my own household, that next week the bomb, some bomb, was coming, FOB, and that there would be no tomorrow or worst yet believing it was better to be “dead that red” my trajectory, circuitous as it was, was leading toward a life time devotion to the ideals of that self-same hated communism. I have filled up many a post with one or another detail of that experience. I have been asked to write it up in some kind of memoir form so the kids now and in the future will know what it was all about, and have rejected the idea. Nevertheless, I have not regrets, no regrets at all, about my choice. Except that we should have won, and we still need to. Let me tell you some more of my story, at least the story of my political coming of age.

How does one really know, except by reflection and certain introspection long, long after the event, when one comes of political age? If anybody really cares about asking such a question. But after a life time of political activity I have a gut instinct that more people than you might think have both thought about the question and have come to a decision about it. And frankly, many have made the decision to avoid politics at all costs and to not touch it with that proverbial ten-foot pole. Alas, that was not my fate. I was the guy pulling to get his greedy little hands on the pole.

There are little signposts along the way, some meaningful some not, like my over-weaning interest in political news in 1956 when I was excited by the Adlai Stevenson for President campaign and was crestfallen when he lost. That, however, was a mere episodic thing, and in fact I was more than happy to be selected by my teacher to write, in magic marker “Eisenhower Wins” on the daily bulletin that we kept up with in the hall next to our elementary school classroom. Hell, maybe I was just sucking up to the teacher, who I may, or may not, have had a crush on. Or maybe wondering what it was that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg did that was so bad. Or why Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy was saying that there were “reds under every bed” in the Army. But this was all just passing noise to a growing boy’s real interest- how to get girls to like you. I swear half the political things I was interested in really came out of an attempt to appear sophisticated to the neighborhood girls. Why else would a young boy pore over a punishment paper for some infraction on democracy and what it means and insist, no demand, that he read it in front of the class. But again this is not really anything but a scatter-shot build-up to coming of age, politically.

Let's, maybe, take it from a difference perspective and see if it makes more sense. Having grown up in a dirt- poor working class family and living in those early days of the post- World War II “American Century” which promised unheard of prosperity after the trials and tribulations of the 1930s Great Depression and the World War II fight certainly made a deep impression on me. Living in an almost exclusively working poor/lumpen environment with all of its adverse pathologies, however, also can give one a much distorted world view. As I pointed out in a commentary last year it was a very long time before I knew that there was anything other than being poor, although I sensed it on the few occasions that I came up against middle class and rich kids. So early on I knew that there was an us, and them. And I definitely was with us-whatever that meant. But does that lead to political consciousness much less class consciousness? Given our few numbers today among those of my generation I think not. That is as much a prescription for lumpen criminal activity against the nearest and most vulnerable targets as of a desire to serve humankind.

So that is predicate-but how does that take us from what, in most cases, is a turning inward away from society rather than defiantly fighting the "monsters". That, my friends is not a simple story and do not believe those who give too quick an answer to how they developed their world views. It is a mix of impressions, understandings, misunderstandings and turning points. Hell, some of it is just happenstance, or at least it seems that way. How explain that in the heart of the Joe McCarthy-led “red scare” that I did not hate communists. I definitely did not, like others I knew, want to turn anyone I suspected of such views in to the government. In fact a quick run through of my political trajectory that I have made people laugh over is that when told that someone was a communist (meaning American Communist Party supporter) I said, in my best “family of the left” voice- "so what, that is one more for our side." When I finally did move left and was actively searching for those same communists to unite with I could only find them deep inside the Democratic Party. And when I seriously took up a Marxist worldview I dreaded running into them.

But enough of that. What do you make of this- In 1960 I distinctly remembered rooting for the Soviet Union to win more gold medals than the United States at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Or, being in a frenzy to get a copy of the “Communist Manifesto”, although for fairly long time as a political opponent of that world view. (Which I got by sending away to the Government Printing Office. The reason they offered it was that it was part of the ‘evidence’ from the famous 1960 San Francisco sessions of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that were also were demonstrated against as one of the first acts of the 1960s rebellion in the North or West.) Or being non-plussed when a high school history teacher called me a “Bolshevik” (I really wasn’t… then) for some minor disobedience. Those are all well and good examples but let’s leave it at this. All of this was the stuff that made up, helter-skelter, the development of my political class consciousness. I like to think that all of it was natural for a working class kid. Hey, a theory that says labor must rule should be like moth to a flame for such a kid. I have never regretted sticking with my class. And I never have regretted my “softness” for the Russian Bolshevik Revolution. And to 'prove' it let me finish strong- Forward to new Octobers

*The Latest From The "Daily Kos" Website- Know Thy Enemy

Click on the title to link to the "Daily Kos" home page. This site is valuable, mainly, to get the polls and other technical information that major American bourgeois party politics thrives on.

Markin comment:

This site is for bourgeois techno-politicos. At one time I would have stayed up all night to read this stuff. Fortunately, serious politics by Marx, Lenin and Trotsky saved my young hide. Still, "know thy enemy" (and what he or she is up to) is a good political policy, no matter the times.

*A Short Note On The March 4th Defense Of Education Rally At U/Mass-Boston

Click on the headline to link to a "Boston Indymedia" entry from the U/Mass-Boston Commitee To Have Fun (nice name,right?).

Markin comment:

As most people are already painfully aware of, public services, especially in places like California have been crippled during this latest almost catastrophic capitalist economic downturn. Nowhere is this more true that in the public education sector, including higher education. As a response to the ever-spiraling upward cost of tuition and other expenses and a bizarre corresponding decrease in the number of tenured and secured faculty and other personnel that make a campus what it is California students, teachers and labor leaders took the lead in calling for a nation-wide March 4th action. Hence, this writer’s presence at the U/Massachusetts- Boston rally.

The event at U/Mass, as such, was small but spirited. Certainly the young students who did take the time to make their voices heard, made them heard. And that is no small thing at this campus. I should note that while Boston has many, many colleges and universities, mainly private and expensive, U/Mass-Boston is a commuter school catering to a mainly working class, minority and immigrant clientele.

Although the economic squeeze has hit this population hard in every way the public college student here, in comparison at least to the mass of the private college students, although they are starting to fell the crunch too, are not, at this minute, necessarily the kind of student who will come out to such rallies. Many of these students work, are first generation college students, and have a myriad other responsibilities, many times not academically-related. Moreover, and I know this from personal experience, this campus is filled with “shoulder to the wheel” types who understand the only way out of the ghetto, the barrio and the working class quarters is to get that “education for the 21st century”. We have no quarrel with that aspiration; we just want that to include remembering for where they came and who got left behind...

What amazed me most, however, is that although those who did show up for this rally really were more spirited than I have seen students for a long time, since my school days and maybe yours, they do not have a clue about the wider picture. A huge theme, expressed by radicals and plain students alike here and elsewhere that day, ran along the lines of “taxing” the rich. Naturally, I had to mention that it would be far easier for working people to just take state power than to get the enactment a serious tax program that would put a dent in the fortunes of the “Fortune 500”. Far easier, for that is where they live. Nobody questioned my critique, although nobody really bought into the idea. More prevalent, as one would expect, was the call for politicians, especially Democratic politicians, to do the right thing. And without even one little “or else” attached. We have some work to do.

At the end of the day though what was most telling was the failure to link up the Obama war policies and the economic question. And that is the most revealing different, at least anecdotally, from the crowds, the mainly older crowds, which I have been running into recently at various anti-war rallies. The oldsters, for the most part, can make the link at some level. Strange that today the young are fighting for their economic future and the oldsters are fighting for their political “souls”. We have to put the two together, right? Then that easy road to a workers government mentioned above WILL be mere child’s play.

*From The "Socialist Worker"- Updated Reports On The March 4th Day Of Actions- Guest Commentaries

Click on the headline to link to a "Socialist Worker" Website for updates on the events around March 4th-Defend Public Education Day Of Action.

*From The March 4th National Day Of Action- Drop All Charges Against The Milwaukee 16!

Click on the headline to link to a "National March 4th Day Of Action" entry calling for support to the Milwaukee 16.

*The March 4th Day Of Action Facebook

Click on the headline to link to the "March 4th Day Of Action" Facebook page

*Free The Oakland March 4th Public Education Defenders!

Click on the headline to link to a "Oakland (Ca.)Local" blog entry calling for the defense of 150 people arrested during a "Defend Public Education" rally.

Markin comment:

This one is a no-brainer- Free the protesters now!

*The Latest From The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee-Free Lynn Stewart And Her Co-Workers- Lynn Stewart Must Not Die In Jail!

Click on the headline to link to the Lynn Stewart Defense Committee Website.

March Is Women's History Month.

Markin comment:

On a day when I am honoring the great revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, the "Rose of the Revolution", it seems very, very appropriate to enter a post from the Lynn Stewart Defense Committee Website. Both women have worked the same side of the street- for the poor, for the working people, for women, for the downtrodden. I will repeat here what has become something of a constant refrain-and will continue so until Lynn Stewart and her co-workers are free. Lynn Stewart must not die in jail!

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- The Fight Around "No Platform For Fascists" In Britain- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a "Workers Vanguard", Number 952, dated February 12, 2010,article,"Britain: Fascists Feed On Labor Party Racism".

Markin comment:

It is always important for communist militants to get the position being polemicized in favor of here, "No Platform For Fascists", right. On some issues there is, even within our narrower communist perspective of driving the class struggle forward, more than one possible right way to look at the situation. This is not one of them. We have nothing to "debate" with the para-military thugs, or rather we will "debate" them in the streets when, and if, the time comes. One of the most painful, and dearly bought, lessons that we have learned from the communist struggles of the 20th century is that this rabble has to be stopped in the egg. While almost everyone, including communists, prefers to work in a democratic environment we are are under no obligation to defend the rights of fascists to do anything. One of the problems in the United States, and this comment extends to Britain as well, is that we have lived in a relatively democratic society for so long that we have gotten "soft" around some of these issues of who our enemies are, and what they will do to us if they ever get a chance. We must not give the fascists that chance.

I will invoke a little personal history here to make a point. I do not know if it was some working class instinct, or just growing up in a place in society where the working poor and the lumpen elements from whom the fascists recruits their "shock troops" intersected but I have always had a visceral hatred for the fascists. Even when I was nothing but an up-and-coming young liberal politico on the make I always disagreed with the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) so-called absolute defense of free speech that also encompassed the rights of fascists to that privilege. The most graphic example of that in my youth was their defense of George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazis, to spew his garbage. Later, during the 1970s the ACLU went on to disgrace themselves further by defending the right of fascists to march through heavily Jewish, heavily Holocaust survivor Skokie, Illinois. My blood still runs cold just thinking of that even today. And if anyone needs any further reminder of what we are are up against- Remember Germany 1933(and 1923, for that matter, when Hitler first raised his head and the German revolution that could have changed things around failed to materialize paving his way forward), Remember Greensboro, North Carolina 1979, and Remember our slogan-Never Again! "No Platform For Fascists"!

*From The Marxist Archives- Leon Trotsky's Struggle Against The "Family Of The Left" Concept

Click on the title to link to a "Leon Trotsky Internet Archive" 1935 article,"Centrism Alchemy Or Marxism?".

Markin comment:

As I mentioned some time back in a commentary on the need to study the Trotsky-Stalin controversy as part of our communist and anti-imperialist education, we of the American ostensibly communist anti-war left are in desperate need of learning the lessons of previous communist work against imperialism. (See "On The Front Lines Of The Struggle Against The Afghan War...”, dated December 6, 2009.) That learning, of necessity, requires a look back at some of the historic struggles within the communist movement, primarily for our purposes today the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin in the aftermath of Lenin's death and the isolation of the Russian revolution in the early 1920s. The Trotsky polemic here is one of the early examples of his fight against the capitulation of the the increasingly Stalinized Soviet state and Communist International apparatuses that were "trimming their sails" on the questions of correct political strategy of alliances with other classes. and the proper communist attitude toward the non-working class parties of the opponent capitalist imperial states. Read on.

*From The "SteveLendmanBlog"- On The Massachusetts U.S. Senate Election Results

Click on the title to link to a "Steven Lendman Blog" entry that deals with the fall out from the recent special election in Massachusetts to fill the unexpired term of the late Democratic Senator, Edward Kennedy.

Markin commnet:

I leave it to ace commentator Steve Lendman to do the bang-up job of analysis of this benighted bourgeois special election. Thanks, Steve.

*From The "Green Left Global News" Blog- The Diaster In Haiti- Naomi Klein's View

Click on the title to link the "Green Left Global News" blog entry concerning Naomi Klein's view on the situation in Haiti.

*Maine Voters-Vote To Keep Gay Marriage Rights On November 3rd !

Click on title to link to Associated Press article concerning the November 3, 2009 referendum in Maine to determine whether that state will keep its current legislation guaranteeing the rights of gays to marry. All out on this one in Maine.

*On The Question Of Worker Defense Guards In Defense of Bourgeois Democracy

Click on title to link to blog entry that discusses the question of defending various democratic fora against the onslaught of right-wing harassment or threats.

Markin comment:

Hey, what are you guys, revisionists or something? We want to keep worker defense guards solely to defend our own working class institutions like union meetings and picket lines against cops and right-wing thugs. Let the bourgeoisie take care of defending their own institutions. Right?

Wrong! This was just a ‘got ya’ moment sponsored by Markin. Hell, of course we want defend town meetings and other forms of democratic debate against military, police and civilian right-wing threats and harassment. We just do it in our own way and with the proviso that we give no political support to left-wing, centrist or right wing bourgeois parliamentary cretins. Needless to say, under normal circumstances no bourgeois politician, except in extremis, would seek or accept workers defense guards to defend their meetings or other events. They will seek their cops, military etc. to guard them. That does not mean that we cannot make great propaganda for our side out of this, and be prepared to actually do some defending. Moreover, as history so graphically shows, when the deal goes down, all the pretensions and protestations of liberals aside, we leftist working class militants are the most consistent and devoted defenders of democratic rights, including our right to assemble. And that, my friends, ain’t no lie.

*Down With The Federal Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA)- The Legal Fights Steps Up

Click ON Title To Link To National Public Radio Segment On The Legal Fight By The Massachusetts Attorney-General To Challenge The Federal Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA). Needless to say, while we have a different strategic (and political) approach to this vital democratic question all avenues, state and local, legal and on the streets, to gain this right are supportable. Down With DOMA!

*Oppose The Military Coup In Honduras, Ahora- A Guest Commentary

Click On Title To Link To Guest Commentary Concerning The Struggle Against The Recent Military Takeover In Honduras.

Markin Commentary

Some of the points I agree, some not. The situation there, especially from this distance, seems somewhat murky. Especially suspect are the leftist populist credentials of the deposed Zelaya and his actions to gain reelection (or at least run for reelection). But know this, we leftists (and here I mean socialists, anarchists and both branches of the communist movement (including the Communist International before its Stalinist degeneration), Stalinist And Trotskyist, have been sometimes too slow to oppose military takeovers of democratically-elected governments. And , on occasion too quick to support certain so-called leftist military one like in China and Bulgaria in the 1920's. Yes, we want our day but that does not mean that today we are indifferent to the norms of bourgeois democracy. In Honduras we oppose the military junta, if for no other reason than we can work better for our socialist goals and easier under bourgeois norms than the norms of military rule. I will have more to say on this later. For now though the immediate thread of our work (and slogans) should be to fight for the return of the democratic norms linked to the struggle for a workers republic-ahora.

*Solidarity- Defend The Iranian Protesters-U.S. Hands Off Iran!

Click On To Title To Link To Associated Press Article On The Latest Demonstrations In Iran. Information is sketchy, the motives of the protesters are varied but this we know- we stand with the people in the streets as they struggle for some form of democratic voice on this one. Needless to say though at the governmental level-Obama-U.S. Hands Off Iran!