AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Thursday, January 07, 2016

Sometimes A Picture Is Better Than One Thousand Words- And Sometimes Not

"How can we study history, how can we live through the things we have lived through and complacently go on allowing the same causes over and over again to put us through those same horrible experiences. I cannot believe that we are going to go on being as stupid as that. If we are, we deserve to commit suicide-and we will!"
~Eleanor Roosevelt

On The Art Of Keeping Your Head Down-Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman’s WUSA

On The Art Of Keeping Your Head Down-Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman’s WUSA

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

WUSA, starring Joanne Woodward, Paul Newman, Anthony Perkins, 1970

Sometimes films give a slice of life at a certain period in history and don’t age well like the black and white films from the 1950s that dealt with the Cold War and you could almost feel the frost then (and the menace behind that frost if it defrosted and somebody let the big one go off, the big one then as now be a nuclear weapon or weapons). Now the younger generation, hell, maybe even some of us of the older generation who have forgotten, wonder what all the fuss was about as they deal with the age of up front and on-going wars on terror. Other films like the one under review, Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman’s WUSA while clearly of certain period, in this case the later 1960s, have subject matter that could be hot off the current presses (or whatever alternative social media people are tuned into for their information these days). The subject matter here (beyond the question of keeping one’s head down when a struggle is brewing, an eternal and controversial theme) is the relationship between the media represented by the WUSA radio station of the story and various right-wing causes, conspiracies and plots.

Here is the way this one plays out. Rheinhardt, played by Paul Newman, is guy on the drift, just going along to get along, who winds up by the force of his personality getting a job as an announcer at WUSA in New Orleans. That personality, or an aspect of it allowed him to move up the corporate food change even though he disagreed with the right-wing drift of the politics and ownership of the radio station. Along the way, as drifters will do since they play the edges of society rather closely, he meets a heart of gold independent hooker who has been around the block a few times, Geraldine, played by Joanne Woodward, and they eventually get under the sheets before long and thereafter wind up playing house together. (As an aside the chemistry between Woodward and Newman here is palpable unlike some other films they played in together.) Part of “playing house” happened when they rent an apartment in a building which spoke of some 1960s counter-culture madness along the fringes of Bourbon Street but more importantly meet a fellow tenant, Rainey, played by Anthony Perkins who had finally gotten over his Psycho fixations, an idealistic guy who was working some social betterment program for the black community of New Orleans.

As Rainey finds out along the way, finds out the hard way, he is a small cog, even if unintentional on his part, of the owner of WUSA and of his plan to unleash some kind of race riot on the way to attempt to overthrow the government on the backs of the white rednecks and cranks who listen to the words put out by WUSA which is like music to their deeply resentful ears. Sound familiar. Through all of this, or almost all of this, Rheinhardt is going along, troubled a bit maybe, but keeping his head down to keep his job.

Then “judgment day” comes. The owner of WUSA and his pals stage a rally in order to rile up the brethren. Rainey who now is wise to the purposes he was used for decides to take matters in hand and tries to kill the owner during the rally. Pandemonium ensues. Then old head down Rheinhardt got “religion,” a little, decided to rock the boat and break from his keeping his head down world, although in the end he only loses his job and is on the bum again. But not everybody is a survivor. Geraldine is caught up in the melee of the rally holding some dope and is arrested and jailed. In jail, facing who knows what, this delicate world wary flower, commits suicide. Rheinhardt is saddened by the event but you know some guys are organically incapable of not keeping their heads down, at least for long, and he will go on somewhere else. That is an eternal problem. Yeah, this one is a slice of life one with a message for today.

*****Songs To While The Time By- The Roots Is The Toots-Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven

*****Songs To While The Time By- The Roots Is The Toots-Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven

A YouTube clip to give some flavor to this subject.

Over the past several years I have been running an occasional series in this space of songs, mainly political protest songs, you know The Internationale (reflecting the necessarily international brother and sisterhood of the downtrodden and oppressed to get out from under the thumb of the now globalized economic royalists who run the show to their small benefit), Union Maid (reflecting the deep-seeded need to organize the unorganized and reorganize the previously organized sections of the labor movement in America), Which Side Are You On (reflecting, well, that is easy enough to figure out without further explanation, which side are you when the deal goes down), Viva La Quince Brigada (reflecting that at certain times and certain places we must take up arms like in the 1930s Spanish Civil War against the night-takers before they get out of their shells and wreak havoc on the world), Universal Soldier (reflecting the short-fall in the ability of humankind to step forward without going off the deep end of killing each other for no known reason, good reason anyway), and such under the title Songs To While The Class Struggle By.

Those songs have provided our movement with that combination entertainment/political message that is an art form that we use to draw the interested around us. Even though today those interested in struggling may be counted rather than among the countless that we need to take on the beasts and the class struggle to be “whiled away” is rather one-sidedly going against us at present. The bosses are using every means from firing militants to targeting and setting union organizing drives up for failure by every means possible to employing their paid propagandists to complain when the masses are not happy with having their plight groveled in their faces like they should be and are ready to do something about it while the rich, well, while away in luxury and comfort.

Not all life however is political, or rather not all music lends itself to some kind of explicit political meaning but yet speak to, let’s say, the poor sharecropper or planation worker on Mister’s land at the juke joint on Saturday listening to the country blues, unplugged, kids in the early 1950s at the jukebox listening to high be-bop swing heralding a new breeze to break out of the tired music of their parents, other kids listening, maybe at that same jukebox later in the decade now worn with play and coins listening to some guys from some Memphis record company rocking and rolling (okay, okay not just some record company but Sam Phillip’s Sun Records and not just some guys from the cornfields but Warren Smith, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis), or adults spending some dough to hear the latest from Tin Pan Alley (some Cole Porter, Irvin Berlin, Gershwin Brothers summertime and the living is easy tune)or some enchanted evening Broadway musical. And so they too while away to the various aspects of the American songbook and that rich tradition is which in honored here.

This series which could include some modern protest songs as well like Pete Seeger’s Where Have All The Flowers Gone or Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind, is centered on roots music as it has come down the ages and formed the core of the American songbook. You will find the odd, the eccentric, the forebears of later musical trends, and the just plain amusing here. Listen up.

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And as if you needed more motivation to list up run through this sketch:

The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Sam Lowell thought it was funny how things worked out in such contrary fashion in this wicked old world, not his expression that “wicked old world” for he preferred of late the more elastic and ironic “sad old world” reflecting since we are in a reflecting mood the swift passage of time and of times not coming back but that of his old time North Adamsville corner boy Peter Markin, Markin, who seemingly was possessed by the demon fight in his brain against the night-takers whatever their guise and who will be more fully introduced in a moment. (Markin aka Peter Paul Markin although nobody ever called him that except his mother, as one would expect although he hated to be teased by every kid from elementary school on including girls, girls who liked him too as a result, and his first ill-advised wife, a scion of the Mayfair swells who tried, unsuccessfully, to impress her leafy suburban parents with the familiar waspy triple names inherited from the long ago Brahmin forbear stowaways on the good ship Mayflower.)

Neither of those expressions referred to above date back to their youth since neither Sam nor Markin back then, back in their 1960s youth, would have used such old-fashioned religious-drenched expressions to express their take on the world since as with all youth, or at least youth who expected to “turn the world upside down” (an expression that they both did use in very different contexts) they would have withheld such judgments or were too busy doing that “turning” business and they had no time for adjectives to express their worldly concerns. No that expression, that understanding about the wickedness of the world had been picked up by Sam from Markin when they had reconnected a number of years previously after they had not seen each other for decades to express the uphill battles of those who had expected humankind to exhibit the better angels of their nature on a more regular basis. Some might call this a nostalgic glancing back, especially by Markin since he had more at stake in a favorable result, on a world that did not turn upside down or did so in a way very different from those hazy days.

The funny part (or ironic if you prefer) was that Sam had been in his youth the least political, the least culture-oriented, the least musically-oriented of those corner boys like Markin, Jack Dawson, Jimmy Jenkins and “max daddy” leader Fritz Fallon (that “max daddy” another expression coined by Markin so although he has not even been properly introduced we know plenty about his place in the corner boy life, his place as “flak,” for Fritz’s operation although Fritz always called him “the Scribe” when he wanted something written up about his latest exploit and needed to play on Markin’s vanity, Markin with his finger-tip two thousand arcane facts stored in that brain ready to be fired at a moment’s notice for his leader. His leader who kept the coins flowing into the jukebox at Phil’s House of Pizza (don’t ask how that “coins flowing” got going since Fritz like most of the corner boys came “from hunger” but just take on faith that they got there. That shop had been located down a couple of blocks from the choppy ocean waters of Adamsville Beach (and still is although under totally different management from the arch-Italian Rizzo family that ran the place for several generation to some immigrant Albanians named Hoxha).

That made it among other things a natural hang-out place for wayward but harmless poor teenage corner boys. (The serious “townie” professional corner boys, the rumblers, tumblers, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters hung around Harry’s Variety with leader Red Riley over on Sagamore far from beaches, daytime beaches although rumors had been of more than one nighttime orgy with “nice” girls looking for kicks with rough boys down among the briny rocks. Fritz and the boys would not have gone within three blocks of that place. Maybe more from fear, legitimate fear as Fritz’s older brother, Timmy, a serious tough guy himself, could testify to the one time he tried to wait outside Harry’s for some reason, a friend stopping to buy a soda on a hot summer day Fritz said, and got chain-whipped by Red for his indiscretion. Moreover Phil’s provided a beautiful vantage point for scanning the horizon for those wayward girls who also kept their coins flowing into Phil’s jukebox (or a stray “nice” girl passing by after Red and his corner boys threw her over).

Sam had recently thought about that funny story that Markin had told the crowd once on a hot night in the summer of 1965 when nobody had any money and were just holding up the wall at Phil’s about Johnny Callahan, the flashy and unstoppable halfback from the high school team (and a guy even Red respected having made plenty of money off of “sports” who bet with him on Johnny’s prowess any given Saturday although Johnny once confessed that he too, rightly, avoided Harry’s after what had happened to Timmy). See Johnny was pretty poor in those days even by the median working poor standard of the old neighborhoods (although now, courtesy of his incessant radio and television advertising which continues to make everyone within fifty miles of North Adamsville who knew Johnny back in the day aware of his new profession, he is a prosperous Toyota car dealer down across from the mall in Hull about twenty miles from North Adamsville, the town where their mutual friend Josh Breslin soon to be introduced came from). Johnny, a real music maniac who would do his football weight-lifting exercises to Jerry Lee’s Great Balls of Fire, Gene Vincent’s Be-Bop-A-Lula and stuff like that to get him hyped up, had this routine in order to get to hear songs that he was dying to hear, stuff he would hear late at night coming from a rock station out of Detroit and which would show up a few weeks later on Phil’s jukebox just waiting for Johnny and the kids to fill the coffers, with the girls who had some dough, enough dough anyway to put coins into that jukebox.

Johnny would go up all flirty to some young thing (a Fritz expression coped from Jerry Lee and not an invention of Markin as he would later try to claim to some “young thing” that he was trying to “score”) or depending on whatever intelligent he had on the girl, maybe she had just had a fight with her boyfriend or had broken up with him so Johnny would be all sympathy, maybe she was just down in the dumps for no articulable reason like every teen goes through every chance they get, whatever it took. Johnny, by the way, would have gotten that intelligence via Markin who whatever else anybody had to say about him, good or bad, was wired into, no, made himself consciously privy to, all kinds of boy-girl information almost like he had a hook into that Monday morning before school girls’ locker room talkfest (everybody already knew that he was hooked into the boys’ Monday morning version and had started more rumors and other unsavory deeds than any ten other guys).

Now here is what Johnny “knew” about almost every girl if they had the quarter which allowed them to play three selections. He would let them pick that first one on their own, maybe something to express interest in his flirtation, maybe her name, say Donna, was also being used as the title of a latest hit, or if broken up some boy sorrow thing. Brenda Lee’s I Want To Be Wanted, stuff like that. The second one he would “suggest” something everybody wanted to listen to no matter what but which was starting to get old. Maybe an Elvis, Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee thing still on the jukebox playlist but getting wearisome. Then he would go in for the kill and “suggest” they play this new platter, you know, something like Martha and the Vandelas Dancing in the Streets or Roy’s Blue Bayou both of which he had heard on the midnight radio airwaves out of Detroit one night and were just getting play on the jukeboxes. And bingo before you know it she was playing the thing again, and again. Beautiful. And Johnny said that sometimes he would wind up with a date, especially if he had just scored about three touchdowns for the school, a date that is in the days before he and Kitty Kelly became an “item.” An item, although it is not germane to the story, who still is Johnny’s girl, wife, known as Mrs. Toyota now.

But enough of this downstream stuff Sam thought. The hell with Johnny and his cheapjack tricks (although not to those three beautiful touchdowns days, okay) this thing gnawing at him was about old age angst and not the corner boy glory days at Phil’s, although it was about old time corners boys and their current doings, some of them anyway. So yeah he had other things he wanted to think about (and besides he had already, with a good trade-in gotten his latest car from Mr. Toyota so enough there), to tell a candid world about how over the past few years with the country, the world, the universe had been going to hell in a hand-basket. In the old days, like he kept going back to he was not the least bit interested in anything in the big world outside of sports, and girls, of course. And endlessly working on plans to own his own business, a print shop, before he was twenty-five. Well, he did get that small business, although not until thirty and had prospered when he made connections to do printing for several big high-tech companies, notably IBM when they began outsourcing their work. He had prospered, had married (twice, and divorced twice), had the requisite tolerated children and adored grandchildren, and in his old age a woman companion to ease his time.

But there had been for a long time, through those failed marriages, through that business success something gnawing at him, something that Sam felt he had missed out on, or felt he had do something about. Then a few years ago when it was getting time for a high school class reunion he had Googled “North Adamsville Class of 1966” and came upon a class website for that year, his year, that had been set up by the reunion committee, and decided to join the site to keep up with what was going on, keep up with developments there (he would wind up not going to that reunion as he had planned to although that too is not germane to the story here except as one more thing that gnawed at him because in the end he could not face going home, believed in the end after a painful episode, a feud with a female fellow classmate that left bitter ashes in his mouth (hers too from what he had heard later) what Thomas Wolfe said in the title of one of his novels, you can’t go home again).

After he had registered on the site giving a brief resume of his interests and what he had been up to these past forty years or so years Sam looked at the class list, the entire list of class members alive and deceased (a rose beside their name signifying their passing, some seventy or so madding to his sad old world view) of who had joined and found the names of Peter Paul Markin and Jimmy Jenkins among those who had done so. (Sam had to laugh, listed as Peter Paul Markin since everybody was listed by their full names, revenge from the grave by his poor mother, and that leafy suburban first wife who tried to give him Mayflower credentials, he thought.) Jack Dawson had passed away a few years before, a broken man, broken after his son who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan had committed suicide, according to Markin, as had their corner boy leader, Fritz Fallon, homeless after going through a couple of fortunes, his own and a third wife’s.

Through the mechanism established on the site which allowed each class member who joined to have a private e-mail slot Sam contacted both men and the three of them started a rather vigorous on-line chat line for several weeks going through the alphabet of their experiences, good and bad, the time for sugar-coating was over unlike in their youth when all three would lie like crazy, especially about sex and with whom in order to keep their place in the pecking order, and in order to keep up with Fritz whom lied more than the three of them combined. Markin knew that, knew Fritz’s lying about his scorecard with under the satin sheets women, knew it better than anybody else but to keep his place as “scribe” in that crazy quill pecking order went along with such silly teenage stuff, stuff that in his other pursuits he would have laughed at but that is what made being a teenager back then, now too, from what Sam saw of his grandchildren’s trials and tribulation.

After a while, once the e-mail questions had worked their course, all three men met in Boston at the Sunnyvale Grille, a place where Markin had begun to hang out in after he had moved back to Boston from the West Coast (read “hang out”: did his daytime drinking) over by the waterfront, and spent a few hours discussing not so much old times per se but what was going on in the world now, and how the world had changed some much in the meantime. And since Markin, the political maniac of the tribe, was involved in the conversations maybe do something about it at least that is what Sam had hoped since he knew that is where he thought he needed to head in order to cut into that gnawing feeling at him. Sam was elated, and unlike in his youth he did not shut his ears down, when those two guys would talk politics, about the arts or about music. He had not listened back then since he was so strictly into girls and sports, not always in that order (which caused many problems later including one of the grounds for his one of his divorces, not the sports but the girls).

This is probably the place for Sam to introduce Peter Paul Markin although he had already given an earful (and what goes for Markin goes to a lesser extent for Jimmy who tended to follow in Pete’s wake on the issues back then, and still does). Markin as Sam already noted provided that noteworthy, national security agency-worthy service, that “intelligence” he provided all the guys (and not just his corner boys, although they had first dibs) about girls, who was “taken,” a very important factor if some frail (a Fritz term from watching too many 1940s gangster and detective movies and reading Dashiell Hammett too closely, especially The Maltese Falcon),was involved with some bruiser football player, some college joe who belonged to a fraternity and the brothers were sworn to avenge any brother’s indignities, or worse, worse of all, if she was involved with some outlaw biker who hung out in Adamsville and who if he hadn’t his monthly quota of college boy wannabes red meat hanging out at Phil’s would not think twice about chain-whipping you just for the fuck of it (“for the fuck of it” a term Jimmy constantly used so it was not always Markin or Fritz who led the verbal life around the corner), who was “unapproachable,” probably more important than that social blunder of ‘hitting on” a taken woman since that snub by Miss Perfect-Turned-Up-Nose would make the rounds of that now legendary seminar, Monday morning before school girls’ locker room (and eventually work its way through Markin to the boys’ Monday morning version ruining whatever social standing the guy had spent since junior high trying to perfect in order to avoid the fatal nerd-dweeb-wallflower-square name your term).

Strangely Markin had made a serious mistake with Melinda Loring who blasted her freeze deep on him and he survived to tell the tale, or at least that is what he had the boys believe. Make of this what you will though he never after that Melinda Loring sting had a high school girlfriend from North Adamsville High, who, well, liked to “do the do” as they called it back then, that last part not always correct since everybody, girls and boys alike, were lying like crazy about whether they were “doing the do” or not, including Markin.

But beyond, well beyond, that schoolboy silliness Markin was made of sterner stuff (although Sam would not have bothered to use such a positive attribute about Markin back then) was super-political, super into art and what he called culture, you know going to poetry readings at coffeehouses, going over to Cambridge to watch foreign films with subtitles and themes that he would try to talk about and even Jimmy would turn his head, especially those French films by Jean Renoir, and super into music, fortunately he was not crazy for classical music (unlike some nerds in school then who were in the band and after practice you would hear Beethoven or somebody wafting through the halls after they had finished their sport’s practice)but serious about what is now called classic rock and roll and then in turn, the blues, and folk music (Sam still shuttered at that hillbilly stuff Markin tried to interest him in when he thought about it). That was how Markin had first met Josh Breslin, still a friend, whom he introduced to Sam at one of their meetings over at the Sunnyvale Grille.

Josh told the gathering that Markin had met him after high school, after he had graduated from Hull High (the same town where Johnny Callahan was burning up the Toyota sales records for New England) down at the Surf Ballroom (Sam had his own memories of the place, some good, some bad including one affair that almost wound up in marriage). Apparently Josh and Peter had had their wanting habits on the same girl at one Friday night dance when the great local cover band, the Rockin’ Ramrods held sway there, and had been successively her boyfriend for short periods both to be dumped for some stockbroker from New York. But their friendship remained and they had gone west together, gone on that Jack Kerouac On The Road trail for a number of years when they were trying their own version of turning the world upside down on. Josh also dabbled (his word) in the turning upside down politics of the time.

And that was the remarkable thing about Markin, not so much later in the 1960s in cahoots with Josh because half of youth nation, half the generation of ’68 was knee-deep in some movement, but in staid old North Adamsville High days, days when to just be conventionally political, wanting to run for office or something, was seen as kind of strange. See Peter was into the civil rights movement, nuclear disarmament, and social justice stuff that everybody thought he was crazy to be into, everybody from Ma to Fritz (and a few anonymous midnight phone-callers yelling n----r-lover and commie into the Markin home phone). He had actually gone into Boston when he was a freshman and joined the picket-line in front of Woolworths’ protesting the fact that they would not let black people eat in their lunchrooms down south (and maybe Markin would say when he mentioned what he was up to Woolworth’s, or North Adamsville residents, were not that happy to have blacks in their northern lunchrooms either ), had joined a bunch of Quakers and little old ladies in tennis sneakers (a term then in use for airhead blue-haired lady do-gooders with nothing but time on their hands) calling on the government to stop building atomic bombs (not popular in the red scare Cold War “we were fighting against the Russians” North Adamsville, or most other American places either), running over to the art museum to check out the exhibits (including some funny stories about him and Jimmy busting up the place looking at the old Pharaoh times slave building Pyramids stuff uncovered by some Harvard guys way back), and going to coffeehouses in Harvard Square and listening to hokey folk music that was a drag. (Sam’s take on that subject then, and now.) So Markin was a walking contradiction, although that was probably not as strange now as it seemed back then when every new thing was looked at with suspicion and when kids like Peter were twisted in the wind between being corner boys and trying to figure out what that new wind was that was blowing though the land, when Sam and the other corner boys, except Jimmy and sometimes Jack would try to talk him out of stuff that would only upset everybody in town.

But here is the beauty, beauty for Sam now that he was all ears about what Peter had to say, he had kept at it, had kept the faith, while everybody else from their generation, or almost everybody, who protested war, protested around the social issues, had hung around coffeehouses and who had listened to folk music had long before given it up. Markin had, after his Army time, spent a lot of time working with GIs around the war issues, protested the incessantly aggressive American foreign policy dipped internally into wars and coups at the drop of a hat and frequented off-beat coffeehouses set up in the basements of churches in order to hear the dwindling number of folk artists around. He had gotten and kept his “religion,” kept the faith in a sullen world. And like in the old days a new generation (added to that older North Adamsville generation which still, from the class website e-mail traffic had not gotten that much less hostile to what Markin had to say about this “wicked old world,” you already know the genesis of that term, right, was ready to curse him out, ready to curse the darkness against his small voice).

One night when Peter and Sam were alone at the Sunnyvale Grille, maybe both had had a few too many high-shelf scotches (now able to afford such liquor unlike in the old days when they both in their respective poverties, drank low-shelf Johnny Walker whiskey with a beer chaser when they had the dough, if not some cheapjack wine), Peter told Sam the story of how he had wanted to go to Alabama in high school, go to Selma, but his mother threatened to disown him if he did, threatened to disown him not for his desire to go but because she would not have been able to hold her head up in public if he had, and so although it ate at him not to go, go when his girlfriend, Helen Jackson, who lived in Gloversville, did go, he “took a dive” (Markin’s words).

Told Sam redemptive story too about his anti-war fight in the Army when he refused to go to Vietnam and wound up in an Army stockade for a couple of years altogether. (Sam thought that was a high price to pay for redemption but it may have been the scotch at work.) Told a number of stories about working with various veterans’ groups, throwing medals over Supreme Court barricades, chainings to the White House fence, sitting down in hostile honked traffic streets, blocking freeways complete with those same hostile honkings, a million walks for this and that, and some plain old ordinary handing out leaflets, working the polls and button-holing reluctant politicians to vote against the endless war budgets (this last the hardest task, harder than all the jailings, honkings, marches put together and seemingly the most fruitless).

Told too stories about the small coffeehouse places seeing retread folkies who had gone on to other things and then in a fit of anguish, or hubris, decided to go back on the trail. Told of many things that night not in feast of pride but to let Sam know that sometimes it was easier to act than to let that gnawing win the day. Told Sam that he too always had the “gnaw,” probably always would in this wicked old world. Sam was delighted by the whole talk, even if Markin was on his soapbox.

That night too Peter mentioned in passing that he contributed to a number of blogs, a couple of political ones, including an anti-war veterans’ group, a couple of old time left-wing cultural sites and a folk music-oriented one. Sam confessed to Markin that although he had heard the word blog he did not know what a blog was. Peter told him that one of the virtues of the Internet was that it provided space (cyberspace, a term Sam had heard of and knew what it meant) for the average citizen to speak his or her mind via setting up a website or a blog. Blogs were simply a way to put your opinions and comments out there just like newspaper Op/Ed writers or news reporters and commentators although among professional reporters the average blog and blog writers were seen as too filled with opinions and sometimes rather loose with the facts. Peter said he was perfectly willing to allow the so-called “objective” reporters state the facts but he would be damned if the blog system was not a great way to get together with others interested in your areas of interest, yeah, stuff that interested you and that other like-minded spirits might respond to. Yeah that was worth the effort.

The actual process of blog creation (as opposed to the more complex website-creation which still takes a fair amount of expertise to create) had been made fairly simple over time, just follow a few simple prompts and you are in business. Also over time what was possible to do has been updated for ease, for example linking to other platforms to your site and be able to present multi-media works lashing up say your blog with YouTube or downloading photographs to add something to your presentation. Peter one afternoon after Sam had asked about his blog links showed him the most political one that he belonged to, one he had recently begun to share space with Josh Breslin, Frank Jackman and a couple of other guys that he had known since the 1960s on and who were familiar with the various social, political and cultural trends that floated out from that period.

Sam was amazed at the various topics that those guys tackled, stuff that he vaguely remembered hearing about but which kind of passed him by as he had delved into the struggle to build his printing shop after high school and the marriage, first marriage, house, kids and dog bit. He told Markin that as he scrolled through the site he got dizzy looking at the various titles from reviews of old time black and white movies that he remembered watching at the old Strand second run theater uptown, poetry from the “beat” generation, various political pieces on current stuff like the Middle East, the fight against war, political prisoners most of whom he had never heard of except the ones who had been Black Panther or guys like that who were on the news after they were killed or carted off to jail, all kinds of reviews of rock and roll complete with the songs via YouTube, too many reviews of folk music that he never really cared for, books that he knew Peter read like crazy but that Sam could not remember the titles of. The guys really had put a lot of stuff together, even stuff from other sites and announcements for every conceivable left-wing oriented event in Boston or the East Coast. He decided that he would become a Follower which was nothing sinister like some cult but just that you would receive notice when something was put on the blog.

Markin had also encouraged him to write some pieces about what interested him, maybe start out about the old days in North Adamsville since all the guys mined that vein for sketches (that is what Peter liked to call most of the material on site since they were usually too short to be considered short stories but too long to be human interest snapshots). Sam said he would think about the matter, think about it seriously once he read the caption below which was on a sidebar of the blog homepage:

“This space is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of our interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hardworking, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn our attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archaeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived ,and what we listened to back in the day.”

Sam could relate to that, had something to say about some of those songs. Josh Breslin laughed when he heard that Sam was interested in doing old time rock and roll sketches. He then added, “If we can only get him to move off his butt and come out and do some street politics with us we would be getting somewhere.” Peter just replied, “one step at a time.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.

From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Kevin Morgan, Against Fascism and War: Ruptures and Continuities in British Communist Politics 1935-41-A Book Review

Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

***************
Kevin Morgan, Against Fascism and War: Ruptures and Continuities in British Communist Politics 1935-41, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1989, pp328, £40

For an organisation that has for over four decades paraded its patriotic virtues, the Communist Party of Great Britain must find the period of October 1939 to June 1941, when, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of Augus 1939, it opposed the Second World War somewhat embarrassing to recall Morgan’s detailed account of the CP’s activities and propaganda during those 21 months is, therefore, welcome, not least because it demolishes the commonplace myth that the CP reverted to a long forgotten Leninist orthodoxy during the anti-war period, and shows that it continued with a Popular Front approach, notwithstanding the dramatic policy changes

Although the classic Popular Front that the party was attempting to construct the late 1930s fragmented when the people attracted to it on a narrow anti-Fascist, patriotic basis split away when the switched to oppose the war, the party did not dispense with the Popular Front approach. Throughout this period, the CP called for a “people’s government”, although just what this represented and how it was to be achieved were never explicitly or consistently explained. Nor did it stop appealing to the usual Popular Front types, notwithstanding its reduced attraction to them. Morgan shows that in doing this, the CP often adapted to pacifism, and CP members downplayed their politics, protesting about the harsh consequences of the war, rather than making much propaganda about the war itself.

From mid-1940 the party’s main activity was promoting the People’s Convention. The Daily Worker carried statements of support from “engineers, railwaymen, academics, clergymen, pacifists, disenchanted supporters of the Conservative and Liberal Parties” as well as Labour Party activists and Communists, not to mention bandleaders, composers, sculptors, actors and actresses, a “well-known wrestler” and a bloke who could “do anything with a piano accordion” (pp.209-10).

The People’s Convention was held on 12 January 1941, and attracted 2,234 delegates reputedly representing 1.2 million people from 1,304 organisations. Its populist programme called vaguely for higher wages, the defence of democratic rights, emergency powers to take over the banks and large industries, ‘friendship’ with the Soviet Union, freedom for India, a ‘people’s government’ and a ‘people’s peace’, and made no direct reference to the imperialist nature of the war. And as Morgan notes, “the People’s Convention came at last to rest its hopes on the formation of a patriotic opposition within Parliament” (p.225), calling in May 1941 on MPs of all parties to rally behind its banner.

Any serious study of a Communist party must take into account the domestic pressures upon it, its own relationship with Moscow and the relationship between its nation state and the Kremlin. Morgan correctly states that “if the CP was unquestionably a genuine British working class party responsive to the British political situation, it was also, from another aspect, an ‘agent’ of Soviet foreign policy”, and adds that “possibly the main problem in writing Communist Party history (s to comprehend the sometimes complex relationship between the two” (pp.116-7). Moreover, he admits that “the broad lines of Communist policy were determined not by a rational appraisal of what was possible in British conditions but by the erratic directives of the distant heads of world Communism who could not have cared less about the fate of the British working class, nor of the British Communist Party for that matter” (p.51).

And yet in his introduction Morgan aims some sharp barbs at Trotskyist historians of the CP, complaining that their studies treat the party “as the disembodied incarnation of a political ‘line’ ... formulated in Moscow”, leading “inevitably to the conclusion that the paramount question posed by a study of the CP – of any CP – was to ascertain how the Soviet leadership arrived at a particular policy” (p.7), and that “an intelligent appreciation of the changing political environment – the objective framework – in which the CP operated is thus ruled out” (p.5).

Accusing ̵ and by no means fairly – the Trotskyists of ignoring the domestic influences upon the CP, Morgan, whatever his calls for a balanced appraisal, accentuates those influences almost to the exclusion of the general control of the Soviet bureaucracy over the official Communist movement, which leads him into adopting a one-sided approach, overestimating the domestic pressures upon the CP during both the Popular Front and the anti-war periods.

As a description of Communist policies and activities, Against Fascism and War is well worth reading, and is superior to anything produced by the party’s own historians. However, I cannot accept Morgan’s arguments, comparing the CP's ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric with its non-revolutionary practice, which he considers to be a sensible, albeit unconscious, recognition that conditions in prewar and wartime Britain were unlikely to develop into a revolutionary situation, and that its programme was, in fact, utopian.

Morgan’s conception of a peculiarly British brand of Communism does not stand up to the facts. The course of the British party, and the increasing nationalism and moderation during the Popular Front period, were common to the movement as a whole – even where class conflict was approaching a revolutionary level (as in France and Spain) – as were the ensuing twists and turns during the war. Differences between Communist parties were minor local variations on policies handed down by the Soviet bureaucracy. The Communists’ downplaying of their politics was not an implicit recognition of British political realities, but good old-fashioned opportunism. Neither hawking Hitler’s –peace’ offers in their daily paper, nor having to put up with constant jibes about their sharp policy reverses, could have been conducive to political discourse in the workplace or street.

Finally, Morgan asks us to “consider the hunger marches, the growth of the shop stewards’ movement, the untiring campaigns against appeasement and on behalf of Spain, consider the Birmingham rent strike, consider even the People’s Convention”, and concludes that “the balance will be found rather in the CP’s favour than against it” (p.309).

Nobody can doubt the integrity of people who joined the CP, especially when many of the activities in which Communists were involved took a great deal of courage. But the CP, like all Communist parties, spent an inordinate amount of its time and energy defending Stalin’s terror, repeating all the slanders of the Moscow Trials, blind to the convincing refutations and counter-evidence issued by other political trends at the time. Nothing can excuse those in responsible positions in the CP for this, nor for the slanders and violence against others in the labour movement. By making the word Communism synonymous with ties, slander, duplicity, repression, labour camps and mass murder, the official Communist movement has done incalculable damage to the cause of human progress and freedom. The ‘balance’ is not “in the CP’s favour” here.

Morgan’s attack on Trotskyist historians doesn’t stop at their “parody” of a Marxist approach. He says that Brian Pearce “deliberately misleads the reader into thinking that the CP” during the Popular Front period “opposed strikes ‘as inimical to the true interests of the working class’”. Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, “with similar intent”, are condemned for devoting a mere 11 lines to the CP’s industrial activities between 1935 and 1941, compared to 36 pages on its opposition to strikes in the latter part of the Second World War (p.7).

A look at Essays on the History of Communism in Britain (p.205) shows that Pearce is referring to the Communist movement as a whole, not just Britain, and points to the moderating influence of the French Communist Party during the stormy times of the late 1930s. As for Bornstein and Richardson’s Two Steps Back, to quote from page ix: “this little book is not, and has no pretensions to be, a history of the Communist Party”, but is intended to look at it as part of the background for their two books on the history of British Trotskyism. The clash between Trotskyism and Stalinism on the industrial front only took off after June 1941, when the CP refused to back strikes, and the Trotskyists took a leading role in supporting the working class against the Churchill government. Prior to then, their main points of conflict with the CP were on other issues.

Morgan is naturally entitled to his opinions, but to say that Pearce, Bornstein and Richardson “deliberately” mislead their readers is quite unacceptable, and puts a question mark over Morgan’s own intentions and integrity.

Morgan’s claim that the CP continued with a Popular Front approach during its anti-war period is rather contentious, although perhaps not to readers of this journal. The evidence that he has presented is very useful for anyone studying the history of the CP. But, however much they may endear him to the Stalinist academics who seem to run the British labour movement history industry, his analysis and conclusions and, especially, his intemperate attacks upon other historians will not enhance his reputation amongst serious students of British working class history.

Paul Flewers

***Books To While Away The Class Struggle By- Nathaniel Hawthorne 's "The Scarlet Letter"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter".

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same
interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin

Book Review

The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vintage Books, New York, 1952

I started off a review of the more famous of 19th American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories by noting that the old social democratic literary critic and editor of “Dissent”, Irving Howe, once noted that Mark Twain, and his post-Civil War works represented a dramatic break from the Euro-centric ante bellum American literary establishment. And on this question I agree with him. As I do on his choice of Nathaniel Hawthorne as an exemplar of that tradition. Certainly his most famous work, “The Scarlet Letter”, reflects that European influence, and is justly place in the pantheon of that handful of important works that emerged in the early days of the American Republic.

One of the of clearest links the ante bellum American literary establishment and the European tradition, especially from the English tradition was the need to pose and resolve some high moral question. And of course what is simpler to do that go back to the stark and isolated foundations of the white American tradition, the Puritan tradition. I know that if I were a writer and I wanted to dramatically portray the effects that physically isolated (and isolating) religiously-driven communities have on the individual, and on individual choice, those Puritan settlements from Cape Cod to Salem on the coast of Massachusetts in the 1600s would, at least get my serious consideration.

So that, in part is what drives the action (if one can use that term usefully here) of a woman (naturally) banished from the tight-knit community (or so they claimed) by running off and having an affair with Mr. X. Now today that would create in the reader nothing but a big yawn, and maybe some spicy gossip, but hardly banishment, and hardly the necessity to wear a badge of courage sewn on your dress. Except maybe today one would advertise that status and place a video on “YouTube”. And that is my moral point.
Hester Prynne did not deserve the social opprobrium of the religious fundamentalists of her day. But old Hawthorne did a great service by creating a masterpiece to point out that moral ambiguity and dilemma back in the days.

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Two Contemporary Reviews of C.L.R. James" World Revolution (1937)

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-C.L.R. James and British Trotskyism-An Interview

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********

C.L.R. James and British Trotskyism

The following text was originally published as a pamphlet by Socialist Platform Ltd in 1987. It has been out of print for some time and consequently we decided to republish it on our web site.

The interview was one of a substantial collection of interviews with veterans of the Trotskyist movement, assembled for our archives by Al Richardson and Sam Bornstein in the course of researching the history of the movement.

Some readers will find many of the names unfamiliar, and we hope to be able to provide moire extensive explanatory notes in the future. We did not want to delay the appearance of this document until that was possible however. Readers who want to inquire further into any of the individuals mentioned here will find references to most of them in Bornstein & Richardson’s 3 volumes on the history of Trotskyism in Britain (see Socialist Platform Ltd).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

C.L.R. James and British Trotskyism

An interview given by C.L.R. JAMES
to AL RICHARDSON, CLARENCE CHRYSOSTOM
& ANNA GRIMSHAW
on Sunday 8th June & 16th November 1986 in South London
edited by Ted Crawford, Barry Buitekant & Al Richardson.

AR: When you first became connected with the British Labour movement in Lancashire did you start off by going to ILP meetings in Nelson, or did you become active after you came to London?

CLRJ: I was in the Labour Party. I was a Labour Party man but I found myself to the left of the Labour party in Nelson, militant as that was. I came to London and in a few months I was a Trotskyist.

AR: So there wasn’t a period inside the ILP when you were just an ILP member? You more or less joined the Trotskyists and the ILP at the same time?

CLRJ: I joined the Labour Party in London and there I met Trotskyists who were distributing a pamphlet. The Trotskyists decided to go into the ILP and I went with them.

AR: Which Trotskyists were these – the first that you made contact with in London?

CLRJ: There was Robinson and Margaret Johns and a man living here, the chairman of the party ...

AR: Bert Matlow?

CLRJ: There was Matlow, Robinson and Margaret Johns and one or two others. I joined the movement and read Trotsky’s books in French and the pamphlets in English. There were no books in English, only pamphlets, so after a time, I said, “Why haven’t we a book in English?” and they said it was about time that they had one. I finally picked myself up and got hold of Frederick Warburg. In those days people were moving from the Labour Party to the left, but they did not like the Communist Party, because the Communist Party meant Moscow, and so a movement began to develop and I was part of it. There was Groves, there was Dewar, people who were Marxists but not Communist Party. I told Warburg and he thought there was scope for the publication of books that were Marxist but not CP So I went away to Brighton and wrote this book in three or four months. Now I was very fortunate, because very close to where I lived was the Communist Party bookshop, so I had plenty of material. In 1935 – 1936 Moscow shifted from the “revolutionary” policy to associating with the bourgeoisie. Now the young people today can’t understand that at all, In those days when you met people you thought, “C.L.R. James, is he a Trotskyist, CP, or left or right – wing Labour?”. you were a political person and that mattered. Today it doesn’t seem to matter, but in those days it did.

AR: What sort of group meetings did you go to? Were you active in North London?

CLRJ: I was active in Hampstead. I joined the Hampstead group in N.W.3. and we had meetings almost every evening. In the summer we held meetings along the side of the road. We put up something to stand on and we sold books and spoke. I used to go into Hyde Park and I was a speaker there. I had formed a black movement, so I would speak for the Trotskyist movement and then walk about a hundred yards to where the black movement was speaking. There was always a lot of comic laughter about that with which I was well acquainted. Anyway that is what I used to do. Then I started a paper.

AR: Do you remember when you were in the Marxist Group in the ILP how you managed to recruit people like Arthur Ballard? What do you remember about him?

CLRJ: Ballard was a very tall, handsome, striking looking man who was working as a proletarian in industry but who was destined to be an intellectual. He was an intellectual type – in the way he thought, in the way he behaved and in the way he would eat and so on. He was a worker, and a worker in those days was very important in the Trotskyist movement. So here was this gifted intellectual with a proletarian base. He came with us, and became very friendly with me. We worked together and were very closely related not only as politicians but as friends. Then I had to go to America, and when I came back he had joined something or other. He was not a man sufficiently educated to hold the movement together, and let other people see the way it was going. But when he was with us he was tremendously active. He was a man, in spite of all my associations, that I remember with a great deal of affection and respect. When I came back after a number of years in America, he had gone his way and I don’t know what has happened to him now.

AG: The last letter you had from him was sometime in 1976. He had seen you on television. He was at that time in Cornwall or Devon.

AR: What do you remember about Israel Heiger? Heiger was a gifted scientist. Did you remember him?

CLRJ: He too went along with us but he wasn’t interested in theory. He told me he couldn’t go into that, but by and large he was with us, and he was important because every now and again he would come in and say, “Here is some money”, and give us ten pounds. He had a good job and his name was very useful to us, and he was very devoted to the movement, he did not go away from the party. His wife did.

AG: She later married Birney.

AR: When did Birney go back to Canada?

AG: It was at the end of 1936. He became Canada’s Poet Laureate. It was in 1936 when he left England because he wrote to say that he did not remember all that business about Abyssinia and the ILP and that he had gone before that.

CLRJ: I joined the Trotskyist movement and I learned Marxism in the Trotskyist movement. So I raised the Abyssinian question and Fenner Brockway wrote an article in the New Leader in which he supported entirely the position that I and some friends held. Then we went to the conference and we said, “Not the League of Nations but workers’ sanctions”. We were revolutionary workers. Then Maxton and McGovern said, “No”. They were for League of Nations’ sanctions. To say that you were in favour of workers’ sanctions was to support militarism. They were pacifists and not militarists. So they wrecked us on that question. We thought we had something. The party, I think it was at Keighley, had gone into the conference with Brockway who had illusions, but McGovern said, “No, we cannot support that, we are pacifists. You say that you are not for the League of Nations but you are for workers’ sanctions. That is for the workers to decide”. Then it came to the final conference; we had the experience of Keighley and we had the ILP members. When I proposed the motion in the course of the conference it met with tremendous applause from the audience.

Brockway came to me and he said “James I want to talk to you, and you as a man will understand this”. Brockway said that he supported the line I was taking, and he wrote an article in the paper supporting the line I was taking. He said “We can’t pass such a motion at conference condemning James Maxton and the party leadership. If you do that the party will fall apart, because you and I and a few more of us cannot form the party. They are the party and there are a lot of people supporting the party financially who won’t join the Labour Party or us, but they want the ILP to go ahead. If you were to condemn the party then ...”.He then went on to say that what we can do is to oppose the motion and instead propose it for further discussion on the NEC I said that I wanted to make a statement before I spoke and when the time came for the last motion I asked permission to make a statement. I made the statement and then I moved that we accept the resolution but to include this statement of mine. That was how it was done and that was my first experience of big politics. You will find it in the News Chronicle of those days.

AR: Before the conference took place, you had a successful series of meetings up and down the country, when it looked as if the party was going to support your line. Can You remember any of those meetings, because it appears they made quite an impact?

CLRJ: Yes. I went around. They made some impact, above all in Wales. I was welcomed by the Welsh and wherever I went they said they wanted me to, “Speak purely on the question of the party, so James could you speak? On Saturday sometimes and on Sunday night we have a party meeting at which you will speak on general questions”. So that was understood. The local ILP welcomed me speaking against the party leadership and on Sunday there would be general meetings. So I did this everywhere and in Wales I spoke about the colonial question and the need for West Indian self-government. The Welsh audience said, “We understand. We are in the same position in our relation to the British Government”. I hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about. Next they said, “Well, maybe not exactly. They can’t do anything to us but we in Wales understand what it is to fight poverty”. When I went to Ireland it was the same thing. In Ireland they had read about me and sent for me to come because I was speaking against the British Government.

AG: Did you meet Nora Connolly when you went there?

CLRJ: Not only did I meet her, but she came here to speak at our meetings and said she had come here with a counter-view. They sent for me, and I had a tremendous meeting with them because I spoke against the British Government. When I had finished speaking a fellow got up to speak, because I was putting forward the Trotskyist position. I did not go and speak about Trotskyism, I said that I do not come here for that purpose, but for a more general meeting. Then this fellow got up. He was a young fellow, a good looking chap of about thirty, and he denounced me In one of the finest speeches I have ever heard or remembered. “Trotsky was this, Trotskyism was that, you come here disturbing everything”, and so on. So I spoke to him after the meeting and said, “Let us go and have a drink somewhere. I have left politics now”. “I am a member of the Communist Party and you are an enemy!” “So you say that I am a Fascist!” I said. “Oh that’s all right”, he said and we parted good friends.

AR: While you were in Ireland, did you meet Paddy Trench who fought in the POUM battalion?

CLRJ: No. I met Nora Connolly O’Brien. She came to London for the ILP I had invited her. I remember that woman, because in those days the British Trotskyite revolutionaries were no more than left wing Labour. So I went to meet her and invited her to come over here and speak, and she did. Coming from the railway station we crossed the river by Parliament, and she said, “You should have done away with that years ago, it is easy from the river”. So I said “Yes, we are revolutionaries, but bombing the Houses of Parliament is useless”. “You’re talking of something that you know nothing about!” She instinctively saw the revolutionary possibilities. From this side of the river you could bomb the Houses of Parliament and get away with it.

AR: Do you remember the first occasion on which you met George Padmore?

CLRJ: In which I met George Padmore? Sorry you are making a mistake, a serious mistake. Padmore’s father was a teacher in 1905 and Padmore would come to Arima to meet his people, his uncle, and he and I would go to the river to bathe together.

AR: That would be before he went to Berlin?

CLRJ: That was before we left Trinidad. I knew Padmore in Trinidad. As boys we used to live in Arima and go and bathe in the river there. When we grew up, he was far more of a leftist than I was. I was a historian, whilst George had joined the labour movement in Trinidad before I did. Then he went to America, and I lost him. Then I came to England and joined the labour movement, and became a Trotskyist. Then the news came that George Padmore had been expelled from the United States and had come to England. Everyone was taking about “George Padmore” and there was a meeting and “George Padmore” was my old friend, my schoolboy friend from Trinidad! I hadn’t had the faintest idea that “George Padmore”, whom I had written about, spoken about and recommended to everybody was the same. That was a peculiar return. That night when we left the meeting we went to eat and finally parted at four o’clock in the morning, speaking the whole time about the revolutionary movement. Now he was a member of the Communist Party and had been a high official, he had lived in Moscow. I was a Trotskyist, but we remained good friends and when he left the Communist Party we joined together and formed the black movement which I had started. I started the black movement. It was very curious. I started the Trotskyist movement in European terms. Then Padmore came in. He said that he was a Marxist, but what about the colonial question? What about Africa? That movement became an African movement, a Marxist African movement. Padmore did that. He educated me and I carried it on. After he died, people began to think that I had brought Marxism to the African movement. It wasn’t so.

AR: Did he ever speak to you about his bad experiences with the Communist International, and do you remember the substance of what he said?

CLRJ: The substance of what he said was that the Communist Party would hope that something would happen and then they would do something. Padmore said that when he went to Moscow, he had been in Germany and when he was in Germany he had been sent to England. They sent a message to say that they wanted a black man in the Communist International in Moscow, and, as he was the right one, they sent him. He went to Moscow, he had nobody, but they made him into a big political leader. On May Day when Stalin, Molotov and the others would be on the platform reviewing the revolutionaries, they would invite him, and he would be up there with them representing the Caribbean, where they had nobody. Then Lenin died and they all went to pieces. He meant that the Communist Party began to change their line and, after the line had changed, they said that they could no longer be as completely for the revolution. “In the Caribbean, in your country and in America the blacks have democracy, so we are not going to attack them. There are some democratic capitalists.” So I said, “You told them there are `democratic capitalists’ in the Caribbean, ‘democratic capitalists’ in the United States, and ‘democratic capitalists’ somewhere else?”. He said, “I come from those countries, and they know me for years as the man who had denounced the ‘democratic capitalists!’. How do you expect me to go there and write and say that this is democratic capitalism?” They said to him, “Well George, sometimes you have to change the line”. His answer was, “Well boys, this is one line I can’t change”. He broke with them and went to England and we joined together and re-formed the Pan-African movement. That was a movement of strength.

AR: What do you remember when you sent out the journal International African Opinion? Roughly, what was its circulation and what sort of people were gathered around it?

CLRJ: I remember well the journal International African Opinion. Marcus Garvey’s first wife and I founded the thing. Was the date 1937?

AR: Yes. About then.

CLRJ: I am being cautious here, because I haven’t got documents. As I remember it, there was nobody concerned about the colonial movement in Western politics. Nevertheless something was happening. Mussolini had attacked Ethiopia and Mrs Garvey and I said that we were openly to oppose that. We felt that there ought to be an opposition, and we published the opposition. It is difficult to be precise, but I remember when at a certain stage we were writing we said, “Why is it only Ethiopia? We are against the whole imperialist domination, African and everywhere else”, and we wrote it in. I remember writing that, as no-one was talking about it, and to my astonishment within thirty years there were forty new African states. I have said that before, I think. That is one of the great experiences of my life. I want to emphasise, I hadn’t the faintest idea that would happen and when that happened I was astonished. We went into it and built it up. Others came in and said “You want this international movement, this, that or the other”. When we began we had no idea of going any further.

AR: Did you attempt to get your journal into the colonial world by smuggling it in or other ways?

CLRJ: We tried all ways. We couldn’t get it in normally, because many of those colonial governments, and those that came in afterwards, were quite hostile to us. Others, if not hostile were sympathetic that James was writing books that brought in the colonial people, but were nevertheless Marxist, Trotskyist. We had one or two people who worked on the waterfront. They gave the pamphlets to seamen and people in boats. In that way it went around.

AG: Was it people like Chris Jones?

CLRJ: Chris Jones was a very fine comrade. Chris would get himself into a temper and explode and make a revolution at the back of the hall. But he was able to get the pamphlets and make contact and people would send it around. We got it around, to my astonishment and delight. After all, we were but a few intellectuals in London, and could not have done much.

AR: George Padmore, whilst he was in Moscow, built up a tremendous range of contacts.

CLRJ: Yes, that is quite right. Padmore was quite a notable. When he split with Moscow, the platform that he had built up, went with Padmore. In other words, as happens quite often in the early stages of the movement, people follow a political personality and somebody whom they can recognise. I have to say also that Padmore and I were leaders of the black movement, though I was outside as a Marxist, Trotskyist. They came and followed James and Padmore, although I was quite sure that there was a large percentage of Padmore and a small percentage of James. They came in because of Padmore. He got on well with them.

AR: Some of those you were working with at the time, became very important later, in the politics of independent Africa. Were you able to influence any of them in a particularly Trotskyist direction, and do you remember any of the discussions you had with them?

CLRJ: No. But I can tell you this. I am very conscious that most of the African leaders of the independence movement, who were in Europe, orientated naturally towards the Marxist movement which said we are for freedom in the colonies. We never had too much power but I wrote one or two pamphlets and books in which it was very clear. Later I was often invited to come and speak on the Marxist movement in Africa. It was in a very small way influenced by the Stalinists. Normally they would have dominated it, but those leaders who had worked in London hadn’t become Trotskyists – but we had so educated them that Stalinism didn’t do much to them.

AR: Did you attempt to have conferences with them and try to get them to discuss together the idea of a United Africa, or anything like that?

CLRJ: I must say the idea of a United Africa was nonsense. That was quite obvious. It was not a practical proposition. East Africa was one way, West Africa another and Central a third way. On the coast there were different tongues, and away from the coast you had entirely different African villages and styles. So whilst in every resolution, or at the end, you spoke of Africa united at every important part, you knew it wasn’t being realistic. It was a general vision, and one that would become an ideal. I once spoke, and it was very effective, and said that the unity of Africa was closer, theoretically speaking, than the unity of Europe for this reason, that the African states were not organically settled as were Britain, France, Germany. There were large tribal organisations but they didn’t have the barriers between them that the European states had. But the policy shouldn’t be put forward when people objected. But that was all. There were one or two fanatics who talked about it, but they were so fanatical. There is one of them that I have in mind, and wouldn’t mention his name, although we would talk with him about it.

AR: Do you remember any of the debates in which you managed to get the Stalinists to debate with you at the time of the Moscow trials?

CLRJ: We had debates in London and I debated with them, and there was not only a debate, but there was one particular moment in which there were a number of people on the platform with Kingsley Martin and the rest of them. I challenged them from the hall and then I stood up. There was a man called Gerry Bradley, Gerry was a great fighter, irrespective of the number of policemen. Gerry was my good friend, he said to me, “James, there will be the two of us ...” and we went into the meeting together. He stood up and said, “Mr Chairman, Comrade James here has been standing up for the past half hour and wants to be able to say a few words ...”. The Communist Party did not want to give me the democracy, but they were afraid that Gerry would break up their meeting. Then Gerry turned to me and said, “Mr James, come with me” and led me up to the platform. The audience listened, and I put the case for Trotskyism, and it wrecked their meeting. The famous one was when they held a meeting and I came there at nine o’clock. They were speaking when I came in. They knew what was up and the chairman spoke for ten minutes and said that they had a full discussion of the question and must draw the meeting to a close. I used to go to their meetings and take only two people with me and their meetings would break up, because I had the Stalinist statements in my pocket and I would have a lot of copies and give the chaps copies and say “Now have a read ...”. “That is not so, but you yourselves have said that it is impossible for the bourgeoisie ever to meet him”, and they would say, “No, we have not said it”. I would say, “You did say it” and again they would say “No”. So I would say, “Wait a bit” and go and get the pamphlet and show them. I used to do that here. I used to speak in Britain, and made it a habit to wreck the Stalinist meetings.

There was a black man who had joined the CP He said to me that you could do that in Britain and keep breaking up their meetings but in America if you carry on like that they will kill you. As far as the police were concerned, if a Stalinist killed a Trotskyist they would have no part of that, so just take it easy. The difference between British democracy and democracy in the United States is that there you have to be aware, not of the government, but of the Stalinists. In New York and Massachusetts, the government would not bother with you, but the Stalinists in those days were the enemy. The bourgeoisie didn’t bother with us, as we were too small.

AR: Do you remember when you addressed a packed public meeting, when Jock Milligan was in the chair? Do you recall what you said there? It was on the Moscow trials and it was an enormous meeting.

CLRJ: Where was that?

AR: It was in London. I’m not sure whether it was in the Memorial Hall in Farringdon or the Holborn Hall.

CLRJ: I refer to it in World Revolution?

AR: No. A friend of mine was in the audience and he remembers Jock Milligan and you getting a bigger audience than anyone could have dreamed of. Everybody was standing at the side of the stage fearful about beginning, so what happened apparently, Jock got hold of a pile of books, put them under his arm and said, “Come on!”. That was the memory that my friend Bert Atkinson had. You wouldn’t remember him.

CLRJ: I remember the meeting very well, because there was a tremendous contrast between that meeting and meetings we held on Trotskyism, but on the Moscow Trials a lot of Communist Party members came and listened to what we had to say. It was a crisis for them, but soon afterwards I went to the United States in November 1938.

AR: Could you double back a little, because you have covered a lot of ground. Do you remember when you went to Paris to discuss the question whether you were to stay in the 1.L.P., or form a separate organisation, or join the Labour Party? It was called the “Geneva Conference”, but it was not held in Geneva, but in Paris. Do you remember when you went there?

CLRJ: Yes. I remember, Harber was there.

AR: Harber was there. Do you remember the other English representative? Was it Arthur Ballard?

CLRJ: No it was not Ballard. He was a close personal friend of mine.

AR: Apparently there was another English representative according to the minutes.

CLRJ: I am not sure now who the other delegate was. It could have been Starkey Jackson. I must say that as far as I remember it, I and Harber made a good speech. We were from the British Labour movement and I was aware that another fellow had come from Austria. He had come from the revolutionary movement, but we had not. I felt that very strongly in the conference. I would say a few words and speak, as I could speak in French, but I was aware that what was happening in Britain was nothing. The French themselves were in a bit of trouble. They were being persecuted. Some of the boys came from Germany, and even one or two from Russia.

AR: At the conference?

CLRJ: Yes, at the conference. They had been in Europe, and they came in secretly at the conference. They didn’t have much to say, but I remember them sitting there, and I spoke with them. It took some time, they smiled and said, “Yes”. But I know now that they were saying, “You are nothing but left wing Labour democrats”. Immediately after that conference the war came, and those boys from Belgium were shot. After the war, when we went to Belgium, we found that they had all been shot.

AR: Who was the Belgian delegate who supported you? In the minutes it mentions that you got support from the Belgian delegate, but not from the others. Do you remember who that was?

CLRJ: He was a working man. He was not an intellectual. He was about 35 to 40, and he was very friendly to us.

AR: Do you remember his name? Was it Vereeken?

CLRJ: No. Vereeken was an old fashioned Trotskyist. If I were to see him again I would remember him.

AR: You had some differences earlier with the Trotskyist movement around 1936-1937. According to the minutes you used to receive some of the material from Field’s group and Weisbord. You had some criticism about Trotsky’s theory about the development of European history at that time which is shown in your World Revolution. Can you explain in full the way you were thinking at that time and how you were developing those differences about 1937-38 when you wrote World Revolution?

CLRJ: I will tell you something which will astonish you. When I began to attack the Trotskyist position, some people in the United States said, “When we read your book World Revolution we said that it won’t be long before James is attacking the Trotskyist movement”. In this book it was pointed out to me in a particular paragraph. I agreed with the interpretation. I was told “James, when some of us read that quotation, we said that ultimately James will go”.

AR: Who was it that said that?

CLRJ: Friends of mine who were party members. They said that when they read that (they had long experience) and they weren’t surprised. I broke with the Trotskyist movement practically alone and said “No!” They said “What about the whole International?” and I said “I don’t care!”. In those days I wasn’t politically wise. If I had been, I would have waited, but there was nothing wrong, though I said “No!” It is not a wrong view to be against the defence of Russia, but at the same time for Trotsky. I said that if you are against the defence of Russia that Trotsky was advocating you are breaking not with Trotskyism but with the defence of Russia. Freddie Forest and I worked it out, and then I wrote the pamphlet.

AR: Can you tell me what else you remember about the founding conference of the Fourth International?

CLRJ: I can remember that conference for one reason. We were against the Trotskyist position on the defence of the USSR. In the United States in particular, when the Moscow Trials took place there was a movement against the Fourth International, but the Russian question was the reason. I was in the United States, that was my last trip, and I told them, “I have joined you, but I have not joined because I agree with you on the Russian position”. They said, “You cannot have an international which is all united with Trotsky, but opposed to Trotsky on the Russian question. It means you are opposed to Trotskyism”. Freddie Forest and I set out like Christopher Colombus. We had another boy with us who had some money and he supported us with some finance. We hadn’t a position, but she said, and we agreed, we were going to find out why it is that the Trotskyist position seemed to be wrong on the Russian question in general. After a year or two we came out with a full position in which we attacked Trotskyism from beginning to end. We started looking for the answer in Capital Volume I and the Communist Manifesto. That pamphlet we published. After, we started to study the question to find out why in the Trotskyist movement we were against on the Russian question but in agreement on other issues. Trotsky died in 1940. I am positive if he had been alive he would have seen what we were talking about. No one mentioned it but they weren’t able to argue against it.

AR: What other actual memories do you have of the founding conference in Paris? Can you remember who was there and what they talked about?

CLRJ: What I do remember was some Polish comrades who came and took the position that we were advancing. We did not advance it too strongly when we came to Europe and met these comrades. Also for the first time, I believe, some comrades from the United States talked about it. We put forward our position and had it copied into the minutes, but we didn’t press the issue. The Polish comrades told us “We are not going to vote for you, because we did not come here to vote, we came from Poland where there are big problems. The Communist Party there had a split, we split from them and now we have split from the split. So we haven’t come here to vote against the conference, but we are sympathetic to you, James. You have the line, although we are not supporting it”. Nevertheless we had a powerful influence on that conference but a year or two afterwards the whole movement threw it away.

Because Trotsky kept on insisting that you had to support the Moscow regime since the Moscow bureaucracy is just a bureaucracy, a labour bureaucracy. When the war came those bureaucracies that supported it would go. He said that this is what happened to Lenin with the Second International when the war came, and the Third emerged. I said, “No, you are wrong, because the bureaucracy that Lenin fought against was a labour bureaucracy, bureaucracy in the labour movement, but in Moscow they are not labour bureaucracy, they are a state power, which the war will build up and make stronger than ever. This will increase their domination over the rest of the workers”. They could not answer me at all. When the war came this is what happened.

AR: That is another interesting question. From the way I see the evidence you would have had a greater effect in the struggle against imperialism especially during the war and towards the end if you had remained exactly where you were in Britain co-operating with Padmore and organising and training this movement. What did you yourself think about this, when the IS decided to send you to the USA?

CLRJ: I was invited to the United States and I went there at the end of 1938 and started to organise the movement. We began to have something. As the war continued I did not know what to do so I discussed with them. Do you know Freddie Forest?

AR: Yes. Raya Dunayevskaya.

CLRJ: She had a tremendous influence on me. If it hadn’t been for Raya Dunayevskaya I would have come back to Britain, where I had a movement, where I had people, where I had a paper and where was known, because I was writing cricket for the Manchester Guardian. So I thought that I ought to go back to where the boys were speaking against the war. But Raya Dunayevskaya had come to the conclusion that I was the man to remain in the United States, a black man who was automatically the leader of the black movement, but whose education was such that he could be head of the Trotskyist movement as a whole. I was in doubt whether to go or stay. Raya was insistent that I stay, and then I said that I had no money to live on she said, “Don’t worry about money”. For months she got money for me. She had friend and was well established, and that is why I stayed in the United States. We finally split in 1955, but as a role in my history, for staying in the United States (and I am glad I did) she did it and that should be said.

AR: So when you first went to the United States it wasn’t considered then to be a permanent thing?

CLRJ: No. I went to the United States, but with the intention of coming back.

AR: That is very interesting because some of your supporters here who later went into the Revolutionary Workers’ League, like Cliff Stanton, Ben Elsbury, Sid Frost – those people, considered that the reason that you had been sent to the United States was because when they invited all the groups to unite In August 1938, because of their different origins, they sent you to the United States to give Harber a free run in the group that was to follow. Some were for entry work and others were for open work. So you say that was not true, but that was what a lot of your followers have been saying in this country.

CLRJ: No. It was not true. They were wanting me to do work. I had a national and international reputation. I had written the history and articles. So I brought to the Trotskyist movement some international reputation. I used to speak on Trotskyism, but they couldn’t hold me because I hadn’t followed Trotsky. I had read all the material. I remembered the night I joined the Trotskyist movement there were some people from Oxford and Cambridge who were joining the same night, but they brought some criticism to the official Trotskyists and they couldn’t answer. So on the same night I joined I had to speak on behalf of Trotskyism. I went to America and had a great deal to do with the foundation of the movement there. The blacks in America wanted me to form a black movement and I said, “No!”, that I was not going to do that. I was very effective, and the American Government said that I had overstayed my time there and must go.

CC: Is there any truth in the statement that Trotsky and James supported a black state in America ?

CLRJ: No! No! No! We discussed in some detail plans to help create and build an independent black organisation in the United States. That we did, but we were thinking of a political grouping that would advocate the cause of the blacks. But this was taken up by people to mean that we wanted to build a little black section of the United States – a black Mississippi! There were people in the United States doing that who were claiming that a part of Mississippi should be a black state, but the Marxist movement had nothing to do with that – absolutely nothing! But our enemies, or one of two of them, took it up when we said, “an independent black organisation”. I am sure that if you read the resolution you will see that it makes clear that it was a political organisation fighting for the position of rights in general and the black people in particular. That was misinterpreted to mean something else, but nobody took It seriously, although we had a lot of trouble with it. Nobody thinks so today?

AR: I think that is the way some people are interpreting it.

CLRJ: Well, you can tell them that it isn’t so, and that it never was so.

AG: Why were the CP pushing the line of an independent black state?

CLRJ: The CP was pushing it – that seems to be one of the mysteries of the revolutionary movement. One or two people believe that Stalin, who was notoriously backward and ignorant of international politics, thought so, and said so, and the rest followed. So for years they went along with this thing, which struck great blows against Marxism in the United States. It was such an absurdity that all Marxists were discredited by it.

AR: In the transcript of your discussions with Trotsky in 1939 I notice at one point you mention the groups in Britain. You describe roughly what they are and you mention the Workers’ International League and say that they were very active in the work they did. There did not appear to be any come-back from Trotsky. Was he interested at all in what you said, because there is nothing in his replies?

CLRJ: No. I wouldn’t be too concerned about that. People were coming from Britain, from France, from Norway, some from America and other places. I used to wonder how he managed to take it in and hold it in his head and express opinions on complicated matter in far-away countries which he knew nothing about. I stayed about a week. We had a general discussion and then Trotsky and I had a separate discussion that I had asked him for. That has been published.

AR: Do you remember any of the other Trotskyists who were there at the same time, from other countries?

CLRJ: There were two men from Poland and they listened to the discussion. They sharply disagreed with the attitude we were taking to the Trotskyist movement outside of Western Europe, but they didn’t intervene and say so. I have to be careful here, but their attitude, when the thing was explained to them in their language, was because we were introducing the idea of differences that were troubling us into those movements. I think that was the problem, and their concept was, that you don’t know the kind of thing it is to have a Trotskyist movement inside a Stalinist party regime. We haven’t time to argue all this, and there was one particular case where the Stalinists and Trotskyists formed a United Front, (I think it was in Vietnam) against the dominant party. The idea of a United Front with the Trotskyists elsewhere would have been impossible. At the time I was very much struck by what today I can see more clearly than ever. For us in Western Europe and in France the differences in the labour movement were matters of discussion, pamphlets, meetings. For them over there, there was none of that. It was a question of life and death, what your attitude was to the existing regimes and to the Communist Party. Because if you were at fault with the Communist Party they came to wipe you away. That was the struggle against the authoritarian state. You don’t only fight them with words, you had a murderous fight between sections of the new movement. That is what I remember.

AR: After you had been in the United states for a while the Trotskyist movement there split and you supported, or rather went with, the group led by Max Shachtman, but you had your own particular point of view. What do you remember of the circumstances in which you parted from the group led by Cannon?

CLRJ: Cannon was an Irishman of a similar type and with the qualities that distinguished the Irish in the Democratic Party. Physically he looked like them, and he had this capacity for two things, propaganda speeches to build up the movement, and intricate organisation. As for the refinements of political policy he wasn’t into that. Shachtman was the Jewish Boy, well-educated in urban universities, who did that, but Cannon was a very gifted man. He ran the party, and people were very concerned that they did not oppose him as secretary. There was much conflict inside the party, and then the Moscow split took place. Whereupon the party split and Shachtman went, and I went with Shachtman. The Shachtmanites said at the time, “Look, you are splitting!” but I said, “I am not splitting with you”. They split on the Russian question and I had differences with them, and this is still something on which I fancy that I was right. I said that you don’t split a party on the Russian question, because to split is a tremendous thing in our movement. You are cast out, and they say that you are an enemy of the labour movement. This also means that you are opposed to them in a manner in which you do not know yet. Freddie Forest and I stated that that was our position, but in what way we differed from them apart from the Russian question we didn’t know. So we decided to go and find out and make that public. We set out to study Marxism to find out why we split with them on the Russian question and we found we came out with new and different policies. That was quite a theoretical activity and the results were published.

AR: Can you give us some details on the way you worked on the philosophy part that came out in your Notes on Dialectics, on the method you used to work out some of those ideas?

CLRJ: There were three of us, two to begin with. Firstly there was Freddie Forest, and later Grace Lee joined us. Grace Lee had her doctorate from the university in philosophy. That means that she was a philosophy graduate, which meant that all the elements of the great philosophers she understood, but that was not all. There was another man, a short Greek-looking fellow, a white man named Johnny Zupern. He was not educated, he was a worker, but that fellow used to read the philosophical documents and not only understand, which many didn’t, but he understood them and expounded and developed them in a manner in which some of us, who were philosophically trained, couldn’t. He left us completely astounded. So we hired him and Raya, who knew what was done In Russian. Russian was the language native to her. She translated all that Lenin had said on philosophy. Grace Lee had all the Leninist writings, and the Marxist ones in German. I was familiar with all the writings in French. So we formed a rather formidable organisation, and we covered everything on Marxist philosophy. We were not going to say what Marx and Engels might say about philosophy, or Hegel. Everybody used to say that Engels had said this or that about Hegel. I said, “None of that, we are going to find out what Hegel said and deal with it”. We produced work which, to this day, I find invaluable. Many years later a Frenchman wrote, and he didn’t write badly, but in my opinion he didn’t write particularly well either, and he raised some problems. We are the only ones who had seriously gone into the philosophical analysis in terms of the doctrines of Hegel and German philosophy. Most of the Trotskyists made noises but left it.

AR: So in fact quite a long period of discussion had gone on before you actually wrote the document.

CLRJ: I remember talking to Forest and saying, “Well I don’t want to say it, but we must go into it”, and she said, “All right, I started it and I will finish it on what Lenin said about Hegel”. This was translated in Europe, and we not only translated but published. We had two translations. Grace Lee translated it from the German, but Freddie Forest translated it from the Russian, and so we had the two translations. I don’t want to go into it now, but I was quite impressed. We had an organisation here. Nobody has done these translations, and it later became one of the official documents, but we had done it and I was very much impressed, because I knew what it meant.

AR: When you went back with the SWP in 1947, how well were you able to work there? Was there friction a lot of the time? What was the sort of set-up between you? Because you did maintain your own independent views.

CLRJ: We went back in 1947 and left when?

AR: 1949 or 1950 as far as I can tell.

CLRJ: They were expecting that we would come in, thinking that the people who were with the Johnson/Forest tendency, having joined their party, not because of me but because we had a clear doctrinal statement would join them, but we went on and trained them in that way. Not one of them left, and Cannon and company were very disappointed, because they said, “They will come in with Johnson and Forest, but as time goes on we will work on them, and eventually they will join the majority”. We lost nobody, and when the time came for us to leave we cleared out. I remember Cannon telling people “What I don’t understand is that not one of these people joined our movement”. He also said that, “They don’t create any disturbances, they don’t keep up an agitation for their policies, they are very good party members. but they won’t join”. That meant a great deal.

Now when I had to leave they were not able to go on. This was partly my fault. I tried to keep leading the party from London, but if I had stayed in the United States we would have had an organisation, because they were good people, trained and full of ability, devoted to the movement. When I left, I told them who should be the leader, and that was blunder number one. That was followed by blunders numbers two, three, four and five. Complete blunder! Actually I should have left them alone, but I began by saying Raya should be leader. Raya didn’t fight it, although she didn’t want to be particularly, but she went along. She couldn’t lead, and it fell apart. Even today people will tell you that that was a movement not only for the people who were in it, although they went their different ways. They all became important leaders In the organisations in which they joined. They were trained, and disciplined, and had firm Marxist foundations. One thing I said, that before you join us you will have to do some work and present a piece in writing. You will have to take a piece of Marxist writing, expound it and get it published, even if it has to be published by us, otherwise you cannot become a member of our party. They all did that.

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Editorial Note.

The footnotes are insertions by the editors, in consultation with CLRJ, to clarify aspects of this interview.

World Revolution 1937, recently republished by Humanities Press, with a new introduction by Al Richardson
Fight 1936–38
1935/6
Padmore was a party name. His name in Arima was Malcolm Nurse and the fathers of both boys were teachers. Arima is a small town 15 miles from Port of Spain.
International African Friends of Ethiopia, later it became the International African Service Bureau.
This was the pseudonym for Raya Dunayevskaya.
State Capitalism & World Revolution, 1950.

At this point CLRJ was handed the following cutting which he read:

“Sir

The article by Clive Davis on C.L.R. James (Guardian February 17) contained misleading information on James’s meeting with Leon Trotsky in Mexico.

The meeting was called to discuss the question of black liberation in the United States. As transcripts of these discussions show there was a large measure of agreement amongst those involved. The participants agreed on the right of United States blacks to self determination, up to and including the right to form their own state if they wished. They also discussed In some detail plans to create and build an independent black organisation in the United States.

After these discussions CLR James returned to the US and drafted a resolution on black liberation for the Socialist Workers Party – the US section of the Trotskyist International. The resolution was overwhelmingly accepted by an SWP Congress.

Transcripts of these extremely interesting discussions between James, Trotsky and others can be found in the book Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-determination published by Pathfinder Press.

yours
Ceri Evans,
Pontypridd,
Mid-Glam.”

Guardian, 21st February 1986