Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of Bruce Springsteen performing "The Ghost Of Tom Joad." Tom Joad is a central figure in John Steinbeck's classic Great Depression novel, "The Grapes Of Wrath."
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Pete Seeger's "Bring Them Home"
Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of Pete Seeger performing his anti-Vietnam war song, "Bring Them Home."
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
***************
Markin comment:
This one was, and is, just way too social-patriotic for my tastes but it was, and is, a crowd-pleaser at anti-war rallies. Better to be more direct (and less tolerant)- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S.Troops and Mercenaries From Afghanistan and Iraq! Harder to sing-but more to the point.
Pete Seeger Lyrics
Bring 'Em Home Lyrics
If you love your Uncle Sam,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Support our boys in Vietnam,
Bring them home, bring them home.
It'll make our generals sad, I know,
Bring them home, bring them home.
They want to tangle with the foe,
Bring them home, bring them home.
They want to test their weaponry,
Bring them home, bring them home.
But here is their big fallacy,
Bring them home, bring them home.
I may be right, I may be wrong,
Bring them home, bring them home.
But I got a right to sing this song,
Bring them home, bring them home.
There's one thing I must confess,
Bring them home, bring them home.
I'm not really a pacifist,
Bring them home, bring them home.
If an army invaded this land of mine,
Bring them home, bring them home.
You'd find me out on the firing line,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Even if they brought their planes to bomb,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Even if they brought helicopters and napalm,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Show those generals their fallacy:
Bring them home, bring them home.
They don't have the right weaponry,
Bring them home, bring them home.
For defense you need common sense,
Bring them home, bring them home.
They don't have the right armaments,
Bring them home, bring them home.
The world needs teachers, books and schools,
Bring them home, bring them home.
And learning a few universal rules,
Bring them home, bring them home.
So if you love your Uncle Sam,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Support our boys in Vietnam,
Bring them home, bring them home.
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
***************
Markin comment:
This one was, and is, just way too social-patriotic for my tastes but it was, and is, a crowd-pleaser at anti-war rallies. Better to be more direct (and less tolerant)- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S.Troops and Mercenaries From Afghanistan and Iraq! Harder to sing-but more to the point.
Pete Seeger Lyrics
Bring 'Em Home Lyrics
If you love your Uncle Sam,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Support our boys in Vietnam,
Bring them home, bring them home.
It'll make our generals sad, I know,
Bring them home, bring them home.
They want to tangle with the foe,
Bring them home, bring them home.
They want to test their weaponry,
Bring them home, bring them home.
But here is their big fallacy,
Bring them home, bring them home.
I may be right, I may be wrong,
Bring them home, bring them home.
But I got a right to sing this song,
Bring them home, bring them home.
There's one thing I must confess,
Bring them home, bring them home.
I'm not really a pacifist,
Bring them home, bring them home.
If an army invaded this land of mine,
Bring them home, bring them home.
You'd find me out on the firing line,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Even if they brought their planes to bomb,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Even if they brought helicopters and napalm,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Show those generals their fallacy:
Bring them home, bring them home.
They don't have the right weaponry,
Bring them home, bring them home.
For defense you need common sense,
Bring them home, bring them home.
They don't have the right armaments,
Bring them home, bring them home.
The world needs teachers, books and schools,
Bring them home, bring them home.
And learning a few universal rules,
Bring them home, bring them home.
So if you love your Uncle Sam,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Support our boys in Vietnam,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
*General McChrystal Must Not Stand Alone- All U.S. Troops Out Of Afghanistan Now!
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for old time Marine Corps General Smedley Butler mentioned in the entry below.
Markin comment:
In the normal course of events the question of who, that is which military figure, is running an American imperial war, like that of the question of who is running the American imperial state is strictly a secondary question for anti-war activists. However, with the “Rolling Stone” magazine expose around the antics of now ex- Afghan commander, General Stanley McChrystal and his senior staff, I get a “teachable” moment. (By the way what the heck are generals and their buddies doing talking to “Rolling Stone” any way? I know that the magazine is not as of old, back in the halcyon 1960s, but still it is not exactly “Time” or “Newsweek”.) Moreover, I get a chance to once again make a fervent pitch for American (and international) withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.
Although the American bourgeois republic was founded on the principle of civilian control of the military, and that principle represented an important accretion in the chain of human progress at the time, it has always been a near thing. The annals of American history are filled with leaders who became president via some military prowess, earned or otherwise. At one point it was virtually impossible to obtain presidential (or other) election if one did not have some military service under his belt, even a “desk jockey” job like ex-president Ronald Reagan.
Still there has always been a great deal of pressure, many times behind the scene, to put forward a military candidate for the role of Bonaparte, a “national savior” in times of crisis, and sometimes with far less reason than that. The case of famed Marine Corps General Smedley Butler (see link above) in the 1930s comes readily to mind. He turned the “conspirators” down flat. But there has always been a subterranean current in the military that has “pined for” a military dictatorship to solve the problems of the country. With the enormous American military budget and bloated military bureaucracy it would be bizarre if that were not the case.
That said, it brings up an important point for militant leftists and anti-war activists. Yes, we want a socialist, and eventually a communist society, but we are not blind to the practical virtues of working for our goals in a bourgeois republic rather than a military dictatorship. Thus, if an attempted military coup, or other type action, took place to threaten that status we would fight, and be front line fighters at that, in military defense of the republic. While fighting politically, and fighting hard to show that our path is better. I take the case of the Spanish revolution in the 1930s as an exemplar of that position.
Since this latest “dust-up” between the American civilian and military elites has not reached that point we are left with this. In the words of a fighting soldier, a "grunt", so eloquently quoted as having asked, after losing a buddy in a firefight in Afghanistan, the now deposed General McChrystal this question- “What are we doing here?" Here is my answer; here is the ground that I will fight on. General McChrystal must not stand alone- Obama, Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S/Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
In the normal course of events the question of who, that is which military figure, is running an American imperial war, like that of the question of who is running the American imperial state is strictly a secondary question for anti-war activists. However, with the “Rolling Stone” magazine expose around the antics of now ex- Afghan commander, General Stanley McChrystal and his senior staff, I get a “teachable” moment. (By the way what the heck are generals and their buddies doing talking to “Rolling Stone” any way? I know that the magazine is not as of old, back in the halcyon 1960s, but still it is not exactly “Time” or “Newsweek”.) Moreover, I get a chance to once again make a fervent pitch for American (and international) withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.
Although the American bourgeois republic was founded on the principle of civilian control of the military, and that principle represented an important accretion in the chain of human progress at the time, it has always been a near thing. The annals of American history are filled with leaders who became president via some military prowess, earned or otherwise. At one point it was virtually impossible to obtain presidential (or other) election if one did not have some military service under his belt, even a “desk jockey” job like ex-president Ronald Reagan.
Still there has always been a great deal of pressure, many times behind the scene, to put forward a military candidate for the role of Bonaparte, a “national savior” in times of crisis, and sometimes with far less reason than that. The case of famed Marine Corps General Smedley Butler (see link above) in the 1930s comes readily to mind. He turned the “conspirators” down flat. But there has always been a subterranean current in the military that has “pined for” a military dictatorship to solve the problems of the country. With the enormous American military budget and bloated military bureaucracy it would be bizarre if that were not the case.
That said, it brings up an important point for militant leftists and anti-war activists. Yes, we want a socialist, and eventually a communist society, but we are not blind to the practical virtues of working for our goals in a bourgeois republic rather than a military dictatorship. Thus, if an attempted military coup, or other type action, took place to threaten that status we would fight, and be front line fighters at that, in military defense of the republic. While fighting politically, and fighting hard to show that our path is better. I take the case of the Spanish revolution in the 1930s as an exemplar of that position.
Since this latest “dust-up” between the American civilian and military elites has not reached that point we are left with this. In the words of a fighting soldier, a "grunt", so eloquently quoted as having asked, after losing a buddy in a firefight in Afghanistan, the now deposed General McChrystal this question- “What are we doing here?" Here is my answer; here is the ground that I will fight on. General McChrystal must not stand alone- Obama, Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S/Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan!
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Paul Robeson's "Let My People Go"
Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of singer/communist activist Paul Robeson performing "Let My People Go."
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
*************
Let My People Go-Lyrics
When Israel was in Egypt’s land,
Let My people go!
Oppressed so hard they could not stand,
Let My people go!
Refrain:
Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egypt’s land;
Tell old Pharaoh
To let My people go!
No more shall they in bondage toil,
Let My people go!
Let them come out with Egypt’s spoil,
Let My people go!
Oh, let us all from bondage flee,
Let My people go!
And let us all in Christ be free,
Let My people go!
You need not always weep and mourn,
Let My people go!
And wear these slav’ry chains forlorn,
Let My people go!
Your foes shall not before you stand,
Let My people go!
And you’ll possess fair Canaan’s land,
Let My people go!
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
*************
Let My People Go-Lyrics
When Israel was in Egypt’s land,
Let My people go!
Oppressed so hard they could not stand,
Let My people go!
Refrain:
Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egypt’s land;
Tell old Pharaoh
To let My people go!
No more shall they in bondage toil,
Let My people go!
Let them come out with Egypt’s spoil,
Let My people go!
Oh, let us all from bondage flee,
Let My people go!
And let us all in Christ be free,
Let My people go!
You need not always weep and mourn,
Let My people go!
And wear these slav’ry chains forlorn,
Let My people go!
Your foes shall not before you stand,
Let My people go!
And you’ll possess fair Canaan’s land,
Let My people go!
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Paul Robeson's "Joe Hill"
Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of singer/communist activist Paul Robeson performing the labor classic, "Joe Hill."
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
************
Joe Hill Lyrics-Joan Baez
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I "But Joe, you're ten years dead"
"I never died" said he,
"I never died" said he.
"The Copper Bosses killed you Joe,
they shot you Joe" says I.
"Takes more than guns to kill a man"
Says Joe "I didn't die"
Says Joe "I didn't die"
"In Salt Lake City, Joe," says I,
Him standing by my bed,
"They framed you on a murder charge,"
Says Joe, "But I ain't dead,"
Says Joe, "But I ain't dead."
And standing there as big as life
and smiling with his eyes.
Says Joe "What they can never kill
went on to organize,
went on to organize"
From San Diego up to Maine,
in every mine and mill,
Where working men defend their rights,
it's there you'll find Joe Hill,
it's there you'll find Joe Hill!
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I "But Joe, you're ten years dead"
"I never died" said he,
"I never died" said he.
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
************
Joe Hill Lyrics-Joan Baez
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I "But Joe, you're ten years dead"
"I never died" said he,
"I never died" said he.
"The Copper Bosses killed you Joe,
they shot you Joe" says I.
"Takes more than guns to kill a man"
Says Joe "I didn't die"
Says Joe "I didn't die"
"In Salt Lake City, Joe," says I,
Him standing by my bed,
"They framed you on a murder charge,"
Says Joe, "But I ain't dead,"
Says Joe, "But I ain't dead."
And standing there as big as life
and smiling with his eyes.
Says Joe "What they can never kill
went on to organize,
went on to organize"
From San Diego up to Maine,
in every mine and mill,
Where working men defend their rights,
it's there you'll find Joe Hill,
it's there you'll find Joe Hill!
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I "But Joe, you're ten years dead"
"I never died" said he,
"I never died" said he.
*Paul Robeson On The Peekskill Events Of 1949
Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of singer/communist activist Paul Robeson (and others) on the anti-communist riots at Peekskill (a place he was suppose to sing at) in 1949 during the heart of the anti-Soviet Cold War hysteria in America.
Monday, June 21, 2010
*Films to While Away The Class Struggle By-"This Is What Democracy Looks Like"- The 1999 Seattle WTO Protests
Click on the title to link to a "YouTube" film clip of the movie trailer for "This Is What Democracy Looks Like."
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
DVD Review
This is What Democracy Looks Like, various anti-globalization demonstrators, A Big Noise Film, 2000
At one time, and maybe, as it turned out, it was just this one time in 1999 in Seattle at a WTO meeting the militant mass demonstrations organized by various components of the anti-globalization movement looked like the ‘new wave’ on the world-wide social reform curve. As this short but energetically-paced film footage (from many camera sources) makes clear an alliance between American organized labor (mainly through the middle and lower levels of some of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy but with plenty of enthusiastic rank and file worker support) and more overtly leftist environmentally-concerned organizations (in short, mainly students and their hangers-on) with a fringe of anarcho-lifestyle activists was in the making. While this film, composed of street footage of the action and released very shortly after the event, does not go into much detail about the long term prospects the footage itself does provide some of the reasons, if only accidentally, that this movement has been spinning its wheels since that time.
Look, not every movement has to start out with an explicitly socialist agenda and tactics and strategy to match. Waiting for such an occurrence, or more succinctly, waiting for such a full-blown movement to be hatched fully-formed from the embryo is not how social movements gather steam and become important in history. That said though, such social movements better end with a socialist agenda or they are doomed to that wheel-spinning mentioned above. And that is the nut of the matter here. That and the extreme provocations by the police of basically nothing more than militant (and creative) mass demonstrations. Those police reactions then, and the virtual para-military state that has been erected at subsequent sites for international capitalist economic conferences of various hues, certainly have a chilling effect on mass organizing for them. In the end only the most committed have stayed the course, as the last event in Pittsburgh in 2009 has demonstrated.
Now there is not much that we can do, currently, about the relationship of forces with that police state para-military operation so the last part of this commentary centers on what we can do, the political organizing part. What became clear throughout this film was that what looked like a conventional united front action was more a convenient convergence of a loose coalition of ultimately conflicting forces. In short, the various components had competing political agendas. The labor bureaucracy was talking jobs, protectionism, and, frankly, China-bashing as a way to deal with the crisis of the decline of the American working class’ continually eroding standard of living. The other components spoke to such issues as the downsizing of the industrial state, better protection of the environment, and living more simply, to put it simply. The anarchist fringe I never did get a sense of, as much as I like the young anarchists that I have run into. Militancy, complete with Zapata-like protective handkerchiefs over face, for its own sake has no independent virtue.
All this mixture is not mutually exclusive but what comes out glaringly is that the basic premise expressed explicitly in the title of this thing that more democracy, somewhat ill-undefined, will cure the ills of this sorry old world. Well, as much as we socialist respect the historic achievements of the bourgeois democratic revolutions that have brought humankind this far this is simply not enough. Those movements long ago ran out of steam. And at the end of the day that is what was missing in this film, that idea that we have to go beyond some merely enhanced democratic process. There was plenty of feel-good talk about community, and community-building and very little about the need to not just take over the current nation-state apparatuses and do a little tweaking to right things but to change the institutions, change them utterly. Think about that my friends, as you watch these well-meaning, courageous fighters go through their paces.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
DVD Review
This is What Democracy Looks Like, various anti-globalization demonstrators, A Big Noise Film, 2000
At one time, and maybe, as it turned out, it was just this one time in 1999 in Seattle at a WTO meeting the militant mass demonstrations organized by various components of the anti-globalization movement looked like the ‘new wave’ on the world-wide social reform curve. As this short but energetically-paced film footage (from many camera sources) makes clear an alliance between American organized labor (mainly through the middle and lower levels of some of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy but with plenty of enthusiastic rank and file worker support) and more overtly leftist environmentally-concerned organizations (in short, mainly students and their hangers-on) with a fringe of anarcho-lifestyle activists was in the making. While this film, composed of street footage of the action and released very shortly after the event, does not go into much detail about the long term prospects the footage itself does provide some of the reasons, if only accidentally, that this movement has been spinning its wheels since that time.
Look, not every movement has to start out with an explicitly socialist agenda and tactics and strategy to match. Waiting for such an occurrence, or more succinctly, waiting for such a full-blown movement to be hatched fully-formed from the embryo is not how social movements gather steam and become important in history. That said though, such social movements better end with a socialist agenda or they are doomed to that wheel-spinning mentioned above. And that is the nut of the matter here. That and the extreme provocations by the police of basically nothing more than militant (and creative) mass demonstrations. Those police reactions then, and the virtual para-military state that has been erected at subsequent sites for international capitalist economic conferences of various hues, certainly have a chilling effect on mass organizing for them. In the end only the most committed have stayed the course, as the last event in Pittsburgh in 2009 has demonstrated.
Now there is not much that we can do, currently, about the relationship of forces with that police state para-military operation so the last part of this commentary centers on what we can do, the political organizing part. What became clear throughout this film was that what looked like a conventional united front action was more a convenient convergence of a loose coalition of ultimately conflicting forces. In short, the various components had competing political agendas. The labor bureaucracy was talking jobs, protectionism, and, frankly, China-bashing as a way to deal with the crisis of the decline of the American working class’ continually eroding standard of living. The other components spoke to such issues as the downsizing of the industrial state, better protection of the environment, and living more simply, to put it simply. The anarchist fringe I never did get a sense of, as much as I like the young anarchists that I have run into. Militancy, complete with Zapata-like protective handkerchiefs over face, for its own sake has no independent virtue.
All this mixture is not mutually exclusive but what comes out glaringly is that the basic premise expressed explicitly in the title of this thing that more democracy, somewhat ill-undefined, will cure the ills of this sorry old world. Well, as much as we socialist respect the historic achievements of the bourgeois democratic revolutions that have brought humankind this far this is simply not enough. Those movements long ago ran out of steam. And at the end of the day that is what was missing in this film, that idea that we have to go beyond some merely enhanced democratic process. There was plenty of feel-good talk about community, and community-building and very little about the need to not just take over the current nation-state apparatuses and do a little tweaking to right things but to change the institutions, change them utterly. Think about that my friends, as you watch these well-meaning, courageous fighters go through their paces.
*From “The Rag Blog”- “Bob Feldman 68” Blog- A People’s History Of Afghanistan, Part Ten
Click on the headline to link to a “The Rag Blog” entry from the “Bob Feldman 68” blog on the history of Afghanistan
Markin comment:
This is a great series for those who are not familiar with the critical role of Afghanistan in world politics, if not directly then as part of the history of world imperialism. Thanks, Bob Feldman.
And, speaking of world imperialism, let us keep our eyes on the prize- Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
This is a great series for those who are not familiar with the critical role of Afghanistan in world politics, if not directly then as part of the history of world imperialism. Thanks, Bob Feldman.
And, speaking of world imperialism, let us keep our eyes on the prize- Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan!
*From "The Rag Blog"- Rereading John Steinbeck's "Grapes Of Wrath"
Click on the headline to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry- "Rereading John Steinbeck's "Grapes Of Wrath."
Markin comment:
Every militant should read this Steinbeck classic, and be outraged today as well. There are plenty of Joad stories out there, except the names now include Gomez, Lopez, and Sanchez as well.
Markin comment:
Every militant should read this Steinbeck classic, and be outraged today as well. There are plenty of Joad stories out there, except the names now include Gomez, Lopez, and Sanchez as well.
*From The "International Marxist Tendency" Website- "Where Is The Iranian Revolution Going?"-A Guest Commentray
Click on the headline to link to the "International Marxist Tendency" Website- "Where Is The Iranian Revolution Going?"
Markin comment:
No sooner had I posted a resignation statement (posted from the "Workers' Press" blog), complete with a blow-by-blow international analysis of the failings of the organization, including the split in the Iran section and here is a polemic by IMT honcho Alan Wood directed at those "former" Iranian comrades. With a classic amorphous "ebb and flow of the class struggle" defense of why his analysis of last year's upheavals as the start of the Iranian revolution was a tad bit off. More later, as I have to start paying more attention to this organization.
Markin comment:
No sooner had I posted a resignation statement (posted from the "Workers' Press" blog), complete with a blow-by-blow international analysis of the failings of the organization, including the split in the Iran section and here is a polemic by IMT honcho Alan Wood directed at those "former" Iranian comrades. With a classic amorphous "ebb and flow of the class struggle" defense of why his analysis of last year's upheavals as the start of the Iranian revolution was a tad bit off. More later, as I have to start paying more attention to this organization.
*From The "Workers' Press" Blog- Resignation (With Analysis) From The International Marxist Tendency (IMT)
Click on the headline to link to a "Workers' Press" Blog- "Resignation (With Analysis) From The International Marxist Tendency (IMT)."
Markin comment:
This is an interesting document from a former member of the American section of the International Marxist Tendency. Frankly, I don't know much about this organization other than of their adoration for Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, his scheme for some kind of Fifth International, and various, admittedly, interesting historical articles from their site, that IMT supporter "Renegade Eye" puts on his blog. For the IMT position on the allegations in this document, if any, click on links to that site at the right.
Markin comment:
This is an interesting document from a former member of the American section of the International Marxist Tendency. Frankly, I don't know much about this organization other than of their adoration for Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, his scheme for some kind of Fifth International, and various, admittedly, interesting historical articles from their site, that IMT supporter "Renegade Eye" puts on his blog. For the IMT position on the allegations in this document, if any, click on links to that site at the right.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
From The "Bob Feldman '68" Blog - The Song "They Killed The Rosenbergs"- In Honor Of The Heroic Communists Julius And Ethel Rosenberg
*Click on the headline to link to a "Bob Feldman '68" Blog archive entry -"They Killed The Rosenbergs"- In Honor Of The Heroic Communists Julius And Ethel Rosenberg.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
On The Anniversary Of The Execution Of Julius And Ethel Rosenberg-The Meerpol's Story
Click On Title To Link To The Rosenberg Defense Fund For Children.
Markin comment:
The names of the heroic Communist militants Julius and Ethel Rosenberg-soldiers of the revolution- are no strangers to this space. I have mentioned this before and it bears repeating here. The Rosenbergs were not our people (hard Stalinists rather than supporters of Trotsky), but they were our people (they defended the Soviet Union in the best way they knew how, and didn't complain about linking their personal fates to that defense right to the end).
Markin comment:
The names of the heroic Communist militants Julius and Ethel Rosenberg-soldiers of the revolution- are no strangers to this space. I have mentioned this before and it bears repeating here. The Rosenbergs were not our people (hard Stalinists rather than supporters of Trotsky), but they were our people (they defended the Soviet Union in the best way they knew how, and didn't complain about linking their personal fates to that defense right to the end).
Friday, June 18, 2010
*Reflections On The Class-War Prisoners Freedom Campaign And The Black Liberation Struggle- On The Imprisoned Black Liberation Army (BLA) Fighters
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the Black Liberation Army (BLA). As always be careful with this source when politics, especially left politics, are at issue. The real import of this entry is the list provided of those class-war prisoners still behind bars who were associated with the BLA.
*Reflections On The Class-War Prisoners Freedom Campaign And The Black Liberation Struggle- On The Imprisoned Black Liberation Army (BLA) Fighters-A Short Note
Markin comment:
Over the past several days I have placed a large number of posts centered on the struggle to get some publicity for the class-war prisoners now languishing in American prisons. I took the list of class-war prisoners from the National Jericho Movement site as that seemed to be the most complete listing (and also overlapped with some of the prisoners supported by the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization that I support). Putting this campaign together: reading about the individual cases, looking for sites that gave added information on those cases and the like I became aware, or became more aware, of how close the struggle to free the American class-war prisoners is with the black liberation struggle.
The list of class-war prisoner cases include some old time white radicals, notably recently imprisoned people’s attorney and grandmother Lynne Stewart, the last two members remaining behind bars of the Ohio 7, Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman, and 1960s SDS- style activists like David Gilbert and Marilyn Buck. It also includes younger activists from more recent movements like animal rights liberation and the ecological struggle. Missing, although given the low level of class struggle over the past few decades understandable, are labor militants like the old time Wobblies (IWW) or Tom Mooney. Also missing are younger versions of 1960s student activists like Gilbert and Buck mentioned above, although given the lack of serious campus struggles (at least until recently over budget cuts) that too is understandable.
What is truly amazing, however, and should give us pause, is how many of the prisoners listed are old time black liberation fighters from the Black Panthers and other black nationalist organizations, particularly the Black Liberation Army (BLA). In the cases of the remaining old time white radicals still imprisoned, there are also some connections to that black liberation struggle as some of those activists saw themselves as aiding black and “Third World” liberation movements from “inside the heart of the beasts.” But the black liberation fighters are the real subject of this commentary.
Now these fighters are not Martin Luther King wannabes, although some of them may have started out their political careers with that prospective. A great number of them may have started looking at that King “turn the other cheek” strategy as the way to deliverance from black oppression. But when things got “hot” in America in the late 1960s and the deep racism inherent in an American society bedrock born on the bones of black slaves was exposed for all to see, at least those who wanted to that approach went by the boards. When the fight went beyond some simple white liberal support for the right to vote, down South, these fighters gravitated to black nationalist organizations like the Black Panthers. Some stayed and some moved on.
Every radical, certainly every white radical, in the 1960s fawned; there is no other word for it, over the Black Panthers, rightly or wrongly, as the vanguard of the revolution, or at least the vanguard of the black liberation struggle. And that, moreover, is the way that organization, and its leaders, saw themselves. There was no room for criticism of strategy, hell, at one point there was no room for white radicals even talking to black militants. Until the “heat” came down. The American government “heat” that made no secret about the fact that if one wanted to be a black revolutionary then one was going to be a dead black revolutionary. And, frankly, as the class-war case histories and other evidence demonstrate they basically succeeded in that objective. In response the Black Panthers fractured, some like Bobby Seale, Bobby Rush and Huey Newton heading “home” to the Democratic Party, other went off to form organizations dedicated to various black urban guerrilla warfare strategies.
And that is where the Black Liberation Army (BLA) comes in. The names of the Cuba-exiled Assata Shakur (yes, Tupac’s “auntie”), imprisoned Doctor Mutulu Shakur (yes, Tupac’s father), and imprisoned Sundiata Acoli should come to mind. It is almost mind-boggling how many of those still behind bars for revolutionary activity are connected, one way or another, with that organization. Now the BLA came at the tail end of the struggle of the 1960s and so it has gotten short shrift both by those 1960s radicals who should know better and by a wall of ignorance by later activists caught up in the mighty grip of a lack of historic interest in the struggles of those who came before them.
I have enclosed a link to a “Wikipedia” entry on the BLA and will be writing more about that organization later, including criticism of speratist urban guerilla warfare strategies. But today listen to this. I know that the only justice these fighters will get is by a successful socialist revolution but in the meantime let’s fight and fight like demons to get them out of those hellhole prisons. Free the Black Liberation Army (BLA) fighters- Hands Off Assata Shakur!
*Reflections On The Class-War Prisoners Freedom Campaign And The Black Liberation Struggle- On The Imprisoned Black Liberation Army (BLA) Fighters-A Short Note
Markin comment:
Over the past several days I have placed a large number of posts centered on the struggle to get some publicity for the class-war prisoners now languishing in American prisons. I took the list of class-war prisoners from the National Jericho Movement site as that seemed to be the most complete listing (and also overlapped with some of the prisoners supported by the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization that I support). Putting this campaign together: reading about the individual cases, looking for sites that gave added information on those cases and the like I became aware, or became more aware, of how close the struggle to free the American class-war prisoners is with the black liberation struggle.
The list of class-war prisoner cases include some old time white radicals, notably recently imprisoned people’s attorney and grandmother Lynne Stewart, the last two members remaining behind bars of the Ohio 7, Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman, and 1960s SDS- style activists like David Gilbert and Marilyn Buck. It also includes younger activists from more recent movements like animal rights liberation and the ecological struggle. Missing, although given the low level of class struggle over the past few decades understandable, are labor militants like the old time Wobblies (IWW) or Tom Mooney. Also missing are younger versions of 1960s student activists like Gilbert and Buck mentioned above, although given the lack of serious campus struggles (at least until recently over budget cuts) that too is understandable.
What is truly amazing, however, and should give us pause, is how many of the prisoners listed are old time black liberation fighters from the Black Panthers and other black nationalist organizations, particularly the Black Liberation Army (BLA). In the cases of the remaining old time white radicals still imprisoned, there are also some connections to that black liberation struggle as some of those activists saw themselves as aiding black and “Third World” liberation movements from “inside the heart of the beasts.” But the black liberation fighters are the real subject of this commentary.
Now these fighters are not Martin Luther King wannabes, although some of them may have started out their political careers with that prospective. A great number of them may have started looking at that King “turn the other cheek” strategy as the way to deliverance from black oppression. But when things got “hot” in America in the late 1960s and the deep racism inherent in an American society bedrock born on the bones of black slaves was exposed for all to see, at least those who wanted to that approach went by the boards. When the fight went beyond some simple white liberal support for the right to vote, down South, these fighters gravitated to black nationalist organizations like the Black Panthers. Some stayed and some moved on.
Every radical, certainly every white radical, in the 1960s fawned; there is no other word for it, over the Black Panthers, rightly or wrongly, as the vanguard of the revolution, or at least the vanguard of the black liberation struggle. And that, moreover, is the way that organization, and its leaders, saw themselves. There was no room for criticism of strategy, hell, at one point there was no room for white radicals even talking to black militants. Until the “heat” came down. The American government “heat” that made no secret about the fact that if one wanted to be a black revolutionary then one was going to be a dead black revolutionary. And, frankly, as the class-war case histories and other evidence demonstrate they basically succeeded in that objective. In response the Black Panthers fractured, some like Bobby Seale, Bobby Rush and Huey Newton heading “home” to the Democratic Party, other went off to form organizations dedicated to various black urban guerrilla warfare strategies.
And that is where the Black Liberation Army (BLA) comes in. The names of the Cuba-exiled Assata Shakur (yes, Tupac’s “auntie”), imprisoned Doctor Mutulu Shakur (yes, Tupac’s father), and imprisoned Sundiata Acoli should come to mind. It is almost mind-boggling how many of those still behind bars for revolutionary activity are connected, one way or another, with that organization. Now the BLA came at the tail end of the struggle of the 1960s and so it has gotten short shrift both by those 1960s radicals who should know better and by a wall of ignorance by later activists caught up in the mighty grip of a lack of historic interest in the struggles of those who came before them.
I have enclosed a link to a “Wikipedia” entry on the BLA and will be writing more about that organization later, including criticism of speratist urban guerilla warfare strategies. But today listen to this. I know that the only justice these fighters will get is by a successful socialist revolution but in the meantime let’s fight and fight like demons to get them out of those hellhole prisons. Free the Black Liberation Army (BLA) fighters- Hands Off Assata Shakur!
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard" -Once Again On Running For The Executive Offices Of The Bourgeois State
Click on the headline to link to an "American Left History" entry on the subject of this writer's mea culpa on running for the executive offices of the bourgeois state.
Markin comment:
Will this political blushing I am forced to undergo for my old position on this issue of running for the executive offices of the bourgeois state at any level never end? (See above linked post.) Of course, as pointed out in the article below, the local executive offices of the bourgeois state (in alleged contrast to the national state) is a key "hotbed" for sliding from revolution to reformism on this question.
Workers Vanguard No. 960
4 June 2010
Lutte Ouvrière’s Municipal Antics
The following article is translated from Le Bolchévik No. 192 (June 2010).
In 2007, [the reformist group] Lutte Ouvrière (LO) mobilized its members for the following year’s municipal elections, insisting on the importance of getting some municipal representatives. At the end of 2007, by a majority of 97 percent, LO’s party congress adopted a resolution stating:
“Getting some municipal councillors elected is extremely important for our political influence. These elected officials are a means of rooting ourselves in a city and the axis that our local activities can orbit around….
“The conclusion is that we should try to field slates in the maximum number of localities. However, that will not stop us from examining and being open to all proposals for alliances, which we will consider depending on the situation, the local relationship of forces and the possibilities for getting elected that these alliances could really open up to us. Indeed, we have no interest in making alliances on a program of agreements with possible allies if that does not get us some people elected, or even prevents us from getting people elected, and all the more so since we have the means to run independently.”
—Lutte de Classe No. 109, December 2007
In other words, LO was ready for any dirty deal to obtain positions on municipal councils and told its members that it was going to try to negotiate for positions on “left” slates. LO went to beg the Socialist Party [SP], which in most cases said flatly no. But the PCF [French Communist Party] often accepted them on its slates, after making sure that LO would be loyal to the future municipal majority. LO eventually ran on the slates of the bourgeois mayor of Belfort, a fiefdom of [bourgeois politician Jean-Pierre] Chevènement, who served as minister of police under [former SP prime minister Lionel] Jospin.
So far, LO has more than proven that it is a reliable partner for a municipal popular front. We don’t know of any instances when LO voted against a budget. LO national spokesman Nathalie Arthaud, a member of the CP-led municipal majority running Vaulx-en-Velin (in the Lyon suburbs), justified voting for the budget “in the name of LO” during the municipal council meeting on 25 March 2009:
“Of course we are going to vote for the budget presented by the municipal majority, because we are in solidarity with the proposed orientations and choices, whether they are expressed in educational policy, support to associations, rates applied to services rendered or general orientation. The municipal majority is concerned about responding to the needs of the population and especially the underprivileged population, and for us that is essential. Beyond some disagreements on details, we share this majority’s basic choices.”
—Minutes of the Vaulx-en-Velin Municipal Council,
25 March 2009
In spite of LO’s concerns that having municipal councillors was “extremely important for our political influence,” the political influence of these municipal councillors did not reach the pages of the weekly Lutte Ouvrière, which has barely breathed a word about their performance: to our knowledge, LO wrote about them briefly three times in the space of two years. That’s why a 19 February article mentioning them takes on a very particular importance for judging their municipal politics.
The article is about Bagnolet—a municipality in the Paris suburbs—which has been controlled by the CP for decades. Bagnolet is also where an LO regional leader, Jean-Pierre Mercier (also a union bureaucrat in the PSA automobile factory at Aulnay), was elected on the slates of CP mayor Marc Everbecq in 2008. The article recounts the forcible eviction, on the mayor’s orders and in the middle of winter, of the tenants of an apartment building occupied in part by African workers. This time LO condemned the racist eviction, contrary to what they did in 2005 in a similar case in the town of Aubervilliers, which was run at the time by the CP (see our article in Le Bolchévik No. 173 [September 2005]). LO solidarizes with the victims of the Bagnolet eviction and denounces the propaganda of the town administration, which, indeed, does not hesitate to use every racist cliché in order to justify its action, calling the victims smugglers, drug dealers and pimps.
A naive reader, taking LO’s recent hypocritical rhetoric about “communism” at face value, might expect LO to denounce all its past capitulations to the PCF mayor and break its pact with the devil of bourgeois municipalism. Absolutely not! On the contrary, LO’s article states:
“A support committee was set up for the evicted people, with the Right to Housing Committee and other organizations. LO’s municipal councillors in the town participated in its creation. And the evictees were quite happy to find members of the municipal majority at their side, able to condemn the dirty tricks, even when they came from City Hall.”
In other words, LO went to the victims of the municipal government, openly declaring itself part of the very municipal council majority that was evicting them! Under these conditions, LO’s support amounted to reassuring the evictees that they really should not infer from this that the administration of capitalism is necessarily racist (whether in the hands of the PCF and LO or not). It is precisely for this kind of thing that LO is useful to the PCF mayors. The message that LO thus helps to get across is that of course you cannot run a town administration without breaking a few eggs, but in the last analysis there is always somebody in the municipal majority who will come and warm your heart (if nothing else) when you are out on the street and it’s snowing.
LO itself accurately described its conception of municipal work as reformist: “By definition, neither municipal work nor trade-union activity can be revolutionary; they are reformist” (Lutte de Classe No. 110, February 2008). LO deliberately confuses two things. One is the question of administering capitalism at the municipal level by taking part in a municipal council majority—and thus taking responsibility for what running capitalism entails, i.e., inevitably, racist discrimination in public housing; “personnel management,” including the mayor’s office laying off city workers; reducing the number of elementary school classes; cutting back childcare; raising local taxes; setting up “neighborhood police” and police stations; etc. The other is winning an election as a revolutionary proletarian opposition in order to denounce administering capitalism.
For Marxists, however, this is a fundamental difference—a difference of principle. More than 150 years ago, Karl Marx insisted that you cannot take hold of the capitalist state—which is an apparatus of oppression made up of armed bodies whose role is to maintain the dictatorship of capital—in order to make it serve the interest of the working class. This is true for the central government, and it is equally true at the lowest level of the state, the municipal level. Thus, the mayor has police powers within his territory; mayors, including PCF mayors, are the direct representatives of the capitalist state at the municipal level.
That is why Lenin always opposed municipalism, notably during the elections to the local (municipal) dumas in April 1917 in Russia. We recommend to our readers the article in the current issue of our international journal Spartacist [English-language edition No. 61, Spring 2009]. The article documents Lenin’s intransigent struggle, even though the Third International itself had come to questionable conclusions on the question of municipalism at its [1920] Second Congress. Denouncing the bourgeoisie’s institutions of local government, the resolution on parliamentarism stipulated that “to counterpose them to the organs of the state is theoretically incorrect. They are in reality organizations similar to the mechanism of the bourgeois state.” However, the resolution wrongly allowed Communist parties to hold municipal executive office.
The bourgeois state must be destroyed by a workers revolution based on new organs of power—workers councils—unconditionally opposed to the bourgeois order at all levels, national, regional and municipal. So it should be evident that the working class cannot reach this understanding if its revolutionary element itself participates in the institutions of bourgeois power, even municipal ones. From this principled opposition to executive offices of the bourgeois state flows the fact that Marxists cannot run for such posts without risking conferring legitimacy upon them in the eyes of the workers. Therefore we refuse on principle to run for executive office, be it the election of the mayor and his deputies by the municipal council or the election of the president of the republic by universal suffrage. We also refuse to seek to be a part of a parliamentary or municipal majority that takes on executive responsibility.
In contrast, for nearly 40 years LO has never failed to run a candidate for president. In 2008, they took a further step by “getting their hands dirty” at the municipal level. In fact, it is the logic of reformism to set about administering capitalism starting at the municipal level. Our perspective, on the other hand, is international socialist revolution. That perspective begins by opposing LO’s bourgeois municipalism and must end with the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will eliminate the organs of bourgeois repression at all levels, including the municipal. Down with executive offices of the capitalist state!
Markin comment:
Will this political blushing I am forced to undergo for my old position on this issue of running for the executive offices of the bourgeois state at any level never end? (See above linked post.) Of course, as pointed out in the article below, the local executive offices of the bourgeois state (in alleged contrast to the national state) is a key "hotbed" for sliding from revolution to reformism on this question.
Workers Vanguard No. 960
4 June 2010
Lutte Ouvrière’s Municipal Antics
The following article is translated from Le Bolchévik No. 192 (June 2010).
In 2007, [the reformist group] Lutte Ouvrière (LO) mobilized its members for the following year’s municipal elections, insisting on the importance of getting some municipal representatives. At the end of 2007, by a majority of 97 percent, LO’s party congress adopted a resolution stating:
“Getting some municipal councillors elected is extremely important for our political influence. These elected officials are a means of rooting ourselves in a city and the axis that our local activities can orbit around….
“The conclusion is that we should try to field slates in the maximum number of localities. However, that will not stop us from examining and being open to all proposals for alliances, which we will consider depending on the situation, the local relationship of forces and the possibilities for getting elected that these alliances could really open up to us. Indeed, we have no interest in making alliances on a program of agreements with possible allies if that does not get us some people elected, or even prevents us from getting people elected, and all the more so since we have the means to run independently.”
—Lutte de Classe No. 109, December 2007
In other words, LO was ready for any dirty deal to obtain positions on municipal councils and told its members that it was going to try to negotiate for positions on “left” slates. LO went to beg the Socialist Party [SP], which in most cases said flatly no. But the PCF [French Communist Party] often accepted them on its slates, after making sure that LO would be loyal to the future municipal majority. LO eventually ran on the slates of the bourgeois mayor of Belfort, a fiefdom of [bourgeois politician Jean-Pierre] Chevènement, who served as minister of police under [former SP prime minister Lionel] Jospin.
So far, LO has more than proven that it is a reliable partner for a municipal popular front. We don’t know of any instances when LO voted against a budget. LO national spokesman Nathalie Arthaud, a member of the CP-led municipal majority running Vaulx-en-Velin (in the Lyon suburbs), justified voting for the budget “in the name of LO” during the municipal council meeting on 25 March 2009:
“Of course we are going to vote for the budget presented by the municipal majority, because we are in solidarity with the proposed orientations and choices, whether they are expressed in educational policy, support to associations, rates applied to services rendered or general orientation. The municipal majority is concerned about responding to the needs of the population and especially the underprivileged population, and for us that is essential. Beyond some disagreements on details, we share this majority’s basic choices.”
—Minutes of the Vaulx-en-Velin Municipal Council,
25 March 2009
In spite of LO’s concerns that having municipal councillors was “extremely important for our political influence,” the political influence of these municipal councillors did not reach the pages of the weekly Lutte Ouvrière, which has barely breathed a word about their performance: to our knowledge, LO wrote about them briefly three times in the space of two years. That’s why a 19 February article mentioning them takes on a very particular importance for judging their municipal politics.
The article is about Bagnolet—a municipality in the Paris suburbs—which has been controlled by the CP for decades. Bagnolet is also where an LO regional leader, Jean-Pierre Mercier (also a union bureaucrat in the PSA automobile factory at Aulnay), was elected on the slates of CP mayor Marc Everbecq in 2008. The article recounts the forcible eviction, on the mayor’s orders and in the middle of winter, of the tenants of an apartment building occupied in part by African workers. This time LO condemned the racist eviction, contrary to what they did in 2005 in a similar case in the town of Aubervilliers, which was run at the time by the CP (see our article in Le Bolchévik No. 173 [September 2005]). LO solidarizes with the victims of the Bagnolet eviction and denounces the propaganda of the town administration, which, indeed, does not hesitate to use every racist cliché in order to justify its action, calling the victims smugglers, drug dealers and pimps.
A naive reader, taking LO’s recent hypocritical rhetoric about “communism” at face value, might expect LO to denounce all its past capitulations to the PCF mayor and break its pact with the devil of bourgeois municipalism. Absolutely not! On the contrary, LO’s article states:
“A support committee was set up for the evicted people, with the Right to Housing Committee and other organizations. LO’s municipal councillors in the town participated in its creation. And the evictees were quite happy to find members of the municipal majority at their side, able to condemn the dirty tricks, even when they came from City Hall.”
In other words, LO went to the victims of the municipal government, openly declaring itself part of the very municipal council majority that was evicting them! Under these conditions, LO’s support amounted to reassuring the evictees that they really should not infer from this that the administration of capitalism is necessarily racist (whether in the hands of the PCF and LO or not). It is precisely for this kind of thing that LO is useful to the PCF mayors. The message that LO thus helps to get across is that of course you cannot run a town administration without breaking a few eggs, but in the last analysis there is always somebody in the municipal majority who will come and warm your heart (if nothing else) when you are out on the street and it’s snowing.
LO itself accurately described its conception of municipal work as reformist: “By definition, neither municipal work nor trade-union activity can be revolutionary; they are reformist” (Lutte de Classe No. 110, February 2008). LO deliberately confuses two things. One is the question of administering capitalism at the municipal level by taking part in a municipal council majority—and thus taking responsibility for what running capitalism entails, i.e., inevitably, racist discrimination in public housing; “personnel management,” including the mayor’s office laying off city workers; reducing the number of elementary school classes; cutting back childcare; raising local taxes; setting up “neighborhood police” and police stations; etc. The other is winning an election as a revolutionary proletarian opposition in order to denounce administering capitalism.
For Marxists, however, this is a fundamental difference—a difference of principle. More than 150 years ago, Karl Marx insisted that you cannot take hold of the capitalist state—which is an apparatus of oppression made up of armed bodies whose role is to maintain the dictatorship of capital—in order to make it serve the interest of the working class. This is true for the central government, and it is equally true at the lowest level of the state, the municipal level. Thus, the mayor has police powers within his territory; mayors, including PCF mayors, are the direct representatives of the capitalist state at the municipal level.
That is why Lenin always opposed municipalism, notably during the elections to the local (municipal) dumas in April 1917 in Russia. We recommend to our readers the article in the current issue of our international journal Spartacist [English-language edition No. 61, Spring 2009]. The article documents Lenin’s intransigent struggle, even though the Third International itself had come to questionable conclusions on the question of municipalism at its [1920] Second Congress. Denouncing the bourgeoisie’s institutions of local government, the resolution on parliamentarism stipulated that “to counterpose them to the organs of the state is theoretically incorrect. They are in reality organizations similar to the mechanism of the bourgeois state.” However, the resolution wrongly allowed Communist parties to hold municipal executive office.
The bourgeois state must be destroyed by a workers revolution based on new organs of power—workers councils—unconditionally opposed to the bourgeois order at all levels, national, regional and municipal. So it should be evident that the working class cannot reach this understanding if its revolutionary element itself participates in the institutions of bourgeois power, even municipal ones. From this principled opposition to executive offices of the bourgeois state flows the fact that Marxists cannot run for such posts without risking conferring legitimacy upon them in the eyes of the workers. Therefore we refuse on principle to run for executive office, be it the election of the mayor and his deputies by the municipal council or the election of the president of the republic by universal suffrage. We also refuse to seek to be a part of a parliamentary or municipal majority that takes on executive responsibility.
In contrast, for nearly 40 years LO has never failed to run a candidate for president. In 2008, they took a further step by “getting their hands dirty” at the municipal level. In fact, it is the logic of reformism to set about administering capitalism starting at the municipal level. Our perspective, on the other hand, is international socialist revolution. That perspective begins by opposing LO’s bourgeois municipalism and must end with the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will eliminate the organs of bourgeois repression at all levels, including the municipal. Down with executive offices of the capitalist state!
Thursday, June 17, 2010
*When The "Bad Boy" Of The Left Was A "Bad Boy"- Christopher Hitchen's Memoir- A Guest Review
Click on the headline to link to a "Boston Sunday Globe" review, dated June 13, 2009, of ex-leftist "bad boy" Christopher Hitchens' new memoir, "Hitch 22: A Memoir."
Markin comment:
Thanks to Professor Washburn for his review. Now I don't have to do one. The only thing worse than writing about the myriad of extremely literate (and savage) has-been leftists who have made their peace with the imperial order, and who insist on writing about that "conversion", is to write about bourgeois politics. But not by much.
Markin comment:
Thanks to Professor Washburn for his review. Now I don't have to do one. The only thing worse than writing about the myriad of extremely literate (and savage) has-been leftists who have made their peace with the imperial order, and who insist on writing about that "conversion", is to write about bourgeois politics. But not by much.
*Not Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle- Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” –A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of the movie trailer for "Rear Window."
DVD Review
Rear Window, starring Jimmie Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr, directed by Sir Alfred Hitchcock, 1954
As I noted in a recent review of another of his movies, “Dial M For Murder”, at one time the great mystery movie director, Sir Alfred Hitchcock, was one of my favorite directors. Not that I was ever a big fan of the whodunit, “puzzle it out”, Agatha Christie-influenced part of the genre that he tended to use in his film work. I have always been more of a Raymond Chandler/ Phillip Marlowe swaggering detective “chasing after windmills” mystery guy. But visually, most of Alfred Hitchcock’s work has always left me gasping for breath until the end, even in those productions like the one under review here, “Real Window”, where the murder plot is pretty much laid out for you in advance and all you have to do is figure the key to the slip up that will bring the villain low.
The villain in this case is, as seen by photojournalist Jimmy Stewart from the rear window of his apartment in some Greenwich Village building while he is slowly recuperating from a serious injury, cast on leg, is none other than Perry Mason. Oops, wrong script, I mean Raymond Burr. Apparently Burr had had it with his nagging wife and therefore did what any self-respecting person would do with said spouse-get a divorce. No, no, this is the 1950s remember where marriage was forever or for as long as the nerves held up. The plot revolves around trying to link up Stewart'd rear-windowed observed suspicious behavior by Burr, find out the whereabouts of said wife, and lay a trap to catch this villain.
Wait a minute. How is Brother Stewart going to bring justice to the world when he is laid up in a cast? Oh, did I mention that he had a fiancé/Girl Friday. A fetching fiancé/Girl Friday, Grace Kelly. She is here to perform the leg work, and to do a little off-hand romancing. Along the way we are also treated to a little Hitchcock sociological study as he pans the “makings and doings” that are happening from the rear window in the other apartments. A sub-theme here is the alienated and lonely life of the crowded city. For the rest of the story you are on your own.
As always though I cannot leave this thing without mentioning the presence of Grace Kelly. I mentioned in the review of “Dial M For Murder” that in that film she was not as fetching as in other Hitchcock vehicles like “Rear Window” and “To Catch A Thief.” That comment still holds up after another viewing. Be still my heart. I would just note here, as I have in reviewing other works in which Ms. Kelly starred, that according to the gossip her real life husband, Prince Rainer, a man not given to open displays of sentiment, wept openly at her death. And now I know why.
DVD Review
Rear Window, starring Jimmie Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr, directed by Sir Alfred Hitchcock, 1954
As I noted in a recent review of another of his movies, “Dial M For Murder”, at one time the great mystery movie director, Sir Alfred Hitchcock, was one of my favorite directors. Not that I was ever a big fan of the whodunit, “puzzle it out”, Agatha Christie-influenced part of the genre that he tended to use in his film work. I have always been more of a Raymond Chandler/ Phillip Marlowe swaggering detective “chasing after windmills” mystery guy. But visually, most of Alfred Hitchcock’s work has always left me gasping for breath until the end, even in those productions like the one under review here, “Real Window”, where the murder plot is pretty much laid out for you in advance and all you have to do is figure the key to the slip up that will bring the villain low.
The villain in this case is, as seen by photojournalist Jimmy Stewart from the rear window of his apartment in some Greenwich Village building while he is slowly recuperating from a serious injury, cast on leg, is none other than Perry Mason. Oops, wrong script, I mean Raymond Burr. Apparently Burr had had it with his nagging wife and therefore did what any self-respecting person would do with said spouse-get a divorce. No, no, this is the 1950s remember where marriage was forever or for as long as the nerves held up. The plot revolves around trying to link up Stewart'd rear-windowed observed suspicious behavior by Burr, find out the whereabouts of said wife, and lay a trap to catch this villain.
Wait a minute. How is Brother Stewart going to bring justice to the world when he is laid up in a cast? Oh, did I mention that he had a fiancé/Girl Friday. A fetching fiancé/Girl Friday, Grace Kelly. She is here to perform the leg work, and to do a little off-hand romancing. Along the way we are also treated to a little Hitchcock sociological study as he pans the “makings and doings” that are happening from the rear window in the other apartments. A sub-theme here is the alienated and lonely life of the crowded city. For the rest of the story you are on your own.
As always though I cannot leave this thing without mentioning the presence of Grace Kelly. I mentioned in the review of “Dial M For Murder” that in that film she was not as fetching as in other Hitchcock vehicles like “Rear Window” and “To Catch A Thief.” That comment still holds up after another viewing. Be still my heart. I would just note here, as I have in reviewing other works in which Ms. Kelly starred, that according to the gossip her real life husband, Prince Rainer, a man not given to open displays of sentiment, wept openly at her death. And now I know why.
Poet's Corner- Osip Mandelstam's "Epigram Against Stalin"- A Guest Review
Click on the headline to link to a guest review article on the Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, especially a close reading of his "Epigram Against Stalin" for which he paid dearly with his life.
Markin comment:
As a follower of the great anti-Stalinist, pro-communist fighter, and Bolshevik Revolution leader, Leon Trotsky, I am all too familiar with the "night of the long knives" Moscow Trials period described here. Our Russian Left Oppositionists (Communists) forebears fought Stalin politically, as best they could. Mandelstam fought with his pen, as best he could. Although a vast gulf separates his ideas from ours we can appreciate his anti-Stalin poem. The story behind it is fascinating, as laid out in the article. Stalin, not known as one of nature's noblemen, obviously would chaff under this poem. When the deal went down Mandelstam, unlike someone like Boris Paternak, paid with his life for his art. We definitely can appreciate that.
Markin comment:
As a follower of the great anti-Stalinist, pro-communist fighter, and Bolshevik Revolution leader, Leon Trotsky, I am all too familiar with the "night of the long knives" Moscow Trials period described here. Our Russian Left Oppositionists (Communists) forebears fought Stalin politically, as best they could. Mandelstam fought with his pen, as best he could. Although a vast gulf separates his ideas from ours we can appreciate his anti-Stalin poem. The story behind it is fascinating, as laid out in the article. Stalin, not known as one of nature's noblemen, obviously would chaff under this poem. When the deal went down Mandelstam, unlike someone like Boris Paternak, paid with his life for his art. We definitely can appreciate that.
Playwright's' Corner- Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire"- A Guest Review
Click on the headline to link to a review of a New York revival of Tennessee Williams' play, "A Streetcar Named Desire."
Markin comment:
In looking over my blog archives I find that I have not reviewed Tennessee Williams' master-work (at least that is what I consider it). I will provide my own review later.
Markin comment:
In looking over my blog archives I find that I have not reviewed Tennessee Williams' master-work (at least that is what I consider it). I will provide my own review later.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class- War Prisoners!- Maumin Khabir (aka Melvin Mayes), Mohamman Geuka Koti, Hanif Shabaz
I have been unable to find any information about the cases of the class-war prisoners listed above from the National Jericho Movement list. Any help would be appreciated to publicize these individual cases.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment
In “surfing” the “National Jericho Movement” Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a “The Rag Blog” post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matter here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment
In “surfing” the “National Jericho Movement” Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a “The Rag Blog” post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matter here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
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