Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
***********
When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973
Markin comment on this series:
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
********
The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited
These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30]
Reply to the Guardian
THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED
5. THE STRUGGLE FOR THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
A party that is incapable of defending the conquests already won by the working class will certainly be unable to lead the proletarian revolution. From the time it was formed in 1923 until Stalin ordered the German Communist Party to capitulate to Hitler without a fight almost ten years later, the Left Opposition steadfastly held to the banner of the Third International. In spite of the most incredible bureaucratic rigging, wholesale expulsions, and even exile and deportation, Trotsky held adamantly to his course of reforming the Comintern. Bureaucratically expelled Left Oppositionists demanded readmittance to their respective CPs and acted insofar as possible as factions of the Communist International, rather than proclaiming new parties. Critical events inside or outside the Soviet Union could stir the working class into action once again and provide the opportunity for replacing the Stalinist usurpers. Further, the Third International, enjoying the prestige of association with the only successful socialist revolution, had strong ties with the masses which could not be ignored. For the Left Opposition to prematurely renounce the Comintern would abandon hundreds of thousands of revolutionary-minded workers to the bureaucracy and doom the Trotskyists to isolation and irrelevance.
The sectarian-defeatist "Third-Period" policies of the Comintern which led to the victory of fascism in Germany in 1933 forced the Left Opposition to adopt a radical change in its perspective. Ever since 1930 Trotsky had warned that the fate of the international revolutionary movement depended on the outcome of the struggle against the fascist threat in Germany. The Communists (KPD), following Stalin's orders, played directly into the hands of the fascists by refusing to call for a united front with the Social Democracy (SPD) against the Nazis, instead denouncing the SPD as "social fascist."
The Call for a New International
Hitler's peaceful march to power, without even token resistance by the Communists, led Trotsky to correctly conclude that the KPD had decisively degenerated. As a consequence of this world-historical defeat and betrayal, the German working class lay prostrate for more than a decade and the second imperialist world war and Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union were prepared. The Left Opposition now called for a new party in Germany:
"The question of the open break with the Stalinist bureaucracy in Germany is at the present moment of enormous principled importance. The revolutionary vanguard will not pardon the historical crime committed by the Stalinists. If we support the illusion of the vitality of the party of Thaelmann-Neumann we would appear to the masses as the real defenders of their bankruptcy. That would signify that we ourselves veer toward the road of centrism and putrefaction."
--L.D. Trotsky, "KPD or New Party?," March 1933
But what about the rest of the CI?
"Here it is natural to ask how we act toward the other sections of the Comintern and the Third International as a whole. Do we break with them immediately? In my opinion, it would be incorrect to give a rigid answer--yes, we break with them. The collapse of the KPD diminishes the chances for the regeneration of the Comintern. But on the other hand the catastrophe itself could provoke a healthy reaction in some of the sections. We must be ready to help this process. The question has not been settled for the USSR, where proclamation of the second party would be incorrect. We are calling today for the creation of a new party in Germany, to seize the Comintern from the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy. It is not a question of the Fourth International but of salvaging the Third."
--Ibid.
However, not a single one of the Comintern sections made the slightest protest to Stalin's claim that the policies of the KPD had been correct from start to finish, or even called for a discussion of the German events! Trotsky responded by declaring that an organization which is not roused by the thunderbolt of fascism and submits docilely to the outrageous acts of the bureaucracy demonstrates that it is dead and that nothing can revive it; Stalinism had its 4 August (a reference to the definitive betrayal of the reformist German Social Democrats, who voted for the Kaiser's war budget in August 1914, thus siding with "their own" bourgeoisie in the imperialist war). In July 1933 Trotsky called on the Left Opposition to begin working for the creation of a new International and new revolutionary parties throughout the world. In accord with the new perspective, the Left Opposition changed its name to the International Communist League.
Trotsky's analysis was quickly confirmed. After the German debacle the Comintern substituted the capitulatory policy of the "united front" at any price for the adventures of the Third Period. In its international policies, the Soviet Union decided to join the imperialists' League of Nations (which Lenin had denounced as a den of thieves) and turned toward military alliance with French imperialism, openly repudiating revolutionary internationalism. The Stalinists divided the imperialist powers into two categories: the "democratic, peace-loving" on the one hand, and the fascist, war-like on the other. The Third International was subverted into becoming a simple tool for the diplomatic interests of the Russian bureaucracy, with the job of forging alliances with the "peace-loving" imperialists to protect "socialism in one country." Thus the French CP was ordered to vote for the defense budget of its bourgeois rulers. The Stalinist bureaucracy officially declared that Roosevelt was "honestly seeking a democratic and pacifist solution to imperialist conflicts" and consummated popular-front alliances with liberal bourgeois parties in France and Spain in 1936, which led to the victory of the fascists three years later. During World War II Stalin finally declared that the Comintern no longer served any purpose and formally disbanded it.
The ICL and groups sympathetic to it did not simply proclaim themselves to be the new International. Expulsion of the Left Opposition from the Comintern had deprived it of a necessary sphere of political activity, forcing it to develop as an isolated propaganda group. The Left Opposition had been able to train a limited number of cadres but lacked roots in the masses and was numerically weak. Moreover, its organizations had not been tested in serious class battles. The period ahead was to be one of preparation:
"Propagating the ideas of the Left Opposition, recruiting more and more adherents, individually and in groups, into the ranks of the International Communist League, carrying on an agitation among the masses under the slogan of the Fourth International, educating our own cadres, deepening our theoretical position--such is our basic work in the historic period immediately ahead of us." [emphasis in original]
--L. D. Trotsky, "The SAP, the ICL and the Fourth International," January 1934
The principal tactic used by the ICL to recruit new adherents was revolutionary regroupment. Trotsky was the first to recognize the immensity of the task faced by his small, isolated movement. He searched out every opportunity to break out of isolation and find new allies, even temporary ones, so that the first steps could be taken toward the building of a new International.
In a period of tremendous revolutionary opportunities and dangers the oppositionist moods and tendencies of the 1930's bore a predominantly centrist character, vacillating between social patriotism and socialist revolution. The German events (1931-33), the crushing of the "leftist" Austrian Social Democracy together with its supposedly powerful party militia (the Schutzbund) in 1934, caused deep ferment in the working-class movement and a widespread rejection of reformism. A proliferation of centrist currents appeared, as frequently occurs in the early stages of a new upsurge of working-class militancy. The ICL (oriented toward these groups in order by example and propaganda to win the healthiest elements to a revolutionary program. But the tactic of revolutionary regroupment is not, as some maintain, a process of political accommodation to centrism. At the same time Trotsky waged a consistent struggle against the vacillating centrist leaderships, mercilessly rejecting the slogan of "unity" of all working-class organizations regardless of program and tactics:
"...to blur our difference with centrism in the name of facilitating 'unity' would mean not only to commit political suicide, but also to cover up, strengthen, and nourish all the negative features of bureaucratic centrism, and by that fact alone help the reactionary currents within it against the revolutionary tendencies."
--"On the State of the Left Opposition," 16 December 1932
The realignment of forces within the European working class did not bypass the parties of the Second International. Disillusioned with the Comintern, many working-class militants and youth joined the social democratic parties, resulting in the proliferation of leftward-moving tendencies within them. In France, Spain, Belgium and Switzerland sections of the Socialist Youth became sympathetic to Trotsky's ideas.
In France, the Socialists (SFIO) had split at the end of 1933 with the right wing forming its own organization. This split shifted the SFIO, the largest workers party in France, to the left, and Trotsky advised the small French section of the ICL to enter the Socialists. The formation of a "united front" of the SFIO and CP in July 1934 and talk of merger of the two reformist parties provided added reason for immediate entry; every tendency outside the united front would become more isolated than ever. Trotsky advocated similar entries (the so-called "French turn") in most of the other sections as well.
The French turn led to deep disputes and even splits within the partisans of the Fourth International, with some ultra-left sectarians such as Oehler in the U.S. rejecting the entry tactic on principle. The French section was split in half over the question, and the Spanish Communist Left (led by Andres Nin) rejected it outright (only to fuse with a reformist group to form the POUM a year later). Even where it was carried out, however, the French turn and struggles to regroup revolutionaries out of leftward-moving centrist formations brought few recruits to the Trotskyists. The proletariat had a long series of defeats behind it and was in retreat. With the threat of a new world war, the working class was interested in immediate solutions to its problems; the tiny Trotskyist groups were not attractive.
Founding of the Fourth International
But with the impending threat of imperialist war and the drying up of the various centrist currents following the advent of the popular-front governments in France and Spain, the objective need for the foundation of a new International permitted no further delay. In September 1938 the founding conference was held in Paris with 21 delegates representing 11 countries. While the Fourth International was weak in numbers, it represented the continuity of Leninism, expressed above all in its program.
The basic programmatic document adopted at the founding conference, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International ("Transitional Program"), is the single most comprehensive and succinct summary of Trotskyism, representing the distillation of the interests of the proletariat in the epoch of imperialism. It is a document that has been willfully misunderstood, both by its opponents and some of its supposed adherents. Above all, it is not a program of reforms but represents marching orders for the seizure of power by the proletariat. It is based on the premise that in the epoch of capitalist decay, the objective prerequisites for socialist revolution are not only ripened, but already beginning to rot. The fundamental factor preventing world revolution is the reformist leadership of the unions and mass workers parties, the agent of the bourgeoisie in the workers movement: "The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership."
During the period of progressive capitalism the Social Democracy distinguished its minimum program (trade-union reforms, political democracy) and its maximum program (socialism), postponing the latter to the indefinite future. Now "there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and the raising of the masses' living standards...every serious demand of the proletariat...inevitably reaches beyond the limits of capitalist property relations and of the bourgeois state." The task of the communist vanguard was to make the proletariat conscious of its tasks, through a series of transitional demands which formulate the objective needs of the working class in such a way as to make clear the need to destroy capitalism:
"The strategic task of the next period--a prerevolutionary period of agitation, propaganda and organization--consists in overcoming the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard (the confusion and disappointment of the older generation, the inexperience of the younger generation). It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today's consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat." [emphasis in original]
--The Transitional Program, 1938
Such demands included a sliding scale of wages and hours, opening the books of the capitalists, expropriation of industry under workers control, for the formation of factory committees, workers militias, soviets and a workers government. In the backward countries it called for proletarian revolution, supported by the peasantry, which would solve both democratic (agrarian revolution, national independence) and socialist tasks. In the Soviet Union it called for political revolution, while stressing the commitment of the Fourth International to unconditional defense of the USSR against imperialist attack.
Stalinist Persecution
The Fourth International, at the time of its founding conference, was composed of sections consisting of a few dozen or at the most a few hundred members (with one exception, the U.S. section, the Socialist Workers Party, with 2,500 members). But despite their small numbers, the Trotskyists were a mortal threat to Stalin and his entourage of bureaucratic usurpers. The only answer was political and physical annihilation.
Stalin was, however, increasingly worried about even his own faction, and beginning in 1936 he proceeded to purge the entire leadership of the army; through the medium of the Moscow trials he accused and convicted all nine members of Lenin's Political Bureau (save Stalin himself), as well as virtually the entire Bolshevik Central Committee of 1917. At the third trial (March 1938) Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov were accused of conspiring to sabotage and overthrow the Soviet government and restore capitalism in alliance with Hitler and Mikado. In his famous secret speech at the 1956 Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev officially admitted that the trials and the "confessions" on which they were ostensibly based were a fraud from start to finish. Nevertheless, both Moscow-line and Maoist Stalinists today continue to repeat the slanders that Trotsky cooperated with the fascists even though there was never produced one shred of evidence to "prove" these charges.
Also at this time Stalin unleashed a systematic campaign to exterminate Trotskyist leaders throughout the world and to eliminate the thousands of Russian Left Oppositionists in the labor camps. An eyewitness account from the Vorkuta camps told of roughly 1,000 Bolshevik-Leninists in this camp, and several thousand more in the other camps of the province. Down to the end, the Trotskyist prisoners called for the overthrow of the Stalin government, while always stressing they would defend the Soviet Union unconditionally in case of war. When in the spring of 1938 the GPU ordered the murder of all remaining Trotskyists they marched to their deaths singing the Internationale.
Internationally, the GPU had assassinated Trotsky's son; the Czech Erwin Wolf and the German Rudolf Klement, both secretaries of Trotsky; and the Pole Ignace Reiss, a former head of Soviet secret service in Europe. During the same period they also eliminated prominent ex-Trotskyists such as Nin in Spain, the Austrian Landau and others. The culmination came with the assassination by a GPU agent of Trotsky himself on 20 August 1940.
Unconditional Defense of the Soviet Union
The favorite charge of the Stalinists during this period was always that Trotsky allied with foreign powers to destroy the Soviet state. This was a bald-faced lie, as Trotsky always insisted that true Bolshevik-Leninists must unconditionally defend the historical gains of the October Revolution (see part 3 of this series). Every single programmatic document of the Left Opposition, the International Communist League and the Fourth International proclaimed the unconditional defense of the USSR against capitalist restorationist forces and imperialist attack.
But defense of the Soviet state required above all the ousting of the Stalinist regime which consistently sabotaged that defense. By the theory of "socialism in one country" the bureaucracy wrote off the possibility of world socialist revolution which was the only real defense of the achievements of the first workers state in history. But Stalin did more than this: he twice decapitated the top leadership of the Soviet armed forces during the late 1930's (after repeatedly purging the Red Army during the 1920's to drive out the Trotskyists); and he placed blind faith in his treaty with Hitler, thereby preparing the way for the rout of the Russian forces during the first weeks of Hitler's invasion of the USSR. Only by vigorously leading the workers against their own bourgeoisies in the capitalist countries, and through political revolution in the Soviet Union, could the road be opened to socialism. This was the task of the Fourth International.
Trotsky's last political battle was over precisely this question. In 1939-40, under the pressure of public opinion which had turned against the Soviet Union during the Hitler-Stalin pact, a petty-bourgeois opposition formed among elements of the leadership in the American SWP. The Shachtman/Burnham/Abern group suddenly "discovered" that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers state, and thus need not be defended unconditionally. Trotsky steadfastly refused to give one inch to the Shachtmanite faction, for he understood perfectly that to waver on this crucial issue would condemn the Fourth International to an ignominious death. This dedication to Bolshevik principles cost the SWP roughly 40 percent of the party membership when the Shachtmanites split in 1940, and destroyed the youth section. Though weak and persecuted, the Fourth International was able to avoid its own "4 August" by steadfastly holding to its program during this period of intense social patriotism.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973 -Carl Davidson's "Left in Form,Right in Essence:Trotskyism and China today"
Markin comment on this series:
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
*************
Carl Davidson's "Left in Form,Right in Essence:Trotskyism and China today"
“The ‘Russian question’ has been the main axis in world politics for nearly four decades,” states the Socialist Workers party’s 1955 resolution on the Chinese revolution.
“It now has found its extension and deepening,” the SWP continues, “in the ‘Chinese question.’ ”
The Trotskyists pose the question fairly enough. Their conclusions, however, just as in the past, lead them to the other side of the barricades.
What made the “Russian question” a touchstone for revolutionaries, demarcating Marxist-Leninists from right and “left” revisionists, was the existence of the proletarian dictatorship and its undertaking of the task of socialist construction “in one country.” The Trotskyists opposed the former in practice by denying the latter in theory.
Today China represents the main example in the world of the proletarian dictatorship and is likewise a touchstone for revolutionaries. But the Chinese revolution has also “deepened and extended” the question on two fronts: in the international arena through its call for a united front of all the world’s peoples against the “two superpowers” of U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism and in the domestic arena through its example of continuing the class struggle by the means of the “great proletarian cultural revolution” in socialist society.
Liu and Lin
In these two arenas the SWP has opposed the gains of the Chinese revolution. In general, it has attacked the policies of the Chinese Communist party under the leadership of Mao Tsetung as “ultraleftist” domestically and “rightist” internationally. In reality, however, it is the Trotskyists who vacillate between right and “left” opportunism and to the extent that their views have been reflected in China, it has been in the lines pursued by Liu Shao-chi and Lin Piao.
How is this manifested? In China’s socialist construction the theoretical link between Trotsky and Liu Shao-chi can be seen in the “theory of productive forces” put forth by both figures.
The Sept. 19, 1969 issue of Peking Review sums up the “theory” as claiming that “the socialist road cannot be taken in any country where capitalism is not highly developed and the productive forces have not reached a high level ... After the seizure of power (Liu Shao-chi) raised it to oppose socialist transformation in a futile effort to lead China on the road to capitalism.”
Liu Shao-chi’s line came into sharp conflict with Mao’s over the collectivization of agriculture through the development of the cooperative system. “Some people have expressed the opinion,” Liu is quoted as saying in The Struggle Between the Two Roads in China’s Countryside, “that steps should be taken gradually to shake the foundations of private ownership, weaken it until it is nullified and raise the mutual aid organizations for agricultural production to the level of agricultural producers cooperatives as a new factor for ‘overcoming the peasants’ spontaneous tendency.’ This is an erroneous, dangerous and utopian conception of agricultural socialism.”
Liu held the view that farming had to develop for some time on an individual basis and that “mechanization” had to occur before “cooperation.” His struggle with Mao on the issue, together with severe natural calamities, hindered the development of China’s people’s communes and was not decisively defeated until the cultural revolution.
What are the Trotskyist views on this struggle? “China’s productive forces,” states the SWP in 1955, “are far from adequate to give the statized property a socialist character.” This is rooted in Trotsky’s own position where, in 1936, he summed up the essence of the “productive forces” line.
Vulgar evolutionism
“Marxism,” writes Trotsky, “sets out from the development of technique as the fundamental spring of progress.” Marxism, of course, does no such thing. It posits the class struggle as the motive force of historical development, including the development of the productive forces. Trotsky simply replaces revolutionary dialectics with vulgar evolutionism.
The SWP also sympathized with Liu’s line on the communes. “Abolition of private property on the land,” states Daniel Roberts in the May 1959 SWP Discussion Bulletin, is an “irrational and utopian” objective, “as long as China’s technological development and industrial equipment remain low. Communist social relations can evolve only on the basis of a technology that stands higher in its development and universal application than the heights reached under capitalism in the advanced industrial countries.”
“Does setting up the communes violate the peasants’ petty bourgeois aspirations to be individual farmers?” Roberts asks. He believes that it does and that, at most, the peasants might defer this individualism, for a brief time. After this period some peasants will have become bureaucrats or workers “and then we can also expect that tens of millions of peasants will want at last to engage in individual farming plus some form of voluntary cooperation.”
“The peasantry,” as Lenin put it, “has two souls,” one aspiring toward petty capitalism and the other casting its lot with the proletariat. What the Chinese experience has demonstrated is that “technique in command” leads them along the former path while “politics in command” leads to the latter. Given correct leadership the peasant masses, states Mao, “have a potentially inexhaustible enthusiasm for socialism.”
“The ‘theory of productive forces’ hawked by Liu Shao-chi,” states Peking Review, “onesidedly describes the progress of society as the natural outcome of the development of the productive forces, chiefly the instruments of production. It completely denies that, Under certain conditions, the superstructure and the relations of production play the principle and decisive role in relation to the economic base and the productive forces; it also denies the proletariat’s consciously making revolution under the guidance of revolutionary theory, seizing political power and changing the relations of production that play the decisive role in greatly developing the productive forces and pushing social development ahead.”
China’s cultural revolution represented the massive class struggle between these two lines in every sphere of life. Its results have represented a tremendous advance for proletarian revolutionary forces, not only in China but throughout the world.
Side with revisionists
The Trotskyists, however, have tended to side with the modern Soviet revisionists in their evaluation of its results. They view it as an anti-intellectual, anti-cultural purge of one group of bureaucrats by another and if any “progressive tendencies” were involved at all, they would be found in the camp opposed to Mao Tsetung’s line.
For instance, SWP activist Les Evans, writing in the January 1973 International Socialist Review, interprets the cultural revolution in China’s educational system in the same fashion as the revisionists:
“The new standards,” he writes, commenting on university admissions policies, “are supposed to favor the children of workers and peasants, but clearly when the total enrollment is so sharply restricted this can have little application for the Chinese masses.”
Loyalty “downgrades”
The new standards downgrade educational performance and replace it with the criterion of unwavering loyalty to the regime ...
While the universities have been restricted to party members (a false claim – CD), the regime has stepped up its campaign to deport masses of city youth to remote areas of the countryside.
What the CPC has done, of course, is to apply Mao’s line of “serving the people” to its academic standards, rather than relying solely on the grading system in evaluating students. It also requires that students be selected directly from production in factories and communes, rather than entering the universities directly from the lower schools.
Its “deportation of youth” consists of the policy of tempering the masses of urban youth in continuing the revolution, going among the masses of rural workers and peasants – the basic social reality of China – to learn from them, assist the revolution in the countryside and remold their class outlook in the process.
Evans also attacks the principle of criticism and self-criticism, the leading role in the revolutionary committees of the CPC and the May 7 cadre schools, where cadres manifesting bureaucratic attitudes toward the masses are re-educated in the spirit of serving the people.
Al] this, according to the Trotskyists, amounts to so many violations of what they term “worker’s democracy” but in reality represents the practice of the CPC slogan, “Fight self, repudiate revisionism.”
To the SWP this is unbearable and only confirms their 1955 assertion that “the Mao bureaucracy succeeded in the very course of the third Chinese revolution in imposing a totalitarian state power” which the SWP claims must be overthrown “by iron necessity.”
In evaluating China’s role in international affairs, the Trotskyists switch over and put on their ultra-“leftist” hat. Here the 1955 SWP statement attacks Mao for working to “confine the revolution to China’s borders.”
What does this mean? One indication is the Trotskyist attack on China for “betraying” the Vietnamese revolution. The “evidence” is that China has not given the Vietnamese “adequate” aid. Since the Vietnamese state that China has given them whatever they needed and the Chinese have given whatever the Vietnamese have asked, what do the Trotskyists consider “adequate?”
In his pamphlet, China and the U.S., SWPer Dick Roberts gives a hint. The imperialists were stopped in Korea when China sent in its troops, he points out. “But the Chinese did not send troops to aid the Vietminh,” he adds.
Thus “adequate” aid boils down to China’s giving the People’s Liberation Army their marching orders. This is the theory of the “export” of revolution, which is opposed by both the Chinese and Vietnamese leaderships, as contrary to the basic principle that the revolution in each country must be based mainly on self-reliance, on the masses of people in each country themselves. Only then can international aid have its greatest effect.
“We have always believed,” a Chinese official stated in a 1972 interview with the Guardian, “that revolution cannot be exported ... Look at the countries of Eastern Europe which depended primarily on the Soviet Union to make revolution. They have very limited independence. Albania achieved victory by relying on its own efforts – and it is staunch and independent today. A revolution cannot succeed if the revolutionary forces do not rely on their own efforts and do not mobilize the great masses of people but place hope on aid from abroad.” (From Unite the Many, Defeat the Few, a Guardian pamphlet on China’s foreign policy.)
In addition to their opposition to the principle of self-reliance as “autarchic,” Trotskyism also attacks the Chinese call for an international united front of the world’s peoples against the “two superpowers” of U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism as a class collaborationist betrayal of the national movements in the small and medium-sized countries in the colonial world.
Support for struggles
“In our objective,” the Chinese official told the Guardian, “national struggles must not be subordinated. China has friendly and diplomatic relations with a number of countries. This should not have any effect on the revolutionary forces in those countries ... China is not against peoples’ struggles in reactionary countries or in countries where a progressive government is in power. Countries want independence, nations want liberation, people want revolution. We support this.”
Regarding countries with which we have diplomatic relations, we support the government insofar as it is engaging in struggle against the two superpowers, not in its suppression of local struggles. We believe that in giving firm backing to governments against the domination of one or two superpowers we are helping the forces of national liberation and revolution.
United front
Just as in their views on the national united front in the colonial countries, the Trotskyist line on the world scale makes no distinctions in the enemy camp, between enemies in general and particular or principal enemies at various times and stages. As a result, the revolutionary forces are left more isolated from both strategic and tactical allies, however temporary and wavering they may be.
Finally, the Trotskyists blur the distinction between the revisionist countries and the socialist countries and on most questions side with the former. For instance, in 1963 the SWP denounced Albania as one of the most despicable Stalinized regimes in Europe and added that “the internal regime of communist Yugoslavia is much freer.”
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
*************
Carl Davidson's "Left in Form,Right in Essence:Trotskyism and China today"
“The ‘Russian question’ has been the main axis in world politics for nearly four decades,” states the Socialist Workers party’s 1955 resolution on the Chinese revolution.
“It now has found its extension and deepening,” the SWP continues, “in the ‘Chinese question.’ ”
The Trotskyists pose the question fairly enough. Their conclusions, however, just as in the past, lead them to the other side of the barricades.
What made the “Russian question” a touchstone for revolutionaries, demarcating Marxist-Leninists from right and “left” revisionists, was the existence of the proletarian dictatorship and its undertaking of the task of socialist construction “in one country.” The Trotskyists opposed the former in practice by denying the latter in theory.
Today China represents the main example in the world of the proletarian dictatorship and is likewise a touchstone for revolutionaries. But the Chinese revolution has also “deepened and extended” the question on two fronts: in the international arena through its call for a united front of all the world’s peoples against the “two superpowers” of U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism and in the domestic arena through its example of continuing the class struggle by the means of the “great proletarian cultural revolution” in socialist society.
Liu and Lin
In these two arenas the SWP has opposed the gains of the Chinese revolution. In general, it has attacked the policies of the Chinese Communist party under the leadership of Mao Tsetung as “ultraleftist” domestically and “rightist” internationally. In reality, however, it is the Trotskyists who vacillate between right and “left” opportunism and to the extent that their views have been reflected in China, it has been in the lines pursued by Liu Shao-chi and Lin Piao.
How is this manifested? In China’s socialist construction the theoretical link between Trotsky and Liu Shao-chi can be seen in the “theory of productive forces” put forth by both figures.
The Sept. 19, 1969 issue of Peking Review sums up the “theory” as claiming that “the socialist road cannot be taken in any country where capitalism is not highly developed and the productive forces have not reached a high level ... After the seizure of power (Liu Shao-chi) raised it to oppose socialist transformation in a futile effort to lead China on the road to capitalism.”
Liu Shao-chi’s line came into sharp conflict with Mao’s over the collectivization of agriculture through the development of the cooperative system. “Some people have expressed the opinion,” Liu is quoted as saying in The Struggle Between the Two Roads in China’s Countryside, “that steps should be taken gradually to shake the foundations of private ownership, weaken it until it is nullified and raise the mutual aid organizations for agricultural production to the level of agricultural producers cooperatives as a new factor for ‘overcoming the peasants’ spontaneous tendency.’ This is an erroneous, dangerous and utopian conception of agricultural socialism.”
Liu held the view that farming had to develop for some time on an individual basis and that “mechanization” had to occur before “cooperation.” His struggle with Mao on the issue, together with severe natural calamities, hindered the development of China’s people’s communes and was not decisively defeated until the cultural revolution.
What are the Trotskyist views on this struggle? “China’s productive forces,” states the SWP in 1955, “are far from adequate to give the statized property a socialist character.” This is rooted in Trotsky’s own position where, in 1936, he summed up the essence of the “productive forces” line.
Vulgar evolutionism
“Marxism,” writes Trotsky, “sets out from the development of technique as the fundamental spring of progress.” Marxism, of course, does no such thing. It posits the class struggle as the motive force of historical development, including the development of the productive forces. Trotsky simply replaces revolutionary dialectics with vulgar evolutionism.
The SWP also sympathized with Liu’s line on the communes. “Abolition of private property on the land,” states Daniel Roberts in the May 1959 SWP Discussion Bulletin, is an “irrational and utopian” objective, “as long as China’s technological development and industrial equipment remain low. Communist social relations can evolve only on the basis of a technology that stands higher in its development and universal application than the heights reached under capitalism in the advanced industrial countries.”
“Does setting up the communes violate the peasants’ petty bourgeois aspirations to be individual farmers?” Roberts asks. He believes that it does and that, at most, the peasants might defer this individualism, for a brief time. After this period some peasants will have become bureaucrats or workers “and then we can also expect that tens of millions of peasants will want at last to engage in individual farming plus some form of voluntary cooperation.”
“The peasantry,” as Lenin put it, “has two souls,” one aspiring toward petty capitalism and the other casting its lot with the proletariat. What the Chinese experience has demonstrated is that “technique in command” leads them along the former path while “politics in command” leads to the latter. Given correct leadership the peasant masses, states Mao, “have a potentially inexhaustible enthusiasm for socialism.”
“The ‘theory of productive forces’ hawked by Liu Shao-chi,” states Peking Review, “onesidedly describes the progress of society as the natural outcome of the development of the productive forces, chiefly the instruments of production. It completely denies that, Under certain conditions, the superstructure and the relations of production play the principle and decisive role in relation to the economic base and the productive forces; it also denies the proletariat’s consciously making revolution under the guidance of revolutionary theory, seizing political power and changing the relations of production that play the decisive role in greatly developing the productive forces and pushing social development ahead.”
China’s cultural revolution represented the massive class struggle between these two lines in every sphere of life. Its results have represented a tremendous advance for proletarian revolutionary forces, not only in China but throughout the world.
Side with revisionists
The Trotskyists, however, have tended to side with the modern Soviet revisionists in their evaluation of its results. They view it as an anti-intellectual, anti-cultural purge of one group of bureaucrats by another and if any “progressive tendencies” were involved at all, they would be found in the camp opposed to Mao Tsetung’s line.
For instance, SWP activist Les Evans, writing in the January 1973 International Socialist Review, interprets the cultural revolution in China’s educational system in the same fashion as the revisionists:
“The new standards,” he writes, commenting on university admissions policies, “are supposed to favor the children of workers and peasants, but clearly when the total enrollment is so sharply restricted this can have little application for the Chinese masses.”
Loyalty “downgrades”
The new standards downgrade educational performance and replace it with the criterion of unwavering loyalty to the regime ...
While the universities have been restricted to party members (a false claim – CD), the regime has stepped up its campaign to deport masses of city youth to remote areas of the countryside.
What the CPC has done, of course, is to apply Mao’s line of “serving the people” to its academic standards, rather than relying solely on the grading system in evaluating students. It also requires that students be selected directly from production in factories and communes, rather than entering the universities directly from the lower schools.
Its “deportation of youth” consists of the policy of tempering the masses of urban youth in continuing the revolution, going among the masses of rural workers and peasants – the basic social reality of China – to learn from them, assist the revolution in the countryside and remold their class outlook in the process.
Evans also attacks the principle of criticism and self-criticism, the leading role in the revolutionary committees of the CPC and the May 7 cadre schools, where cadres manifesting bureaucratic attitudes toward the masses are re-educated in the spirit of serving the people.
Al] this, according to the Trotskyists, amounts to so many violations of what they term “worker’s democracy” but in reality represents the practice of the CPC slogan, “Fight self, repudiate revisionism.”
To the SWP this is unbearable and only confirms their 1955 assertion that “the Mao bureaucracy succeeded in the very course of the third Chinese revolution in imposing a totalitarian state power” which the SWP claims must be overthrown “by iron necessity.”
In evaluating China’s role in international affairs, the Trotskyists switch over and put on their ultra-“leftist” hat. Here the 1955 SWP statement attacks Mao for working to “confine the revolution to China’s borders.”
What does this mean? One indication is the Trotskyist attack on China for “betraying” the Vietnamese revolution. The “evidence” is that China has not given the Vietnamese “adequate” aid. Since the Vietnamese state that China has given them whatever they needed and the Chinese have given whatever the Vietnamese have asked, what do the Trotskyists consider “adequate?”
In his pamphlet, China and the U.S., SWPer Dick Roberts gives a hint. The imperialists were stopped in Korea when China sent in its troops, he points out. “But the Chinese did not send troops to aid the Vietminh,” he adds.
Thus “adequate” aid boils down to China’s giving the People’s Liberation Army their marching orders. This is the theory of the “export” of revolution, which is opposed by both the Chinese and Vietnamese leaderships, as contrary to the basic principle that the revolution in each country must be based mainly on self-reliance, on the masses of people in each country themselves. Only then can international aid have its greatest effect.
“We have always believed,” a Chinese official stated in a 1972 interview with the Guardian, “that revolution cannot be exported ... Look at the countries of Eastern Europe which depended primarily on the Soviet Union to make revolution. They have very limited independence. Albania achieved victory by relying on its own efforts – and it is staunch and independent today. A revolution cannot succeed if the revolutionary forces do not rely on their own efforts and do not mobilize the great masses of people but place hope on aid from abroad.” (From Unite the Many, Defeat the Few, a Guardian pamphlet on China’s foreign policy.)
In addition to their opposition to the principle of self-reliance as “autarchic,” Trotskyism also attacks the Chinese call for an international united front of the world’s peoples against the “two superpowers” of U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism as a class collaborationist betrayal of the national movements in the small and medium-sized countries in the colonial world.
Support for struggles
“In our objective,” the Chinese official told the Guardian, “national struggles must not be subordinated. China has friendly and diplomatic relations with a number of countries. This should not have any effect on the revolutionary forces in those countries ... China is not against peoples’ struggles in reactionary countries or in countries where a progressive government is in power. Countries want independence, nations want liberation, people want revolution. We support this.”
Regarding countries with which we have diplomatic relations, we support the government insofar as it is engaging in struggle against the two superpowers, not in its suppression of local struggles. We believe that in giving firm backing to governments against the domination of one or two superpowers we are helping the forces of national liberation and revolution.
United front
Just as in their views on the national united front in the colonial countries, the Trotskyist line on the world scale makes no distinctions in the enemy camp, between enemies in general and particular or principal enemies at various times and stages. As a result, the revolutionary forces are left more isolated from both strategic and tactical allies, however temporary and wavering they may be.
Finally, the Trotskyists blur the distinction between the revisionist countries and the socialist countries and on most questions side with the former. For instance, in 1963 the SWP denounced Albania as one of the most despicable Stalinized regimes in Europe and added that “the internal regime of communist Yugoslavia is much freer.”
In Honor Of Miss (Ms.) Lenora Sonos, Clintondale High School English Department, Circa 1961
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Ellen Terry reciting Portia's mercy speech from The Merchant of Venice. Fitting right?
"The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, Upon the place beneath" lines from Portia's speech to the court in William Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice
As Jimmy came across these above lines in the epilogue of a book that he was innocently, very innocently, reading about the sources of old time English playwright William Shakespeare’s sources for his various works he suddenly developed a 50th anniversary case of the nerves. And the source of those nerves was easily traceable, very easily traceable, to time spent in Miss Lenora Sonos’ classroom memorizing those very lines of the Bard.
Miss Lenora Sonos, Jimmy’s senior year English teacher made many people nervous. Who was he kidding, she made James Cullen, Jimmy, Class of 1961, and king hell king of the intramural bowling league (boys’ division) at old Clintondale High, nervous. Others can, on their own hook, come forth with their own benighted and heart-rendering testimony but she made him nervous before her class, nervous while in her class, nervous after leaving her class, and nervous in that occasional dark hour just before the dawn when he woke up, woke up with the sweats, became that book report due Monday morning bright and early was not coming together the way he wanted. Come on, again, who was Jimmy kidding, waking up with the sweats kidding, the way that she wanted it. The no rush, no night before it was due , well-thought out and drafted, concise, with some kind of original twist to it paper, and written like some come down from the mountain patriarchal tablet screed, or really an endlessly re-written version of that self-same screed.
And worst, worst than not being concise, worst than not having an original twist idea, was that you had to publicly defend your ideas in front of the whole class. But, once again who was Jimmy kidding, the class was child’s play, putty in his hands once he started throwing his obscure, arcane, in-your-face two thousand facts at them, and they retreated, or better, surrendered, white flags in hand. No, it was her, Miss Sonos, that he had to impress with his obscure, arcane, in-your-face knowledge but here was the rub, she had no surrender, or white flag, in her because she was privy to those two thousand facts, had in fact taught him a bunch of them, and had a few thousand additional ones in her own storehouse just waiting for Jimmy to make that one wrong move, the one wrong move that was inevitably to come from a young, still unformed, mind.
And worst, worst than public Sonos humiliation, worst than being at a lost for that original idea was to not be with her, to be with her one hundred percent, when she spoke, almost in a hushed whisper, of some piece of literature the virtues of which she endlessly drilled into the class, but really had her eyes set on him when doing so, or so he thought. (He found out later that that feeling was shared by every at least half-awake student in the class, the others were just ducking behind some book hoping not to be noticed.) As he thought of those books just now, he remembered the time, trying to be one hundred with her, when he blurred out that Holden Caulfield from The Catcher In The Rye “spoke” to him, spoke to him about his own teen alienation, spoke about what can a kid do when the cards are stacked against him in this cruel old world, a world he didn’t put together, spoke of teen angst in trying to find his place in the sun when everybody was pushing him in about six different ways and he was pushing himself in about seven.
And there Jimmy was, proud as a peacock, feeling like a junior-sized literary critic and then she, Miss Sonos in high dudgeon, lowered the hammer and dismissed the book, and the author, as so much hot air and New Yorker-style cheapjack kids’ short story, barely pabulum. And that was the end of it, for once Miss Sonos pronounced someone a mere short story writer, oblivion beckoned. She much preferred that her Jimmys tackle James T. Farrell, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Flannery O’Connor, and Edith Wharton who although they too wrote short stories wrote novels, great novels, and therefore were not assigned to hellish depths. And you know in a funny way Jimmy had to admit that she was right, right in the sense that these other guys had a lot to say and that one should no put all their “literary light” eggs in one basket, although she was still wrong, wrong big time, about J.D. Salinger. Wrong that is if she is not now nearby, nearby this side of the grave.
But the worst time, the worst time of all, for Jimmy who was trying to hold his head up in that dark early 1960s Cold War working poor teen angst night was when she made him write a paper as a proponent of the then front line, flame-burning civil rights movement down South after he had written a short piece, a short diary-like piece, for her eyes only, one time. Not only that but he was going to be forced to argue his case against the editor of the school newspaper, a hot shot who had real literary ambitions and a father who was a professor, or something, over at the university. Now Jimmy, as he noted in his short piece, was in sympathy, secret sympathy, with the struggle of black people down South, and had linked that struggle with his own sense of what white working poor people needed to. Not all that deeply thought out then, but that was the gist of it. But see, the secret part was necessary because the best word, the absolutely best word that he ever heard anybody in Clintondale, young or old, call black people was “nigra,” like the neighborhood, the predominantly Irish and Italian Catholic neighborhood that he lived in, and breathed in, was down South itself.
And the most vitriolic voice around the neighborhood was that of his father, and his kindred, who resided nightly at the Old Gaelic Pub, egging on vicariously, while watching the barroom television news, the Bull Connors of the world. Jimmy tried, tried hard, to explain this all to Miss Sonos but she, unlike in other things, dismissed his pleas out of hand. Well, he gave that presentation, and if he didn’t win the debate points, the precious debate points, that he thought he was fighting for he made it clear that the he was on the other side of the road between the those who lived, thought and acted “nigra” and those who said 1960s “negro.” So there she was right again, although many bridges were burned that day.
As Jimmy nervously finished up musing over the exploits, the maybe un-heroic exploits, of Miss Lenora Sonos, he though about those lines from Portia’s speech to the court in Shakespeare’s The Merchant Of Venice, lines that she made the class memorize, although that memorizing business was not her style in general. And Jimmy chuckled to himself that did not, after all, have to look those sentences in that speech up, although if he was in court he would have to confess that he did look up to see if there was one or two p's in droppeth. He knew those lines and more from the master by heart. And that fact, that fact of remembrance, served to bring up something, something heroic about Miss Sonos. About what she said, said endlessly. Literature matters. Words matter. Jimmy had, on more occasions than he cared to remember, honored those ideas more in the breech than the observance but he tried to be guided by them. But they, no question, were planted there by Miss Sonos.
Thinking on it now though Jimmy realized that he not close to Ms. Sonos, certainly not her "pet". Perhaps she did not even really know who he was, although that bout over the civil rights paper may have turned the tables a little away from the truth of that notion. He did not know about today but back then the classes were very large and there were many minds to feed. So it was possible. Perhaps she did not even “like” him. That too was possible. Jimmy did not display his better side, the "better angel of his nature", in those days, on most days. However, Jimmy did know two things about her-literature matters, words matter. That more than balanced things out, Jimmy thought. And then he said in whisper, “Miss (Ms.) Lenora Sonos, wherever you are-thanks.”
"The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, Upon the place beneath" lines from Portia's speech to the court in William Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice
As Jimmy came across these above lines in the epilogue of a book that he was innocently, very innocently, reading about the sources of old time English playwright William Shakespeare’s sources for his various works he suddenly developed a 50th anniversary case of the nerves. And the source of those nerves was easily traceable, very easily traceable, to time spent in Miss Lenora Sonos’ classroom memorizing those very lines of the Bard.
Miss Lenora Sonos, Jimmy’s senior year English teacher made many people nervous. Who was he kidding, she made James Cullen, Jimmy, Class of 1961, and king hell king of the intramural bowling league (boys’ division) at old Clintondale High, nervous. Others can, on their own hook, come forth with their own benighted and heart-rendering testimony but she made him nervous before her class, nervous while in her class, nervous after leaving her class, and nervous in that occasional dark hour just before the dawn when he woke up, woke up with the sweats, became that book report due Monday morning bright and early was not coming together the way he wanted. Come on, again, who was Jimmy kidding, waking up with the sweats kidding, the way that she wanted it. The no rush, no night before it was due , well-thought out and drafted, concise, with some kind of original twist to it paper, and written like some come down from the mountain patriarchal tablet screed, or really an endlessly re-written version of that self-same screed.
And worst, worst than not being concise, worst than not having an original twist idea, was that you had to publicly defend your ideas in front of the whole class. But, once again who was Jimmy kidding, the class was child’s play, putty in his hands once he started throwing his obscure, arcane, in-your-face two thousand facts at them, and they retreated, or better, surrendered, white flags in hand. No, it was her, Miss Sonos, that he had to impress with his obscure, arcane, in-your-face knowledge but here was the rub, she had no surrender, or white flag, in her because she was privy to those two thousand facts, had in fact taught him a bunch of them, and had a few thousand additional ones in her own storehouse just waiting for Jimmy to make that one wrong move, the one wrong move that was inevitably to come from a young, still unformed, mind.
And worst, worst than public Sonos humiliation, worst than being at a lost for that original idea was to not be with her, to be with her one hundred percent, when she spoke, almost in a hushed whisper, of some piece of literature the virtues of which she endlessly drilled into the class, but really had her eyes set on him when doing so, or so he thought. (He found out later that that feeling was shared by every at least half-awake student in the class, the others were just ducking behind some book hoping not to be noticed.) As he thought of those books just now, he remembered the time, trying to be one hundred with her, when he blurred out that Holden Caulfield from The Catcher In The Rye “spoke” to him, spoke to him about his own teen alienation, spoke about what can a kid do when the cards are stacked against him in this cruel old world, a world he didn’t put together, spoke of teen angst in trying to find his place in the sun when everybody was pushing him in about six different ways and he was pushing himself in about seven.
And there Jimmy was, proud as a peacock, feeling like a junior-sized literary critic and then she, Miss Sonos in high dudgeon, lowered the hammer and dismissed the book, and the author, as so much hot air and New Yorker-style cheapjack kids’ short story, barely pabulum. And that was the end of it, for once Miss Sonos pronounced someone a mere short story writer, oblivion beckoned. She much preferred that her Jimmys tackle James T. Farrell, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Flannery O’Connor, and Edith Wharton who although they too wrote short stories wrote novels, great novels, and therefore were not assigned to hellish depths. And you know in a funny way Jimmy had to admit that she was right, right in the sense that these other guys had a lot to say and that one should no put all their “literary light” eggs in one basket, although she was still wrong, wrong big time, about J.D. Salinger. Wrong that is if she is not now nearby, nearby this side of the grave.
But the worst time, the worst time of all, for Jimmy who was trying to hold his head up in that dark early 1960s Cold War working poor teen angst night was when she made him write a paper as a proponent of the then front line, flame-burning civil rights movement down South after he had written a short piece, a short diary-like piece, for her eyes only, one time. Not only that but he was going to be forced to argue his case against the editor of the school newspaper, a hot shot who had real literary ambitions and a father who was a professor, or something, over at the university. Now Jimmy, as he noted in his short piece, was in sympathy, secret sympathy, with the struggle of black people down South, and had linked that struggle with his own sense of what white working poor people needed to. Not all that deeply thought out then, but that was the gist of it. But see, the secret part was necessary because the best word, the absolutely best word that he ever heard anybody in Clintondale, young or old, call black people was “nigra,” like the neighborhood, the predominantly Irish and Italian Catholic neighborhood that he lived in, and breathed in, was down South itself.
And the most vitriolic voice around the neighborhood was that of his father, and his kindred, who resided nightly at the Old Gaelic Pub, egging on vicariously, while watching the barroom television news, the Bull Connors of the world. Jimmy tried, tried hard, to explain this all to Miss Sonos but she, unlike in other things, dismissed his pleas out of hand. Well, he gave that presentation, and if he didn’t win the debate points, the precious debate points, that he thought he was fighting for he made it clear that the he was on the other side of the road between the those who lived, thought and acted “nigra” and those who said 1960s “negro.” So there she was right again, although many bridges were burned that day.
As Jimmy nervously finished up musing over the exploits, the maybe un-heroic exploits, of Miss Lenora Sonos, he though about those lines from Portia’s speech to the court in Shakespeare’s The Merchant Of Venice, lines that she made the class memorize, although that memorizing business was not her style in general. And Jimmy chuckled to himself that did not, after all, have to look those sentences in that speech up, although if he was in court he would have to confess that he did look up to see if there was one or two p's in droppeth. He knew those lines and more from the master by heart. And that fact, that fact of remembrance, served to bring up something, something heroic about Miss Sonos. About what she said, said endlessly. Literature matters. Words matter. Jimmy had, on more occasions than he cared to remember, honored those ideas more in the breech than the observance but he tried to be guided by them. But they, no question, were planted there by Miss Sonos.
Thinking on it now though Jimmy realized that he not close to Ms. Sonos, certainly not her "pet". Perhaps she did not even really know who he was, although that bout over the civil rights paper may have turned the tables a little away from the truth of that notion. He did not know about today but back then the classes were very large and there were many minds to feed. So it was possible. Perhaps she did not even “like” him. That too was possible. Jimmy did not display his better side, the "better angel of his nature", in those days, on most days. However, Jimmy did know two things about her-literature matters, words matter. That more than balanced things out, Jimmy thought. And then he said in whisper, “Miss (Ms.) Lenora Sonos, wherever you are-thanks.”
***On War-For Those Who Come After-Fritz Taylor's View-With Kudos To Bob Dylan's "John Brown"
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube cover of Bob Dylan's John Brown.
Fritz, old battle-scarred and battle-weary purple-hearted Fritz Taylor, Vietnam, 1969-1971, Fritz John Taylor RA048433691 to be exact, was still in a reflective mood a few days after he had made his way from home town Adamsville to the downtown Boston waterfront. To the jut of land Christopher Columbus Park for what he was not sure, exactly, was either the third or fourth annual Veterans For Peace counter-Memorial Day commemoration (really counter-traditional observance). And while he was glad, glad as hell, and felt about ten feet tall for a while, that he had done so these observance memory trips triggered many old days Vietnam thoughts, too many sometimes. Although, mercifully, mercifully for his “sweet pea,” his better other, Lillian, not this time(he had named her that for her sunny disposition, and her tough determination to give him a home to feel planted in and, early on, a little anti-war “religion” bump start too).
This time his thoughts dwelt on an old comrade-in-arms from ‘Nam, Johnny Jakes, a buddy who had just recently passed away after a long struggle with about seven known medical complications, and about twelve unknown ones, including the mysterious war-frenzy disease (not carried by him, not quiet, unassuming Johnny Jakes, but caught from others, family others, Richard Nixon and his crowd others, VFW and American Legion others, back in the day, and now too for that matter, although the names of the frenzied have changed, if not the frenzy).
Yes, John Lee Jakes, Johnny Jakes out of nowhere Georgia (actually Dalton Junction but we will call it nowhere, okay), or a nowhere that Fritz, northern boy Fritz, had ever heard of, and from Johnny’s night stories, sometimes night barroom stories along the way, no where he needed to go. And as long as the two had known each other, and as many adventures, dead-ends, wrong roads, and, occasionally, a right road they had traveled together in a forty year friendship, through hot and cold friendship phases, he had never been there. And Johnny never pressed the issue, never pressed it after he told Fritz the rough outline details, the blood-stained, sweat-fermented, star-spangled details. And the story, the thoughtless rush to war, the hoopla three-ring circus, brass band blaring, waving off soldier boys at the station story, was not that unfamiliar then. Fritz had been caught up in a little quieter cousin of that same story. Fritz hoped against hope to high heaven that the story was uncommon now but he felt, felt deep in his war- scarred gut, that that was not true. But right now it is Johnny’s turn in the limelight. Speak, good god, quiet, unassuming Johnny Jakes speak, and maybe it will become an uncommon story:
“Jakes, and for that matter McKays (my mother’s side), have fought out of little nowhere Georgia in all of the American military adventures since back in Civil War times. Naturally that Civil War military adventure was under the auspices of the Confederate version of American military adventures but don’t tell me, my kin, my brethren, or any complete Southern stranger that it was a failed, flawed or any of that other yankee stuff about cloud-puff dreams for bad, or ugly, reasons. Let’s just say, so we stay even now, that we fought, that there was an honored tradition of fighting, and any odd-ball relative, male of course, our women don’t fight but stay at home and worry, who didn’t, well, I never heard about anyone like that so I don’t know what would have happened. We fought, some of us bled, and most of us grabbed a fist-full of medals along the way. And our womenfolk cheered us on, as we left for the world’s fronts at that still working little nowhere Georgia railroad station that took us to some god-forsaken military camp. We mostly came back that same way, mostly okay but not all, and not my father, Jefferson Davis Jakes.
See Jefferson Davis Jakes, before the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, was the king hell-raiser of Forsythe County, was known far and wide as such and was not known to back down from anything, anything any male, or female for that matter, put in his way. But little did anyone know, anyone in the public know, that old Jeff (that’s the name he liked to be called by in latter life, by friend and foe alike, so I will use it here), was smitten by my mother, Doris McKay Jakes, so smitten that he had turned to putty in her hands. Not things that anyone, anyone in public anyway, would notice. All they would see was a king-hell-raiser and maybe a cut or other wound for their efforts; or the wise ones would cut a wide path away from his fury. But Doris had a spell over him, and he craved being with her, craved it more than anything, even being king hell-raiser of Forsythe County. Soft, and he knew it. So when those Jap bombs landed at Pearl and all Georgia thought it was William Tecumseh Sherman returned to burn the land and every red-blooded, hell, every any- blooded male, even black guys, were running to the railroad station to get signed up Jefferson Davis Jakes hesitated, hesitated just that minute, just that Doris McKay back home minute. Until Doris McKay, no squeamish damsel, and maybe with some vision of Scarlett O’Hara, pushed dad out the door- “Go now, and go fast.” And I will quote here, quote because I heard it about six times a year, at least, the first few years of growing up, “Kill every Jap you can get your hands on, and more if you can. And when you come back I will be a Jakes, and proudly.” So naturally she and half the town showed up at that nowhere train station to see the boys, including in the lead my father, off.
And as such scenes go that is the nice, upbeat part. The not so up-beat part was that after almost four years of South Pacific war, relentless, heat-scrabbled, hell-underbrush and hard rock-scrabbled war on more nowhere islands than one would think possible as big as the Pacific is Jefferson Davis Jakes, Jakes fist-full of medals collected, some odd souvenirs of as many Japs as he could collect, and only a few small purple heart wounds he returned home, home to his ever-loving Doris McKay. They married, as Doris had promised, and they had four children, all boys, including number two, me, John Lee Jakes. Just a normal American post World War II scenario.
Hold on; hold on just a minute, please. Jefferson Davis Jakes came home, and to the public eye, he seemed just like the pre-war king hell-raiser of Forsythe County. But on some nights, sometimes late at night, after a few hours of hard, hard drinking he would go up into the attic of the old-time Jakes home where we lived and begin to howl, howl like a wolf at the moon. And everyone around thought that was what it was. We knew better, or got to know better, especially Ma. This went on for a few years, every once in a while, but as time went on more frequently as such things do. And dad got quieter, more home quiet, although out in public he was still Jefferson Davis Jakes whose family had fought in this country’s battles since back in Civil War days. Then one night when I was eight he went up to the attic and we didn’t hear him howl like we expected. A few minutes later we heard a shot, one shot. They buried Jefferson Davis Jakes with full military honors down at our nowhere Georgia cemetery, believing the story we had concocted about his having interrupted an intruder and had accidentally discharged his old M-1. And that was the end of it.”
Fritz thought; well, not quite the end of it. Once nowhere Georgia heard about the commies in Vietnam in the 1960s every red-blooded male, hell, every any-blooded male, even black guys, headed down to the fading railroad station to sign up. Including quiet, unassuming John Lee Jakes, the late Johnny Jakes. But see Johnny had also hesitated, hesitated just that non-Jakes moment, just that Doris McKay Jakes moment. Until Doris McKay, still no squeamish damsel, and maybe still with some vision of Scarlett O’Hara, pushed Johnny out the door- “Go now, and go fast. Kill every gook you can get your hands on, and more if you can.”
*******
John Brown
John Brown went off to war to fight on a foreign shore
His mama sure was proud of him!
He stood straight and tall in his uniform and all
His mama’s face broke out all in a grin
“Oh son, you look so fine, I’m glad you’re a son of mine
You make me proud to know you hold a gun
Do what the captain says, lots of medals you will get
And we’ll put them on the wall when you come home”
As that old train pulled out, John’s ma began to shout
Tellin’ ev’ryone in the neighborhood:
“That’s my son that’s about to go, he’s a soldier now, you know”
She made well sure her neighbors understood
She got a letter once in a while and her face broke into a smile
As she showed them to the people from next door
And she bragged about her son with his uniform and gun
And these things you called a good old-fashioned war
Oh! Good old-fashioned war!
Then the letters ceased to come, for a long time they did not come
They ceased to come for about ten months or more
Then a letter finally came saying, “Go down and meet the train
Your son’s a-coming home from the war”
She smiled and went right down, she looked everywhere around
But she could not see her soldier son in sight
But as all the people passed, she saw her son at last
When she did she could hardly believe her eyes
Oh his face was all shot up and his hand was all blown off
And he wore a metal brace around his waist
He whispered kind of slow, in a voice she did not know
While she couldn’t even recognize his face!
Oh! Lord! Not even recognize his face
“Oh tell me, my darling son, pray tell me what they done
How is it you come to be this way?”
He tried his best to talk but his mouth could hardly move
And the mother had to turn her face away
“Don’t you remember, Ma, when I went off to war
You thought it was the best thing I could do?
I was on the battleground, you were home . . . acting proud
You wasn’t there standing in my shoes”
“Oh, and I thought when I was there, God, what am I doing here?
I’m a-tryin’ to kill somebody or die tryin’
But the thing that scared me most was when my enemy came close
And I saw that his face looked just like mine”
Oh! Lord! Just like mine!
“And I couldn’t help but think, through the thunder rolling and stink
That I was just a puppet in a play
And through the roar and smoke, this string is finally broke
And a cannonball blew my eyes away”
As he turned away to walk, his Ma was still in shock
At seein’ the metal brace that helped him stand
But as he turned to go, he called his mother close
And he dropped his medals down into her hand
Copyright © 1963, 1968 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1996 by Special Rider Music
Fritz, old battle-scarred and battle-weary purple-hearted Fritz Taylor, Vietnam, 1969-1971, Fritz John Taylor RA048433691 to be exact, was still in a reflective mood a few days after he had made his way from home town Adamsville to the downtown Boston waterfront. To the jut of land Christopher Columbus Park for what he was not sure, exactly, was either the third or fourth annual Veterans For Peace counter-Memorial Day commemoration (really counter-traditional observance). And while he was glad, glad as hell, and felt about ten feet tall for a while, that he had done so these observance memory trips triggered many old days Vietnam thoughts, too many sometimes. Although, mercifully, mercifully for his “sweet pea,” his better other, Lillian, not this time(he had named her that for her sunny disposition, and her tough determination to give him a home to feel planted in and, early on, a little anti-war “religion” bump start too).
This time his thoughts dwelt on an old comrade-in-arms from ‘Nam, Johnny Jakes, a buddy who had just recently passed away after a long struggle with about seven known medical complications, and about twelve unknown ones, including the mysterious war-frenzy disease (not carried by him, not quiet, unassuming Johnny Jakes, but caught from others, family others, Richard Nixon and his crowd others, VFW and American Legion others, back in the day, and now too for that matter, although the names of the frenzied have changed, if not the frenzy).
Yes, John Lee Jakes, Johnny Jakes out of nowhere Georgia (actually Dalton Junction but we will call it nowhere, okay), or a nowhere that Fritz, northern boy Fritz, had ever heard of, and from Johnny’s night stories, sometimes night barroom stories along the way, no where he needed to go. And as long as the two had known each other, and as many adventures, dead-ends, wrong roads, and, occasionally, a right road they had traveled together in a forty year friendship, through hot and cold friendship phases, he had never been there. And Johnny never pressed the issue, never pressed it after he told Fritz the rough outline details, the blood-stained, sweat-fermented, star-spangled details. And the story, the thoughtless rush to war, the hoopla three-ring circus, brass band blaring, waving off soldier boys at the station story, was not that unfamiliar then. Fritz had been caught up in a little quieter cousin of that same story. Fritz hoped against hope to high heaven that the story was uncommon now but he felt, felt deep in his war- scarred gut, that that was not true. But right now it is Johnny’s turn in the limelight. Speak, good god, quiet, unassuming Johnny Jakes speak, and maybe it will become an uncommon story:
“Jakes, and for that matter McKays (my mother’s side), have fought out of little nowhere Georgia in all of the American military adventures since back in Civil War times. Naturally that Civil War military adventure was under the auspices of the Confederate version of American military adventures but don’t tell me, my kin, my brethren, or any complete Southern stranger that it was a failed, flawed or any of that other yankee stuff about cloud-puff dreams for bad, or ugly, reasons. Let’s just say, so we stay even now, that we fought, that there was an honored tradition of fighting, and any odd-ball relative, male of course, our women don’t fight but stay at home and worry, who didn’t, well, I never heard about anyone like that so I don’t know what would have happened. We fought, some of us bled, and most of us grabbed a fist-full of medals along the way. And our womenfolk cheered us on, as we left for the world’s fronts at that still working little nowhere Georgia railroad station that took us to some god-forsaken military camp. We mostly came back that same way, mostly okay but not all, and not my father, Jefferson Davis Jakes.
See Jefferson Davis Jakes, before the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, was the king hell-raiser of Forsythe County, was known far and wide as such and was not known to back down from anything, anything any male, or female for that matter, put in his way. But little did anyone know, anyone in the public know, that old Jeff (that’s the name he liked to be called by in latter life, by friend and foe alike, so I will use it here), was smitten by my mother, Doris McKay Jakes, so smitten that he had turned to putty in her hands. Not things that anyone, anyone in public anyway, would notice. All they would see was a king-hell-raiser and maybe a cut or other wound for their efforts; or the wise ones would cut a wide path away from his fury. But Doris had a spell over him, and he craved being with her, craved it more than anything, even being king hell-raiser of Forsythe County. Soft, and he knew it. So when those Jap bombs landed at Pearl and all Georgia thought it was William Tecumseh Sherman returned to burn the land and every red-blooded, hell, every any- blooded male, even black guys, were running to the railroad station to get signed up Jefferson Davis Jakes hesitated, hesitated just that minute, just that Doris McKay back home minute. Until Doris McKay, no squeamish damsel, and maybe with some vision of Scarlett O’Hara, pushed dad out the door- “Go now, and go fast.” And I will quote here, quote because I heard it about six times a year, at least, the first few years of growing up, “Kill every Jap you can get your hands on, and more if you can. And when you come back I will be a Jakes, and proudly.” So naturally she and half the town showed up at that nowhere train station to see the boys, including in the lead my father, off.
And as such scenes go that is the nice, upbeat part. The not so up-beat part was that after almost four years of South Pacific war, relentless, heat-scrabbled, hell-underbrush and hard rock-scrabbled war on more nowhere islands than one would think possible as big as the Pacific is Jefferson Davis Jakes, Jakes fist-full of medals collected, some odd souvenirs of as many Japs as he could collect, and only a few small purple heart wounds he returned home, home to his ever-loving Doris McKay. They married, as Doris had promised, and they had four children, all boys, including number two, me, John Lee Jakes. Just a normal American post World War II scenario.
Hold on; hold on just a minute, please. Jefferson Davis Jakes came home, and to the public eye, he seemed just like the pre-war king hell-raiser of Forsythe County. But on some nights, sometimes late at night, after a few hours of hard, hard drinking he would go up into the attic of the old-time Jakes home where we lived and begin to howl, howl like a wolf at the moon. And everyone around thought that was what it was. We knew better, or got to know better, especially Ma. This went on for a few years, every once in a while, but as time went on more frequently as such things do. And dad got quieter, more home quiet, although out in public he was still Jefferson Davis Jakes whose family had fought in this country’s battles since back in Civil War days. Then one night when I was eight he went up to the attic and we didn’t hear him howl like we expected. A few minutes later we heard a shot, one shot. They buried Jefferson Davis Jakes with full military honors down at our nowhere Georgia cemetery, believing the story we had concocted about his having interrupted an intruder and had accidentally discharged his old M-1. And that was the end of it.”
Fritz thought; well, not quite the end of it. Once nowhere Georgia heard about the commies in Vietnam in the 1960s every red-blooded male, hell, every any-blooded male, even black guys, headed down to the fading railroad station to sign up. Including quiet, unassuming John Lee Jakes, the late Johnny Jakes. But see Johnny had also hesitated, hesitated just that non-Jakes moment, just that Doris McKay Jakes moment. Until Doris McKay, still no squeamish damsel, and maybe still with some vision of Scarlett O’Hara, pushed Johnny out the door- “Go now, and go fast. Kill every gook you can get your hands on, and more if you can.”
*******
John Brown
John Brown went off to war to fight on a foreign shore
His mama sure was proud of him!
He stood straight and tall in his uniform and all
His mama’s face broke out all in a grin
“Oh son, you look so fine, I’m glad you’re a son of mine
You make me proud to know you hold a gun
Do what the captain says, lots of medals you will get
And we’ll put them on the wall when you come home”
As that old train pulled out, John’s ma began to shout
Tellin’ ev’ryone in the neighborhood:
“That’s my son that’s about to go, he’s a soldier now, you know”
She made well sure her neighbors understood
She got a letter once in a while and her face broke into a smile
As she showed them to the people from next door
And she bragged about her son with his uniform and gun
And these things you called a good old-fashioned war
Oh! Good old-fashioned war!
Then the letters ceased to come, for a long time they did not come
They ceased to come for about ten months or more
Then a letter finally came saying, “Go down and meet the train
Your son’s a-coming home from the war”
She smiled and went right down, she looked everywhere around
But she could not see her soldier son in sight
But as all the people passed, she saw her son at last
When she did she could hardly believe her eyes
Oh his face was all shot up and his hand was all blown off
And he wore a metal brace around his waist
He whispered kind of slow, in a voice she did not know
While she couldn’t even recognize his face!
Oh! Lord! Not even recognize his face
“Oh tell me, my darling son, pray tell me what they done
How is it you come to be this way?”
He tried his best to talk but his mouth could hardly move
And the mother had to turn her face away
“Don’t you remember, Ma, when I went off to war
You thought it was the best thing I could do?
I was on the battleground, you were home . . . acting proud
You wasn’t there standing in my shoes”
“Oh, and I thought when I was there, God, what am I doing here?
I’m a-tryin’ to kill somebody or die tryin’
But the thing that scared me most was when my enemy came close
And I saw that his face looked just like mine”
Oh! Lord! Just like mine!
“And I couldn’t help but think, through the thunder rolling and stink
That I was just a puppet in a play
And through the roar and smoke, this string is finally broke
And a cannonball blew my eyes away”
As he turned away to walk, his Ma was still in shock
At seein’ the metal brace that helped him stand
But as he turned to go, he called his mother close
And he dropped his medals down into her hand
Copyright © 1963, 1968 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1996 by Special Rider Music
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Victory To The Greek Workers-All Greek Workers Out In Support Of the General Strike- This Is The Future of The Class Struggle
Click on the headline to link to an Associated Press release concerning the general strike in Greece.
Markin comment:
The class struggle is alive and well in Greece. The question is to win. Fight for workers councils! Build a Bolshevik Party. Fight for state power! This is the wave of the future in the class struggle. Victory to the Greek workers! All out in Greece in support of the our brother and sister workers! Build solidarity actions internationally!
Markin comment:
The class struggle is alive and well in Greece. The question is to win. Fight for workers councils! Build a Bolshevik Party. Fight for state power! This is the wave of the future in the class struggle. Victory to the Greek workers! All out in Greece in support of the our brother and sister workers! Build solidarity actions internationally!
Breaching Gaza's Siege Update - by Stephen Lendman
Monday, June 27, 2011
Breaching Gaza's Siege Update
Breaching Gaza's Siege Update - by Stephen Lendman
Israel keeps exerting pressure to block humanitarian efforts to deliver vital to life and other essential aid to besieged Gazans.
Endorsing Israeli lawlessness, the State Department issued a June 22 "Travel Warning - Israel, the West Bank and Gaza," saying in part:
"The Department of State warns US citizens of the risks of traveling to Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, and about threats to themselves and to US interests in those locations," adding "avoid all travel to the Gaza Strip."
Access the full statement through the following link:
http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_5511.html
On June 23, Secretary of State Clinton added:
"We do not believe that the flotilla is a necessary or useful effort to try to assist the people of Gaza. And we think that it's not helpful for there to be flotillas that try to provoke actions by entering into Israeli waters and creating a situation in which the Israelis have the right to defend themselves."
Defend against whom she didn't explain or that Gazan waters belong to Palestine, not Israel. Moreover, delivering humanitarian aid is essential until Gaza's blockade is ended, a crime against humanity Washington funds and supports.
This week, "Freedom Flotilla II - Stay Human" sails to Gaza. Neither Israel nor Clinton will stop it, but they're trying by blocking its departure or planned interdiction surprises if it comes.
The US Boat to Gaza (The Audacity of Hope) is one of 10 participating ships, now blocked by Greek officials, saying the vessel is unseaworthy, a spurious claim with no validity.
A June 26 US Boat to Gaza press release asked "Greek government officials to clarify whether (their leased boat) is being blocked....because of an anonymous request of a private citizen....or whether (Greece) made a political decision....in response to US and Israeli" pressure.
Specifically they want to know if bailout help is contingent on succumbing to blackmail, besides Greece already surrendering its sovereignty to foreign bankers.
A previous article explained, accessed through the following link:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/06/banker-occupation-of-greece.html
On June 27, a US Boat to Gaza press release responded to reports that an Israeli "Lawfare" group (Shurat HaDin) complaint is delaying the boat's departure.
Israel, Washington, AIPAC, and the Shurat HaDin Law Center (SH) are directly involved. In fact, SH's web site claims it's "bankrupting terrorism one lawsuit at a time," adding on June 19:
"I am happy to report that we have achieved some important victories in the struggle to block the anti-Israel Flotilla from 'smuggling contraband' to the Hamas controlled Gaza Strip."
Specifically, it referred to a French insurance company succumbing to intimidation not to cover a French boat from Marseilles, and the Turkish ship pressured by Ankara to cancel its participation.
On June 15, SH announced a Manhattan federal court lawsuit to "confiscate 14 ships outfitted with funds unlawfully raised in the United States by anti-Israeli groups, including the Free Gaza Movement."
SH, the Obama administration, AIPAC and other Israeli Lobby members clearly support state terrorism in violation of international, US and Israeli law. Nonetheless, America's "Audacity of Hope" is confident it will sail, saying:
SH is notorious for filing "frivolous legal complaints against the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. We reiterate that the boat we are leasing....was surveyed by a professional surveyor and successfully completed its sea trials."
At noon Athens time June 27, a press conference will announce its readiness to sail, but expect continued pressure to stop it - criminal co-conspirators determined to lawlessly suffocate besieged Gazans.
On June 27, a Haaretz editorial headlined, "Let the flotilla go," saying:
Israel equates "flotilla" with terrorism or "a declaration of war," no matter that cargo includes food, medicines, educational materials and other humanitarian aid raised by private donations.
Nonetheless, Israel "seems to be as frightened of the flotilla as one would think it would be of an attack by an armed naval fleet." As a result, it's "preparing to fight an enemy" comprised of unarmed, nonviolent men and women who care enough to risk their safety to deliver vital aid and symbolically oppose Israeli lawlessness.
Thirteen months after the Mavi Marmara massacre, "Israel is showing that it has learned just one lesson: the military lesson....The country is not willing to give up a display of power, thereby no doubt contributing to inflating the flotilla's importance" and Israel as a rogue terror state. "From Israel, we can at least demand that it let the flotilla get through....without once again endangering the country's position in the world."
On June 27, Israel National News said former US Ecuador ambassador Samuel Hart (a 27-year Foreign Service veteran) will participate in the Flotilla mission.
In a 1992 Foreign Affairs Oral History Project for the Association for Diplomatic Studies interview, Hart said:
"I've always felt that Israel has been a little bit of a burr in the saddle in our foreign policy. Here is a small country with no particular interest to us in any real strategic terms, yet it sort of jerks us around because it has not only a very vocal Jewish population, but also supporters of Israel from non-Jewish groups."
He also once wrote an essay calling Israel "an exhausting place to live (because) the tension, anxiety and intensity wear you out."
Now aged 77, he told a Jacksonville, FL newspaper he joined the Flotilla because he "missed" participating in the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement to end segregation. "I see great similarities between this and the civil rights movement," he said. "I am pleased to be part of it."
He also asked, "What did the residents of Gaza do to deserve such punishment? The honest answer is they" elected Hamas in 2006 democratically and now suffer lawlessly.
On June 26, New York Times writer Ethan Bronner headlined, "Avoid Gaza Flotilla, Israel Warns Foreign Journalists," saying:
"Israel threatened Sunday to bar for up to a decade any foreign journalist who boards a flotilla seeking to challenge an Israeli naval blockade of Gaza."
Moreover, Israel's Government Press Office director Oren Helman said their equipment will be impounded and they'll be subjected to "additional sanctions." He sent a warning letter to registered foreign correspondents, stopping short of saying they'll be arrested and jailed.
Perhaps all Flotilla participants will be mistreated, imprisoned, their personal possessions confiscated, then summarily deported the way Flotilla I activists were treated after being attacked, beaten and otherwise abused, besides nine on board massacred in cold blood.
On June 26, Israel's Foreign Press Association responded, saying:
Journalists "covering a legitimate news event should be allowed to do their jobs without threat and intimidation. (Helman's letter) sends a chilling message to the international media and raises serious questions about Israel's commitment to freedom of the press."
Bronner said an unnamed New York Times journalist would participate, joining other international correspondents.
Further updates will follow, highlighting courageous activism against lawless Israeli brutality, complicit with its Washington paymaster/partner.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
posted by Steve Lendman @ 5:26 AM
Breaching Gaza's Siege Update
Breaching Gaza's Siege Update - by Stephen Lendman
Israel keeps exerting pressure to block humanitarian efforts to deliver vital to life and other essential aid to besieged Gazans.
Endorsing Israeli lawlessness, the State Department issued a June 22 "Travel Warning - Israel, the West Bank and Gaza," saying in part:
"The Department of State warns US citizens of the risks of traveling to Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, and about threats to themselves and to US interests in those locations," adding "avoid all travel to the Gaza Strip."
Access the full statement through the following link:
http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_5511.html
On June 23, Secretary of State Clinton added:
"We do not believe that the flotilla is a necessary or useful effort to try to assist the people of Gaza. And we think that it's not helpful for there to be flotillas that try to provoke actions by entering into Israeli waters and creating a situation in which the Israelis have the right to defend themselves."
Defend against whom she didn't explain or that Gazan waters belong to Palestine, not Israel. Moreover, delivering humanitarian aid is essential until Gaza's blockade is ended, a crime against humanity Washington funds and supports.
This week, "Freedom Flotilla II - Stay Human" sails to Gaza. Neither Israel nor Clinton will stop it, but they're trying by blocking its departure or planned interdiction surprises if it comes.
The US Boat to Gaza (The Audacity of Hope) is one of 10 participating ships, now blocked by Greek officials, saying the vessel is unseaworthy, a spurious claim with no validity.
A June 26 US Boat to Gaza press release asked "Greek government officials to clarify whether (their leased boat) is being blocked....because of an anonymous request of a private citizen....or whether (Greece) made a political decision....in response to US and Israeli" pressure.
Specifically they want to know if bailout help is contingent on succumbing to blackmail, besides Greece already surrendering its sovereignty to foreign bankers.
A previous article explained, accessed through the following link:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/06/banker-occupation-of-greece.html
On June 27, a US Boat to Gaza press release responded to reports that an Israeli "Lawfare" group (Shurat HaDin) complaint is delaying the boat's departure.
Israel, Washington, AIPAC, and the Shurat HaDin Law Center (SH) are directly involved. In fact, SH's web site claims it's "bankrupting terrorism one lawsuit at a time," adding on June 19:
"I am happy to report that we have achieved some important victories in the struggle to block the anti-Israel Flotilla from 'smuggling contraband' to the Hamas controlled Gaza Strip."
Specifically, it referred to a French insurance company succumbing to intimidation not to cover a French boat from Marseilles, and the Turkish ship pressured by Ankara to cancel its participation.
On June 15, SH announced a Manhattan federal court lawsuit to "confiscate 14 ships outfitted with funds unlawfully raised in the United States by anti-Israeli groups, including the Free Gaza Movement."
SH, the Obama administration, AIPAC and other Israeli Lobby members clearly support state terrorism in violation of international, US and Israeli law. Nonetheless, America's "Audacity of Hope" is confident it will sail, saying:
SH is notorious for filing "frivolous legal complaints against the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. We reiterate that the boat we are leasing....was surveyed by a professional surveyor and successfully completed its sea trials."
At noon Athens time June 27, a press conference will announce its readiness to sail, but expect continued pressure to stop it - criminal co-conspirators determined to lawlessly suffocate besieged Gazans.
On June 27, a Haaretz editorial headlined, "Let the flotilla go," saying:
Israel equates "flotilla" with terrorism or "a declaration of war," no matter that cargo includes food, medicines, educational materials and other humanitarian aid raised by private donations.
Nonetheless, Israel "seems to be as frightened of the flotilla as one would think it would be of an attack by an armed naval fleet." As a result, it's "preparing to fight an enemy" comprised of unarmed, nonviolent men and women who care enough to risk their safety to deliver vital aid and symbolically oppose Israeli lawlessness.
Thirteen months after the Mavi Marmara massacre, "Israel is showing that it has learned just one lesson: the military lesson....The country is not willing to give up a display of power, thereby no doubt contributing to inflating the flotilla's importance" and Israel as a rogue terror state. "From Israel, we can at least demand that it let the flotilla get through....without once again endangering the country's position in the world."
On June 27, Israel National News said former US Ecuador ambassador Samuel Hart (a 27-year Foreign Service veteran) will participate in the Flotilla mission.
In a 1992 Foreign Affairs Oral History Project for the Association for Diplomatic Studies interview, Hart said:
"I've always felt that Israel has been a little bit of a burr in the saddle in our foreign policy. Here is a small country with no particular interest to us in any real strategic terms, yet it sort of jerks us around because it has not only a very vocal Jewish population, but also supporters of Israel from non-Jewish groups."
He also once wrote an essay calling Israel "an exhausting place to live (because) the tension, anxiety and intensity wear you out."
Now aged 77, he told a Jacksonville, FL newspaper he joined the Flotilla because he "missed" participating in the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement to end segregation. "I see great similarities between this and the civil rights movement," he said. "I am pleased to be part of it."
He also asked, "What did the residents of Gaza do to deserve such punishment? The honest answer is they" elected Hamas in 2006 democratically and now suffer lawlessly.
On June 26, New York Times writer Ethan Bronner headlined, "Avoid Gaza Flotilla, Israel Warns Foreign Journalists," saying:
"Israel threatened Sunday to bar for up to a decade any foreign journalist who boards a flotilla seeking to challenge an Israeli naval blockade of Gaza."
Moreover, Israel's Government Press Office director Oren Helman said their equipment will be impounded and they'll be subjected to "additional sanctions." He sent a warning letter to registered foreign correspondents, stopping short of saying they'll be arrested and jailed.
Perhaps all Flotilla participants will be mistreated, imprisoned, their personal possessions confiscated, then summarily deported the way Flotilla I activists were treated after being attacked, beaten and otherwise abused, besides nine on board massacred in cold blood.
On June 26, Israel's Foreign Press Association responded, saying:
Journalists "covering a legitimate news event should be allowed to do their jobs without threat and intimidation. (Helman's letter) sends a chilling message to the international media and raises serious questions about Israel's commitment to freedom of the press."
Bronner said an unnamed New York Times journalist would participate, joining other international correspondents.
Further updates will follow, highlighting courageous activism against lawless Israeli brutality, complicit with its Washington paymaster/partner.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
posted by Steve Lendman @ 5:26 AM
Boston Protest Of U.S./NATO Attacks On Libya- Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attack!
Click on the headline to link to a UJP post on a demonstration in Boston at Senator John Kerry's office protesting the U.S./NATO attacks on Libya. Defend Libya against imperialist attacks! Even if we have have to hold ours noses to do so! The Libyan masses will have to settle with "the colonel" on their own terms.
The Business of America is War - by Stephen Lendman
The Business of America Is War
The Business of America is War - by Stephen Lendman
Noted trends analyst Gerald Celente said it, and it's true. In fact, America's business is war, more war, multiple wars, permanent wars, pillaging one nation after another for wealth, power, and dominance, while homeland needs go begging.
America never was and isn't now the "land of the free and home of the brave." In fact, it's become a "Let 'em eat cake" society.
Whether or not Marie Antoinette actually said it, France's 1789-99 revolution was very real, delivering guillotine justice, not promised "Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite," a status now destroying what's left of American freedom, heading for the trash bin of history if not already there.
Earlier articles discussed Washington's wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Yemen, as well as numerous proxy ones in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and at home against Muslims, Latino immigrants, and working households.
Combined, they represent a shocking contempt for rule of law justice, democratic values and humanity, notions now mere artifacts long ago abandoned to advance America's imperium.
As previous articles explained, out-of-control imperialism is heading America for tyranny and ruin. In her 1951 book, "The Origins of Totalitarianism," Hannah Arendt said it's "never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within."
She called it dictatorship based on:
"(1) an elaborate ideology;
(2) a single mass party;
(3) terror;
(4) a technologically conditioned monopoly of communication;
(5) a monopoly of weapons; (and)
(6) a centrally controlled economy."
Duplicitously called a democracy, today's America nearly qualifies:
(1) Its ideology is concentrated wealth and power.
(2) It's governed by a two-party duopoly - the money or property party, excluding alternative choices.
(3) It's the world's leading purveyor of state terrorism, waging global wars against nations, groups or individuals, including targeted assassinations of its own citizens.
(4) Major media managed news gives it dominant (not monopoly) communication control, but efforts to subvert Internet discourse and debate may undermine its free and open content.
(5) Corporate-run society makes it centrally controlled for bottom line priorities, excluding other choices.
In her book, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil," Arendt said crimes of state aren't committed by fanatics or sociopaths, just "terrifyingly normal" (people)....neither perverted or sadistic....who accepted the premises of their superiors and their state" to continue current and/or longstanding policies.
In his book, "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," Ward Churchill agreed, explaining what he called the "technocrats of empire," functioning as "little Eichmanns," banally serving imperial interests, no matter how lawless or evil. They could say "no," of course, but go along to get along, including at the highest levels. For them, it's to share spoils, no matter the harm or human misery globally.
Churchill's many books and writings discussed 500 genocidal years against America's indigenous peoples, as well as its global imperial apparatus. Touching the right nerves persuasively, the University of Colorado disgracefully fired him in summer 2007, a pattern repeated elsewhere against other activist professors, notably targeting Israeli critics like Norman Finkelstein, Joel Kovel, Denis Rancourt, and Sami Al-Arian among others.
Al-Arian was also lawlessly arrested, tried, acquitted, imprisoned, brutalized, then freed, but remains under house arrest awaiting dismissal of spurious charges against him.
Imperial America's War Machine
The empire never sleeps or tolerates anti-war activism, threatening its quest for unchallengeable "full spectrum dominance" over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any adversary, including with nuclear weapons preemptively.
September 11, 2001 served as pretext to consolidate power, destroy civil liberties and human rights, and wage permanent wars against invented enemies for global dominance over world markets, resources, and cheap labor - notably at home and throughout
Eurasia, Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Asia at the expense of democratic freedoms and social justice.
In its 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the Pentagon called it the "long war." Dick Cheney said wars won't end in our lifetime, and former CIA Director James Woolsey said America "is engaged in World War IV, and it could continue for years....This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us."
In his 1990 address to a joint session of Congress, GHW Bush called it a "New World Order," preparing the public for Operation Desert Storm and years of war and occupation of Iraq, perhaps knowing Serbia/Kosovo, Afghanistan, and other targeted states would follow.
Obama is America's latest warrior president, succeeding numerous past ones, including Washington, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Wilson, F. Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, and GW Bush preceding him.
Today's stakes, however are far greater and riskier because of Pentagon grand plans, including militarizing space as a platform for future wars. A previous article explained, accessed through the following link:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/09/americas-grand-strategy-militarizing.html
It discussed plans to position nuclear, other state-of-the-art weapons, and delivery systems to wage multiple wars from space anywhere on short notice. Under Obama, the policy remains in place. His May 2010 National Security Strategy:
"reserve(s) the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend our nation and our interests." In other words, to wage preemptive wars, using first-strike nuclear and other destructive weapons "to keep the American people safe (and advance the nation's) values and ideals," pursuing unchallengeable global/space dominance, ruling by intimidation and war, making the world safe for capital.
During the Cold War, MAD (mutually assured destruction) held both sides at bay. Today's strategy includes "more flexible options (for) a wider range of contingencies (with weapons) to optimize performance." It means destroy an adversary's capabilities preemptively, then target others to eliminate all challenges to US dominance.
With America on a nuclear hair-trigger, it reinvented MAD in new form, threatening potential global nuclear winter, defined as "a long period of darkness and extreme cold that scientists predict would follow a full-scale nuclear war, a layer of dust and smoke in the atmosphere cover(ing) the earth and block(ing) the rays of the sun, (causing) most living organisms (to) perish."
Anti-nuclear expert Helen Caldicott says "one single failure of nuclear deterrence could end human history (quickly). Once initiated, it would take one hour to trigger a swift, sudden end to life on this planet." Only nuclear disarmament and abolition of nuclear weapons can stop it, what's never discussed or considered.
On January 17, 1961, Dwight Eisenhower coined the phrase "military industrial complex" in his farewell address, saying:
"....we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
As he prepared to leave office, he could hardly imagine the difference 50 years would make, transforming fortress America into a colossus, waging permanent global wars, spending unconscionable amounts on militarism and threatening planetary survival in the process.
On April 17, 2010, Independent Institute analyst Robert Higgs said annual "defense-related spending greatly exceeds the amounts budgeted by the Department of Defense," presenting FY 2009 data, the most recent figures available.
The official $636.5 billion spent way understated a growing annual total even Higgs can't fully identify, given enormous black budgets and hidden add-ons, likely totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. What's known for FY 2009, however, in billions of dollars includes the following:
-- Department of Defense: $636.5
-- Department of Energy (nuclear weapons and environmental cleanup): $16.7
-- Department of State: $36.3
-- Department of Veterans Affairs: $95.5
-- Department of Homeland Security: $51.7
-- Department of the Treasury (for Military Retirement Fund): $54.9
-- Half of NASA's budget: $9.6
-- Net interest attributable to past-debt-financed defense outlays: $126.3
Total: $1,027.5 trillion
Moreover, the National Priorities Project's analysis of FY 2010 discretionary spending showed 62% spent for military-related purposes, including 4% for veterans' benefits.
For FY 2012, the House approved $690.1 billion, an 8.4% increase (though below the $725 FY 2011 budget, a temporary drop, likely compensated for with add-ons). The Senate will approve a similar amount. If the entire $1,027.5 trillion increases by the same amount, it raises known FY 2012 defense-related spending to $1,113.8 trillion.
In fact, with supplemental and hidden add-ons, as well as Pentagon, intelligence, and other unknown amounts, the grand total likely exceeds $1.5 trillion, a figure rising most years while popular needs go begging.
Higgs also cites the unreliability of official numbers. He believes it's more accurate to take the Pentagon's basic budget and double it because as much as 40% of it is black or hidden. Moreover, as Pentagon power grows, more spending accrues to congressional districts. As a result, Congress willingly goes along as jobs are allegedly created. In addition, generous campaign contributions follow - bribes to keep funding the war machine.
Congressional Affirmation of Permanent War
The current House bill, HR 1540 includes a worrisome/duplicitous Sec. 1034: Affirmation of Armed Conflict with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Associated Forces, affirming:
"(1) the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces and that those entities continue to pose a threat to the United States and its citizens, both domestically and abroad;
(2) the President has the authority to use all necessary and appropriate force during the current armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40);
(3) the current armed conflict includes nations, organization(s), and persons, who --
(A) are part of, or are substantially supporting al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or
(B) have engaged in hostilities or have engaged in hostilities or have directly supported hostilities in aid of a nation, organization, or person described in subparagraph (A); and
(4) the President's authority pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force....includes the authority to detain belligerents, including persons described in paragraph (3), until the termination of hostilities."
In September 2001, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) for "the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States." Still in force today, it began the "war on terror," giving George Bush carte blanche authority to wage global wars in violation of international and constitutional laws. A 2002 AUMF against Iraq followed.
The House (and likely the Senate) FY 2012 Defense Authorization bill affirms that authority, letting Obama as commander and chief, wage wars anywhere at his discretion. He's taking full advantage, duplicitous congressional posturing notwithstanding.
On June 24, in fact, House Republicans and 70 Democrats rejected support for Obama's Libya war, but defeated a measure to defund it. In other words, they authorized war at the same time symbolically rejecting it, exposing their gross hypocrisy.
America's Permanent War Agenda
In inflation adjusted dollars, annual defense spending more than doubled under George Bush and keeps rising under Obama despite growing budget cutting pressures, given a much greater national debt burden than reported.
Officially it's nearly $14.3 trillion (headed for an estimated $15.5 trillion by September 30), exceeding 100% of GDP at that time. Omitted, however, is another $7.6 trillion owed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other government agencies, besides future trillion dollar or more amounts added annually.
It hardly matters, given the military/industrial complex's power to demand what it wants and get it. Today, in fact, it comprises:
-- defense, technology, energy, financial, private military contractor (PMCs), and other corporate interests;
-- Congress;
-- America's media;
-- prominent think tanks and other pressure groups;
-- various others benefitting from militarism; and
-- the Pentagon colossus, a frightening power unto itself, threatening humanity's survival.
The Defense Department's FY 2010 Base Structure Report shows how large it's become, even with important information omitted:
DOD is the world's largest landlord with over 539,000 facilities (buildings, structures, and linear structures) located on nearly 5,000 sites, covering more than 28 million acres and over two billion square feet of space in America, its territories and overseas. In fact, these numbers way understate much higher totals as many Pentagon facilities are secret and/or unreported.
They include over 1,000 overseas bases in 150 or more countries, as well as additional secret ones shared with or leased from host countries. As of April 2009, Congressional Research Service data includes 1,402,000 total active duty US military personnel worldwide, 73,000 National Guard, and 208,000 Selected Reserves, for a 1,683,000 total.
Add to them America's private military contractor (PMC) army, corporate mercenaries profiting from US imperialism. They perform a wide range of functions from combat to consulting to logistics, virtually anything once done by the Pentagon. Moreover, America's intelligence agencies, State Department, Homeland Security, and other branches also use PMCs.
Overall, they're unregulated, unaccountable, and often out-of-control, involved in some of the most controversial aspects of war from over-billing to ritual slaughter of unarmed civilians. Yet they're not prosecuted, convicted or imprisoned, just rewarded with fat contracts costing far more for services military personnel once performed. Moreover, the more they're used, the greater they influence war making, sustaining their bottom line priorities at the expense of a free society and vital homeland needs.
America's New Military Industrial Complex
On March 1, 2003 Business 2.0 magazine writers Ian Mount, Matthew Maier and David Freedman headlined, "The New Military Industrial Complex" for digital age war, describing the Pentagon's "revolution in military affairs (RMA)," comprised of "faster, lighter, smarter" cutting-edge technology warfare. Readying for it, they're building an unchallengeable high-tech arsenal, more advanced now than then.
The old one remains and gets huge contracts for new and more traditional weapons. The result is an influential "iron triangle" of Congress, the Pentagon and defense industry. Besides major media support, conservative think tanks also like:
-- the Project for a New American Century (PNAC); its "Rebuilding America's Defenses" scheme promotes US global hegemony;
-- the Center for Security Policy (CSP) headed by super-hawk Frank Gaffney endorses a policy of "Peace through Strength" and perpetual wars for perpetual peace;
-- the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) composed of hard right leaders and members, "fighting terrorism and the ideologies that drive it;"
-- the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP), focusing on defense issues, tied to the nuclear weapons industry; and
-- the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), emphasizing national security and "advancing (US) global interests;" specializing in crisis management, it's connected to the highest levels in government and the Pentagon.
The nation's 16 intelligence agencies, including CIA, NSA, DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), FBI, Army, Navy and Air Force Intelligence, DHS (Department of Homeland Security), and Department of State comprise another component destroying a free society. They comprise a multi-billion dollar funded, largely off-the-books, clandestine anti-democratic network. Interconnected with thousands of private contractors, they're tied to world governments and their intelligence services.
Moreover, they comprise a government/military/industrial/intelligence service/media/think tank colossus, waging global wars, bankrupting the nation, wrecking the remnants of a free society. Plagued by the same dynamic that doomed past empires unwilling to change, they also pursue the misguided notion that militarism sustains growth.
In fact, it erodes it by sacrificing industrial America, shifting production and other high-paying service operations abroad to focus on war making. As a result, essential homeland needs go begging, including healthcare, education, job creation, and the nation's infrastructure, crumbling from years of neglect.
In his farewell address, Eisenhower said:
"Every gun that is made, every war ship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and not clothed."
In his November 2003 Harper's article titled, "The War Business," Chalmers Johnson said:
"(M)unitions and war profiteering have (become) the most efficient means for well-connected capitalists to engorge themselves at the public trough." Even Wall Street profits hugely. "To call these companies 'private,' though, is mere ideology. (Weapons and) munitions making in the United States today (and related industries profiting from them are) not really private enterprise. It is state socialism."
They also destroy constitutional freedoms, what George Washington in 1796 warned about, saying "overgrown military establishments (are) inauspicious to liberty." Johnson called it America's future, now more the present, saying, "When war becomes the most profitable course of action, we can certainly expect more of it," sacrificing a free society for private interests reaping short-term gains.
In his book titled, "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War," Andrew Bacevich discussed America's "trinity," its global military presence, power projection, and intervention, creating a "permanent national security crisis....propell(ing) the United States into a condition approximating perpetual war." However, "(no) evidence exists - none - to suggest that US efforts advance the cause of global peace," just the opposite. As a result, "(o)ver the horizon, a shipwreck of epic proportions awaits."
It's coming perhaps when least expected. Nations that live by the sword, die by it. America is no exception, nor any other.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
The Business of America is War - by Stephen Lendman
Noted trends analyst Gerald Celente said it, and it's true. In fact, America's business is war, more war, multiple wars, permanent wars, pillaging one nation after another for wealth, power, and dominance, while homeland needs go begging.
America never was and isn't now the "land of the free and home of the brave." In fact, it's become a "Let 'em eat cake" society.
Whether or not Marie Antoinette actually said it, France's 1789-99 revolution was very real, delivering guillotine justice, not promised "Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite," a status now destroying what's left of American freedom, heading for the trash bin of history if not already there.
Earlier articles discussed Washington's wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Yemen, as well as numerous proxy ones in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and at home against Muslims, Latino immigrants, and working households.
Combined, they represent a shocking contempt for rule of law justice, democratic values and humanity, notions now mere artifacts long ago abandoned to advance America's imperium.
As previous articles explained, out-of-control imperialism is heading America for tyranny and ruin. In her 1951 book, "The Origins of Totalitarianism," Hannah Arendt said it's "never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within."
She called it dictatorship based on:
"(1) an elaborate ideology;
(2) a single mass party;
(3) terror;
(4) a technologically conditioned monopoly of communication;
(5) a monopoly of weapons; (and)
(6) a centrally controlled economy."
Duplicitously called a democracy, today's America nearly qualifies:
(1) Its ideology is concentrated wealth and power.
(2) It's governed by a two-party duopoly - the money or property party, excluding alternative choices.
(3) It's the world's leading purveyor of state terrorism, waging global wars against nations, groups or individuals, including targeted assassinations of its own citizens.
(4) Major media managed news gives it dominant (not monopoly) communication control, but efforts to subvert Internet discourse and debate may undermine its free and open content.
(5) Corporate-run society makes it centrally controlled for bottom line priorities, excluding other choices.
In her book, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil," Arendt said crimes of state aren't committed by fanatics or sociopaths, just "terrifyingly normal" (people)....neither perverted or sadistic....who accepted the premises of their superiors and their state" to continue current and/or longstanding policies.
In his book, "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," Ward Churchill agreed, explaining what he called the "technocrats of empire," functioning as "little Eichmanns," banally serving imperial interests, no matter how lawless or evil. They could say "no," of course, but go along to get along, including at the highest levels. For them, it's to share spoils, no matter the harm or human misery globally.
Churchill's many books and writings discussed 500 genocidal years against America's indigenous peoples, as well as its global imperial apparatus. Touching the right nerves persuasively, the University of Colorado disgracefully fired him in summer 2007, a pattern repeated elsewhere against other activist professors, notably targeting Israeli critics like Norman Finkelstein, Joel Kovel, Denis Rancourt, and Sami Al-Arian among others.
Al-Arian was also lawlessly arrested, tried, acquitted, imprisoned, brutalized, then freed, but remains under house arrest awaiting dismissal of spurious charges against him.
Imperial America's War Machine
The empire never sleeps or tolerates anti-war activism, threatening its quest for unchallengeable "full spectrum dominance" over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any adversary, including with nuclear weapons preemptively.
September 11, 2001 served as pretext to consolidate power, destroy civil liberties and human rights, and wage permanent wars against invented enemies for global dominance over world markets, resources, and cheap labor - notably at home and throughout
Eurasia, Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Asia at the expense of democratic freedoms and social justice.
In its 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the Pentagon called it the "long war." Dick Cheney said wars won't end in our lifetime, and former CIA Director James Woolsey said America "is engaged in World War IV, and it could continue for years....This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us."
In his 1990 address to a joint session of Congress, GHW Bush called it a "New World Order," preparing the public for Operation Desert Storm and years of war and occupation of Iraq, perhaps knowing Serbia/Kosovo, Afghanistan, and other targeted states would follow.
Obama is America's latest warrior president, succeeding numerous past ones, including Washington, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Wilson, F. Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, and GW Bush preceding him.
Today's stakes, however are far greater and riskier because of Pentagon grand plans, including militarizing space as a platform for future wars. A previous article explained, accessed through the following link:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/09/americas-grand-strategy-militarizing.html
It discussed plans to position nuclear, other state-of-the-art weapons, and delivery systems to wage multiple wars from space anywhere on short notice. Under Obama, the policy remains in place. His May 2010 National Security Strategy:
"reserve(s) the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend our nation and our interests." In other words, to wage preemptive wars, using first-strike nuclear and other destructive weapons "to keep the American people safe (and advance the nation's) values and ideals," pursuing unchallengeable global/space dominance, ruling by intimidation and war, making the world safe for capital.
During the Cold War, MAD (mutually assured destruction) held both sides at bay. Today's strategy includes "more flexible options (for) a wider range of contingencies (with weapons) to optimize performance." It means destroy an adversary's capabilities preemptively, then target others to eliminate all challenges to US dominance.
With America on a nuclear hair-trigger, it reinvented MAD in new form, threatening potential global nuclear winter, defined as "a long period of darkness and extreme cold that scientists predict would follow a full-scale nuclear war, a layer of dust and smoke in the atmosphere cover(ing) the earth and block(ing) the rays of the sun, (causing) most living organisms (to) perish."
Anti-nuclear expert Helen Caldicott says "one single failure of nuclear deterrence could end human history (quickly). Once initiated, it would take one hour to trigger a swift, sudden end to life on this planet." Only nuclear disarmament and abolition of nuclear weapons can stop it, what's never discussed or considered.
On January 17, 1961, Dwight Eisenhower coined the phrase "military industrial complex" in his farewell address, saying:
"....we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
As he prepared to leave office, he could hardly imagine the difference 50 years would make, transforming fortress America into a colossus, waging permanent global wars, spending unconscionable amounts on militarism and threatening planetary survival in the process.
On April 17, 2010, Independent Institute analyst Robert Higgs said annual "defense-related spending greatly exceeds the amounts budgeted by the Department of Defense," presenting FY 2009 data, the most recent figures available.
The official $636.5 billion spent way understated a growing annual total even Higgs can't fully identify, given enormous black budgets and hidden add-ons, likely totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. What's known for FY 2009, however, in billions of dollars includes the following:
-- Department of Defense: $636.5
-- Department of Energy (nuclear weapons and environmental cleanup): $16.7
-- Department of State: $36.3
-- Department of Veterans Affairs: $95.5
-- Department of Homeland Security: $51.7
-- Department of the Treasury (for Military Retirement Fund): $54.9
-- Half of NASA's budget: $9.6
-- Net interest attributable to past-debt-financed defense outlays: $126.3
Total: $1,027.5 trillion
Moreover, the National Priorities Project's analysis of FY 2010 discretionary spending showed 62% spent for military-related purposes, including 4% for veterans' benefits.
For FY 2012, the House approved $690.1 billion, an 8.4% increase (though below the $725 FY 2011 budget, a temporary drop, likely compensated for with add-ons). The Senate will approve a similar amount. If the entire $1,027.5 trillion increases by the same amount, it raises known FY 2012 defense-related spending to $1,113.8 trillion.
In fact, with supplemental and hidden add-ons, as well as Pentagon, intelligence, and other unknown amounts, the grand total likely exceeds $1.5 trillion, a figure rising most years while popular needs go begging.
Higgs also cites the unreliability of official numbers. He believes it's more accurate to take the Pentagon's basic budget and double it because as much as 40% of it is black or hidden. Moreover, as Pentagon power grows, more spending accrues to congressional districts. As a result, Congress willingly goes along as jobs are allegedly created. In addition, generous campaign contributions follow - bribes to keep funding the war machine.
Congressional Affirmation of Permanent War
The current House bill, HR 1540 includes a worrisome/duplicitous Sec. 1034: Affirmation of Armed Conflict with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Associated Forces, affirming:
"(1) the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces and that those entities continue to pose a threat to the United States and its citizens, both domestically and abroad;
(2) the President has the authority to use all necessary and appropriate force during the current armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40);
(3) the current armed conflict includes nations, organization(s), and persons, who --
(A) are part of, or are substantially supporting al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or
(B) have engaged in hostilities or have engaged in hostilities or have directly supported hostilities in aid of a nation, organization, or person described in subparagraph (A); and
(4) the President's authority pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force....includes the authority to detain belligerents, including persons described in paragraph (3), until the termination of hostilities."
In September 2001, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) for "the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States." Still in force today, it began the "war on terror," giving George Bush carte blanche authority to wage global wars in violation of international and constitutional laws. A 2002 AUMF against Iraq followed.
The House (and likely the Senate) FY 2012 Defense Authorization bill affirms that authority, letting Obama as commander and chief, wage wars anywhere at his discretion. He's taking full advantage, duplicitous congressional posturing notwithstanding.
On June 24, in fact, House Republicans and 70 Democrats rejected support for Obama's Libya war, but defeated a measure to defund it. In other words, they authorized war at the same time symbolically rejecting it, exposing their gross hypocrisy.
America's Permanent War Agenda
In inflation adjusted dollars, annual defense spending more than doubled under George Bush and keeps rising under Obama despite growing budget cutting pressures, given a much greater national debt burden than reported.
Officially it's nearly $14.3 trillion (headed for an estimated $15.5 trillion by September 30), exceeding 100% of GDP at that time. Omitted, however, is another $7.6 trillion owed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other government agencies, besides future trillion dollar or more amounts added annually.
It hardly matters, given the military/industrial complex's power to demand what it wants and get it. Today, in fact, it comprises:
-- defense, technology, energy, financial, private military contractor (PMCs), and other corporate interests;
-- Congress;
-- America's media;
-- prominent think tanks and other pressure groups;
-- various others benefitting from militarism; and
-- the Pentagon colossus, a frightening power unto itself, threatening humanity's survival.
The Defense Department's FY 2010 Base Structure Report shows how large it's become, even with important information omitted:
DOD is the world's largest landlord with over 539,000 facilities (buildings, structures, and linear structures) located on nearly 5,000 sites, covering more than 28 million acres and over two billion square feet of space in America, its territories and overseas. In fact, these numbers way understate much higher totals as many Pentagon facilities are secret and/or unreported.
They include over 1,000 overseas bases in 150 or more countries, as well as additional secret ones shared with or leased from host countries. As of April 2009, Congressional Research Service data includes 1,402,000 total active duty US military personnel worldwide, 73,000 National Guard, and 208,000 Selected Reserves, for a 1,683,000 total.
Add to them America's private military contractor (PMC) army, corporate mercenaries profiting from US imperialism. They perform a wide range of functions from combat to consulting to logistics, virtually anything once done by the Pentagon. Moreover, America's intelligence agencies, State Department, Homeland Security, and other branches also use PMCs.
Overall, they're unregulated, unaccountable, and often out-of-control, involved in some of the most controversial aspects of war from over-billing to ritual slaughter of unarmed civilians. Yet they're not prosecuted, convicted or imprisoned, just rewarded with fat contracts costing far more for services military personnel once performed. Moreover, the more they're used, the greater they influence war making, sustaining their bottom line priorities at the expense of a free society and vital homeland needs.
America's New Military Industrial Complex
On March 1, 2003 Business 2.0 magazine writers Ian Mount, Matthew Maier and David Freedman headlined, "The New Military Industrial Complex" for digital age war, describing the Pentagon's "revolution in military affairs (RMA)," comprised of "faster, lighter, smarter" cutting-edge technology warfare. Readying for it, they're building an unchallengeable high-tech arsenal, more advanced now than then.
The old one remains and gets huge contracts for new and more traditional weapons. The result is an influential "iron triangle" of Congress, the Pentagon and defense industry. Besides major media support, conservative think tanks also like:
-- the Project for a New American Century (PNAC); its "Rebuilding America's Defenses" scheme promotes US global hegemony;
-- the Center for Security Policy (CSP) headed by super-hawk Frank Gaffney endorses a policy of "Peace through Strength" and perpetual wars for perpetual peace;
-- the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) composed of hard right leaders and members, "fighting terrorism and the ideologies that drive it;"
-- the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP), focusing on defense issues, tied to the nuclear weapons industry; and
-- the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), emphasizing national security and "advancing (US) global interests;" specializing in crisis management, it's connected to the highest levels in government and the Pentagon.
The nation's 16 intelligence agencies, including CIA, NSA, DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), FBI, Army, Navy and Air Force Intelligence, DHS (Department of Homeland Security), and Department of State comprise another component destroying a free society. They comprise a multi-billion dollar funded, largely off-the-books, clandestine anti-democratic network. Interconnected with thousands of private contractors, they're tied to world governments and their intelligence services.
Moreover, they comprise a government/military/industrial/intelligence service/media/think tank colossus, waging global wars, bankrupting the nation, wrecking the remnants of a free society. Plagued by the same dynamic that doomed past empires unwilling to change, they also pursue the misguided notion that militarism sustains growth.
In fact, it erodes it by sacrificing industrial America, shifting production and other high-paying service operations abroad to focus on war making. As a result, essential homeland needs go begging, including healthcare, education, job creation, and the nation's infrastructure, crumbling from years of neglect.
In his farewell address, Eisenhower said:
"Every gun that is made, every war ship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and not clothed."
In his November 2003 Harper's article titled, "The War Business," Chalmers Johnson said:
"(M)unitions and war profiteering have (become) the most efficient means for well-connected capitalists to engorge themselves at the public trough." Even Wall Street profits hugely. "To call these companies 'private,' though, is mere ideology. (Weapons and) munitions making in the United States today (and related industries profiting from them are) not really private enterprise. It is state socialism."
They also destroy constitutional freedoms, what George Washington in 1796 warned about, saying "overgrown military establishments (are) inauspicious to liberty." Johnson called it America's future, now more the present, saying, "When war becomes the most profitable course of action, we can certainly expect more of it," sacrificing a free society for private interests reaping short-term gains.
In his book titled, "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War," Andrew Bacevich discussed America's "trinity," its global military presence, power projection, and intervention, creating a "permanent national security crisis....propell(ing) the United States into a condition approximating perpetual war." However, "(no) evidence exists - none - to suggest that US efforts advance the cause of global peace," just the opposite. As a result, "(o)ver the horizon, a shipwreck of epic proportions awaits."
It's coming perhaps when least expected. Nations that live by the sword, die by it. America is no exception, nor any other.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
Strikes can stop Tory pension thieves- From Socialist Worker (UK)On-Line
Strikes can stop Tory pension thieves
by Judith Orr
The Tories are out to rob the poor to pay the rich.
They want to cut the pensions of millions of working class people to fill the hole left after the bank bailouts.
Workers will be left to grow old in poverty while bankers still live the high life on their obscene bonuses.
Workers are told they will have to work longer, pay more and receive less when they do finally retire.
Yet none of the super-rich public schoolboys who dominate the Tory-Lib Dem cabinet will have to worry about their old age.
We won’t let them get away with it. They are facing a huge fightback.
Beacon
This week 750,000 public sector workers have come together in a magnificent show of strength to tell the Tories to back off.
The NUT and ATL teachers’ unions, alongside the civil service PCS union and a section of the UCU lecturers’ union were set to join the national one-day strike this Thursday.
Their strike is a beacon of hope for millions who want to see the Tories beaten.
Thousands of council workers were also set to join the fight on 30 June. And across the country workers, students and activists have organised solidarity with the strikers.
People have seen the wave of struggles across Europe, the general strikes in Greece and the city occupations in Spain.
They are longing for a bit of that struggle here in Britain.
This week is just the beginning.
The unity that has been forged across the working class can be the basis for even greater mass strikes in the autumn.
Our greatest strength is our unity. The Tories are terrified of the prospect of millions of workers taking action together.
They want to divide us and make us blame each other for poverty, low pay and unemployment.
We can’t let them get away with it.
That’s why every trade unionist and activist must go all-out to build on this week’s strikes for the sort of action in the autumn that can stop the Tories’ attacks—and bring this government down.
by Judith Orr
The Tories are out to rob the poor to pay the rich.
They want to cut the pensions of millions of working class people to fill the hole left after the bank bailouts.
Workers will be left to grow old in poverty while bankers still live the high life on their obscene bonuses.
Workers are told they will have to work longer, pay more and receive less when they do finally retire.
Yet none of the super-rich public schoolboys who dominate the Tory-Lib Dem cabinet will have to worry about their old age.
We won’t let them get away with it. They are facing a huge fightback.
Beacon
This week 750,000 public sector workers have come together in a magnificent show of strength to tell the Tories to back off.
The NUT and ATL teachers’ unions, alongside the civil service PCS union and a section of the UCU lecturers’ union were set to join the national one-day strike this Thursday.
Their strike is a beacon of hope for millions who want to see the Tories beaten.
Thousands of council workers were also set to join the fight on 30 June. And across the country workers, students and activists have organised solidarity with the strikers.
People have seen the wave of struggles across Europe, the general strikes in Greece and the city occupations in Spain.
They are longing for a bit of that struggle here in Britain.
This week is just the beginning.
The unity that has been forged across the working class can be the basis for even greater mass strikes in the autumn.
Our greatest strength is our unity. The Tories are terrified of the prospect of millions of workers taking action together.
They want to divide us and make us blame each other for poverty, low pay and unemployment.
We can’t let them get away with it.
That’s why every trade unionist and activist must go all-out to build on this week’s strikes for the sort of action in the autumn that can stop the Tories’ attacks—and bring this government down.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Out In The Be-Bop Doo Wop Night- The Night Red Rock Doo Wopped
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Don & Juan performing their doo wop classic, What's Your Name?
CD Review
25 All-Time Doo Wop Hits, various artists, Varese Sarabonde Records, 2002
Road weary, yes, road weary all right that is what Fritz Taylor said to himself repeatedly as he waited, waited his third hour waited, by this god-forsaken exit just off Interstate 40 heading west out of Albuquerque on the seemingly endless hitchhike road. This trip had more than its fair share of mishaps. Road weary let’s just call it that, and let’s call it also a sudden realization by Fritz that something was not right in the world, the hitchhike world. For example, a couple of years back there was no way in hell, or god’s good green earth, have it your way, that poster hippie hitchhike boy, Fritz Taylor, would be standing for his third hour, christ, his third hour, on a major highway west looking for a ride.
Not Fritz, decked out in obligatory olive drab army jacket (World War II version, bought at some ubiquitous Army-Navy surplus store not earned by military duty, although he did serve it was just that he couldn’t bear to wear anything that reminded him of ‘Nam), slightly faded, faded from too much washing and wear blue jeans, sturdy, reliable, purposeful work boots (although sometimes they felt like lead, heavy atomic lead, when he had to walk to some more practical road in search of a ride), bedroll nicely slung over one shoulder, a small green knapsack over the other carrying, in toto, all his worldly goods. Something was definitely off-kilter in his world in this year, this 1974 year that had started out with so much promise. Now in hard August, hard hitchhike road August, no girl, no home except the road, no real dough, and no prospects, add in no sense of order in his universe and there you have it. A serious recipe for road weariness.
Deep in those bleak house thoughts Fritz almost missed the Volkswagen mini-bus that was slowing down just ahead of him. Or maybe, reflecting on the bleak road idea, he no longer believed, except as apparitions, old time mini-buses, or converted yellow brick multi-colored school buses that trolled the roads in great profusion just a couple of years back still existed. This trip had been dealt out, been pushed forward, mainly, by tired big-load cross-country truckers looking for white-line road company, a son’s company really, and by an occasional curious tourist-type wondering, probably wondering hard, why a good looking, although oddly dressed, young man who looked like he knew what he was doing was out on some no job, no home, no prospects road in Muncie, Indiana, Moline, Illinois, Omaha, Nebraska, Dallas, Texas or a million other just names stops on the road west.
“Hey, brother where are you heading?” came a question for the front passenger seat of the now fully stopped van. And the question, once Fritz came to his road senses, was uttered by a very sweet-looking woman all dressed in Native American regalia. “Los Angeles, and then Big Sur” answered Fritz. “Oh, we are going to the Intertribal gathering just up the road at Red Rock for a few days and then heading to Joshua Tree, does that help you?,” came the sing-song response. Fritz, for just a minute, thought that he would thank them for stopping but that he needed a longer ride and needed to make faster time pass but that sing-song voice, that van apparition, and just that flat-out road weariness made him say “Hell, yes, it’s good to see fellow freaks on the road, it has been a while. What are you guys the lost tribe that they are always talking about in the books?” That brought a chuckle from the occupants of the van as the side door slid open and Fritz threw his gear on to a mattress, maybe two mattresses, that filled the floor of the whole back portion of the van. And on that matting were two kindred guys, and a youngish woman, a girl really. “Hi, I’m Fritz,” he said as he closed the door and the van started up. “Hi, I’m Zeke,” Hi, I’m Benjy,” yelled the two kindred over the roar of the engine. ‘I’m Moonbeam,” whispered the girl, who actually, on closer inspection was older than a girl and also clearly deep in some mystical drug experience, either coming down or going up Fritz could not tell. From the front the sing-song voice called out her name, “I’m Sally Running Water and I am one-sixteenth Hopi,” and the driver yelled out, “Hi, I’m Doc and I know how to cure you,” as he passed back a pipe filled with some herb. “We are the Pink Fogs and we’ve just finished a rock concert in Austin and Sally wanted to go to the Intertribal to see some of her people before we head to Joshua Tree for the big alterno-rock jam that will put us on the rock ‘n’ rock map.” Just them Doc, steady, rock-like Doc, who was the obvious leader of this group, maybe more like a flock shepard turned the tape deck up and the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter came blasting away at us and they all, collectively, started blasting away at it in response-yes, "it’s just a shot away, just a shot away." Fritz, now a little high from that passed pipe, thought yes I finally made a right decision, these are my people, lost tribe or not.
Between this and that it was dark, very dark but also star-bright dark, where they got to Red Rock, found their assigned site and started to set up kitchen stuff for a meal, and prepare the van for sleeping, if sleeping time ever came. Doc, as Docs will do, started a fire from some heavy brush gathered in the area, and Fritz noticed as he hadn’t before in the dark that the campsite was adjacent to a high cavern wall and as the flames of the fire grew stronger he could see shadows, almost human form shadows bouncing off those walls. And in the distance, although he, to be honest was too stoned to know how distant, he could hear the steady, slow, rhythmic pounding of the war drums, or rain drums, or just plain entertaining drums that provided an almost mesmerizing effect. Fritz also noticed that Sally and Doc seemed to be sitting together just now, her head on his shoulder, listening to that same incessant hypnotic sound. And Zeke and Moonbeam were doing the same. Benjy was sitting by himself, off to the side just a little, and maybe a little miffed that he had “lost” the girl wars. And of course Fritz, new boy Fritz, was left to fend for himself. And just that moment he wished, he wished to high heaven, that he had not been girl-less and wished that Cindy was here with him.
Suddenly the air was filled not only with the tattoo of drums but sounds of rattles and some almost bass guitar sound. And that sudden change brought the little Pink Fog campsite to life. Because, for whatever reason, Doc started singing out in a very strong bass the words to that old time doo- wop rock song by the Five Satins, In The Still Of The Night, and his fellow Pink Fogs joined in on the harmony, even Benjy. Hell, even Fritz did a low-slung harmony just to help fill the air. And Doc, or Doc and Sally, or just Sally, Fritz never did quite figure it out after than song was over, started up on The Penquins Earth Angel and that really got Fritz kind of weepy for Cindy, and for his not so long ago lost youth.
But here is the real funny, funny odd, part. Fritz noticed as the flames flickered from the campfire that on the walls he could see human figures, women’s figures, a couple anyway, and when he looked over in the dark he noticed that a couple of young women, twenty-ish women from what he could tell, women who in any case knew, knew as well as he did the words, and, more importantly, the spirit and growing up absurd meaning behind the songs, and were moving closer to the circle. Then, like it was contagious, Zeke started in on the Capris’ There’s A Moon Out Tonight (and there was) and all joined in. Fritz waved the two shadowy women toward the circle and noticed that in the meantime they had been joined by two other youngish, twenty-ish women.
Benjy got into the act having also noticed the bevy of women standing in some ill-defined outer circle and bellowed out Don & Juan’s What’s Your Name and backed it up with Robert & Johnny’s We Belong Together. The other members of the troupe backing him up, backing him up big time. Now they are all in one circle, even Benjy is in tight, and with the drums and other instruments still beating time for them Fritz starts out low-voiced just above a whisper Johnnie & Joe’s Over The Mountain; Across The Sea as one of the women moved over to sit right next to him, almost on his lap. And that night, that ancient flame, ancient sounds starry night, was the night Red Rock did indeed doo-wop.
CD Review
25 All-Time Doo Wop Hits, various artists, Varese Sarabonde Records, 2002
Road weary, yes, road weary all right that is what Fritz Taylor said to himself repeatedly as he waited, waited his third hour waited, by this god-forsaken exit just off Interstate 40 heading west out of Albuquerque on the seemingly endless hitchhike road. This trip had more than its fair share of mishaps. Road weary let’s just call it that, and let’s call it also a sudden realization by Fritz that something was not right in the world, the hitchhike world. For example, a couple of years back there was no way in hell, or god’s good green earth, have it your way, that poster hippie hitchhike boy, Fritz Taylor, would be standing for his third hour, christ, his third hour, on a major highway west looking for a ride.
Not Fritz, decked out in obligatory olive drab army jacket (World War II version, bought at some ubiquitous Army-Navy surplus store not earned by military duty, although he did serve it was just that he couldn’t bear to wear anything that reminded him of ‘Nam), slightly faded, faded from too much washing and wear blue jeans, sturdy, reliable, purposeful work boots (although sometimes they felt like lead, heavy atomic lead, when he had to walk to some more practical road in search of a ride), bedroll nicely slung over one shoulder, a small green knapsack over the other carrying, in toto, all his worldly goods. Something was definitely off-kilter in his world in this year, this 1974 year that had started out with so much promise. Now in hard August, hard hitchhike road August, no girl, no home except the road, no real dough, and no prospects, add in no sense of order in his universe and there you have it. A serious recipe for road weariness.
Deep in those bleak house thoughts Fritz almost missed the Volkswagen mini-bus that was slowing down just ahead of him. Or maybe, reflecting on the bleak road idea, he no longer believed, except as apparitions, old time mini-buses, or converted yellow brick multi-colored school buses that trolled the roads in great profusion just a couple of years back still existed. This trip had been dealt out, been pushed forward, mainly, by tired big-load cross-country truckers looking for white-line road company, a son’s company really, and by an occasional curious tourist-type wondering, probably wondering hard, why a good looking, although oddly dressed, young man who looked like he knew what he was doing was out on some no job, no home, no prospects road in Muncie, Indiana, Moline, Illinois, Omaha, Nebraska, Dallas, Texas or a million other just names stops on the road west.
“Hey, brother where are you heading?” came a question for the front passenger seat of the now fully stopped van. And the question, once Fritz came to his road senses, was uttered by a very sweet-looking woman all dressed in Native American regalia. “Los Angeles, and then Big Sur” answered Fritz. “Oh, we are going to the Intertribal gathering just up the road at Red Rock for a few days and then heading to Joshua Tree, does that help you?,” came the sing-song response. Fritz, for just a minute, thought that he would thank them for stopping but that he needed a longer ride and needed to make faster time pass but that sing-song voice, that van apparition, and just that flat-out road weariness made him say “Hell, yes, it’s good to see fellow freaks on the road, it has been a while. What are you guys the lost tribe that they are always talking about in the books?” That brought a chuckle from the occupants of the van as the side door slid open and Fritz threw his gear on to a mattress, maybe two mattresses, that filled the floor of the whole back portion of the van. And on that matting were two kindred guys, and a youngish woman, a girl really. “Hi, I’m Fritz,” he said as he closed the door and the van started up. “Hi, I’m Zeke,” Hi, I’m Benjy,” yelled the two kindred over the roar of the engine. ‘I’m Moonbeam,” whispered the girl, who actually, on closer inspection was older than a girl and also clearly deep in some mystical drug experience, either coming down or going up Fritz could not tell. From the front the sing-song voice called out her name, “I’m Sally Running Water and I am one-sixteenth Hopi,” and the driver yelled out, “Hi, I’m Doc and I know how to cure you,” as he passed back a pipe filled with some herb. “We are the Pink Fogs and we’ve just finished a rock concert in Austin and Sally wanted to go to the Intertribal to see some of her people before we head to Joshua Tree for the big alterno-rock jam that will put us on the rock ‘n’ rock map.” Just them Doc, steady, rock-like Doc, who was the obvious leader of this group, maybe more like a flock shepard turned the tape deck up and the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter came blasting away at us and they all, collectively, started blasting away at it in response-yes, "it’s just a shot away, just a shot away." Fritz, now a little high from that passed pipe, thought yes I finally made a right decision, these are my people, lost tribe or not.
Between this and that it was dark, very dark but also star-bright dark, where they got to Red Rock, found their assigned site and started to set up kitchen stuff for a meal, and prepare the van for sleeping, if sleeping time ever came. Doc, as Docs will do, started a fire from some heavy brush gathered in the area, and Fritz noticed as he hadn’t before in the dark that the campsite was adjacent to a high cavern wall and as the flames of the fire grew stronger he could see shadows, almost human form shadows bouncing off those walls. And in the distance, although he, to be honest was too stoned to know how distant, he could hear the steady, slow, rhythmic pounding of the war drums, or rain drums, or just plain entertaining drums that provided an almost mesmerizing effect. Fritz also noticed that Sally and Doc seemed to be sitting together just now, her head on his shoulder, listening to that same incessant hypnotic sound. And Zeke and Moonbeam were doing the same. Benjy was sitting by himself, off to the side just a little, and maybe a little miffed that he had “lost” the girl wars. And of course Fritz, new boy Fritz, was left to fend for himself. And just that moment he wished, he wished to high heaven, that he had not been girl-less and wished that Cindy was here with him.
Suddenly the air was filled not only with the tattoo of drums but sounds of rattles and some almost bass guitar sound. And that sudden change brought the little Pink Fog campsite to life. Because, for whatever reason, Doc started singing out in a very strong bass the words to that old time doo- wop rock song by the Five Satins, In The Still Of The Night, and his fellow Pink Fogs joined in on the harmony, even Benjy. Hell, even Fritz did a low-slung harmony just to help fill the air. And Doc, or Doc and Sally, or just Sally, Fritz never did quite figure it out after than song was over, started up on The Penquins Earth Angel and that really got Fritz kind of weepy for Cindy, and for his not so long ago lost youth.
But here is the real funny, funny odd, part. Fritz noticed as the flames flickered from the campfire that on the walls he could see human figures, women’s figures, a couple anyway, and when he looked over in the dark he noticed that a couple of young women, twenty-ish women from what he could tell, women who in any case knew, knew as well as he did the words, and, more importantly, the spirit and growing up absurd meaning behind the songs, and were moving closer to the circle. Then, like it was contagious, Zeke started in on the Capris’ There’s A Moon Out Tonight (and there was) and all joined in. Fritz waved the two shadowy women toward the circle and noticed that in the meantime they had been joined by two other youngish, twenty-ish women.
Benjy got into the act having also noticed the bevy of women standing in some ill-defined outer circle and bellowed out Don & Juan’s What’s Your Name and backed it up with Robert & Johnny’s We Belong Together. The other members of the troupe backing him up, backing him up big time. Now they are all in one circle, even Benjy is in tight, and with the drums and other instruments still beating time for them Fritz starts out low-voiced just above a whisper Johnnie & Joe’s Over The Mountain; Across The Sea as one of the women moved over to sit right next to him, almost on his lap. And that night, that ancient flame, ancient sounds starry night, was the night Red Rock did indeed doo-wop.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
*From The "Spartacist" Journal Archives-Leon Trotsky's "What is a 'Mass Paper'?"
Markin comment:
This article below is still a pretty good general Communist exposition on this subject.
Note: In the interest of political clarity please be aware that the material provided here from the early issues of the Spartacist theoretical journal archives of what is now the International Communist League (ICL, formerly International Spartacist Tendency, ISpT) is posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website. I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, although, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense- legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
*********
What is a "Mass Paper"?
By Leon Trotsky, 30 November 1935, published in The Crisis of the French Section (1935-36)
To the Members of the Bolshevik-Leninist Group:
I have just learned that my letter to the Political Bureau on the new "mass paper" ["Turn to the Masses!"] was read to the general meeting. I can only rejoice if it succeeded in clarifying the situation a little. I addressed myself first to the Political Bureau in the hope that the question could be solved without a new discussion on the foundations determined by the last national conference. But it developed that the initiators of La Commune, after having prepared their undertaking outside the organization, and in fact against both the national and international organizations, decided to provoke a discussion after the fait accompli. In these circumstances it would perhaps not be without value if I enlarged in a more precise manner upon the criticisms and suggestions contained in my letter to the Political Bureau.
1. What is a "mass paper"? The question is not new. It can be said that the whole history of the revolutionary movement has been filled with discussions on the "mass paper." It is the elementary duty of a revolutionary organization to make its political newspaper as accessible as possible to the masses. This task cannot be effectively solved except as a function of the growth of the organization and its cadres, who must pave the way to the masses for the newspaper--since it is not enough, of course, to call a publication a "mass paper" for the masses to really accept it. But quite often revolutionary impatience (which becomes transformed easily into opportunist impatience) leads to this conclusion: The masses do not come to us because our ideas are too complicated and our slogans too advanced. It is therefore necessary to simplify our program, water down our slogans--in short, to throw out some ballast. Basically, this means: Our slogans must correspond not to the objective situation, not to the relation of classes, analyzed by the Marxist method, but to subjective assessments (extremely superficial and inadequate ones) of what the "masses" can or cannot accept. But what masses? The mass is not homogeneous. It develops. It feels the pressure of events. It will accept tomorrow what it will not accept today. Our cadres will blaze the trail with increasing success for our ideas and slogans, which will be shown to be correct, because they are confirmed by the march of events and not by subjective and personal assessments.
2. A mass paper is distinguished from a theoretical review or from a journal for cadres not by the slogans but by the manner in which they are presented. The cadre journal unfolds for its readers all the steps of the Marxist analysis. The mass paper presents only its results, basing itself at the same time on the immediate experience of the masses themselves. It is far more difficult to write in a Marxist manner for the masses than it is to write for cadres.
3. Let us suppose for a moment that the GBL consented to "simplify" our program, to renounce the slogans for the new party and for the Fourth International, to renounce implacable criticism of the social patriots (naming them by name), to renounce systematic criticism of the Revolutionary Left and of Pivert personally. I do not know if this newspaper would become, with the help of a magic wand, a mass paper. I doubt it. But it would in any event become a SAPist or Pivertist paper. The essence of the Pivert tendency is just that: to accept "revolutionary" slogans, but not to draw from them the necessary conclusions, which are the break with Blum and Zyromsky, the creation of the new party and the new International. Without that, all the "revolutionary" slogans become null and void. At the present stage the Pivert agitation is a sort of opium for the revolutionary workers. Pivert wants to teach them that one can be for revolutionary struggle, for "revolutionary action" (to borrow a phrase now in vogue), and remain at the same time on good terms with chauvinist scum. Everything depends on your "tone," you see? It is the tone that makes the music. If the tiger cooed like a pigeon the whole world would be enchanted. But we, with our rude language, we must say that the leaders of the Revolutionary Left are demoralizing and prostituting revolutionary consciousness.
I ask you: If we renounced the slogans which are dictated by the objective situation, and which constitute the very essence of our program, in what shall we be distinguished from the Pivertists? In nothing. We would only be second-rate Pivertists. But if the "masses" should have to decide for the Pivertists, they would prefer the first-rate to the second.
4. I take up the little appeal printed for "La Commune--organ of revolutionary (?) action (?)." This document provides us with a striking demonstration (unsought by its authors) of some of the ideas expressed above. "La Commune will speak the language of the factories and the fields. It will tell of the misery which reigns there; it will express its passions and rouse to revolt."
This is a very laudable intention, although the masses know perfectly well their own misery and their feelings of revolt (stifled by the patriotic apparatuses with the aid of the Pivertists). What the masses can demand of a newspaper is a clear program and a correct orientation. But precisely on this question the appeal is utterly silent. Why? Because it wants more to conceal its ideas than to express them. It accepts the SAPist (centrist) recipe: in seeking the line of least resistance do not say what is. The program of the Fourth International, that’s for "us," for the big shots of the leadership. And the masses? What are the masses? They can rest content with a quarter, or even a tenth, of the program. This mentality we call elitism, of both an opportunist and, at the same time, an adventurist type. It is a very dangerous attitude, comrades. It is not the attitude of a Marxist.
We find in the appeal, after the sentence quoted, a number of historical reminiscences: "To the sons and grandsons of the fighters of the Croix-Rousse, of those who manned the barricades of June 1848, of the Communards of 1871, La Commune says," etc. (followed by rhetoric à la Magdeleine Paz). I do not know, truly, if the rebelling masses need literary reminiscences and somewhat hollow rhetoric disguised as a program.
But here is where the most important part begins: "La Commune is not going to add itself to the multiplicity of tendencies in the workers’ movement." What sovereign scorn for the "multiplicity" of existing tendencies! What does that mean? If all the tendencies are wrong or insufficient, a new one has to be created, the true one, the correct one. If there are true and false tendencies, then the workers must be taught to distinguish among them. The masses must be called on to join the correct tendency to fight the false ones. But no, the initiators of La Commune, somewhat like Romain Rolland, place themselves "above the battle." Such a procedure is absolutely unworthy of Marxists.
After this a number of names are proclaimed in order to particularize, however little, the utterly vague character of the new paper. I set aside my own name, which La Commune claims without the slightest justification. Being among the living, I can at least defend myself. But the others, our common teachers, the real leaders of revolutionary socialism? Unfortunately, they are defenseless. The appeal names Marx and Blanqui. What does that mean? Do they want to create a new "synthesis" of Marxism and Blanquism? How will the masses disentangle themselves from the combination of these two names? A little farther on we find Lenin. But the Stalinists claim him also. If you do not explain to the masses that you are against the Stalinist tendency, they will have to prefer l’Humanité to La Commune. This combination of names explains nothing. It only extends and deepens the ambiguity.
And here is the high point: "La Commune is launched by militants belonging to various tendencies to bring about the rise of a great army of communards." What does this mean, this unknown crew of anonymous, unknown "various tendencies"? What tendencies are involved? Why are they (still unknown) grouped outside and against the other tendencies? The purpose of creating a "great army of communards" is laudable. But it is necessary not to forget that this army, once created (1871), suffered a terrific catastrophe because that magnificent army lacked a program and a leadership.
The conclusion: The appeal could have been written by Marceau Pivert (in collaboration with Magdeleine Paz) except for one point--the name of the author of these lines. But as for me, I repeat, I am implacably opposed to this equivocal and anti-Marxist appeal.
5. The adherence of the GBL to the SFIO has proved absolutely correct. It was a step forward. The Mulhouse congress was the high point of the Bolshevik-Leninist influence in the SFIO. It was necessary to understand that the limit of the possibilities within the Socialist Party was being reached (at least for the adults). It was necessary to utilize the newly won and fresh authority to influence new and virgin elements outside the Socialist Party, whose social composition is miserable. It is this suggestion which I expressed in a letter since published in an internal bulletin of the GBL (no. 6, letter of June 10), and which I permit myself to recommend to the comrades for rereading in connection with the present letter. Passing through Paris [on the way to Norway] I met with several comrades, especially some of the future promoters of La Commune, who were in strong opposition to the idea of a new turn. These comrades had taken a liking to their activity in reformist and centrist circles and hoped to be able to progress further and further. It was a mistake. Time and strength were wasted fruitlessly instead of emulating the youth, whose orientation was more correct because it was directed toward the young workers outside the Socialist Party.
Then came the expulsions at Lille. I, for my part, regarded them as an act of liberation, because they expressed the reality: the impossibility of fruitful future activity in the ranks of the SFIO, especially with the approach of war and fusion with the Stalinists. It seemed that the fact of the expulsion was so eloquent as to spare us the need for any discussion as to what road to take. It was necessary to open up a vigorous and implacable offensive against the expellers, not as "splitters" (that’s the small talk of Pivert), but primarily as the valets of French imperialism. It was necessary at the same time to criticize Pivert openly, since he had taken the place of Zyromsky in covering the left wing of the People’s Front. It was necessary to develop the program of committees of action, to oppose collaboration with the Radicals, and to proclaim openly the necessity for preparing a new party to save the proletariat and its younger generation. Instead of that, the Commune group sought above all to win the sympathies of the Revolutionary Left by personal maneuvering, by combinations in the lobbies, and above all by abdication of our slogans and of criticism of the centrists. Marceau Pivert declared two or three months ago that the struggle against "Trotskyism" is the sign of a reactionary tendency. But now he himself, led by the SAP people, represents this reactionary tendency. The Revolutionary Left has become the most immediate and most noxious obstacle in the development of the revolutionary vanguard. That is what has to be said openly and everywhere, i.e., especially in a mass newspaper. But the Commune group has gone so far in its romance with the Pivertists that one is forced to ask if these comrades are still with us or if they have passed over to centrist positions. That is where one gets when one throws principles overboard and adapts oneself longer than is necessary to the reformist apparatus and its centrist valets.
6. We may ask: and Révolution? It is also not the paper of our tendency. Nevertheless we participate in it. That is correct, but Révolution is the paper of an organization which everybody knows--the Young Socialists. The newspaper is led by two tendencies which are drawing close and which must inevitably fuse. The progressive character of the Revolutionary Socialist Youth is determined precisely by this fact: that they are turning toward the Bolshevik-Leninists and not toward the Revolutionary Left. (The episodic adherence of Comrade Zeller to the Revolutionary Left, after all that had happened, was a mistake the responsibility for which must be shared by the Commune group.)
Révolution is a living, moving paper which can become the paper of the proletarian youth. To accomplish this task, however, Révolution must not fall into the shadows of La Commune’s confusion, but must concretize its position—i.e., definitively accept the slogans of the Bolshevik-Leninists.
7. La Vérité is an absolute necessity. But it must liberate itself from the centrist influences which resulted in the appeal of La Commune. La Vérité must resume its fighting, intransigent character. The most important object of its criticism is Pivertism, which is opposed to Leninism and has thus become, by its own characterization, a reactionary tendency.
8. I do not want to analyze in this letter the extraordinary methods employed by the Commune group vis-Ã -vis its own national and international tendency. It is a very important question but nevertheless secondary in comparison with the question of program and banner.
I believe, dear comrades, that you have the greatest opportunities before you. You are at last going to reap the fruits of your efforts up to now, but on one condition: that you do not permit a confusion of tendencies, of ideas and banners; that you practice Leninist intransigence more than ever and orient yourselves openly and vigorously toward the new party and the Fourth International.
L. Trotsky
This article below is still a pretty good general Communist exposition on this subject.
Note: In the interest of political clarity please be aware that the material provided here from the early issues of the Spartacist theoretical journal archives of what is now the International Communist League (ICL, formerly International Spartacist Tendency, ISpT) is posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website. I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, although, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense- legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
*********
What is a "Mass Paper"?
By Leon Trotsky, 30 November 1935, published in The Crisis of the French Section (1935-36)
To the Members of the Bolshevik-Leninist Group:
I have just learned that my letter to the Political Bureau on the new "mass paper" ["Turn to the Masses!"] was read to the general meeting. I can only rejoice if it succeeded in clarifying the situation a little. I addressed myself first to the Political Bureau in the hope that the question could be solved without a new discussion on the foundations determined by the last national conference. But it developed that the initiators of La Commune, after having prepared their undertaking outside the organization, and in fact against both the national and international organizations, decided to provoke a discussion after the fait accompli. In these circumstances it would perhaps not be without value if I enlarged in a more precise manner upon the criticisms and suggestions contained in my letter to the Political Bureau.
1. What is a "mass paper"? The question is not new. It can be said that the whole history of the revolutionary movement has been filled with discussions on the "mass paper." It is the elementary duty of a revolutionary organization to make its political newspaper as accessible as possible to the masses. This task cannot be effectively solved except as a function of the growth of the organization and its cadres, who must pave the way to the masses for the newspaper--since it is not enough, of course, to call a publication a "mass paper" for the masses to really accept it. But quite often revolutionary impatience (which becomes transformed easily into opportunist impatience) leads to this conclusion: The masses do not come to us because our ideas are too complicated and our slogans too advanced. It is therefore necessary to simplify our program, water down our slogans--in short, to throw out some ballast. Basically, this means: Our slogans must correspond not to the objective situation, not to the relation of classes, analyzed by the Marxist method, but to subjective assessments (extremely superficial and inadequate ones) of what the "masses" can or cannot accept. But what masses? The mass is not homogeneous. It develops. It feels the pressure of events. It will accept tomorrow what it will not accept today. Our cadres will blaze the trail with increasing success for our ideas and slogans, which will be shown to be correct, because they are confirmed by the march of events and not by subjective and personal assessments.
2. A mass paper is distinguished from a theoretical review or from a journal for cadres not by the slogans but by the manner in which they are presented. The cadre journal unfolds for its readers all the steps of the Marxist analysis. The mass paper presents only its results, basing itself at the same time on the immediate experience of the masses themselves. It is far more difficult to write in a Marxist manner for the masses than it is to write for cadres.
3. Let us suppose for a moment that the GBL consented to "simplify" our program, to renounce the slogans for the new party and for the Fourth International, to renounce implacable criticism of the social patriots (naming them by name), to renounce systematic criticism of the Revolutionary Left and of Pivert personally. I do not know if this newspaper would become, with the help of a magic wand, a mass paper. I doubt it. But it would in any event become a SAPist or Pivertist paper. The essence of the Pivert tendency is just that: to accept "revolutionary" slogans, but not to draw from them the necessary conclusions, which are the break with Blum and Zyromsky, the creation of the new party and the new International. Without that, all the "revolutionary" slogans become null and void. At the present stage the Pivert agitation is a sort of opium for the revolutionary workers. Pivert wants to teach them that one can be for revolutionary struggle, for "revolutionary action" (to borrow a phrase now in vogue), and remain at the same time on good terms with chauvinist scum. Everything depends on your "tone," you see? It is the tone that makes the music. If the tiger cooed like a pigeon the whole world would be enchanted. But we, with our rude language, we must say that the leaders of the Revolutionary Left are demoralizing and prostituting revolutionary consciousness.
I ask you: If we renounced the slogans which are dictated by the objective situation, and which constitute the very essence of our program, in what shall we be distinguished from the Pivertists? In nothing. We would only be second-rate Pivertists. But if the "masses" should have to decide for the Pivertists, they would prefer the first-rate to the second.
4. I take up the little appeal printed for "La Commune--organ of revolutionary (?) action (?)." This document provides us with a striking demonstration (unsought by its authors) of some of the ideas expressed above. "La Commune will speak the language of the factories and the fields. It will tell of the misery which reigns there; it will express its passions and rouse to revolt."
This is a very laudable intention, although the masses know perfectly well their own misery and their feelings of revolt (stifled by the patriotic apparatuses with the aid of the Pivertists). What the masses can demand of a newspaper is a clear program and a correct orientation. But precisely on this question the appeal is utterly silent. Why? Because it wants more to conceal its ideas than to express them. It accepts the SAPist (centrist) recipe: in seeking the line of least resistance do not say what is. The program of the Fourth International, that’s for "us," for the big shots of the leadership. And the masses? What are the masses? They can rest content with a quarter, or even a tenth, of the program. This mentality we call elitism, of both an opportunist and, at the same time, an adventurist type. It is a very dangerous attitude, comrades. It is not the attitude of a Marxist.
We find in the appeal, after the sentence quoted, a number of historical reminiscences: "To the sons and grandsons of the fighters of the Croix-Rousse, of those who manned the barricades of June 1848, of the Communards of 1871, La Commune says," etc. (followed by rhetoric à la Magdeleine Paz). I do not know, truly, if the rebelling masses need literary reminiscences and somewhat hollow rhetoric disguised as a program.
But here is where the most important part begins: "La Commune is not going to add itself to the multiplicity of tendencies in the workers’ movement." What sovereign scorn for the "multiplicity" of existing tendencies! What does that mean? If all the tendencies are wrong or insufficient, a new one has to be created, the true one, the correct one. If there are true and false tendencies, then the workers must be taught to distinguish among them. The masses must be called on to join the correct tendency to fight the false ones. But no, the initiators of La Commune, somewhat like Romain Rolland, place themselves "above the battle." Such a procedure is absolutely unworthy of Marxists.
After this a number of names are proclaimed in order to particularize, however little, the utterly vague character of the new paper. I set aside my own name, which La Commune claims without the slightest justification. Being among the living, I can at least defend myself. But the others, our common teachers, the real leaders of revolutionary socialism? Unfortunately, they are defenseless. The appeal names Marx and Blanqui. What does that mean? Do they want to create a new "synthesis" of Marxism and Blanquism? How will the masses disentangle themselves from the combination of these two names? A little farther on we find Lenin. But the Stalinists claim him also. If you do not explain to the masses that you are against the Stalinist tendency, they will have to prefer l’Humanité to La Commune. This combination of names explains nothing. It only extends and deepens the ambiguity.
And here is the high point: "La Commune is launched by militants belonging to various tendencies to bring about the rise of a great army of communards." What does this mean, this unknown crew of anonymous, unknown "various tendencies"? What tendencies are involved? Why are they (still unknown) grouped outside and against the other tendencies? The purpose of creating a "great army of communards" is laudable. But it is necessary not to forget that this army, once created (1871), suffered a terrific catastrophe because that magnificent army lacked a program and a leadership.
The conclusion: The appeal could have been written by Marceau Pivert (in collaboration with Magdeleine Paz) except for one point--the name of the author of these lines. But as for me, I repeat, I am implacably opposed to this equivocal and anti-Marxist appeal.
5. The adherence of the GBL to the SFIO has proved absolutely correct. It was a step forward. The Mulhouse congress was the high point of the Bolshevik-Leninist influence in the SFIO. It was necessary to understand that the limit of the possibilities within the Socialist Party was being reached (at least for the adults). It was necessary to utilize the newly won and fresh authority to influence new and virgin elements outside the Socialist Party, whose social composition is miserable. It is this suggestion which I expressed in a letter since published in an internal bulletin of the GBL (no. 6, letter of June 10), and which I permit myself to recommend to the comrades for rereading in connection with the present letter. Passing through Paris [on the way to Norway] I met with several comrades, especially some of the future promoters of La Commune, who were in strong opposition to the idea of a new turn. These comrades had taken a liking to their activity in reformist and centrist circles and hoped to be able to progress further and further. It was a mistake. Time and strength were wasted fruitlessly instead of emulating the youth, whose orientation was more correct because it was directed toward the young workers outside the Socialist Party.
Then came the expulsions at Lille. I, for my part, regarded them as an act of liberation, because they expressed the reality: the impossibility of fruitful future activity in the ranks of the SFIO, especially with the approach of war and fusion with the Stalinists. It seemed that the fact of the expulsion was so eloquent as to spare us the need for any discussion as to what road to take. It was necessary to open up a vigorous and implacable offensive against the expellers, not as "splitters" (that’s the small talk of Pivert), but primarily as the valets of French imperialism. It was necessary at the same time to criticize Pivert openly, since he had taken the place of Zyromsky in covering the left wing of the People’s Front. It was necessary to develop the program of committees of action, to oppose collaboration with the Radicals, and to proclaim openly the necessity for preparing a new party to save the proletariat and its younger generation. Instead of that, the Commune group sought above all to win the sympathies of the Revolutionary Left by personal maneuvering, by combinations in the lobbies, and above all by abdication of our slogans and of criticism of the centrists. Marceau Pivert declared two or three months ago that the struggle against "Trotskyism" is the sign of a reactionary tendency. But now he himself, led by the SAP people, represents this reactionary tendency. The Revolutionary Left has become the most immediate and most noxious obstacle in the development of the revolutionary vanguard. That is what has to be said openly and everywhere, i.e., especially in a mass newspaper. But the Commune group has gone so far in its romance with the Pivertists that one is forced to ask if these comrades are still with us or if they have passed over to centrist positions. That is where one gets when one throws principles overboard and adapts oneself longer than is necessary to the reformist apparatus and its centrist valets.
6. We may ask: and Révolution? It is also not the paper of our tendency. Nevertheless we participate in it. That is correct, but Révolution is the paper of an organization which everybody knows--the Young Socialists. The newspaper is led by two tendencies which are drawing close and which must inevitably fuse. The progressive character of the Revolutionary Socialist Youth is determined precisely by this fact: that they are turning toward the Bolshevik-Leninists and not toward the Revolutionary Left. (The episodic adherence of Comrade Zeller to the Revolutionary Left, after all that had happened, was a mistake the responsibility for which must be shared by the Commune group.)
Révolution is a living, moving paper which can become the paper of the proletarian youth. To accomplish this task, however, Révolution must not fall into the shadows of La Commune’s confusion, but must concretize its position—i.e., definitively accept the slogans of the Bolshevik-Leninists.
7. La Vérité is an absolute necessity. But it must liberate itself from the centrist influences which resulted in the appeal of La Commune. La Vérité must resume its fighting, intransigent character. The most important object of its criticism is Pivertism, which is opposed to Leninism and has thus become, by its own characterization, a reactionary tendency.
8. I do not want to analyze in this letter the extraordinary methods employed by the Commune group vis-Ã -vis its own national and international tendency. It is a very important question but nevertheless secondary in comparison with the question of program and banner.
I believe, dear comrades, that you have the greatest opportunities before you. You are at last going to reap the fruits of your efforts up to now, but on one condition: that you do not permit a confusion of tendencies, of ideas and banners; that you practice Leninist intransigence more than ever and orient yourselves openly and vigorously toward the new party and the Fourth International.
L. Trotsky
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