Click on the headline to link to the West Coast Port Shutdown website.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era which will get sorted out in the future.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to immiserate the mass of society for the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Thursday, January 05, 2012
The Latest From The “Occupy Oakland” Website-This Is Class War-We Say No More-Take The Offensive- Defend The Occupy Movement!- Defend The Oakland Commune!-Notes Of A Street Corner Agitator- In Six-Part Harmony
Click on the headline to link to Occupy Oakland website for the latest from the Bay Area vanguard battleground in the struggle for social justice.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Notes Of A Street Corner Agitator- In Six-Part Harmony
Markin comment:
I have spent the better portion of my life fighting for one progressive cause or another, sometimes one issue, sometimes several issues in tandem. Mainly those fights have been with small crowds about, but not always. The always part is that throughout it all I have been ready, mostly ready anyway, to get up on the street corner soapbox, literally or figuratively as the case called for, and shout out, shout out until I was hoarse at times, the glad tidings of the new more equitable society a-bornin’. The following sketches are representative of those efforts although, except for the last sketch, they are not the actual words used but reflect the moments with a certain literary and political license.
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At the Parkman Bandstand on the Tremont Street side of the Boston Common or anyplace in between that location and the Park Street subway station on any one of several early weekday evenings in the summer of 1961. In those days time and space was reserved for anyone to speak from the ever present soapbox (literally a sturdy wooden box that one stood on to be hear above the crowd although the box used may, or may not, have started out life as a container for soap) about any subject that came to mind. Said speeches were, as now, directed to a small lingering audience and a larger indifference (or, occasionally hostile) audience glancing by as they quickly headed home, or went about their shopping business.
As we hone in on the scene the previous speaker, an elderly lady, small, very dignified, very well dressed, and very morally correct, had just finished up her remark sweetly railing against the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the name of her grandchildren’s future. The next speaker, a ragamuffin of a boy of fifteen, me, Peter Paul Markin, red-faced, Irish red-faced from over- exposure at the Adamsville Beach gotten a few days before, was ready to speak. His hands were sweaty, his bedraggled odd-ball Bargain Center purple shirt was wet with the summer humidity moisture that usually kept him indoors on such days, his pants, his de rigueur black chinos without cuffs were clinging to his off-shaped body as he leaped forward to the unknown on his maiden public speech on any subject. He starts a little timidly, weakly, and lowly and is asked to speak up by the few people who have stopped by that moment to listen up to what a mere boy had to say about anything:
“There is an evil in America, a terrible wrong going on right this minute down South, down in places like Alabama and Mississippi and we have to do something about it right now. Most of you have read the news, the news that kids, kids, just like me, except they are black are going up against the police so they do not have to be treated as second-class citizens, or really just to get out of slavery days. And older people too, people who work like slaves on the farms for no money, who can’t vote, can’t pay the money to vote, and can’t get out from under the racists who control their lives. They are fighting too, fighting as best they can under the great leadership of Doctor Martin Luther King who seems to know what he is doing. [From a passer-by: “Nigger-lover, go back to Africa with them, for chrissakes”]. No, no that man has it all wrong we were all born here and this is where the fight is. But you can see what we are up against and not just down South but here on the Common and over in my own hometown, North Adamsville.
Let me continue, although I am a little rattled by what that guy said. See he doesn’t know we are really fighting for him too. What I was trying to say was that we can do something here, here right now. You might have heard last winter that a bunch of college students down in North Carolina, a bunch of black kids and a few white ones too, tried to go eat lunch at Woolworth’s, a place just like the one over on Washington Street. A place where you probably have gone to eat just like me and had one of their great grilled cheese sandwiches, or something. Shouldn’t people be able to do that without being bothered? I want you to help us out by standing with us and do not eat at Woolworths’s okay. [Another voice, this time from the edge of the audience- “Commie, go back to Russia and take your kind with you.”] No, I ain’t no commie, no way, but you don’t have to be a commie to see that it just isn’t right that people can’t eat where they want, or go to school where want or vote just like us.
Let me finish up though so the next speaker can get his turn. What we really need to do is write to our beloved president, our own beloved Irish Jack Kennedy, who last fall when he was running for President I roamed the streets of North Adamsville for putting his literature in doorways and stuff, and tell him to sent his Justice Department people, his brother Bobby, down to Mississippi right now and straighten things out. Straighten things out so that Negros can have the same kind of dreams as he talked about in his inauguration speech in January. Will you do that? Thanks. [Sight applause and a few yeses] “
As I turned to get off the platform to give time to the next speaker from the back of the audience I heard a distinct voice, distinct black southern voice say in a low tone, “Praise be, brother, praise be.”
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I have put on my “soapbox” street corner agitation in many corners of this country since that first day going over the summer heated North Adamsville Bridge to Boston and my first Common speech in the summer of 1961. Just now on this May Day 1971 I am standing this Monday morning, wearily standing after very little sleep this past weekend, near the Washington Monument Mall haranguing a crowd of anti-Vietnam War protestors to keep pushing on although we have suffered a grievous defeat this day, a day when we had proclaimed with much bravado that if the government (the Nixon government just then) did not close down the war then we would close down the government. All we have received for our efforts is tears, tear-gas, and massive arrests after being picked off like fleas by the massive police and military presence and not even a close approximation of shutting down this evil government. But tomorrow, literally tomorrow, is another day, and the anti-warriors need some assurance that their efforts will be more fruitful the next day, and the next day, and next until we meet our goal. End that damn war, and end it fast.
I, Peter Paul Markin, this day only a few months out of an army stockade for my military service anti-war work, am again “courting” arrest on the streets of Washington. It is hot in Washington this day, made hotter by the constant running to avoid the cop traps that seem to be everywhere but I made it to the Mall which is something of a “safe haven” from the madness of the tear-gassed streets and baton-wielding cops. Appearance and attire: youth nation de rigueur army jacket (no, not the GI issue one that I was discharged from the service with but a “real” World War II Army-Navy Store purchase, two dollar purchase), bell-bottomed jeans, army boots (boots that I did leave said service with), a flannel shirt against cold nights, and a trusty green knapsack (not Army issue) with all my
possessions. Hair getting longer uncut from Army times and the wisp of a beard growing to manly length, slowly. My mother’s comment: “You dressed better, much better when you were in high school.” Ya Ma, but now it is cool to be unkempt-don’t you get it. But enough let’s listen to this harangue of the maybe hundred plus crowd seeking verbal shelter from the storm:
“Although I was in the military I do not know much about military strategy and tactics since I spent most of my time fighting against the war-machine including time in the stockade. [Audience; light applause] I do know this though we have suffered a defeat, a military-like defeat today in trying to shut down this evil government, this evil Nixon government which has no legitimacy, none at all and wouldn’t even be here if Bobby Kennedy was alive [Audience: a couple of deep boos] Don’t worry out there I am not going to go on about that. We have more pressing business. We still have to shut this evil government down. We have to stand with the heroic struggles of the Vietnamese people who are today, and every day, facing much more than tear-gas, much more than unlawful assembly arrest, facing everything that the American military monster can throw against them, and maybe more that we don’t even know about. Like that Agent-Orange stuff that we keep hearing about that is destroying everything in sight for years in a country that depends on agriculture. [Audience: Right on, brother].
When we take that kind of beating then we will be able to complain, complain a little, but not until then. [Right on!]. Now I know a lot of people have been talking about leaving D.C. because of what happened today but we said yesterday, a lot of us said we were in this for the long haul, right? [Yes, brother from a few voices] Hey I am afraid too. I don’t want to go back to jail, hell no, but if that is my fate then so be it. Like Che said we have to fight here “in the belly of the beast,” and we have to fight proudly since the fate of the earth depends on it. [“Viva, Che!” from several voices]. Now maybe not everybody can be a street fighter, I know that, but stay and support our efforts okay. Steve Sloan will now come up and tell us about tomorrow’s actions. Down with American imperialism! Down with the American war-machine! Long live the people’s struggles!”
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A warm California October 1981 day, a warm San Francisco day, not always the same thing despite the travel brochures, as I walk up to the small, jerry-rigged “podium” in a corner of City Hall Plaza to make my one hundred and first, or so it seems speech against the unfolding Reagan “doctrine” in Central America, primarily to blast the Soviet-aided Sandinista government to smithereens (and, incidentally the same to the pesky Salvadoran rebels). Overtly, or covertly, blast to smithereens it does not seem to matter to this rabidly anti-communist cabal who have nightmare visions of Cuba 1959 redux.
I am showing just the slightest sights of age, or rather of losing a certain youthful innocence about our capacity, our left-wing capacity, to build a more equitable society in my lifetime and so my demeanor is a little less the “shout to the rafters” jubilee certainty of ten years ago or so. Showing the age part does enter a little though but the few flecks of grey showing up unwanted in my beard, and in my now shortened hair, shortened against the work-a-day world, the nine-to-five grind that requires certain personal compromises. I still retain, fiercely retain, my working-class casual garb; denim jacket, black chino pants worn since de rigueur high school days, busted-blue work shirt (to show I am one with the companeros perhaps), and stolid black shoes better for walking these protest miles these days than the old Chuck Taylor's of old. Let’s listen up as the last speaker, a very eloquent young women speaking on behalf of the emerging sanctuary movement, a movement responding to the very real fears of some illegal political immigrants from all over Central and South America to be deported back to the “black hole” that awaits them if they have to go back, walks back to her chair:
“Hola, Que Tal, Hermanos and Hermanas, Hello, What’s Up, Brothers and Sisters, there is a madness in the land, in this Norte American land and it has a name. Ronald Reagan. And it has an address. Washington, D.C. And the madness? These cowboys, and you who lived here in California in the 1960s under the cowboy-in-chief know this better than I do, are hell-bent on turning back the clock on any social progress here, or anywhere. And just this minute that anywhere is Central America where we have just gained a victory, a tenuous victory against reaction in Nicaragua, and we are fighting like hell to get one in El Salvador. Long live the Sandinista struggle! Long live the FMLN! [Cheers and chanting of those two slogans]
But as long as American imperialism exists, as long as the greatest military machine in history exists, those steps forward are always in danger. And that is why the help that the Soviet Union is providing, and in my opinion not providing enough of, is important. I have my differences with the Soviets, no question, but on this one they are right, right as rain. [A couple of boos and a “Down with Soviet imperialism” are heard.] To keep the American monster from bringing back the banana republic days, the Somoza dictatorship days.
And that is why we need to keep clear who are friends are here in this proxy war, this proxy Cold War just like in Angola a while back. That is why we must call for stepped up Soviet aid and that is why we here in the “belly of the beast,” as Che used to say, need to take concrete steps to help by providing funds for the Sandinista cause. Their struggle is our struggle. If they lose, we lose. It is that simple. Long live the national liberation struggles. Fight for a Workers Republic in Nicaragua!”
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A christ cold day in January, an early January christ cold Park Street subway station on Boston Common 1991 day, the sun going down over the John Hancock building making it even more christ cold as we make a last ditch effort to stop the impending American imperial army (and so-called coalition forces but you know who is running the show) invasion of Iraq over “poor little Kuwait,” jesus. The few hundred people present are forming a circle, a circle of life according to those who insist on such antics, which I assume was meant to ward off the evil spirits and bring peace. Me, I prefer, greatly prefer some labor action, some longshoremen refusing to ship military goods but that is music for the future, maybe. What is not music for the future, and really music from the past, a certain then growing pains past, is that circles, squares, hexagons or whatever geometric shape you are now touting are now replacing the urgency of hard anti-imperialist actions against the American war machine. It is as if this “peace” movement has regressed to those 1961 days when I stood on this very ground and held hands with my line neighbor and spoke of “soft” peace in the world. But that was just youthful ignorance on my part. This christ cold night studied ignorance rules.
Those flecks of grey in beard and hair of ten years ago have marched on, marched on in triumph, although the garments are no longer aged (except of course those chinos, oops, Dockers now, a little larger, a little more room) as I take my turn “in the circle” to have my say after the last dozen speakers have cried to the heavens for peace, like that mantra would solve everything. Listen up to this crowd-pleaser:
“Nobody here should have anything but contempt for Saddam Hussein and what he has done in Kuwait. Let me make that clear, especially clear, since old Saddam used to be American imperialism’s “boy” back in the day when we all loved him, well almost all, okay. Now he is the devil incarnate since his has turned rogue and fouled up the American government’s cozy deals in the oil-rich Middle East.
But this impending war is not about Saddam or what he did or didn’t do to upset the apple cart in the “new world order” that Bush want to put in place. This is about the exercise of American military power, the vaunted war death machine and about American hubris. Now most of the previous speakers, in fact maybe all of them, have chimed in on the need for peace. And, of course, we all want peace, even George H.W. Bush, except his is the peace of the graveyard for the Iraqi people. So here in an America, here in what the great Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara called the “belly of the beast” have a special obligation to oppose the actions of this government. We are duty-bound to defend Iraq against American attack, no question. No question at all. Otherwise we cannot build an anti-war, anti-imperialist movement worthy of the name. The struggle starts here against this government. Down with American imperialism! Defend Iraq Against American Attack!” [Silence, utter silence]
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A late September 2001 Boston day, a day before the leaves begin to turn, before the whitened winter sets in but some time after the hellish 9/11 has fully taken its tool on whatever is left of American democracy. A small clot of anti-imperialist fighters is meeting this day in the courtyard quadrangle at Northeastern University to ward off the impending invasion of Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 and the search for scapegoats, Taliban/Al Qaeda scapegoats. Meeting at the traditional site of protest in Boston, the Common, is out of the question just now with the fury over the World Trade Center still not abated, no even close. Even this spot, this campus location, is shaky, very shaky, as all thoughts of anti-war, anti-imperialism by students and others have gone out the door. Revenge, revenge is the order of the day for all but this clot, this very small clot of activists standing with me.
Although, perhaps, on this occasion it does not matter, in the interest of literary completeness, the writer’s hair and beard are now completely grey and his garb not significantly different from that of ten years ago. What is different, significantly different from ten years ago is that, for one of the few times in his political career, he is afraid, afraid that he will be pummeled for what he has to say in this deeply hostile post 9/11 environment. That every “commie,” “go back to Russia,” get a job,” “Traitor,” remark of the past pales in the anger he can sense and not just from the usual yahoo sources but from “soccer moms” and others who think about politics about once every ten years. Cup your ear and listen up, listen up hard, because he has a catch in his voice this day:
“No one, not one self-respecting human on this planet can do anything but condemn, condemn in no uncertain terms, the criminal acts that took place in New York at the World Trade Center. That should be clear to all the few who hear me today. But there are larger questions posed, posed long ago by the American imperial state when their government decided, decided consciously to rip up and rule this planet for the few. None here, who were old enough, did anything but condemn the American invasion of Iraq in 1991, and the continuing imperialist-driven economic and military sanctions against that state.
Now we are here confronting another American imperial adventure, the revenge invasion of Afghanistan for the acts of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Organizations that we have no truck with, no truck at all. Over the years I have, and others whom I have worked with have, very easily condemned every act of American imperialist from Vietnam to Serbia, and done so forthrightly. On Afghanistan, and the military invasion this time, we have lost some of those former supporters. Revenge for innocent victims, even by an imperial monster, is hard to resist. But it must be said now if it to be said at all. Down with American imperialism! Hands Off Afghanistan!
To finish up. I have, over the years fought for many unpopular causes, from black civil rights down South facing off against hardened racists, to being called a “communist dupe (and worst)” for the whole range of anti-imperialist actions from Vietnam to Serbia. And I have done so, mainly, out on the streets of this country. Today though I am afraid, afraid for the first time in my long political career, to be out on these protest streets. Not of the hardened racists, not of the know-nothing red-baiters, but of ordinary citizens, friends, neighbors, and in some cases long-time political associates who look at me with hatred or distain. For the first time I thought about taking a political dive on this question of the American invasion of Afghanistan. No, no can do. Down with American imperialism, wherever it rears its ugly head. [Slight applause.]
*******
A fairly warm, fairly warm for mid-December 2011 Boston day turning into night at 4:00 PM standing once again somewhere between the Boston City Hall (now replete with huge circus tent for the latest carnival attraction, Peter Pan) and the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, named ironically, ironically for probably the first big time political figure that I could get my head around back in the day. Today, like many days past since youth I am standing here in opposition to some vile act that so-called “friends of the people” Democrats have done. Here the recent police occupation of the Occupy Boston space at Dewey Square in the name of, in the name of what, order I guess, their order. But I am also here to pass the torch, the torch of a revitalized labor movement that is beginning to stir with this day’s actions out in the West Coast of activists trying to shut down the ports. That is the glad tiding I bring today.
Of course the world has moved on since 2001. Now the populace, in a general and vague way, has repudiated the war in Afghanistan, although no the revenge motive that drove that original support. Economic strife rules the land and a new generation, or the best parts of it, are beginning to stake their claims in the political struggle through the
Occupy movement. A movement that exploded onto the political scene with the advent of Occupy Wall Street in mid-September.
Of course also, as I never tire of saying of late, each new generation must find its own forms of struggle, its own forms of organization, and its own voice. This Occupy movement, unlike other earlier ones, does not depend on trusty bullhorns to get the message out but the “people’s mic” and the very present “mic check” when one wants to speak to the general audience. This form centers on a loud voice and refrain from the crowd to get the speaker’s message to the outer fringes of the audience. Today I prefer the proffered “old-fashioned” bullhorn but after some fumbling I can see the benefits of the “new way” a little better for future reference. Here goes. Oh, just for the record the hair and beard are whiter, much whiter now. And the garb is replete with a pair of New Balance running shoes for easier walking since my knee operation. Farewell, Chuck Taylor’s, sandals and soft shoes. But listen up:
“I will read from prepared notes. Let me explain why. In the old days, my old street corner agitator days, I could whip up a speech off the top of my head. But of late, before the fresh breeze of the Occupy movement blew across the Boston waterfront, I was more used to sitting at tables in small, over-heated rooms. Or participating in small marches, rallies, and vigils where such oratorical skills were not in much demand. But let me get to my main point.
Sisters and brothers, brothers and sisters, no question, no question at all that the recent police occupation at Dewey Square was a big defeat, a big if temporary defeat, for our struggle for freedom of expression and assembly in the public square. In response, over the past few days not a few younger or newer activists, not used to the ebb and flow of the political struggle, the class struggle, have been disheartened and expressed a sense of defeat.
Today though I bring you glad tidings. The sleeping giant of the labor movement has begun to stir. The long night of despair and disorientation is beginning to lift. At the beginning of this year when the struggle of the public workers unions in Wisconsin heated up I, among others, proposed a general strike and solidarity rallies in order to beat back the anti-labor attacks. We were written off as mad men and women, old-time leftists gone off their rockers. General strike, shut down, no, that was okay for those Greek workers who seemed to strike every other day, or those French workers who struck every day. In America, never. And then came the mass actions in Wisconsin, the shut down of the Port Of Oakland on November 2nd, and today’s actions. Now we can quibble over whether such events are real general strikes or not but now the language of general strike and shutdown is firmly etched on labor’s political agenda.
The old Polish socialist scholar, Isaac Deutscher, once remarked back in the 1960s heyday of the anti-Vietnam War movement that he would give up all the endless marches, rallies and vigils for one dock strike against the war. He was right. We have to hit the war-mongers, the capitalists where it hurts-their profits and power. And today’s West Coast actions are proof of that proposition. If the age of the Occupy encampment has passed so too has the age of endless marches, rallies and vigils. They certainly have their place but now we must take the offensive. Now every action must be thought out to measure the effect on breaking the power of the one percent.
I had, several weeks ago, proposed to various people that we shut down the Port of Boston today in solidarity with the West Coast. That proposal was premature considering the situation in the Boston movement. But someday, someday soon, we too will be marching to shut down the port. To shut down GE in Lynn. To shut down the Bank of America. To shut down this government. And maybe not to just shut them down for a day either. I will leave you with this thought. We created the wealth-let’s take it back. Working people and their allies must rule!”
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Notes Of A Street Corner Agitator- In Six-Part Harmony
Markin comment:
I have spent the better portion of my life fighting for one progressive cause or another, sometimes one issue, sometimes several issues in tandem. Mainly those fights have been with small crowds about, but not always. The always part is that throughout it all I have been ready, mostly ready anyway, to get up on the street corner soapbox, literally or figuratively as the case called for, and shout out, shout out until I was hoarse at times, the glad tidings of the new more equitable society a-bornin’. The following sketches are representative of those efforts although, except for the last sketch, they are not the actual words used but reflect the moments with a certain literary and political license.
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At the Parkman Bandstand on the Tremont Street side of the Boston Common or anyplace in between that location and the Park Street subway station on any one of several early weekday evenings in the summer of 1961. In those days time and space was reserved for anyone to speak from the ever present soapbox (literally a sturdy wooden box that one stood on to be hear above the crowd although the box used may, or may not, have started out life as a container for soap) about any subject that came to mind. Said speeches were, as now, directed to a small lingering audience and a larger indifference (or, occasionally hostile) audience glancing by as they quickly headed home, or went about their shopping business.
As we hone in on the scene the previous speaker, an elderly lady, small, very dignified, very well dressed, and very morally correct, had just finished up her remark sweetly railing against the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the name of her grandchildren’s future. The next speaker, a ragamuffin of a boy of fifteen, me, Peter Paul Markin, red-faced, Irish red-faced from over- exposure at the Adamsville Beach gotten a few days before, was ready to speak. His hands were sweaty, his bedraggled odd-ball Bargain Center purple shirt was wet with the summer humidity moisture that usually kept him indoors on such days, his pants, his de rigueur black chinos without cuffs were clinging to his off-shaped body as he leaped forward to the unknown on his maiden public speech on any subject. He starts a little timidly, weakly, and lowly and is asked to speak up by the few people who have stopped by that moment to listen up to what a mere boy had to say about anything:
“There is an evil in America, a terrible wrong going on right this minute down South, down in places like Alabama and Mississippi and we have to do something about it right now. Most of you have read the news, the news that kids, kids, just like me, except they are black are going up against the police so they do not have to be treated as second-class citizens, or really just to get out of slavery days. And older people too, people who work like slaves on the farms for no money, who can’t vote, can’t pay the money to vote, and can’t get out from under the racists who control their lives. They are fighting too, fighting as best they can under the great leadership of Doctor Martin Luther King who seems to know what he is doing. [From a passer-by: “Nigger-lover, go back to Africa with them, for chrissakes”]. No, no that man has it all wrong we were all born here and this is where the fight is. But you can see what we are up against and not just down South but here on the Common and over in my own hometown, North Adamsville.
Let me continue, although I am a little rattled by what that guy said. See he doesn’t know we are really fighting for him too. What I was trying to say was that we can do something here, here right now. You might have heard last winter that a bunch of college students down in North Carolina, a bunch of black kids and a few white ones too, tried to go eat lunch at Woolworth’s, a place just like the one over on Washington Street. A place where you probably have gone to eat just like me and had one of their great grilled cheese sandwiches, or something. Shouldn’t people be able to do that without being bothered? I want you to help us out by standing with us and do not eat at Woolworths’s okay. [Another voice, this time from the edge of the audience- “Commie, go back to Russia and take your kind with you.”] No, I ain’t no commie, no way, but you don’t have to be a commie to see that it just isn’t right that people can’t eat where they want, or go to school where want or vote just like us.
Let me finish up though so the next speaker can get his turn. What we really need to do is write to our beloved president, our own beloved Irish Jack Kennedy, who last fall when he was running for President I roamed the streets of North Adamsville for putting his literature in doorways and stuff, and tell him to sent his Justice Department people, his brother Bobby, down to Mississippi right now and straighten things out. Straighten things out so that Negros can have the same kind of dreams as he talked about in his inauguration speech in January. Will you do that? Thanks. [Sight applause and a few yeses] “
As I turned to get off the platform to give time to the next speaker from the back of the audience I heard a distinct voice, distinct black southern voice say in a low tone, “Praise be, brother, praise be.”
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I have put on my “soapbox” street corner agitation in many corners of this country since that first day going over the summer heated North Adamsville Bridge to Boston and my first Common speech in the summer of 1961. Just now on this May Day 1971 I am standing this Monday morning, wearily standing after very little sleep this past weekend, near the Washington Monument Mall haranguing a crowd of anti-Vietnam War protestors to keep pushing on although we have suffered a grievous defeat this day, a day when we had proclaimed with much bravado that if the government (the Nixon government just then) did not close down the war then we would close down the government. All we have received for our efforts is tears, tear-gas, and massive arrests after being picked off like fleas by the massive police and military presence and not even a close approximation of shutting down this evil government. But tomorrow, literally tomorrow, is another day, and the anti-warriors need some assurance that their efforts will be more fruitful the next day, and the next day, and next until we meet our goal. End that damn war, and end it fast.
I, Peter Paul Markin, this day only a few months out of an army stockade for my military service anti-war work, am again “courting” arrest on the streets of Washington. It is hot in Washington this day, made hotter by the constant running to avoid the cop traps that seem to be everywhere but I made it to the Mall which is something of a “safe haven” from the madness of the tear-gassed streets and baton-wielding cops. Appearance and attire: youth nation de rigueur army jacket (no, not the GI issue one that I was discharged from the service with but a “real” World War II Army-Navy Store purchase, two dollar purchase), bell-bottomed jeans, army boots (boots that I did leave said service with), a flannel shirt against cold nights, and a trusty green knapsack (not Army issue) with all my
possessions. Hair getting longer uncut from Army times and the wisp of a beard growing to manly length, slowly. My mother’s comment: “You dressed better, much better when you were in high school.” Ya Ma, but now it is cool to be unkempt-don’t you get it. But enough let’s listen to this harangue of the maybe hundred plus crowd seeking verbal shelter from the storm:
“Although I was in the military I do not know much about military strategy and tactics since I spent most of my time fighting against the war-machine including time in the stockade. [Audience; light applause] I do know this though we have suffered a defeat, a military-like defeat today in trying to shut down this evil government, this evil Nixon government which has no legitimacy, none at all and wouldn’t even be here if Bobby Kennedy was alive [Audience: a couple of deep boos] Don’t worry out there I am not going to go on about that. We have more pressing business. We still have to shut this evil government down. We have to stand with the heroic struggles of the Vietnamese people who are today, and every day, facing much more than tear-gas, much more than unlawful assembly arrest, facing everything that the American military monster can throw against them, and maybe more that we don’t even know about. Like that Agent-Orange stuff that we keep hearing about that is destroying everything in sight for years in a country that depends on agriculture. [Audience: Right on, brother].
When we take that kind of beating then we will be able to complain, complain a little, but not until then. [Right on!]. Now I know a lot of people have been talking about leaving D.C. because of what happened today but we said yesterday, a lot of us said we were in this for the long haul, right? [Yes, brother from a few voices] Hey I am afraid too. I don’t want to go back to jail, hell no, but if that is my fate then so be it. Like Che said we have to fight here “in the belly of the beast,” and we have to fight proudly since the fate of the earth depends on it. [“Viva, Che!” from several voices]. Now maybe not everybody can be a street fighter, I know that, but stay and support our efforts okay. Steve Sloan will now come up and tell us about tomorrow’s actions. Down with American imperialism! Down with the American war-machine! Long live the people’s struggles!”
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A warm California October 1981 day, a warm San Francisco day, not always the same thing despite the travel brochures, as I walk up to the small, jerry-rigged “podium” in a corner of City Hall Plaza to make my one hundred and first, or so it seems speech against the unfolding Reagan “doctrine” in Central America, primarily to blast the Soviet-aided Sandinista government to smithereens (and, incidentally the same to the pesky Salvadoran rebels). Overtly, or covertly, blast to smithereens it does not seem to matter to this rabidly anti-communist cabal who have nightmare visions of Cuba 1959 redux.
I am showing just the slightest sights of age, or rather of losing a certain youthful innocence about our capacity, our left-wing capacity, to build a more equitable society in my lifetime and so my demeanor is a little less the “shout to the rafters” jubilee certainty of ten years ago or so. Showing the age part does enter a little though but the few flecks of grey showing up unwanted in my beard, and in my now shortened hair, shortened against the work-a-day world, the nine-to-five grind that requires certain personal compromises. I still retain, fiercely retain, my working-class casual garb; denim jacket, black chino pants worn since de rigueur high school days, busted-blue work shirt (to show I am one with the companeros perhaps), and stolid black shoes better for walking these protest miles these days than the old Chuck Taylor's of old. Let’s listen up as the last speaker, a very eloquent young women speaking on behalf of the emerging sanctuary movement, a movement responding to the very real fears of some illegal political immigrants from all over Central and South America to be deported back to the “black hole” that awaits them if they have to go back, walks back to her chair:
“Hola, Que Tal, Hermanos and Hermanas, Hello, What’s Up, Brothers and Sisters, there is a madness in the land, in this Norte American land and it has a name. Ronald Reagan. And it has an address. Washington, D.C. And the madness? These cowboys, and you who lived here in California in the 1960s under the cowboy-in-chief know this better than I do, are hell-bent on turning back the clock on any social progress here, or anywhere. And just this minute that anywhere is Central America where we have just gained a victory, a tenuous victory against reaction in Nicaragua, and we are fighting like hell to get one in El Salvador. Long live the Sandinista struggle! Long live the FMLN! [Cheers and chanting of those two slogans]
But as long as American imperialism exists, as long as the greatest military machine in history exists, those steps forward are always in danger. And that is why the help that the Soviet Union is providing, and in my opinion not providing enough of, is important. I have my differences with the Soviets, no question, but on this one they are right, right as rain. [A couple of boos and a “Down with Soviet imperialism” are heard.] To keep the American monster from bringing back the banana republic days, the Somoza dictatorship days.
And that is why we need to keep clear who are friends are here in this proxy war, this proxy Cold War just like in Angola a while back. That is why we must call for stepped up Soviet aid and that is why we here in the “belly of the beast,” as Che used to say, need to take concrete steps to help by providing funds for the Sandinista cause. Their struggle is our struggle. If they lose, we lose. It is that simple. Long live the national liberation struggles. Fight for a Workers Republic in Nicaragua!”
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A christ cold day in January, an early January christ cold Park Street subway station on Boston Common 1991 day, the sun going down over the John Hancock building making it even more christ cold as we make a last ditch effort to stop the impending American imperial army (and so-called coalition forces but you know who is running the show) invasion of Iraq over “poor little Kuwait,” jesus. The few hundred people present are forming a circle, a circle of life according to those who insist on such antics, which I assume was meant to ward off the evil spirits and bring peace. Me, I prefer, greatly prefer some labor action, some longshoremen refusing to ship military goods but that is music for the future, maybe. What is not music for the future, and really music from the past, a certain then growing pains past, is that circles, squares, hexagons or whatever geometric shape you are now touting are now replacing the urgency of hard anti-imperialist actions against the American war machine. It is as if this “peace” movement has regressed to those 1961 days when I stood on this very ground and held hands with my line neighbor and spoke of “soft” peace in the world. But that was just youthful ignorance on my part. This christ cold night studied ignorance rules.
Those flecks of grey in beard and hair of ten years ago have marched on, marched on in triumph, although the garments are no longer aged (except of course those chinos, oops, Dockers now, a little larger, a little more room) as I take my turn “in the circle” to have my say after the last dozen speakers have cried to the heavens for peace, like that mantra would solve everything. Listen up to this crowd-pleaser:
“Nobody here should have anything but contempt for Saddam Hussein and what he has done in Kuwait. Let me make that clear, especially clear, since old Saddam used to be American imperialism’s “boy” back in the day when we all loved him, well almost all, okay. Now he is the devil incarnate since his has turned rogue and fouled up the American government’s cozy deals in the oil-rich Middle East.
But this impending war is not about Saddam or what he did or didn’t do to upset the apple cart in the “new world order” that Bush want to put in place. This is about the exercise of American military power, the vaunted war death machine and about American hubris. Now most of the previous speakers, in fact maybe all of them, have chimed in on the need for peace. And, of course, we all want peace, even George H.W. Bush, except his is the peace of the graveyard for the Iraqi people. So here in an America, here in what the great Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara called the “belly of the beast” have a special obligation to oppose the actions of this government. We are duty-bound to defend Iraq against American attack, no question. No question at all. Otherwise we cannot build an anti-war, anti-imperialist movement worthy of the name. The struggle starts here against this government. Down with American imperialism! Defend Iraq Against American Attack!” [Silence, utter silence]
**********
A late September 2001 Boston day, a day before the leaves begin to turn, before the whitened winter sets in but some time after the hellish 9/11 has fully taken its tool on whatever is left of American democracy. A small clot of anti-imperialist fighters is meeting this day in the courtyard quadrangle at Northeastern University to ward off the impending invasion of Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 and the search for scapegoats, Taliban/Al Qaeda scapegoats. Meeting at the traditional site of protest in Boston, the Common, is out of the question just now with the fury over the World Trade Center still not abated, no even close. Even this spot, this campus location, is shaky, very shaky, as all thoughts of anti-war, anti-imperialism by students and others have gone out the door. Revenge, revenge is the order of the day for all but this clot, this very small clot of activists standing with me.
Although, perhaps, on this occasion it does not matter, in the interest of literary completeness, the writer’s hair and beard are now completely grey and his garb not significantly different from that of ten years ago. What is different, significantly different from ten years ago is that, for one of the few times in his political career, he is afraid, afraid that he will be pummeled for what he has to say in this deeply hostile post 9/11 environment. That every “commie,” “go back to Russia,” get a job,” “Traitor,” remark of the past pales in the anger he can sense and not just from the usual yahoo sources but from “soccer moms” and others who think about politics about once every ten years. Cup your ear and listen up, listen up hard, because he has a catch in his voice this day:
“No one, not one self-respecting human on this planet can do anything but condemn, condemn in no uncertain terms, the criminal acts that took place in New York at the World Trade Center. That should be clear to all the few who hear me today. But there are larger questions posed, posed long ago by the American imperial state when their government decided, decided consciously to rip up and rule this planet for the few. None here, who were old enough, did anything but condemn the American invasion of Iraq in 1991, and the continuing imperialist-driven economic and military sanctions against that state.
Now we are here confronting another American imperial adventure, the revenge invasion of Afghanistan for the acts of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Organizations that we have no truck with, no truck at all. Over the years I have, and others whom I have worked with have, very easily condemned every act of American imperialist from Vietnam to Serbia, and done so forthrightly. On Afghanistan, and the military invasion this time, we have lost some of those former supporters. Revenge for innocent victims, even by an imperial monster, is hard to resist. But it must be said now if it to be said at all. Down with American imperialism! Hands Off Afghanistan!
To finish up. I have, over the years fought for many unpopular causes, from black civil rights down South facing off against hardened racists, to being called a “communist dupe (and worst)” for the whole range of anti-imperialist actions from Vietnam to Serbia. And I have done so, mainly, out on the streets of this country. Today though I am afraid, afraid for the first time in my long political career, to be out on these protest streets. Not of the hardened racists, not of the know-nothing red-baiters, but of ordinary citizens, friends, neighbors, and in some cases long-time political associates who look at me with hatred or distain. For the first time I thought about taking a political dive on this question of the American invasion of Afghanistan. No, no can do. Down with American imperialism, wherever it rears its ugly head. [Slight applause.]
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A fairly warm, fairly warm for mid-December 2011 Boston day turning into night at 4:00 PM standing once again somewhere between the Boston City Hall (now replete with huge circus tent for the latest carnival attraction, Peter Pan) and the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, named ironically, ironically for probably the first big time political figure that I could get my head around back in the day. Today, like many days past since youth I am standing here in opposition to some vile act that so-called “friends of the people” Democrats have done. Here the recent police occupation of the Occupy Boston space at Dewey Square in the name of, in the name of what, order I guess, their order. But I am also here to pass the torch, the torch of a revitalized labor movement that is beginning to stir with this day’s actions out in the West Coast of activists trying to shut down the ports. That is the glad tiding I bring today.
Of course the world has moved on since 2001. Now the populace, in a general and vague way, has repudiated the war in Afghanistan, although no the revenge motive that drove that original support. Economic strife rules the land and a new generation, or the best parts of it, are beginning to stake their claims in the political struggle through the
Occupy movement. A movement that exploded onto the political scene with the advent of Occupy Wall Street in mid-September.
Of course also, as I never tire of saying of late, each new generation must find its own forms of struggle, its own forms of organization, and its own voice. This Occupy movement, unlike other earlier ones, does not depend on trusty bullhorns to get the message out but the “people’s mic” and the very present “mic check” when one wants to speak to the general audience. This form centers on a loud voice and refrain from the crowd to get the speaker’s message to the outer fringes of the audience. Today I prefer the proffered “old-fashioned” bullhorn but after some fumbling I can see the benefits of the “new way” a little better for future reference. Here goes. Oh, just for the record the hair and beard are whiter, much whiter now. And the garb is replete with a pair of New Balance running shoes for easier walking since my knee operation. Farewell, Chuck Taylor’s, sandals and soft shoes. But listen up:
“I will read from prepared notes. Let me explain why. In the old days, my old street corner agitator days, I could whip up a speech off the top of my head. But of late, before the fresh breeze of the Occupy movement blew across the Boston waterfront, I was more used to sitting at tables in small, over-heated rooms. Or participating in small marches, rallies, and vigils where such oratorical skills were not in much demand. But let me get to my main point.
Sisters and brothers, brothers and sisters, no question, no question at all that the recent police occupation at Dewey Square was a big defeat, a big if temporary defeat, for our struggle for freedom of expression and assembly in the public square. In response, over the past few days not a few younger or newer activists, not used to the ebb and flow of the political struggle, the class struggle, have been disheartened and expressed a sense of defeat.
Today though I bring you glad tidings. The sleeping giant of the labor movement has begun to stir. The long night of despair and disorientation is beginning to lift. At the beginning of this year when the struggle of the public workers unions in Wisconsin heated up I, among others, proposed a general strike and solidarity rallies in order to beat back the anti-labor attacks. We were written off as mad men and women, old-time leftists gone off their rockers. General strike, shut down, no, that was okay for those Greek workers who seemed to strike every other day, or those French workers who struck every day. In America, never. And then came the mass actions in Wisconsin, the shut down of the Port Of Oakland on November 2nd, and today’s actions. Now we can quibble over whether such events are real general strikes or not but now the language of general strike and shutdown is firmly etched on labor’s political agenda.
The old Polish socialist scholar, Isaac Deutscher, once remarked back in the 1960s heyday of the anti-Vietnam War movement that he would give up all the endless marches, rallies and vigils for one dock strike against the war. He was right. We have to hit the war-mongers, the capitalists where it hurts-their profits and power. And today’s West Coast actions are proof of that proposition. If the age of the Occupy encampment has passed so too has the age of endless marches, rallies and vigils. They certainly have their place but now we must take the offensive. Now every action must be thought out to measure the effect on breaking the power of the one percent.
I had, several weeks ago, proposed to various people that we shut down the Port of Boston today in solidarity with the West Coast. That proposal was premature considering the situation in the Boston movement. But someday, someday soon, we too will be marching to shut down the port. To shut down GE in Lynn. To shut down the Bank of America. To shut down this government. And maybe not to just shut them down for a day either. I will leave you with this thought. We created the wealth-let’s take it back. Working people and their allies must rule!”
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More- Defend The Occupy Movement!-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Boston Commune! Take The Offensive! - Generals Without An Army?
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Peter Paul Markin comment:
Recently my long time friend, Josh Breslin (Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those old enough to recognize that name from half the alterative presses in this country, large and small, over the past forty years or so) sent me an e-mail the contents of which I have commented on in this space under the entry “General Assembly Blues- A Cautionary Tale.” (See post below.)The substance of the piece was that Josh felt that the Occupy idea was ripe for the picking by those bourgeois political forces that were hovering around the movement lately looking like wolves ready to feast on an easy meal. Without going into detail here he also argued that there were some very Potemkin Village-like aspects of the Occupy Boston movement since the police raid on December 10th scattered the tribe. The most remarkable statement though, or at least the one which stuck in my mind after reading his e-mail, was his characterization of Occupy as “generals without an army.’’ That little twist has haunted me not a little since after some thought and some further investigation I find that statement to have some truth in it.
Now some readers of this post will dismiss the whole notion of generals, or at least the free-wheeling use of any military terms when speaking of the movement, out of hand. That would be unfortunate because that expression was merely a short-hand way for Josh to say what many people I have spoke to already sense. This “leaderless” movement has leaders, there is nothing wrong with leaders emerging if based on doing hard political work and winning authority, and that in a very important sense those fairly small numbers whose lives are now entwined with the Occupy movement are de facto leaders and that is just hard political realty. Period
And an equally hard fact is that through the thick and thin of committee meetings, working groups, “rump” General Assemblies (Josh’s word but there is also truth in that characterization as well) and other forms of actions (mainly small, very small) over the past month or so (and thus a mood that pre-dates the demise of Dewey Square) is that the Occupy movement has lost much steam. Some of this was, and should have been, expected. And perhaps with a better political focus here in Boston that may be turned around come spring. But the hard-headed reality is that a lot of possibly very good cadres are spinning their wheels with no forces (or not many) behind them. Others are just doing what comes naturally content to attend endless meetings, discuss endlessly, and let other hostile forces come in and pick those very good cadres clean. Ya, sometime Josh Breslin is clueless on stuff but on this on he is preaching to the converted.
***********
General Assembly Blues- A Cautionary Tale
Peter Paul Markin comment:
I had never seen my old friend Josh Breslin so irate (Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those who know him under that moniker through his various commentary columns in all kind alternative press operations over the past forty years or so). Or rather more correctly I had never read anything of his that practically steamed off the page, the computer screen page that early Monday morning (December 19, 2011, let’s see the time stamp, oh yes, 5:14 AM, Ya early, definitely early for Josh) when I was casually perusing my daily e-mail delete slaughter-house. It seems that he had attended an Occupy Boston General Assembly (GA) meeting the night before over at the hallowed Community Church on Boylston Street (hallowed in leftist circles, I had first gone there long ago to attend a commemoration program for Sacco and Vanzetti). Since the police raid on the Occupy camp at Dewey Square in the early morning hours of December 11th the GAs have been assembling helter-skelter at various locations from the Parkman Bandstand on the Common to various sympathetic indoor as winter sets in locations, mainly churches, in order to keep some continuity during these unsettled times.
At that meeting the main order of business was a simple proposal submitted by the OB Socialist Caucus, a loose group of organizationally-affiliated and unaffiliated people who identify themselves with the socialist cause. The gist of the proposal was to make a forthright statement that Occupy Boston was to be clearly identified, more clearly identified than in any previous document, as independent of the main bourgeois parties, the Democrats in particular, and by implication was not to be a front or voting cattle bloc for any particular organized political operation ready to move in like hungry wolves looking for an easy meal. This proposal never reached a vote, a yea or nay vote, that night because it was “blocked” well before such a vote could be taken by, as Josh called it in his e-mail, the “Rump” assembly (see said e-mail posted below, well the gist of it anyway). The Rump being a minority of those eighty or so brethren in attendance that evening whose maneuver in the consensus-addled GA world stopped the proposal in its tracks. This series of events triggered in Josh some kind of previously well-hidden verbal explosion about the trends that he had witnessed developing in the movement, and that had disturbed him previously. Naturally he had to send his old compadre Peter Paul his bilious e-mail as the first step in his “campaign” to get things off his chest.
A little explanation is in order to gauge the seriousness of Josh’s maddened impulse and, as well, for why I have taken the time to write this little commentary up and pushed it forward. Josh and I go back a long way, back to the summer of love in San Francisco in 1967 when I was on Captain Crunch’s merry prankster magical mystery tour freedom bus and I met Josh, then going under the moniker “Prince Of Love,” on Russian Hill in that town. Ya, I know, we were just a little too self-important on changing the name changed the person thing but that was the way it was. I was, for a while, known as Be-Bop Benny, among other names. He had, after just graduating from high school up in Olde Saco, Maine hitch-hiked across the country to see “what was happening.” We hit it off right away, probably because my being from North Adamsville here in Massachusetts we were the only New Englanders “on the bus,” even though I was a few years older. In any case our friendship survived through thick and thin, even despite his “stealing” my girl, Butterfly Swirl (okay, okay I will stop with the a. k. a’s), from right under my nose during the first few days we knew each other. Part of that thick and thin has been involvement in a long series of left-wing political struggles where we have not always seen eye to eye but have generally been “on the right of the angels.”
And that, roughly, brings us to the present. Along the way, for a number of reason that shall not detain us here, I increasingly came to socialist conclusions abut the nature of American society and the ways to change it. Josh, while always on the cutting edge of those same conclusions, never crossed over and has maintained a studied non-socialist radical position very similar to many that I have run into as the Occupy movement has gathered steam. Although as a paid political commentator for various publications he has always kept a certain skeptical distance from going overboard every time there is the slightest left breeze coming in over Boston Harbor. Until now.
As I have written elsewhere Josh, now retired, still likes to keep his hand in the mix and so has been working on a project that may turn into a book about the Occupy Boston experience. When he first he crossed the river from the wilds of Cambridge he held himself pretty aloof from the doings but soon became totally enmeshed in what was going on. I was, and still am, a lot more skeptical about where the winds are heading. Josh though spent some nights at Dewey Square and got involved in the camp life. He marched up and down the streets of Boston in every possible cause. Brought food and other goods to the site when he came over. Donated money and other resources to the efforts. He even told me that he washed dishes (once) to help out in the kitchen one day. And believe me in the old prankster days the Prince of Love was, well, too “important” to bow down and get his hands wet doing anything as lowly as dishes. So this new experiment (or rather a chance to make up for those youthful mistakes) really energized him.
So when Joshua Lawrence Breslin, on a darkened Monday morning, signals that something is wrong, something is politically wrong with the direction of the movement I listen up. And, perhaps, you should too.
*******
Below I have placed the substance of the e-mail that Josh Breslin sent to me that fateful Monday December 19th morning. This is my summarization of the document which was written by him in our usual “code” and with his usual excessive use of expletives to normal ears so that it would be not understandable to “outsiders.” In short I have edited it as best I could while retaining the political direction. If Josh doesn’t like it then he can, well, sue me. Ha ha. Or better, write his own damn translation. Peter Paul Markin.
December 19, 2011, 5:14 AM to PeterPaulMarkin@yahoo.com:
Pee Pee, [The reader is hereby warned no to make anything out of this old-time nickname, old time going back to childhood North Adamsville working-class neighborhood days, or else.] You won’t believe what those arrogant airheads did last night at the so-called GA. I call it, and you can quote me on this, the “Rump” like back in Oliver Cromwell’s time when a bunch of cronies controlled everything, or else. They “blocked” the proposal to have a clear statement of independence from the damn Democrats (and Republicans too) but we know who really wants in on this movement.
What they did was get together enough people to block the thing even though with a simple majority it could have gotten through. So much for democracy. For once you are right on this blocking and consensus b.s. Now when Miss Betty [Elizabeth Warren] comes a-courting she will have a field day. You and I have disagreed on many things but keeping the bourgeois parties the hell away from our movement (except maybe to do “Jimmy Higgins” work putting up chairs or licking envelopes, stuff like that) has always been something that has united us ever since Chicago in 1968.
You should have heard the reasons given. Naturally the old chestnut- “we don’t want to alienate anyone” (anyone to the left of Genghis Khan, I guess). “It’s too negative.” Like the bourgeoisie gives a damn about negativity as long as they keep their moola and their power. “The statement we have already posted about transparency and independence is good enough” Like that flimsy one-size-fits-all statement has any political meaning at all. And it degenerated from there. I was so mad I had to walk out and get some fresh air.
I am far from giving up on this Occupy movement but in a lot of ways it really is like that guy, that homeless camper guy, I interviewed over at Dewey Square in early November when the weather got a little cold said. He said the place was a Potemkin Village. I thought he meant about people not staying there overnight. But now I think he meant the whole experiment. They, we, are generals without any army right now and nothing that is being done lately is calculated to break out from that situation. Were we this ruthlessly obtuse back in the days? I hope not- Josh
*******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
Peter Paul Markin comment:
Recently my long time friend, Josh Breslin (Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those old enough to recognize that name from half the alterative presses in this country, large and small, over the past forty years or so) sent me an e-mail the contents of which I have commented on in this space under the entry “General Assembly Blues- A Cautionary Tale.” (See post below.)The substance of the piece was that Josh felt that the Occupy idea was ripe for the picking by those bourgeois political forces that were hovering around the movement lately looking like wolves ready to feast on an easy meal. Without going into detail here he also argued that there were some very Potemkin Village-like aspects of the Occupy Boston movement since the police raid on December 10th scattered the tribe. The most remarkable statement though, or at least the one which stuck in my mind after reading his e-mail, was his characterization of Occupy as “generals without an army.’’ That little twist has haunted me not a little since after some thought and some further investigation I find that statement to have some truth in it.
Now some readers of this post will dismiss the whole notion of generals, or at least the free-wheeling use of any military terms when speaking of the movement, out of hand. That would be unfortunate because that expression was merely a short-hand way for Josh to say what many people I have spoke to already sense. This “leaderless” movement has leaders, there is nothing wrong with leaders emerging if based on doing hard political work and winning authority, and that in a very important sense those fairly small numbers whose lives are now entwined with the Occupy movement are de facto leaders and that is just hard political realty. Period
And an equally hard fact is that through the thick and thin of committee meetings, working groups, “rump” General Assemblies (Josh’s word but there is also truth in that characterization as well) and other forms of actions (mainly small, very small) over the past month or so (and thus a mood that pre-dates the demise of Dewey Square) is that the Occupy movement has lost much steam. Some of this was, and should have been, expected. And perhaps with a better political focus here in Boston that may be turned around come spring. But the hard-headed reality is that a lot of possibly very good cadres are spinning their wheels with no forces (or not many) behind them. Others are just doing what comes naturally content to attend endless meetings, discuss endlessly, and let other hostile forces come in and pick those very good cadres clean. Ya, sometime Josh Breslin is clueless on stuff but on this on he is preaching to the converted.
***********
General Assembly Blues- A Cautionary Tale
Peter Paul Markin comment:
I had never seen my old friend Josh Breslin so irate (Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those who know him under that moniker through his various commentary columns in all kind alternative press operations over the past forty years or so). Or rather more correctly I had never read anything of his that practically steamed off the page, the computer screen page that early Monday morning (December 19, 2011, let’s see the time stamp, oh yes, 5:14 AM, Ya early, definitely early for Josh) when I was casually perusing my daily e-mail delete slaughter-house. It seems that he had attended an Occupy Boston General Assembly (GA) meeting the night before over at the hallowed Community Church on Boylston Street (hallowed in leftist circles, I had first gone there long ago to attend a commemoration program for Sacco and Vanzetti). Since the police raid on the Occupy camp at Dewey Square in the early morning hours of December 11th the GAs have been assembling helter-skelter at various locations from the Parkman Bandstand on the Common to various sympathetic indoor as winter sets in locations, mainly churches, in order to keep some continuity during these unsettled times.
At that meeting the main order of business was a simple proposal submitted by the OB Socialist Caucus, a loose group of organizationally-affiliated and unaffiliated people who identify themselves with the socialist cause. The gist of the proposal was to make a forthright statement that Occupy Boston was to be clearly identified, more clearly identified than in any previous document, as independent of the main bourgeois parties, the Democrats in particular, and by implication was not to be a front or voting cattle bloc for any particular organized political operation ready to move in like hungry wolves looking for an easy meal. This proposal never reached a vote, a yea or nay vote, that night because it was “blocked” well before such a vote could be taken by, as Josh called it in his e-mail, the “Rump” assembly (see said e-mail posted below, well the gist of it anyway). The Rump being a minority of those eighty or so brethren in attendance that evening whose maneuver in the consensus-addled GA world stopped the proposal in its tracks. This series of events triggered in Josh some kind of previously well-hidden verbal explosion about the trends that he had witnessed developing in the movement, and that had disturbed him previously. Naturally he had to send his old compadre Peter Paul his bilious e-mail as the first step in his “campaign” to get things off his chest.
A little explanation is in order to gauge the seriousness of Josh’s maddened impulse and, as well, for why I have taken the time to write this little commentary up and pushed it forward. Josh and I go back a long way, back to the summer of love in San Francisco in 1967 when I was on Captain Crunch’s merry prankster magical mystery tour freedom bus and I met Josh, then going under the moniker “Prince Of Love,” on Russian Hill in that town. Ya, I know, we were just a little too self-important on changing the name changed the person thing but that was the way it was. I was, for a while, known as Be-Bop Benny, among other names. He had, after just graduating from high school up in Olde Saco, Maine hitch-hiked across the country to see “what was happening.” We hit it off right away, probably because my being from North Adamsville here in Massachusetts we were the only New Englanders “on the bus,” even though I was a few years older. In any case our friendship survived through thick and thin, even despite his “stealing” my girl, Butterfly Swirl (okay, okay I will stop with the a. k. a’s), from right under my nose during the first few days we knew each other. Part of that thick and thin has been involvement in a long series of left-wing political struggles where we have not always seen eye to eye but have generally been “on the right of the angels.”
And that, roughly, brings us to the present. Along the way, for a number of reason that shall not detain us here, I increasingly came to socialist conclusions abut the nature of American society and the ways to change it. Josh, while always on the cutting edge of those same conclusions, never crossed over and has maintained a studied non-socialist radical position very similar to many that I have run into as the Occupy movement has gathered steam. Although as a paid political commentator for various publications he has always kept a certain skeptical distance from going overboard every time there is the slightest left breeze coming in over Boston Harbor. Until now.
As I have written elsewhere Josh, now retired, still likes to keep his hand in the mix and so has been working on a project that may turn into a book about the Occupy Boston experience. When he first he crossed the river from the wilds of Cambridge he held himself pretty aloof from the doings but soon became totally enmeshed in what was going on. I was, and still am, a lot more skeptical about where the winds are heading. Josh though spent some nights at Dewey Square and got involved in the camp life. He marched up and down the streets of Boston in every possible cause. Brought food and other goods to the site when he came over. Donated money and other resources to the efforts. He even told me that he washed dishes (once) to help out in the kitchen one day. And believe me in the old prankster days the Prince of Love was, well, too “important” to bow down and get his hands wet doing anything as lowly as dishes. So this new experiment (or rather a chance to make up for those youthful mistakes) really energized him.
So when Joshua Lawrence Breslin, on a darkened Monday morning, signals that something is wrong, something is politically wrong with the direction of the movement I listen up. And, perhaps, you should too.
*******
Below I have placed the substance of the e-mail that Josh Breslin sent to me that fateful Monday December 19th morning. This is my summarization of the document which was written by him in our usual “code” and with his usual excessive use of expletives to normal ears so that it would be not understandable to “outsiders.” In short I have edited it as best I could while retaining the political direction. If Josh doesn’t like it then he can, well, sue me. Ha ha. Or better, write his own damn translation. Peter Paul Markin.
December 19, 2011, 5:14 AM to PeterPaulMarkin@yahoo.com:
Pee Pee, [The reader is hereby warned no to make anything out of this old-time nickname, old time going back to childhood North Adamsville working-class neighborhood days, or else.] You won’t believe what those arrogant airheads did last night at the so-called GA. I call it, and you can quote me on this, the “Rump” like back in Oliver Cromwell’s time when a bunch of cronies controlled everything, or else. They “blocked” the proposal to have a clear statement of independence from the damn Democrats (and Republicans too) but we know who really wants in on this movement.
What they did was get together enough people to block the thing even though with a simple majority it could have gotten through. So much for democracy. For once you are right on this blocking and consensus b.s. Now when Miss Betty [Elizabeth Warren] comes a-courting she will have a field day. You and I have disagreed on many things but keeping the bourgeois parties the hell away from our movement (except maybe to do “Jimmy Higgins” work putting up chairs or licking envelopes, stuff like that) has always been something that has united us ever since Chicago in 1968.
You should have heard the reasons given. Naturally the old chestnut- “we don’t want to alienate anyone” (anyone to the left of Genghis Khan, I guess). “It’s too negative.” Like the bourgeoisie gives a damn about negativity as long as they keep their moola and their power. “The statement we have already posted about transparency and independence is good enough” Like that flimsy one-size-fits-all statement has any political meaning at all. And it degenerated from there. I was so mad I had to walk out and get some fresh air.
I am far from giving up on this Occupy movement but in a lot of ways it really is like that guy, that homeless camper guy, I interviewed over at Dewey Square in early November when the weather got a little cold said. He said the place was a Potemkin Village. I thought he meant about people not staying there overnight. But now I think he meant the whole experiment. They, we, are generals without any army right now and nothing that is being done lately is calculated to break out from that situation. Were we this ruthlessly obtuse back in the days? I hope not- Josh
Wednesday, January 04, 2012
The Latest From “The Rag Blog”- Sean Stewart's On the Ground is a lively anecdotal history of the underground press
Click on the headline to link to The Rag Blog website.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
Sean Stewart's On the Ground is a livelyanecdotal history of the underground press
Amply illustrated with art, cartoons, drawings, and covers from the colorful, eye-catching papers of the Sixties, it comes closer to the spirit of the in-your-face underground papers.
By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / December 14, 2011
[On The Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S., edited by Sean Stewart, preface by Paul Buhle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011); Paperback; 204 pages; $20.00.]
Sean Stewart’s On the Ground is the last of three feisty books published in the past year about the Sixties underground press. The strengths of Stewart’s book are spelled out in the subtitle: it’s illustrated and it’s anecdotal.
Unlike John McMillan’s Smoking Typewriters, which came out last winter, and Ken Wachsberger’s Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, which came out last spring, Stewart’s On the Ground -- which has just been published -- does not try to be all-inclusive, comprehensive, and analytical.
Amply illustrated with art, cartoons, drawings, and covers from the colorful, eye-catching papers of the Sixties, it comes closer than the previous two books to the spirit of the in-your-face underground papers.
Many of the anecdotes that appear in On the Ground are told by Sixties writers, photographers, and editors who were omitted, neglected, or shunted to the sidelines by McMillan and Wachsberger, though probably not intentionally. There were just too many contributors to the underground papers to include all of them in one book.
Marvin Garson -- the editor of the San Francisco Express Times -- is mentioned briefly and only in passing. That’s too bad because he had a deep understanding of media, news, and communications. Todd Gitlin mostly dismisses him in The Sixties because he pushed surrealism into “bad taste.” Of course, the underground press was often a mix of surrealism and bad taste.
Paul Krassner -- one of the fathers of the underground papers -- defended the mix time and time again and refused so say what was fact and what was fiction in his published pieces, what was made up and what was an accurate historical depiction.
The historian, Paul Buhle, provides a preface to Stewart’s On the Ground that has the feel of a hastily written piece that seems designed to attack the competition. In fact, Buhle goes out of his way to target what he sees as the flaws of McMillan’s Smoking Typewriters; his comments probably would have been more useful in a review of that book than in the preface to Stewart’s work.
Moreover, Buhle is so partial to the Sixties that he often doesn’t seem to see the creativity and spunk of the subversive newspapers, newsletters, and magazines that were published long before the underground newspapers of the 1960s came along. But Paul Krassner, the founder and long time editor of The Realist, goes back to the 1950s and even further back to Tom Paine and the “whole tradition” of dissenting pamphleteers and makes it clear that America has a long rich history of defiant writers, editors, and publishers.
On the Ground does not aim to be critical of the Sixties papers or to skewer the protest movements of the era, but by reproducing the art, the cartoons, and the provocative covers from Rat, The East Village Other, The Seed, Old Mole, Space City!, and more, it aptly illustrates the youthful sexism of the artists and cartoonists and makes all too apparent a generation’s obsession with violence.
Guns, knives, and various assorted weapons appear again and again in more than two dozen illustrations in this book, and from the beginning to the end there are images of naked women, women with conspicuously large breasts, women performing oral sex, and women as the sex toys of men.
Fortunately, the book does not become defensive or try to make excuses for the images that glorify guns and that turn women into objects of male gratification. Enough time has passed, it would seem, for the pictures to speak for themselves, and to reflect the zeitgeist of the era without the need to condemn or defend. There’s something to be said for the passage of time.
Some of the Sixties chauvinism that Buhle exhibits is apparent in anecdotes from activists and organizers such as John Sinclair of the White Panthers who describes Detroit before the 1960s as “a cultural backwater” in which “nothing was happening,” though even in pre-1960s Detroit -- and in Cleveland, Buffalo, and elsewhere in the Midwest -- there were rumblings, grumblings, beat poets, jazz artists, and Marxists.
Really, folks. The thaw in the cold war and the cracks in the imperial society didn’t show up for the first time in 1960.
The voices of many of the women are less strident now than they were in, say, 1970 in the midst of women’s liberation, when nearly every man was regarded as a male chauvinist pig. Alice Embree gives credit to the civil rights movement that preceded the protests of the 1960s and that provided an “example of moral courage to direct action.”
Judy Gumbo Albert, one of the original Yippies, describes her job at the Berkeley Barb in the department of classified sex ads that were usually placed by heterosexual men. “I was a naïve young woman from Canada,” she writes. “This job really opened me to, and made me appreciate the diversity of human sexuality.”
Trina Robbins describes how she "fought her way into the male-dominated world of underground comix" to create her own original work.
Working for the underground press was usually a learning experience, though not always in accord with the ideas about education that were embraced by the college professors of the day. Rat editor Jeff Shero Nightbyrd explains that in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, “the Mafia controlled magazine distribution.” The East Village Other tried to bypass the Mafia only to learn that working with the Mafia and not against it was the only way to put papers in the hands of readers. “We had Mafia distributors,” Nightbyrd writes.
Many of the contributors to On The Ground -- Thorne Dreyer, Harvey Wasserman, Paul Krassner, Alice Embree, Judy Gumbo Albert, and Jeff Shero Nightbyrd -- will be familiar to readers of The Rag Blog, and there are colorful stories about the original Austin Rag, too.
“One of the important things about the underground press was that it was a collective, communal experience,” Thorne Dreyer says. “Everybody came in and got involved and became a part of it, and got politicized through the process.” And that same process, or something very similar to it, is taking place wherever the Occupy Wall Street movement has surfaced all across America.
[Jonah Raskin is the author of For The Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, and The Radical Jack London. A professor at Sonoma State University, Jonah is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]
• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's August 31, 2010, Rag Radio interview with Sean Stewart, author of On the Ground.
• Read Jonah Raskin's reviews of Ken Wachsberger's Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press and John McMillian's Smoking Typewriters on The Rag Blog.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
Sean Stewart's On the Ground is a livelyanecdotal history of the underground press
Amply illustrated with art, cartoons, drawings, and covers from the colorful, eye-catching papers of the Sixties, it comes closer to the spirit of the in-your-face underground papers.
By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / December 14, 2011
[On The Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S., edited by Sean Stewart, preface by Paul Buhle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011); Paperback; 204 pages; $20.00.]
Sean Stewart’s On the Ground is the last of three feisty books published in the past year about the Sixties underground press. The strengths of Stewart’s book are spelled out in the subtitle: it’s illustrated and it’s anecdotal.
Unlike John McMillan’s Smoking Typewriters, which came out last winter, and Ken Wachsberger’s Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, which came out last spring, Stewart’s On the Ground -- which has just been published -- does not try to be all-inclusive, comprehensive, and analytical.
Amply illustrated with art, cartoons, drawings, and covers from the colorful, eye-catching papers of the Sixties, it comes closer than the previous two books to the spirit of the in-your-face underground papers.
Many of the anecdotes that appear in On the Ground are told by Sixties writers, photographers, and editors who were omitted, neglected, or shunted to the sidelines by McMillan and Wachsberger, though probably not intentionally. There were just too many contributors to the underground papers to include all of them in one book.
Marvin Garson -- the editor of the San Francisco Express Times -- is mentioned briefly and only in passing. That’s too bad because he had a deep understanding of media, news, and communications. Todd Gitlin mostly dismisses him in The Sixties because he pushed surrealism into “bad taste.” Of course, the underground press was often a mix of surrealism and bad taste.
Paul Krassner -- one of the fathers of the underground papers -- defended the mix time and time again and refused so say what was fact and what was fiction in his published pieces, what was made up and what was an accurate historical depiction.
The historian, Paul Buhle, provides a preface to Stewart’s On the Ground that has the feel of a hastily written piece that seems designed to attack the competition. In fact, Buhle goes out of his way to target what he sees as the flaws of McMillan’s Smoking Typewriters; his comments probably would have been more useful in a review of that book than in the preface to Stewart’s work.
Moreover, Buhle is so partial to the Sixties that he often doesn’t seem to see the creativity and spunk of the subversive newspapers, newsletters, and magazines that were published long before the underground newspapers of the 1960s came along. But Paul Krassner, the founder and long time editor of The Realist, goes back to the 1950s and even further back to Tom Paine and the “whole tradition” of dissenting pamphleteers and makes it clear that America has a long rich history of defiant writers, editors, and publishers.
On the Ground does not aim to be critical of the Sixties papers or to skewer the protest movements of the era, but by reproducing the art, the cartoons, and the provocative covers from Rat, The East Village Other, The Seed, Old Mole, Space City!, and more, it aptly illustrates the youthful sexism of the artists and cartoonists and makes all too apparent a generation’s obsession with violence.
Guns, knives, and various assorted weapons appear again and again in more than two dozen illustrations in this book, and from the beginning to the end there are images of naked women, women with conspicuously large breasts, women performing oral sex, and women as the sex toys of men.
Fortunately, the book does not become defensive or try to make excuses for the images that glorify guns and that turn women into objects of male gratification. Enough time has passed, it would seem, for the pictures to speak for themselves, and to reflect the zeitgeist of the era without the need to condemn or defend. There’s something to be said for the passage of time.
Some of the Sixties chauvinism that Buhle exhibits is apparent in anecdotes from activists and organizers such as John Sinclair of the White Panthers who describes Detroit before the 1960s as “a cultural backwater” in which “nothing was happening,” though even in pre-1960s Detroit -- and in Cleveland, Buffalo, and elsewhere in the Midwest -- there were rumblings, grumblings, beat poets, jazz artists, and Marxists.
Really, folks. The thaw in the cold war and the cracks in the imperial society didn’t show up for the first time in 1960.
The voices of many of the women are less strident now than they were in, say, 1970 in the midst of women’s liberation, when nearly every man was regarded as a male chauvinist pig. Alice Embree gives credit to the civil rights movement that preceded the protests of the 1960s and that provided an “example of moral courage to direct action.”
Judy Gumbo Albert, one of the original Yippies, describes her job at the Berkeley Barb in the department of classified sex ads that were usually placed by heterosexual men. “I was a naïve young woman from Canada,” she writes. “This job really opened me to, and made me appreciate the diversity of human sexuality.”
Trina Robbins describes how she "fought her way into the male-dominated world of underground comix" to create her own original work.
Working for the underground press was usually a learning experience, though not always in accord with the ideas about education that were embraced by the college professors of the day. Rat editor Jeff Shero Nightbyrd explains that in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, “the Mafia controlled magazine distribution.” The East Village Other tried to bypass the Mafia only to learn that working with the Mafia and not against it was the only way to put papers in the hands of readers. “We had Mafia distributors,” Nightbyrd writes.
Many of the contributors to On The Ground -- Thorne Dreyer, Harvey Wasserman, Paul Krassner, Alice Embree, Judy Gumbo Albert, and Jeff Shero Nightbyrd -- will be familiar to readers of The Rag Blog, and there are colorful stories about the original Austin Rag, too.
“One of the important things about the underground press was that it was a collective, communal experience,” Thorne Dreyer says. “Everybody came in and got involved and became a part of it, and got politicized through the process.” And that same process, or something very similar to it, is taking place wherever the Occupy Wall Street movement has surfaced all across America.
[Jonah Raskin is the author of For The Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, and The Radical Jack London. A professor at Sonoma State University, Jonah is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]
• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's August 31, 2010, Rag Radio interview with Sean Stewart, author of On the Ground.
• Read Jonah Raskin's reviews of Ken Wachsberger's Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press and John McMillian's Smoking Typewriters on The Rag Blog.
The Latest From “The Rag Blog”-An email string:Analyzing 'mic check'
Click on the headline to link to The Rag Blog website.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
********
An email string:Analyzing 'mic check'
Polarizing behavior, besides being wrong, simply creates more polarization...
By Allen Young / The Rag Blog / November 30, 2011
“Mic check,” as it is known, is short for “microphone check,” a name that was chosen with irony because in fact the speech amplification technique known as “mic check” was introduced by Occupy Wall Street activists in places where electronic sound systems and even bullhorns were not allowed.
So, a speaker calls out “mic check” and speaks sentence after sentence, with the people in the crowd repeating each sentence so everyone can hear it.
It seems that for participants this is quite exhilarating, aside from serving a practical purpose of getting words heard.
Eventually, this “mic check” technique was brought to bear in confrontational situations. A group of Occupy protesters, for example, organized the disruption of speeches by Karl Rove and others, using this now familiar technique -- followed by YouTube videos bringing the scene to many thousands more.
Now, I must be clear that I am enthusiastic about Occupy Wall Street, and the entire Occupy movement, and want to see this movement grow and succeed. I would like to see the movement be more successful than the New Left I was a part of in the 1960s.
This movement has done a much better job than the Democratic Party (and I am a registered Democrat) at bringing to the American public a message of urgent concern about corporate corruption of our democracy, the immoral lack of economic justice and equality, and the criminal or near-criminal activity of bank and corporate executives in recent times.
I am not so enthusiastic, however, about “mic check,” even in its benign form where only used for amplification. It seems to me – especially when observed in a YouTube video – that “mic check” creates a rather cult-like scene. To the general public, I think it looks and sounds ridiculous, and I have experience with some political shouting of my own, circa 1969, that certainly looked and sounded ridiculous to most people. (Remember “Ho Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF. is Gonna Win?” Yeah, that won over lots of hard-working American citizens to the anti-war cause.)
Recently, a friend in San Francisco who I’ll call Fred suggested that I view a YouTube video of “mic check” used at a Karl Rove speech [see below]. He was very animated about this, and said, “It gives me chills.” I looked at the video, and then emailed a response to him, which I shared with a handful of friends, commenting to them that I wondered if I’d become a “softie.”
Fred has not responded to me yet, but the following email exchange resulted. The names of my friends have also been changed. Some Rag Blog readers who don’t agree with me may find the entry by “Bradley” to be a point of view they like best.
I also passed the entire string by fellow Rag Blog contributor Bill Freeland, and his comments close the piece.
Mic check at Occupy Wall Street event. Image from New Clear Vision.
Allen Young: These are tentative thoughts on "mic check." I could change my mind, but here's my honest reaction at the moment after viewing a YouTube video of the Rove “mic check" incident you told me about.
I think people like Rove, Cheney, Bush (and from an earlier era, Kissinger and others), and so on, are war criminals and "very bad people." I think their evil-doings should be remembered and people should be educated about them.
However, disrupting their speech in an auditorium where they are the invited speaker does not seem to me to be correct or productive. I say it's not productive because in the end, those people who disrupt will probably be legally expelled from the auditorium by authorities, with or without scuffles or violence of some sort, and then the people who have come to hear the speaker will most likely have increased sympathy for the speaker and will, with perhaps a few exceptions, not even have heard the points being made by the protesters.
There might even be arrests for "disorderly conduct" and bad publicity and the expense involved in legal defense, a waste of resources, in my view. That's the practical point.
The theoretical point has to do with the right of free speech. You and others may argue that such villains do not deserve rights of any kind. However, as a card-carrying member of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) for decades, I do not agree with this. I and others supported the ACLU when it went to court to protect the rights of the KKK to march in Skokie, Ill. (where many Jews reside) some years ago. (Some people were upset and quit the ACLU, on the other hand.)
I have a personal reason for reacting negatively to "mic check." I have done a fair amount of public speaking, including on gay issues. So I hope you will try to put yourself in my place.
Imagine if I (or you) were in a college auditorium at the microphone, invited by a gay student organization. Imagine that a large group of anti-gay students infiltrated the auditorium and did a "mic check" style of interruption. Certainly, I would be flustered and upset and uncertain how to respond. I could shout out "bigots go home," but I would be unable to make the comments I planned to make, the comments that the gay student group which invited me wanted to hear.
My right to express my views would have been suppressed by a handful of vigilante haters. Maybe friendly supportive people in the audience would give me a big hand, and the homophobes would get bad publicity, but my purpose as a speaker would be lost.
There needs to be justice for Rove and his ilk, but not vigilante justice, as I do not believe in that, and I think it is very dangerous to use vigilante justice concepts as we move forward to try to correct the bad things happening in the nation and the world. The cop who sprayed pepper at UC Davis probably saw himself as dishing out vigilante justice to people he despised.
As for moments when Rove, etc., have speaking engagements, I think picketing outside the auditorium and handing out educational leaflet to those attending as well as passers-by is a more appropriate political action, one that I would be proud to participate in. I would not be proud to participate in "mic check." It would not give me chills (as you said) in any positive sense; it would give me chills in a very frightening negative sense.
Chet: Well-stated and I agree entirely. Polarizing behavior, besides being wrong, simply creates more polarization and a spectacle that people can watch from the sidelines, taking sides and pretending they are acting as citizens rooting for their ideological team, instead of being real citizens doing the unglamorous, slow, and steady work of building broad-based consensus for change.
Kathy: You're absolutely right, it's ghastly. And that doesn't make you a softie, but a man of principle who can speak up when his friends are wrong. A "softie" is someone who would keep quiet about it so as not to offend anyone. People who think that politics is simply a matter of "expressing yourself" by shouting louder than the other guy are ignorant narcissists.
This is the same damn tactic that the original Tea Party people used on the speakers who were trying to present Obama's healthcare plan, and in my eyes it discredited the movement from the get-go. We're desperately in need of reasoned discussion these days, and shouting down the "bad people" makes that impossible, because when you do that you validate everyone's worst image of your own side.
The Right is working hard enough to misrepresent and discredit OWS already; the idiots don't have to help them. This is what happens with a movement with no leaders, no goals, no philosophy and no discipline -- the paranoids, the immature and the violent -- all feel empowered, and they hijack the movement, and then it's all over. Didn't we already go through that in the Sixties?
I could go on ranting but I have family coming and cooking to do. Happy Thanksgiving!
Bradley: I have heard it said that freedom of the press belongs to anyone who owns the press. So it is with the powers of speech. Our society has evolved into one that is completely dominated by mega-wealthy, mega-powerful men and corporations.
They are so powerful that they own and control entire blocks of media outlets and blanket the population with their slanted world view. Their message is delivered in such a manner as to bamboozle the unwary population lulled by their soma as the telescreen emits powerful, suggestive messages designed to mold their opinion of people and events.
Now the inequity in our society grows to proportions not seen since the days of the "robber barons" of the early industrial age. Monopolies grow unabated by impotent laws and a justice system that has been corrupted by money and power.
There is no justice. Just us.
We, the people, struggle to get our message heard. Suddenly, a clever new tool emerges. Mic Check.
The rich and powerful HAVE freedom of speech, and the power (money) to use it. Mic Check has emerged as a way of delivering powerful messages by temporarily hijacking the speech avenue paved by the powerful.
A typical Mic Check only lasts a few minutes, and delivers a couple of carefully worded paragraphs, but the delivery is compelling. The ubiquitous presence of video recording, and the viral nature of YouTube, has combined with traditional commercial media to deliver these messages well beyond the limitations imposed by the lack of power or influence of the messengers.
Does Mic Check have the potential for misuse? Absolutely. It means that any group can potentially take control of a venue to which they have no actual right.
Will Mic Check become an out-of-control phenomenon used frequently for harassment purposes? Maybe. It also may be something that is with us and effective for only a few months, or even weeks.
No one knows how Mic Check may evolve, but as it stands now, it is a powerful tool for the powerless. Our society is on the verge of collapse and maybe, just maybe, the Occupy Movement, and Mic Check can make a difference. There is no denying that Occupy has changed the dialog, and Mic Check has given that dialog voice.
Three cheers for Mic Check.
Stanley: I tend to agree with you, Allen, if for no other reason than -- as you point out -- it would likely be counterproductive and bring sympathy to the one interrupted -- especially as it is communicated through the media. And it would then subordinate the primary issue to that of the free speech of the speaker.
One idea that might be pursued is the use of the Mic Check approach in a situation where it isn't actually being used to interrupt the speaker, but to make a political point in a dramatic fashion.
And finally, from Bill Freeland:
In general, repeated chants of the same phrase ’60-style is different than an ongoing statement under “mic check” with specific content to communicate. The first example seems to be just rhetoric for its own sake, while the second example seems to have a useful purpose designed to communicate specific information.
On the specific example of the use of mic check at Rove’s address:
• Those who have come (and probably paid) to hear Rove in person feel about as sympathetic to him as it is possible to feel. The protesters, I doubt, are not likely to increase the affection those at the event already have for him due to their disruptive behavior. Nor are they likely to view the protesters in a worse light than they already do.
• Meanwhile, when the action goes viral on social media, the protesters have a tool to reach a much larger and presumably less sympathetic audience than those in the room, which can serve to remind people of who Rove is and what he has done in a way that can’t be ignored (as pickets easily can).
• Also, mic check in the Rove setting, unlike the continuous “Ho, Ho, Ho” chanting, is of very limited duration. They make their point and then leave -- or are removed. So they don’t intend to deny Rove of his right to free speech. They hope merely to briefly interrupt him. So I think it becomes as a result a much less urgent free speech issue when weighed against the potential benefit of holding him to some account.
As for the utility of mic check in the practical (and friendly) setting of a large audience where there is no amplification or free speech implications, I’ve found it to be (much to my surprise) a very useful and creative tool.
So in summary:
• Mic check is not the equivalent of a repeated chant.
• It has limited impact on free speech rights when the purpose is to interrupt, but not prohibit, what others are saying
• In a friendly setting with no other alternative methods available it seems useful for the purpose it was designed to address.
[Allen Young left the Washington Post to work with Liberation News Service in the late Sixties and later became an important voice in the gay liberation movement. Allen now lives in rural Massachusetts where he is involved with environmental issues and writes a column for the Athol Daily News.]
• See Jonah Raskin's interview with journalist and gay activist Allen Young on The Rag Blog.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
********
An email string:Analyzing 'mic check'
Polarizing behavior, besides being wrong, simply creates more polarization...
By Allen Young / The Rag Blog / November 30, 2011
“Mic check,” as it is known, is short for “microphone check,” a name that was chosen with irony because in fact the speech amplification technique known as “mic check” was introduced by Occupy Wall Street activists in places where electronic sound systems and even bullhorns were not allowed.
So, a speaker calls out “mic check” and speaks sentence after sentence, with the people in the crowd repeating each sentence so everyone can hear it.
It seems that for participants this is quite exhilarating, aside from serving a practical purpose of getting words heard.
Eventually, this “mic check” technique was brought to bear in confrontational situations. A group of Occupy protesters, for example, organized the disruption of speeches by Karl Rove and others, using this now familiar technique -- followed by YouTube videos bringing the scene to many thousands more.
Now, I must be clear that I am enthusiastic about Occupy Wall Street, and the entire Occupy movement, and want to see this movement grow and succeed. I would like to see the movement be more successful than the New Left I was a part of in the 1960s.
This movement has done a much better job than the Democratic Party (and I am a registered Democrat) at bringing to the American public a message of urgent concern about corporate corruption of our democracy, the immoral lack of economic justice and equality, and the criminal or near-criminal activity of bank and corporate executives in recent times.
I am not so enthusiastic, however, about “mic check,” even in its benign form where only used for amplification. It seems to me – especially when observed in a YouTube video – that “mic check” creates a rather cult-like scene. To the general public, I think it looks and sounds ridiculous, and I have experience with some political shouting of my own, circa 1969, that certainly looked and sounded ridiculous to most people. (Remember “Ho Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF. is Gonna Win?” Yeah, that won over lots of hard-working American citizens to the anti-war cause.)
Recently, a friend in San Francisco who I’ll call Fred suggested that I view a YouTube video of “mic check” used at a Karl Rove speech [see below]. He was very animated about this, and said, “It gives me chills.” I looked at the video, and then emailed a response to him, which I shared with a handful of friends, commenting to them that I wondered if I’d become a “softie.”
Fred has not responded to me yet, but the following email exchange resulted. The names of my friends have also been changed. Some Rag Blog readers who don’t agree with me may find the entry by “Bradley” to be a point of view they like best.
I also passed the entire string by fellow Rag Blog contributor Bill Freeland, and his comments close the piece.
Mic check at Occupy Wall Street event. Image from New Clear Vision.
Allen Young: These are tentative thoughts on "mic check." I could change my mind, but here's my honest reaction at the moment after viewing a YouTube video of the Rove “mic check" incident you told me about.
I think people like Rove, Cheney, Bush (and from an earlier era, Kissinger and others), and so on, are war criminals and "very bad people." I think their evil-doings should be remembered and people should be educated about them.
However, disrupting their speech in an auditorium where they are the invited speaker does not seem to me to be correct or productive. I say it's not productive because in the end, those people who disrupt will probably be legally expelled from the auditorium by authorities, with or without scuffles or violence of some sort, and then the people who have come to hear the speaker will most likely have increased sympathy for the speaker and will, with perhaps a few exceptions, not even have heard the points being made by the protesters.
There might even be arrests for "disorderly conduct" and bad publicity and the expense involved in legal defense, a waste of resources, in my view. That's the practical point.
The theoretical point has to do with the right of free speech. You and others may argue that such villains do not deserve rights of any kind. However, as a card-carrying member of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) for decades, I do not agree with this. I and others supported the ACLU when it went to court to protect the rights of the KKK to march in Skokie, Ill. (where many Jews reside) some years ago. (Some people were upset and quit the ACLU, on the other hand.)
I have a personal reason for reacting negatively to "mic check." I have done a fair amount of public speaking, including on gay issues. So I hope you will try to put yourself in my place.
Imagine if I (or you) were in a college auditorium at the microphone, invited by a gay student organization. Imagine that a large group of anti-gay students infiltrated the auditorium and did a "mic check" style of interruption. Certainly, I would be flustered and upset and uncertain how to respond. I could shout out "bigots go home," but I would be unable to make the comments I planned to make, the comments that the gay student group which invited me wanted to hear.
My right to express my views would have been suppressed by a handful of vigilante haters. Maybe friendly supportive people in the audience would give me a big hand, and the homophobes would get bad publicity, but my purpose as a speaker would be lost.
There needs to be justice for Rove and his ilk, but not vigilante justice, as I do not believe in that, and I think it is very dangerous to use vigilante justice concepts as we move forward to try to correct the bad things happening in the nation and the world. The cop who sprayed pepper at UC Davis probably saw himself as dishing out vigilante justice to people he despised.
As for moments when Rove, etc., have speaking engagements, I think picketing outside the auditorium and handing out educational leaflet to those attending as well as passers-by is a more appropriate political action, one that I would be proud to participate in. I would not be proud to participate in "mic check." It would not give me chills (as you said) in any positive sense; it would give me chills in a very frightening negative sense.
Chet: Well-stated and I agree entirely. Polarizing behavior, besides being wrong, simply creates more polarization and a spectacle that people can watch from the sidelines, taking sides and pretending they are acting as citizens rooting for their ideological team, instead of being real citizens doing the unglamorous, slow, and steady work of building broad-based consensus for change.
Kathy: You're absolutely right, it's ghastly. And that doesn't make you a softie, but a man of principle who can speak up when his friends are wrong. A "softie" is someone who would keep quiet about it so as not to offend anyone. People who think that politics is simply a matter of "expressing yourself" by shouting louder than the other guy are ignorant narcissists.
This is the same damn tactic that the original Tea Party people used on the speakers who were trying to present Obama's healthcare plan, and in my eyes it discredited the movement from the get-go. We're desperately in need of reasoned discussion these days, and shouting down the "bad people" makes that impossible, because when you do that you validate everyone's worst image of your own side.
The Right is working hard enough to misrepresent and discredit OWS already; the idiots don't have to help them. This is what happens with a movement with no leaders, no goals, no philosophy and no discipline -- the paranoids, the immature and the violent -- all feel empowered, and they hijack the movement, and then it's all over. Didn't we already go through that in the Sixties?
I could go on ranting but I have family coming and cooking to do. Happy Thanksgiving!
Bradley: I have heard it said that freedom of the press belongs to anyone who owns the press. So it is with the powers of speech. Our society has evolved into one that is completely dominated by mega-wealthy, mega-powerful men and corporations.
They are so powerful that they own and control entire blocks of media outlets and blanket the population with their slanted world view. Their message is delivered in such a manner as to bamboozle the unwary population lulled by their soma as the telescreen emits powerful, suggestive messages designed to mold their opinion of people and events.
Now the inequity in our society grows to proportions not seen since the days of the "robber barons" of the early industrial age. Monopolies grow unabated by impotent laws and a justice system that has been corrupted by money and power.
There is no justice. Just us.
We, the people, struggle to get our message heard. Suddenly, a clever new tool emerges. Mic Check.
The rich and powerful HAVE freedom of speech, and the power (money) to use it. Mic Check has emerged as a way of delivering powerful messages by temporarily hijacking the speech avenue paved by the powerful.
A typical Mic Check only lasts a few minutes, and delivers a couple of carefully worded paragraphs, but the delivery is compelling. The ubiquitous presence of video recording, and the viral nature of YouTube, has combined with traditional commercial media to deliver these messages well beyond the limitations imposed by the lack of power or influence of the messengers.
Does Mic Check have the potential for misuse? Absolutely. It means that any group can potentially take control of a venue to which they have no actual right.
Will Mic Check become an out-of-control phenomenon used frequently for harassment purposes? Maybe. It also may be something that is with us and effective for only a few months, or even weeks.
No one knows how Mic Check may evolve, but as it stands now, it is a powerful tool for the powerless. Our society is on the verge of collapse and maybe, just maybe, the Occupy Movement, and Mic Check can make a difference. There is no denying that Occupy has changed the dialog, and Mic Check has given that dialog voice.
Three cheers for Mic Check.
Stanley: I tend to agree with you, Allen, if for no other reason than -- as you point out -- it would likely be counterproductive and bring sympathy to the one interrupted -- especially as it is communicated through the media. And it would then subordinate the primary issue to that of the free speech of the speaker.
One idea that might be pursued is the use of the Mic Check approach in a situation where it isn't actually being used to interrupt the speaker, but to make a political point in a dramatic fashion.
And finally, from Bill Freeland:
In general, repeated chants of the same phrase ’60-style is different than an ongoing statement under “mic check” with specific content to communicate. The first example seems to be just rhetoric for its own sake, while the second example seems to have a useful purpose designed to communicate specific information.
On the specific example of the use of mic check at Rove’s address:
• Those who have come (and probably paid) to hear Rove in person feel about as sympathetic to him as it is possible to feel. The protesters, I doubt, are not likely to increase the affection those at the event already have for him due to their disruptive behavior. Nor are they likely to view the protesters in a worse light than they already do.
• Meanwhile, when the action goes viral on social media, the protesters have a tool to reach a much larger and presumably less sympathetic audience than those in the room, which can serve to remind people of who Rove is and what he has done in a way that can’t be ignored (as pickets easily can).
• Also, mic check in the Rove setting, unlike the continuous “Ho, Ho, Ho” chanting, is of very limited duration. They make their point and then leave -- or are removed. So they don’t intend to deny Rove of his right to free speech. They hope merely to briefly interrupt him. So I think it becomes as a result a much less urgent free speech issue when weighed against the potential benefit of holding him to some account.
As for the utility of mic check in the practical (and friendly) setting of a large audience where there is no amplification or free speech implications, I’ve found it to be (much to my surprise) a very useful and creative tool.
So in summary:
• Mic check is not the equivalent of a repeated chant.
• It has limited impact on free speech rights when the purpose is to interrupt, but not prohibit, what others are saying
• In a friendly setting with no other alternative methods available it seems useful for the purpose it was designed to address.
[Allen Young left the Washington Post to work with Liberation News Service in the late Sixties and later became an important voice in the gay liberation movement. Allen now lives in rural Massachusetts where he is involved with environmental issues and writes a column for the Athol Daily News.]
• See Jonah Raskin's interview with journalist and gay activist Allen Young on The Rag Blog.
The Latest From “The Rag Blog”-Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar
Click on the headline to link to The Rag Blog website.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar
It is precisely because Eastwood has made the sexual angle central to the film, without playing games with it, that the film is so powerful.
By David McReynolds / The Rag Blog / November 17, 2011
[This is the first of two Rag Blog reviews of Clint Eastwood's new film, J. Edgar. Also see "Eastwood's Biopic of Kinky Hoover" by Jonah Raskin.]
J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) who, depending on your politics, looked much like a toad... or a bulldog... was without question a monster of American political life. Since his life is now so distant to those younger than 40, the film, J. Edgar, has great value as an historical "look back" at the life and career of a deeply flawed, remarkably powerful man.
As a fan of the work of Clint Eastwood I wish I could give the film unqualified praise, but my praise, while real enough, is limited by two regrets.
First -- while I'd credit the actors with filling their roles so that we soon enough forget Leonardo DiCaprio was so recently the golden boy of youth, as he ages toward the stout, balding figure of Hoover, and that it takes some time to realize Hoover's mother is played by that most accomplished of actors, Judi Dench -- makeup and acting cannot always accomplish miracles.
In the case of Armie Hammer, who plays Clyde Tolson (Hammer played the double role of the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network), his acting skills do not make him believable as an elderly Tolson, crippled by a stroke. Sadly, the makeup leaves him looking as if he were headed for a Halloween party.
Second, I quarrel with Clint Eastwood's approach in which past and present shift throughout the film. But that was his decision and the film works despite my quibble.
There are some things which might have been covered in the film. Younger viewers will not know that Hoover persisted in denying the existence of the Mafia -- so much so that it became a kind of joke (to which passing reference is made in one of the Hercule Poirot TV mysteries). There were suggestions that the Mafia might have had something on Hoover. It is just as likely that Hoover felt the Mafia too big a challenge.
Hoover's role began in 1924, when he was appointed the first director of the Bureau of Investigation, which later became the FBI. His role was to combat "subversion." In the wake of the Russian Revolution, and the folly of some acts of violence by American radicals (to which I'll return later), there was widespread fear of a "Bolshevik Revolution." Hoover played a key role in the Palmer Raids, the deportation of hundreds of aliens.
Then, in the early 1930's, in part linked to the conditions of the Depression, criminal gangs held up a number of banks in the Midwest and John Dillinger became a kind of national folk hero. The FBI played a key role in jailing the gangsters.
On the eve of the Second World War, the FBI investigated German agents and had the key role in counterespionage. With the rise of the Cold War, Hoover became obsessed with the danger of Soviet spies and "un-American" groups. There are few of us who were politically active in that time who do not have FBI files.
(Mine was about 300 pages, when I got it under the Freedom of Information Act, and it was for the most part accurate -- though I was amused that the FBI agent assigned to my case wrote that I was a Trotskyist, basing his conclusion on his access to the documents of the Communist Party's "Control Commission" in Southern California!)
Pacifists often met with FBI agents in the course of routine checks being made on men who had applied for status as conscientious objectors. I met with agents on several occasions when they were asking if certain men were, in fact, members of the War Resisters League. (I always said yes, whether I knew them or not, as it might help get them a CO status and keep them out of jail.)
I remember one such meeting in the early Sixties when I was serving a 25-day jail term on Hart's Island for taking part in a Civil Defense protest. I was on a work crew, dirty from digging. I smoked then, and was very short of cigarettes. A guard came down to the work crew and called me out, saying the FBI wanted to see me.
Grimy and in need of a smoke (which the agent generously offered), I was asked some routine questions about someone applying for CO status. When I got back to the work crew my prestige had, I soon found out, risen greatly, as the men assumed I was involved in some major crime to merit an FBI visit.
A month or two after I finished that short term, I was in my office at 5 Beekman Street when the same agent came in with similar questions -- and, in clean clothes, I was happy to offer him a cigarette.
There are other areas the film might have covered. (I'm not faulting Eastwood for choosing to focus on the personal life of Hoover -- only noting areas younger people wouldn't be aware of.) During the Vietnam War Hoover chose to ignore the Supreme Court limits on his power and set up a "dirty tricks" program called COINTELPRO which sought to disrupt the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King Jr., SCLC, the Communist Party -- and the War Resisters League.
While we at WRL were never able to prove it, it was our assumption that the raid on our offices in 1968, when the office machinery was wrecked, the office badly messed up, and the membership files stolen, was a COINTELPRO project.
This only touches on the dirty world of J. Edgar Hoover, a man so powerful, with his vast secret files, that no president dared to fire him. A man who could destroy careers, drive people of talent, but of left-wing views, to seek new lives in Europe. (One interesting act of defiance -- remarkable at the time -- was the detective story The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout, author of the Nero Wolfe series. Written in 1965, when Hoover was in full power and no one could safely criticize him, Stout ends the story with Hoover ringing the bell on Wolfe's West 35th St. home -- and Wolfe left it unanswered).
However, J. Edgar does what perhaps most needed doing -- humanizing Hoover as a sad, sexually frustrated, deeply insecure man who tried to rearrange facts to help insure his place in history. A man whom Presidents feared, never liked, and never dared to fire.
There had been rumors for years that Hoover was homosexual. His relationship with Clyde Tolson certainly provided the needed grist for the mill.
Hoover had been at his job for several years before he was introduced to Clyde Tolson. There are surely few of us who have not had that electric moment when we met a person to whom we were instantly drawn. In most cases those electric moments never light a real fire, but when Tolson turns up in Hoover's office, having applied for a job, there is absolute clarity about the relationship. Tolson "takes charge of the scene," moving to open an office window, handing Hoover a handkerchief to mop his face, which had broken into a sweat.
Tolson is hired. Hoover soon makes him his second in command -- a post Tolson accepts "only if you will agree we will always have lunch and dinner together." It is clear that Tolson is in love with Hoover, and quite aware of that. It isn't clear whether Hoover is ever able to really come to terms with the fact he has a lover.
It is, I think, quite possible the two men never had an actual sexual encounter. But in a remarkable scene, which homosexuals will recognize as valid, when Hoover tells Tolson he is thinking of marriage there is a sharp sudden physical encounter, breaking glass, and the two fight, hitting each other, tumbling and wrestling together until Tolson, on top, says "I love you" and kisses Hoover.
Hoover says "Never do that again," but it seemed to me that scene was solid, that Eastwood caught the truth of the relationship.
There is a chilling moment when Hoover's mother, Judi Dench, tells him she will teach him how to dance, and that -- referring to a school boy who had been outed for crossdressing (and had then committed suicide) -- she would rather have a dead son than a "daffodil son." One hears, in the mother's words, the most ancient of primitive demands that the race must reproduce itself.
While Tolson never gives a sense of having political views of his own, he does, near the end of the film, as Hoover has completed his autobiographical notes, tell Hoover the truth. He tells him that he has read the book, that the notes are a fiction, that Hoover hadn't personally made the arrests he had claimed, that it was not Hoover, but special agent Melvin Purvis who had tracked down Dillinger. (Hoover, jealous of Purvis' role, had exiled him to a distant post).
It is a devastating but not vindictive setting straight of the record.
It is precisely because Clint Eastwood has made the sexual angle central to the film, without playing games with it, that the film is so powerful. We are able to see the corruption of Hoover (who loved playing the horses, and accepted the arrangements with the tracks that his bets always paid off), the racism, the fanatic fear of subversion, and yet to see the haunted man behind the throne of power.
This generation cannot easily conceive of the power the FBI held on the imaginations of the American public. And it was, to some extent, justified.
In 1954, as the U.S. was considering getting involved in the French disaster in Indochina, Maggie Phair and I, from the Socialist Party, had gone down to the boardwalk in Ocean Park late at night to stencil the slogan "Send Dulles, Not Troops, to Indochina." (Dulles was then Secretary of State.) I had with me a slim folder containing the layout for a leaflet on Vern Davidson, a Socialist Party member then in prison for draft resistance, and some addresses of local contacts, and finally some totally non-political family snapshots, which were of personal value.
When Maggie and I were done, and I went to pick up my manila folder, it was gone. Clearly a theft, but one with few rewards. The next morning I called the FBI office in Los Angeles, and said that someone had stolen something of mine which, if the thief was patriotic, he would turn over to the FBI. The FBI (of course) denied any knowledge of the matter.
However a year or two later the photos that had been in the folder were mailed to me at my parent's address -- an address which hadn't been on the folder. Score one for the FBI.
Two final points. I said earlier that I'd remark on the folly of the occasional acts of radical violence. The casual radical, the young radical "here on vacation," can talk about using violence, bombs, sabotage, in resistance, ignoring that the history of such acts (which helped provide the basis for setting up the FBI) is always to give greater power to the State.
There is surely no one to whom radicals should pay more heed than Lenin, who warned against the "propaganda of the deed," the folly of thinking the force of the State could be overturned by random acts of violence. All of history has shown that there is nothing easier to penetrate than a secret organization. Secrecy and violence play into the hands of Hoover and those like him.
The second final point is troubling and I offer it uneasily. No modern state can afford to be without some security apparatus. We can condemn the FBI, but we were also furious that it did not send its agents into the Ku Klux Klan. We know that the problems of organized crime and of irrational violence which can come as easily from the right as from the left (remember the Oklahoma bombing) require some agency of investigation.
The problem is how to maintain control over such agencies. I pose the problem; I do not have the answer.
Meanwhile, catch J. Edgar and see how dangerous the secret police can be, and how deeply they threatened our freedoms within very recent memory.
[David McReynolds is a former chair of War Resisters International, and was the Socialist Party candidate for President in 1980 and 2000. He is retired and lives with two cats on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He posts at Edge Left and can be reached at dmcreynolds@nyc.rr.com. Read more articles by David McReynolds on The Rag Blog.]
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar
It is precisely because Eastwood has made the sexual angle central to the film, without playing games with it, that the film is so powerful.
By David McReynolds / The Rag Blog / November 17, 2011
[This is the first of two Rag Blog reviews of Clint Eastwood's new film, J. Edgar. Also see "Eastwood's Biopic of Kinky Hoover" by Jonah Raskin.]
J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) who, depending on your politics, looked much like a toad... or a bulldog... was without question a monster of American political life. Since his life is now so distant to those younger than 40, the film, J. Edgar, has great value as an historical "look back" at the life and career of a deeply flawed, remarkably powerful man.
As a fan of the work of Clint Eastwood I wish I could give the film unqualified praise, but my praise, while real enough, is limited by two regrets.
First -- while I'd credit the actors with filling their roles so that we soon enough forget Leonardo DiCaprio was so recently the golden boy of youth, as he ages toward the stout, balding figure of Hoover, and that it takes some time to realize Hoover's mother is played by that most accomplished of actors, Judi Dench -- makeup and acting cannot always accomplish miracles.
In the case of Armie Hammer, who plays Clyde Tolson (Hammer played the double role of the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network), his acting skills do not make him believable as an elderly Tolson, crippled by a stroke. Sadly, the makeup leaves him looking as if he were headed for a Halloween party.
Second, I quarrel with Clint Eastwood's approach in which past and present shift throughout the film. But that was his decision and the film works despite my quibble.
There are some things which might have been covered in the film. Younger viewers will not know that Hoover persisted in denying the existence of the Mafia -- so much so that it became a kind of joke (to which passing reference is made in one of the Hercule Poirot TV mysteries). There were suggestions that the Mafia might have had something on Hoover. It is just as likely that Hoover felt the Mafia too big a challenge.
Hoover's role began in 1924, when he was appointed the first director of the Bureau of Investigation, which later became the FBI. His role was to combat "subversion." In the wake of the Russian Revolution, and the folly of some acts of violence by American radicals (to which I'll return later), there was widespread fear of a "Bolshevik Revolution." Hoover played a key role in the Palmer Raids, the deportation of hundreds of aliens.
Then, in the early 1930's, in part linked to the conditions of the Depression, criminal gangs held up a number of banks in the Midwest and John Dillinger became a kind of national folk hero. The FBI played a key role in jailing the gangsters.
On the eve of the Second World War, the FBI investigated German agents and had the key role in counterespionage. With the rise of the Cold War, Hoover became obsessed with the danger of Soviet spies and "un-American" groups. There are few of us who were politically active in that time who do not have FBI files.
(Mine was about 300 pages, when I got it under the Freedom of Information Act, and it was for the most part accurate -- though I was amused that the FBI agent assigned to my case wrote that I was a Trotskyist, basing his conclusion on his access to the documents of the Communist Party's "Control Commission" in Southern California!)
Pacifists often met with FBI agents in the course of routine checks being made on men who had applied for status as conscientious objectors. I met with agents on several occasions when they were asking if certain men were, in fact, members of the War Resisters League. (I always said yes, whether I knew them or not, as it might help get them a CO status and keep them out of jail.)
I remember one such meeting in the early Sixties when I was serving a 25-day jail term on Hart's Island for taking part in a Civil Defense protest. I was on a work crew, dirty from digging. I smoked then, and was very short of cigarettes. A guard came down to the work crew and called me out, saying the FBI wanted to see me.
Grimy and in need of a smoke (which the agent generously offered), I was asked some routine questions about someone applying for CO status. When I got back to the work crew my prestige had, I soon found out, risen greatly, as the men assumed I was involved in some major crime to merit an FBI visit.
A month or two after I finished that short term, I was in my office at 5 Beekman Street when the same agent came in with similar questions -- and, in clean clothes, I was happy to offer him a cigarette.
There are other areas the film might have covered. (I'm not faulting Eastwood for choosing to focus on the personal life of Hoover -- only noting areas younger people wouldn't be aware of.) During the Vietnam War Hoover chose to ignore the Supreme Court limits on his power and set up a "dirty tricks" program called COINTELPRO which sought to disrupt the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King Jr., SCLC, the Communist Party -- and the War Resisters League.
While we at WRL were never able to prove it, it was our assumption that the raid on our offices in 1968, when the office machinery was wrecked, the office badly messed up, and the membership files stolen, was a COINTELPRO project.
This only touches on the dirty world of J. Edgar Hoover, a man so powerful, with his vast secret files, that no president dared to fire him. A man who could destroy careers, drive people of talent, but of left-wing views, to seek new lives in Europe. (One interesting act of defiance -- remarkable at the time -- was the detective story The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout, author of the Nero Wolfe series. Written in 1965, when Hoover was in full power and no one could safely criticize him, Stout ends the story with Hoover ringing the bell on Wolfe's West 35th St. home -- and Wolfe left it unanswered).
However, J. Edgar does what perhaps most needed doing -- humanizing Hoover as a sad, sexually frustrated, deeply insecure man who tried to rearrange facts to help insure his place in history. A man whom Presidents feared, never liked, and never dared to fire.
There had been rumors for years that Hoover was homosexual. His relationship with Clyde Tolson certainly provided the needed grist for the mill.
Hoover had been at his job for several years before he was introduced to Clyde Tolson. There are surely few of us who have not had that electric moment when we met a person to whom we were instantly drawn. In most cases those electric moments never light a real fire, but when Tolson turns up in Hoover's office, having applied for a job, there is absolute clarity about the relationship. Tolson "takes charge of the scene," moving to open an office window, handing Hoover a handkerchief to mop his face, which had broken into a sweat.
Tolson is hired. Hoover soon makes him his second in command -- a post Tolson accepts "only if you will agree we will always have lunch and dinner together." It is clear that Tolson is in love with Hoover, and quite aware of that. It isn't clear whether Hoover is ever able to really come to terms with the fact he has a lover.
It is, I think, quite possible the two men never had an actual sexual encounter. But in a remarkable scene, which homosexuals will recognize as valid, when Hoover tells Tolson he is thinking of marriage there is a sharp sudden physical encounter, breaking glass, and the two fight, hitting each other, tumbling and wrestling together until Tolson, on top, says "I love you" and kisses Hoover.
Hoover says "Never do that again," but it seemed to me that scene was solid, that Eastwood caught the truth of the relationship.
There is a chilling moment when Hoover's mother, Judi Dench, tells him she will teach him how to dance, and that -- referring to a school boy who had been outed for crossdressing (and had then committed suicide) -- she would rather have a dead son than a "daffodil son." One hears, in the mother's words, the most ancient of primitive demands that the race must reproduce itself.
While Tolson never gives a sense of having political views of his own, he does, near the end of the film, as Hoover has completed his autobiographical notes, tell Hoover the truth. He tells him that he has read the book, that the notes are a fiction, that Hoover hadn't personally made the arrests he had claimed, that it was not Hoover, but special agent Melvin Purvis who had tracked down Dillinger. (Hoover, jealous of Purvis' role, had exiled him to a distant post).
It is a devastating but not vindictive setting straight of the record.
It is precisely because Clint Eastwood has made the sexual angle central to the film, without playing games with it, that the film is so powerful. We are able to see the corruption of Hoover (who loved playing the horses, and accepted the arrangements with the tracks that his bets always paid off), the racism, the fanatic fear of subversion, and yet to see the haunted man behind the throne of power.
This generation cannot easily conceive of the power the FBI held on the imaginations of the American public. And it was, to some extent, justified.
In 1954, as the U.S. was considering getting involved in the French disaster in Indochina, Maggie Phair and I, from the Socialist Party, had gone down to the boardwalk in Ocean Park late at night to stencil the slogan "Send Dulles, Not Troops, to Indochina." (Dulles was then Secretary of State.) I had with me a slim folder containing the layout for a leaflet on Vern Davidson, a Socialist Party member then in prison for draft resistance, and some addresses of local contacts, and finally some totally non-political family snapshots, which were of personal value.
When Maggie and I were done, and I went to pick up my manila folder, it was gone. Clearly a theft, but one with few rewards. The next morning I called the FBI office in Los Angeles, and said that someone had stolen something of mine which, if the thief was patriotic, he would turn over to the FBI. The FBI (of course) denied any knowledge of the matter.
However a year or two later the photos that had been in the folder were mailed to me at my parent's address -- an address which hadn't been on the folder. Score one for the FBI.
Two final points. I said earlier that I'd remark on the folly of the occasional acts of radical violence. The casual radical, the young radical "here on vacation," can talk about using violence, bombs, sabotage, in resistance, ignoring that the history of such acts (which helped provide the basis for setting up the FBI) is always to give greater power to the State.
There is surely no one to whom radicals should pay more heed than Lenin, who warned against the "propaganda of the deed," the folly of thinking the force of the State could be overturned by random acts of violence. All of history has shown that there is nothing easier to penetrate than a secret organization. Secrecy and violence play into the hands of Hoover and those like him.
The second final point is troubling and I offer it uneasily. No modern state can afford to be without some security apparatus. We can condemn the FBI, but we were also furious that it did not send its agents into the Ku Klux Klan. We know that the problems of organized crime and of irrational violence which can come as easily from the right as from the left (remember the Oklahoma bombing) require some agency of investigation.
The problem is how to maintain control over such agencies. I pose the problem; I do not have the answer.
Meanwhile, catch J. Edgar and see how dangerous the secret police can be, and how deeply they threatened our freedoms within very recent memory.
[David McReynolds is a former chair of War Resisters International, and was the Socialist Party candidate for President in 1980 and 2000. He is retired and lives with two cats on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He posts at Edge Left and can be reached at dmcreynolds@nyc.rr.com. Read more articles by David McReynolds on The Rag Blog.]
The Latest From “The Rag Blog”-The burdens of war:Anti-war GI's on Veterans Day
Click on the headline to link to The Rag Blog website.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
The burdens of war:Anti-war GI's on Veterans Day
By Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog / November 15, 2011
See more photos by Susan Van Haitsma, Below.
KILLEEN, Texas -- Usually Veterans Day bums me out big time. War is the worst human invention I know. Sacrificing the lives of young adults to "protect my way of life" is false and backward. I don’t know how to thank veterans for their sincere motivation to help the world when consequences of their roles as soldiers have been so harmful to the world and to themselves.
This Veterans Day, I had an opportunity to reconcile these sentiments in the heart of Texas, in the small town that contains the largest military base in the world.
Staff and volunteers with Under The Hood, the GI Rights Center and Café in Killeen, Texas, teamed with members of the Ft. Hood chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) to march in the Killeen Veterans Day Parade, and they invited supporters to join them. Several of us drove up from Austin to take part.
The parade entry was designed to promote IVAW's Operation Recovery project, a campaign for service members’ right to heal. The campaign is calling for increased health services for traumatized troops instead of continued deployments. Surely this is a reasonable demand.
To dramatize the message in the parade, four soldiers marched single file, carrying full army duffel bags on their backs. The bags were labeled “Trauma,” “PTSD,” “MST" (Military Sexual Trauma, and “TBI” (Traumatic Brain Injury). Each bag was also ringed with the word, “Stigma” in bold lettering.
The symbolism of the burdens of war borne by soldiers provided a strong visual message. The soldiers also carried signs calling on Ft. Hood’s base commander, General Donald Campbell, to stop deploying traumatized troops from Ft. Hood.
We civilian supporters walked with the soldiers, carrying an Operation Recovery banner and distributing fliers to the parade audience about Operation Recovery and Under The Hood. We weren’t sure how we would be received by the crowd lining the parade route, but even with red, white and blue everywhere, people were overwhelmingly receptive.
As the parade wound its way through Killeen’s modest downtown streets, we passed deserted storefronts and saw many signs of economic struggle. War does not profit the warrior.
A press release about our parade entry was issued just before we walked the few blocks from Under The Hood, across the railroad tracks to the parade lineup. A local ABC-TV affiliate responded, and a reporter came to the café after the parade. Iraq war vets, Kyle and Curtis, gave excellent interviews for a good report that ran on the evening news and the KXXV-TV home page.
After the interviews, we hung around the café and talked, readying things for the evening’s special Veterans Day poetry event hosted by the phenomenal Killeen poetry slam group. My feelings about the day’s events seemed to find expression in the poems I heard that night. Truths were spoken about military life, death and injury, separation and reconciliation, love and pain. We were drawn together: soldier and civilian, gay and straight, youngadults and older ones.
Under The Hood is a busy place, with lots of good things happening. Current events include weekly “Ribs ‘n Rights” nights, twice monthly poetry slams and an upcoming Warrior Writers workshop. They recently held a community art show and Combat Paper workshop.
Check out www.underthehoodcafe.org to find out more about Under The Hood, and go to www.operationrecoverycampaign.org to register your support for service members’ right to heal.
[Susan Van Haitsma is active in Austin with Sustainable Options for Youth and CodePink. She also blogs at makingpeace. Find more articles by Susan Van Haitsma on The Rag Blog.]
• Find more articles about IVAW and Under the Hood on The Rag Blog.
The Rag Blog
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
The burdens of war:Anti-war GI's on Veterans Day
By Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog / November 15, 2011
See more photos by Susan Van Haitsma, Below.
KILLEEN, Texas -- Usually Veterans Day bums me out big time. War is the worst human invention I know. Sacrificing the lives of young adults to "protect my way of life" is false and backward. I don’t know how to thank veterans for their sincere motivation to help the world when consequences of their roles as soldiers have been so harmful to the world and to themselves.
This Veterans Day, I had an opportunity to reconcile these sentiments in the heart of Texas, in the small town that contains the largest military base in the world.
Staff and volunteers with Under The Hood, the GI Rights Center and Café in Killeen, Texas, teamed with members of the Ft. Hood chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) to march in the Killeen Veterans Day Parade, and they invited supporters to join them. Several of us drove up from Austin to take part.
The parade entry was designed to promote IVAW's Operation Recovery project, a campaign for service members’ right to heal. The campaign is calling for increased health services for traumatized troops instead of continued deployments. Surely this is a reasonable demand.
To dramatize the message in the parade, four soldiers marched single file, carrying full army duffel bags on their backs. The bags were labeled “Trauma,” “PTSD,” “MST" (Military Sexual Trauma, and “TBI” (Traumatic Brain Injury). Each bag was also ringed with the word, “Stigma” in bold lettering.
The symbolism of the burdens of war borne by soldiers provided a strong visual message. The soldiers also carried signs calling on Ft. Hood’s base commander, General Donald Campbell, to stop deploying traumatized troops from Ft. Hood.
We civilian supporters walked with the soldiers, carrying an Operation Recovery banner and distributing fliers to the parade audience about Operation Recovery and Under The Hood. We weren’t sure how we would be received by the crowd lining the parade route, but even with red, white and blue everywhere, people were overwhelmingly receptive.
As the parade wound its way through Killeen’s modest downtown streets, we passed deserted storefronts and saw many signs of economic struggle. War does not profit the warrior.
A press release about our parade entry was issued just before we walked the few blocks from Under The Hood, across the railroad tracks to the parade lineup. A local ABC-TV affiliate responded, and a reporter came to the café after the parade. Iraq war vets, Kyle and Curtis, gave excellent interviews for a good report that ran on the evening news and the KXXV-TV home page.
After the interviews, we hung around the café and talked, readying things for the evening’s special Veterans Day poetry event hosted by the phenomenal Killeen poetry slam group. My feelings about the day’s events seemed to find expression in the poems I heard that night. Truths were spoken about military life, death and injury, separation and reconciliation, love and pain. We were drawn together: soldier and civilian, gay and straight, youngadults and older ones.
Under The Hood is a busy place, with lots of good things happening. Current events include weekly “Ribs ‘n Rights” nights, twice monthly poetry slams and an upcoming Warrior Writers workshop. They recently held a community art show and Combat Paper workshop.
Check out www.underthehoodcafe.org to find out more about Under The Hood, and go to www.operationrecoverycampaign.org to register your support for service members’ right to heal.
[Susan Van Haitsma is active in Austin with Sustainable Options for Youth and CodePink. She also blogs at makingpeace. Find more articles by Susan Van Haitsma on The Rag Blog.]
• Find more articles about IVAW and Under the Hood on The Rag Blog.
The Rag Blog
Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor American Communist Leader James P. Cannon -A Statement on the War-December 21, 1941
Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
*******
James P. Cannon A Statement on the War-December 21, 1941
Written: 1941
Source: Fourth International, New York, Volume III, No. 1, January 1942, pages 3-4.
Transcription\HTML Markup: David Walters
Copyleft: James P. Cannon (www.marx.org) 2005. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
December 22, 1941
The considerations which determined our attitude toward the war up to the out break of hostilities between the United States and the Axis powers retain their validity in the new situation.
We considered the war upon the part of all the capitalist powers involved—Germany and France, Italy and Great Britain — as an imperialist war.
This characterization of the war was determined for us by the character of the state powers involved in it. They were all capitalist states in the epoch of imperialism; themselves imperialist—oppressing other nations or peoples—or satellites of imperialist powers. The extension of the war to the Pacific and the formal entry of the United States and Japan change nothing in this basic analysis.
Following Lenin, it made no difference to us which imperialist bandit fired the first shot; every imperialist power has for a quarter of a century been “attacking” every other imperialist power by economic and political means; the resort to arms is but the culmination of this process, which will continue as long as capitalism endures.
This characterization of the war does not apply to the war of the Soviet Union against German imperialism. We make a fundamental distinction between the Soviet Union and its “democratic” allies. We defend the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is a workers’ state, although degenerated under the totalitarian-political rule of the Kremlin bureaucracy. Only traitors can deny support to the Soviet workers’ state in its war against fascist Germany. To defend the Soviet Union, in spite of Stalin and against Stalin, to defend the nationalized property established by the October revolution. That is a progressive war.
The war of China against Japan we likewise characterize as a progressive war. We support China. China is a colonial country, battling for national independence against an imperialist power. A victory for China would be a tremendous blow against all imperialism, inspiring all colonial peoples to throw off the imperialist yoke. The reactionary regime of Chiang Kai-shek, subservient to the “democracies,” has hampered China’s ability to conduct a bold war for independence; but that does not alter for us the essential fact that China is an oppressed nation fighting against an imperialist oppressor. We are proud of the fact that the Fourth Internationalists of China are fighting in the front ranks against Japanese imperialism.
None of the reasons which oblige us to support the Soviet Union and China against their enemies can be said to apply to France or Britain. These imperialist “democracies” entered the war to maintain their lordship over the hundreds of millions of subject peoples in the British and French empires; to defend these “democracies” means to defend their oppression of the masses of Africa and Asia, Above all it means to defend the decaying capitalist social order. We do not defend that, either in Italy and Germany, or in France and Britain—or in the United States.
The Marxist analysis which determined our attitude toward the war up to December 8, 1941 [i.e. up to the Pearl Harbor raid] continues to determine our attitude now. We were internationalists before December 8; we still are. We believe that the most fundamental bond of loyalty of all the workers of the world is the bond of international solidarity of the workers against their exploiters. We cannot assume the slightest responsibility for this war. No imperialist regime can conduct a just war. We cannot support it for one moment.
We are the most irreconcilable enemies of the fascist dictatorships of Germany and Italy and the military dictatorship of Japan. Our co-thinkers of the Fourth International in the Axis nations and the conquered countries are fighting and dying in the struggle to organize the coming revolutions against Hitler and Mussolini.
We are doing all in our power to speed those revolutions. But those ex-socialists, intellectuals and labor leaders, who in the name of “democracy” support the war of United States imperialism against its imperialist foes and rivals, far from aiding the German and Italian anti-fascists, only hamper their work and betray their struggle. The Allied imperialists, as every German worker knows, aim to impose a second and worse Versailles; the fear of that is Hitler’s greatest asset in keeping the masses of Germany in subjection. The fear of the foreign yoke holds back the development of the German revolution against Hitler.
Our program to aid the German masses to overthrow Hitler demands, first of all, that they be guaranteed against a second Versailles. When the people of Germany can feel assured that military defeat will not be followed by the destruction of Germany’s economic power and the imposition of unbearable burdens by the victors, Hitler will be overthrown from within Germany. But such guarantees against a second Versailles cannot be given by Germany’s imperialist foes; nor, if given, would they be accepted by the German people. Wilson’s 14 points are still remembered in Germany, and his promise that the United States was conducting war against the Kaiser and not against the German people. Yet the victors’ peace, and the way in which the victors “organized” the world from 1918 to 1933, constituted war against the German people. The German people will not accept any new promises from those who made that peace and conducted that war.
In the midst of the war against Hitler, it is necessary to extend the hand of fraternity to the German people. This can be done honestly and convincingly only by a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government. We advocate the Workers’ and Farmers’ Government. Such a government, and only such a government, can conduct a war against Hitler, Mussolini and the Mikado in cooperation with the oppressed peoples of Germany, Italy and Japan. Our program against Hitlerism and for a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government is today the program of only a small minority. The great majority actively or passively supports the war program of the Roosevelt administration. As a minority we must submit to that majority in action. We do not sabotage the war or obstruct the military forces in any way. The Trotskyists go with their generation into the armed forces. We abide by the decisions of the majority. But we retain our opinions and insist on our right to express them.
Our aim is to convince the majority that our program is the only one which can put an end to war, fascism and economic convulsions. In this process of education the terrible facts speak loudly for our contention. Twice in twenty-five years world wars have wrought destruction. The instigators and leaders of those wars do not offer, and cannot offer, a plausible promise that a third, fourth and fifth world war will not follow if they and their social system remain dominant. Capitalism can offer no prospect but the slaughter of millions and the destruction of civilization. Only socialism can save humanity from this abyss. This is the truth. As the terrible war unfolds, this truth will be recognized by tens of millions who will not hear us now. The war-tortured masses will adopt our program and liberate the people of all countries from war and fascism. In this dark hour we clearly see the socialist future and prepare the way for it. Against the mad chorus of national hatreds we advance once more the old slogan of socialist internationalism: Workers of the World Unite!
New York, December 22, 1941
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
*******
James P. Cannon A Statement on the War-December 21, 1941
Written: 1941
Source: Fourth International, New York, Volume III, No. 1, January 1942, pages 3-4.
Transcription\HTML Markup: David Walters
Copyleft: James P. Cannon (www.marx.org) 2005. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
December 22, 1941
The considerations which determined our attitude toward the war up to the out break of hostilities between the United States and the Axis powers retain their validity in the new situation.
We considered the war upon the part of all the capitalist powers involved—Germany and France, Italy and Great Britain — as an imperialist war.
This characterization of the war was determined for us by the character of the state powers involved in it. They were all capitalist states in the epoch of imperialism; themselves imperialist—oppressing other nations or peoples—or satellites of imperialist powers. The extension of the war to the Pacific and the formal entry of the United States and Japan change nothing in this basic analysis.
Following Lenin, it made no difference to us which imperialist bandit fired the first shot; every imperialist power has for a quarter of a century been “attacking” every other imperialist power by economic and political means; the resort to arms is but the culmination of this process, which will continue as long as capitalism endures.
This characterization of the war does not apply to the war of the Soviet Union against German imperialism. We make a fundamental distinction between the Soviet Union and its “democratic” allies. We defend the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is a workers’ state, although degenerated under the totalitarian-political rule of the Kremlin bureaucracy. Only traitors can deny support to the Soviet workers’ state in its war against fascist Germany. To defend the Soviet Union, in spite of Stalin and against Stalin, to defend the nationalized property established by the October revolution. That is a progressive war.
The war of China against Japan we likewise characterize as a progressive war. We support China. China is a colonial country, battling for national independence against an imperialist power. A victory for China would be a tremendous blow against all imperialism, inspiring all colonial peoples to throw off the imperialist yoke. The reactionary regime of Chiang Kai-shek, subservient to the “democracies,” has hampered China’s ability to conduct a bold war for independence; but that does not alter for us the essential fact that China is an oppressed nation fighting against an imperialist oppressor. We are proud of the fact that the Fourth Internationalists of China are fighting in the front ranks against Japanese imperialism.
None of the reasons which oblige us to support the Soviet Union and China against their enemies can be said to apply to France or Britain. These imperialist “democracies” entered the war to maintain their lordship over the hundreds of millions of subject peoples in the British and French empires; to defend these “democracies” means to defend their oppression of the masses of Africa and Asia, Above all it means to defend the decaying capitalist social order. We do not defend that, either in Italy and Germany, or in France and Britain—or in the United States.
The Marxist analysis which determined our attitude toward the war up to December 8, 1941 [i.e. up to the Pearl Harbor raid] continues to determine our attitude now. We were internationalists before December 8; we still are. We believe that the most fundamental bond of loyalty of all the workers of the world is the bond of international solidarity of the workers against their exploiters. We cannot assume the slightest responsibility for this war. No imperialist regime can conduct a just war. We cannot support it for one moment.
We are the most irreconcilable enemies of the fascist dictatorships of Germany and Italy and the military dictatorship of Japan. Our co-thinkers of the Fourth International in the Axis nations and the conquered countries are fighting and dying in the struggle to organize the coming revolutions against Hitler and Mussolini.
We are doing all in our power to speed those revolutions. But those ex-socialists, intellectuals and labor leaders, who in the name of “democracy” support the war of United States imperialism against its imperialist foes and rivals, far from aiding the German and Italian anti-fascists, only hamper their work and betray their struggle. The Allied imperialists, as every German worker knows, aim to impose a second and worse Versailles; the fear of that is Hitler’s greatest asset in keeping the masses of Germany in subjection. The fear of the foreign yoke holds back the development of the German revolution against Hitler.
Our program to aid the German masses to overthrow Hitler demands, first of all, that they be guaranteed against a second Versailles. When the people of Germany can feel assured that military defeat will not be followed by the destruction of Germany’s economic power and the imposition of unbearable burdens by the victors, Hitler will be overthrown from within Germany. But such guarantees against a second Versailles cannot be given by Germany’s imperialist foes; nor, if given, would they be accepted by the German people. Wilson’s 14 points are still remembered in Germany, and his promise that the United States was conducting war against the Kaiser and not against the German people. Yet the victors’ peace, and the way in which the victors “organized” the world from 1918 to 1933, constituted war against the German people. The German people will not accept any new promises from those who made that peace and conducted that war.
In the midst of the war against Hitler, it is necessary to extend the hand of fraternity to the German people. This can be done honestly and convincingly only by a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government. We advocate the Workers’ and Farmers’ Government. Such a government, and only such a government, can conduct a war against Hitler, Mussolini and the Mikado in cooperation with the oppressed peoples of Germany, Italy and Japan. Our program against Hitlerism and for a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government is today the program of only a small minority. The great majority actively or passively supports the war program of the Roosevelt administration. As a minority we must submit to that majority in action. We do not sabotage the war or obstruct the military forces in any way. The Trotskyists go with their generation into the armed forces. We abide by the decisions of the majority. But we retain our opinions and insist on our right to express them.
Our aim is to convince the majority that our program is the only one which can put an end to war, fascism and economic convulsions. In this process of education the terrible facts speak loudly for our contention. Twice in twenty-five years world wars have wrought destruction. The instigators and leaders of those wars do not offer, and cannot offer, a plausible promise that a third, fourth and fifth world war will not follow if they and their social system remain dominant. Capitalism can offer no prospect but the slaughter of millions and the destruction of civilization. Only socialism can save humanity from this abyss. This is the truth. As the terrible war unfolds, this truth will be recognized by tens of millions who will not hear us now. The war-tortured masses will adopt our program and liberate the people of all countries from war and fascism. In this dark hour we clearly see the socialist future and prepare the way for it. Against the mad chorus of national hatreds we advance once more the old slogan of socialist internationalism: Workers of the World Unite!
New York, December 22, 1941
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