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.
******
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, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
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.
Guest Commentary- From Chapter Eight Of Leon Trotsky's Literature and Revolution:
"The personal dreams of a few enthusiasts today for making life more dramatic and for educating man himself rhythmically, find a proper and real place in this outlook. Having rationalized his economic system, that is, having saturated it with consciousness and planfulness, man will not leave a trace of the present stagnant and worm-eaten domestic life. The care for food and education, which lies like a millstone on the present-day family, will be removed, and will become the subject of social initiative and of an endless collective creativeness. Woman will at last free herself from her semi-servile condition. Side by side with technique, education, in the broad sense of the psycho-physical molding of new generations, will take its place as the crown of social thinking. Powerful “parties” will form themselves around pedagogic systems. Experiments in social education and an emulation of different methods will take place to a degree which has not been dreamed of before. Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral islands, but will be built consciously, will be tested by thought, will be directed and corrected. Life will cease to be elemental, and for this reason stagnant. Man, who will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build peoples’ palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be able to add to his own life richness, brilliancy and intensity, but also a dynamic quality of the highest degree. The shell of life will hardly have time to form before it will burst open again under the pressure of new technical and cultural inventions and achievements. Life in the future will not be monotonous.
More than that. Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk and his play. He will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution. Man first drove the dark elements out of industry and ideology, by displacing barbarian routine by scientific technique, and religion by science. Afterwards he drove the unconscious out of politics, by overthrowing monarchy and class with democracy and rationalist parliamentarianism and then with the clear and open Soviet dictatorship. The blind elements have settled most heavily in economic relations, but man is driving them out from there also, by means of the Socialist organization of economic life. This makes it possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life. Finally, the nature of man himself is hidden in the deepest and darkest corner of the unconscious, of the elemental, of the sub-soil. Is it not self-evident that the greatest efforts of investigative thought and of creative initiative will be in that direction? The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection! Emancipated man will want to attain a greater equilibrium in the work of his organs and a more proportional developing and wearing out of his tissues, in order to reduce the fear of death to a rational reaction of the organism towards danger. There can be no doubt that man’s extreme anatomical and physiological disharmony, that is, the extreme disproportion in the growth and wearing out of organs and tissues, give the life instinct the form of a pinched, morbid and hysterical fear of death, which darkens reason and which feeds the stupid and humiliating fantasies about life after death.
Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.
It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts – literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise."
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Monday, February 06, 2012
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Boston Commune! Take The Offensive!- Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
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.
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 on that date 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 on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as well get a better grip of the important of the labor movement to winning victories in our struggles.
******
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!
*******
Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “to big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
•
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing
a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where
there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
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 on that date 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 on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as well get a better grip of the important of the labor movement to winning victories in our struggles.
******
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!
*******
Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “to big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
•
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing
a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where
there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
The Latest From The "Occupy Boston" Website- Rally And March For "No War On Iran"
Markin comment:
A good, if small, beginning in our efforts to head off the American imperial state's next in line war on Iran. U.S. (and its allies)- Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
A good, if small, beginning in our efforts to head off the American imperial state's next in line war on Iran. U.S. (and its allies)- Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-The Embryo Of An Alternate Government-Learn The Lessons Of History- From The Pages Of The French Revolution- Ernest Belfort Bax-The Last Episode of the French Revolution Being a History of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals (1911)-III. Vicissitudes of Fortune and Ripening of Ideas
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 All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
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Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
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As part of my comment here, dated October 20, 2011, I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the “new world” we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked to were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work checks and balances form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one. In that sense previous historical models come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
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Recently (see October 22, 2011 comment above) I noted the following while arguing for the General Assembly concept as a form of alternate government using historic examples like the Paris Commune (1871), the early soviets in Russia (1905 and 1917), and the early days of the antifascist militias in the Spanish Civil War (1936-37):
“However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.”
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lesson Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
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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. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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Ernest Belfort Bax
Gracchus Babeuf
III. Vicissitudes of Fortune and Ripening of Ideas
As already stated, shortly after the fall of Robespierre, Babeuf reappeared in Paris and founded the Journal de la liberté de la presse, in which he played the part of political free lance, attacking in turn the Robespierrists and the Thermidoreans. At first, however, the whole of his energies seem to have been directed against the party of Robespierre and the old revolutionary government. He was indeed at this time on terms of intimacy with several of the Thermidorean leaders, notably Tallien and Fouché, who subsequently became his bitter enemies. Before long, however, his general journalistic attitude caused the absurd suspicion to fall upon him of being a royalist agent in disguise. This was enhanced by his public speaking, at which he now became very assiduous, more particularly in the club of his quarter, where he nightly attacked the authority of the Convention, and especially the leading Thermidoreans. In this way Babeuf made himself the enemy alike of the Jacobins and of the parties now dominant in the Convention. The former were incensed by a pamphlet issued by him at this time, Du système de depopulation ou la vie et Les crimes de Carrier, in which the methods of Carrier, his noyades, republican marriages, etc., were denounced in the most violent language.
The journal itself was consecrated to the cause implied by its name, and, as already stated, although first directed mainly against the “tail of Robespierre”, as the partisans of the fallen dictator were now termed, soon took to criticising with equal severity the successful faction in the recent struggle. The tenth number merits notice, inasmuch as Babeuf reproduced therein the address of the popular society of Arras to the National Convention, containing a kind of manifesto on the liberty of the press, coupled with a denunciation of Barère, the notorious ex-member of the Committee of Public Safety. As is well known, it was drawn up by Babeuf himself. It concluded with the words: “Men of the 9th of Thermidor, we declare before you, on behalf of our fellow-citizens, that they, deadened by a long lethargy, demand their freedom, claiming that the fall of tyrants shall render to us our eternal rights, that liberty shall step forth in the full glory of its power from the tomb of the dictator. Representatives, the men of the north, who have muzzled that devouring ogre, whose furies have desolated our country during five months, will prove themselves raised to your level, in denouncing to you the revolutionary phantom behind which Joseph Lebon has sheltered himself, in order to battle victoriously against the victims who struggle to escape his fury. We denounce to you Barère, that vile slave of Robespierre.” The document proceeds to stigmatise, in a few phrases, the horrors of “the Terror” as exercised at Arras.
The above, in the oratorical manner of the time, is a good specimen of Babeuf’s writing, in what we may term the “grand” style of manifesto. The journal from the first excited the adverse attention of the authorities, and it had been published little more than two months before the violence of its language caused action to be taken by the “Committee of General Security”, and on the 13th of October 1794 an attempt was made to stop the paper and seize the person of Babeuf. Warned in time, however, he succeeded in hiding himself, and what is more, from a secret retreat, in publishing his paper under a new title. It now appeared as the Tribun du Peuple. Otherwise it remained unchanged, either in shape or character, being avowedly the continuation of the original enterprise.
It is to be remarked that a notable change began about this time to take place in the opinions of Babeuf in regard to the old revolutionary leaders and their policy. He no longer attacked them indiscriminately. We give Babeuf’s opinion of Robespierre at this turning-point of his career. “This Robespierre,” he says, “whose memory to-day is unjustly abhorred, this Robespierre is one in whom we must distinguish two persons – Robespierre the sincere patriot, a friend of just principles down to 1793, and Robespierre the ambitious tyrant, and the worst of criminals since that epoch. This Robespierre, I say, so long as he was a citizen, is perhaps the best source in which to seek great truths and powerful arguments for the rights of the press.” He goes on to point out that the declaration of the Rights of Man the nation really owes to Robespierre. “We cannot fail to esteem the work,” he continues, “though we forget the workman,” or rather, as he had already said, “let us distinguish between Robespierre the apostle of liberty, and Robespierre the most infamous of tyrants!”
During this time the paper seems to have appeared mostly without the printer’s name, though the deputy Guffroy was undoubtedly the printer of several numbers. Number 33 never appeared, the manuscript having been seized by the authorities. It contained a violent attack of the most convincing character on the Thermidorean reaction. All this time the police were unable to lay hands upon Babeuf himself, but, in revenge, they were zealous in arresting the distributors of the journal. Amongst these was one Anne Treillard, who played a leading part in the distribution. This woman was subjected to a close interrogation as to the whereabouts of Babeuf. She denied all knowledge of his domicile, and stated that he himself brought her the packages containing the numbers to a place in the Jardin de l’Égalité. Asked if she would know Babeuf if she saw him, she replied that she had never observed him closely, but that he was of medium stature, with a long, thin, serious-looking face. Asked, still further, where the first numbers were sold, she replied that they were fetched from somewhere near the Place des Piques, and that it was from thence that the Journal de la liberté de la presse had been sent out.
By an irony of fate, it was his recent friend Tallien who had now become the sworn enemy of the late revolutionary government and of Jacobin principles generally, and whom Babeuf had also attacked in his journal, who was the instrument of obtaining Babeuf’s arrest. In a speech in the Convention on this occasion, Tallien denounced Babeuf as the tool of Fouché, whose enemy Tallien had now become. It was the 10th of Pluviose, year III (29th January 1795), that Tallien brought forward his motion for Babeuf’s arrest, on the ground of his having outraged the national representation in his articles. The Convention giving its consent, the arrest was effected by the executive authorities a few days later.
Owing to the hints obtained from the woman Anne Treillard, the committee, acting presumably on the motion carried by Tallien before the Convention a fortnight before, succeeded by means of its police in discovering and seizing Babeuf on the 12th of February 1795. While in prison, their victim, however, was successful in smuggling out and getting distributed a manifesto entitled Babeuf, the Tribune of the People, to his Fellow Citizens. It consisted in a vigorous defence of his public and private conduct, not forgetting the affair at Montdidier. But it was without effect, for, together with other members of his staff, a few days later he was conveyed from Paris to Arras, where the imprisonment was continued. It should be noted, as regards this, that Babeuf and his colleagues were imprisoned in a purely arbitrary manner, as no definite charge had been formulated against them, and no idea of a trial at any definite time seems to have been even entertained, as it certainly never took place.
Babeuf’s companions in the prison at Arras were Lebois, the editor of Le Journal de l’égalité; Taffoureau, a friend of Babeuf’s, probably from the days of the Correspondant Picard, who had been arrested as a partisan of the Terror in his native town of St Omer; and Cochet, also a native of St Omer, who was doubtless in gaol for the same reason. There were other partisans of the fallen party of the Mountain, who subsequently joined Babeuf’s movement, and who were detained in another prison at Arras. Already, in 1787, in a letter to his old correspondent Dubois de Fosseux, Babeuf indicates that his mind was occupied with the question of the communisation of the land and the products of industry, but at that time it was in the form of a problem only. It was in the prison of Arras, singularly enough, the town where his old correspondent resided, that the root ideas of the communism subsequently embodied in the programme of the Equals of the year V were first definitely formulated. The first impulse, or at all events the first definite notion of communism as the economic ideal of human society, seems to have been derived by Babeuf from a study of Morelly’s work, Le Code de la nature et le véritable esprit de ses lois de tout temps négligé ou inconnu.
This work of Morelly, an obscure author of whom little is known, was written about 1755, and seems to have had a certain vogue for a time, probably in part owing to the fact that it was for long attributed to Diderot. The work of Morelly was undoubtedly, both intrinsically and in effect, the most important of the precursors, not only of Babouvism, but of the Utopian Socialism of the early nineteenth century; its influence, either direct or indirect, on Fourier and Cabet being specially noticeable. In accordance with eighteenth-century anthropology, Morelly starts with the classical notion of the “golden age”, which he deduces from the theory that the primitive instincts of all men are good. The present state of inequality and its accompanying human misery is due, not to any intrinsic defect in human nature, but to the institution of private property. It was the inroads of the latter upon the communism originally reigning among the children of men that was the source and fountain of all evil. So soon as individuals began to use more than their share of the common goods, then began all the miseries that had afflicted mankind.
Morelly accepted the principle of Helvetius, that the root of all conduct was self-love, but argued that, since no man can be happy by himself alone without the aid of his fellow-men, recognition of the claims of others – in other words, moral rectitude – is the only certain means of promoting one’s own happiness. As a direct consequence of this principle, Morelly insisted upon the common ownership of all wealth, and the equal enjoyment of the good things of life by all alike. It is curious that this old eighteenth-century writer seems to have been the first to put forward the subsequently well-known maxim “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”. He undoubtedly made this the basis of his social construction. For his scheme is plainly built throughout upon this principle. The only advantage accruing to talent is, according to Morelly’s system, to be the honour of directing the industry and the affairs of the community in general. The natural products of different districts are the paths from one to the other, by a natural system of exchange, founded upon mutual accommodation.
Notwithstanding Morelly’s conviction of the intrinsic goodness of human nature, coercion is assumed as necessary, to prevent the backsliding of individual members of the new society. Strong fortresses are spoken of in deserted places where criminal or recalcitrant persons are to be confined for a time, or, in extreme cases, for life. As regards marriage, Morelly insists that every citizen who has attained to man’s estate shall be compelled to marry. Celibacy is only to be allowed after the fortieth year has been attained. At the beginning of every year the festival of marriage is to be celebrated for all those who have attained the requisite age. “The young persons of both sexes will be gathered together, and, in presence of the senate of the city, every youth will choose the maiden that pleases him, and as soon as he has received her consent, will take her to wife.” The first marriage is to be indissoluble during ten years. Afterwards divorce is to be allowed, by consent of both, or even on the demand of one only, of the parties concerned. The divorced persons are not to be allowed to marry again before the expiration of one year, and they will not be permitted to be reunited to each other under any circumstances. They cannot marry younger persons than themselves, or than the divorced partner of the original marriage. Only widows and widowers are to have this liberty.
As might be expected, there are traces of the influence of the first, and, for a long time, sole exponent of Utopianism – Thomas More. As already stated, many of Fourier’s specific doctrines are anticipated by Morelly, e.g. that the moral world is governed by civil laws, as the physical is by natural laws. In the physical world, argues Morelly, power of attraction, i.e. gravitation, is dominant; in the moral world, the place of gravitation is supplied by that of self-love. There is also a strong analogy between the “city” of Morelly and the phalanstère of Fourier. The division of the various elements of society on a fixed mechanical and arithmetical scheme, founded on a decimal basis, so characteristic of Fourier, is also note-worthy in Morelly. Even Fourier’s description of the arrangement of his ideal phalanstère bears unmistakable traces of Morelly’s work. According to the latter, in the centre of the city is to be a great open space, surrounded by storehouses and public buildings; surrounding these, again, are to be the dwellings of the citizens; farther away, the buildings in which industrial operations are carried on; still further away are the dwelling-places of the peasantry, together with the farm buildings. But these details, interesting as they are in view of the later developments of Utopian Socialism, have no special significance or importance for the movement inaugurated by Babeuf. The chief thing in this connection is the importance of the influence of Morelly’s book in furnishing the groundwork for the definite communistic principles of the Society of the Equals. These ideas ripened in Babeuf’s mind undoubtedly, and, through him, in those of his associates, during their imprisonment at Arras, early in the year 1795. Outside, the party of the Mountain and the Jacobins were throughout France at this time a defeated and a persecuted faction.
Communistic ideas, properly so called, though undoubtedly present in a loose and vague way in the minds of individual members of the old revolutionary party, were never formally recognised by the party as such, which always, in the main, was a party of the small middle-class, and the small independent master-workman, who economically at this time formed part of that class. Hence it represented, as such, economically, the interests of the small property-holder as against the feudal landlord, and all that appertained to him, in the first place; and in the second place, as against the new wealthy manufacturer, contractor, and man of finance. But the proletariat, as we understand it to-day, was too young and immature to have, strictly speaking, a definite class-consciousness of its own, still less determinate principles of political action. Nevertheless, so far as it was possible, Babeuf’s new movement constituted for the moment the rallying point, as for a last effort, of all the revolutionary sections of the French people.
The formation of a new class of wealthy bourgeois to step into the place economically and politically of the displaced feudal aristocracy had already begun. It was already evident that the aim of the Thermidorean leaders, i.e. of those who had been instrumental in the overthrow of Robespierre and of the old revolutionary regime, was to place themselves at the head of such a new aristocracy of wealth. The process of the formation and consolidation of this new monied class was, as we all know, completed under the regime of the first Empire, but, as already said, it began unmistakably immediately after the overthrow of the system of the Terror. It dates, indeed, really from long before, in fact from the end of 1789, when the first sale of the nationalised ecclesiastical lands took place.
Syndicates were formed to compete with private individuals in the scramble for the landed property of the Church. As only a small percentage of the purchase-money had to be paid at once, the way of the astute speculator was smoothed for him. In the not unfounded hopes of evading the payment of the second instalment, many of these adventurers favoured the Revolution, and were specially eager in urging on the Austrian war. After the overthrow of the monarchy on the 10th of August 1792 it was decided that the lands of the emigrant nobles should be sold only in small lots, and not in huge sections, as had been the case with the ecclesiastical lands.
Here we see the effects of the new revolutionary regime, in which the influence of the small middle and working class was dominant. The speculators and financiers were for the moment cowed. But this did not prevent these same speculators and jobbers, during the ensuing winter, from evading the law and making money, by means of sham sales and other arts of trickery, out of the costly furniture and movable effects of the fugitive nobles. But although arranged for on paper, the actual partition of the lands remain unaffected long as the “moderate” party of the Girondins continued to be the official repositories of political power. After their fall, the sale of the lands was definitely ordered on the conditions already described. But the decree of the Convention was again hampered in its execution owing to the intervention of the second great campaign against the coalition of Europe of the autumn of 1793. France became for the nonce a “gigantic armed camp”, and the one thought was the national defence. But though few transfers, in the sense intended, were made, this did not prevent individual agents of the government from improving the situation to their own advantage by sales which evaded the conditions imposed. Two-thirds of the houses in Paris had now become national property.
Finally, the Committee of Public Safety, early in 1794, while ordering the sale of the confiscated lands to be continued with greater despatch than heretofore, and while advising the principle of partition on a small scale should be adhered to as far as possible, did not make the latter an absolute sine qua non, the result being that the victuallers of the army and the contractors for war material generally, who had become suddenly rich by the malpractices usual with their tribe, had succeeded in annexing considerable tracts of French territory for nominal sums in cash. Other means were now adopted for enabling the new privileged classes to raise themselves economically at the expense of the bas people, foremost among which was the hocussing of the currency by the issuing of a limitless mass of a practically worthless paper.
These and other forms of robbery on the part of the new financial middle-class flourished still more exceedingly during the heyday of this class – the period of the Consulate and Empire. It was, then, this new middle-class which from the Revolution of Thermidor onwards gave intellectual, moral, and political tone to French life. The active opposition to their sway was constituted by the remains of the old revolutionary party, which were momentarily gathered together in the movement of which our François Noel, or Gracchus, Babeuf, as he now called himself, was the life and soul.
Babeuf himself alludes in his famous 43rd number of the Tribun to the object-lesson as to the turn things were taking, such as “he that runs could read”, to be found in the comparison between the present and former fortunes of many of the old revolutionary leaders, now termed “Thermidoreans”.
Barras had acquired five estates. Merlin de Thionville possessed two chateaux and immense landed property, and could afford to give 300,000 francs a month to his mistress. Tallien had made an alliance with a Spanish woman of wealth and title. Legendre, the ci-devant butcher, the former friend of Danton, had come into possession of a large estate, which he kept up at vast expense. During the five revolutionary years before the 9th of Thermidor the issue of paper money (assignats), although disastrous enough in its economic effects, was nevertheless kept within bounds, and, it has been computed, amounted to not more than seven milliards. A certain relative proportion between the guarantee security and the paper money was never quite lost sight of during all the issues dating from before the fall of Robespierre. It was only under the reaction which set in shortly after the last event that all idea of proportion was cast to the winds in favour of absolutely reckless swindling. While, as above said, during the first five years of the Revolution, it has been estimated that at most seven milliards of paper was issued within two years following July 1794, the amount of paper poured into circulation has been reckoned to have been not less than thirty-eight milliards; of which thirty milliards belong to the first six months of the Constitution of the year III, that is, to the Government of the Directory.
It was indeed evident that all these “nouveaux riches”, thieves on a great scale, constituted the real and sole effective power in the country. The five directors were their mandatories.
The Directory and all the prominent politicians of the time were hand in glove with a clique of speculative financiers, whose sole aim was to enrich themselves. Their nefarious influence may be seen in most of the laws passed, and is indeed traceable right up to the year 1814. The bulk of the governing classes – under Barras, Bonaparte, the Bourbons – were dominated by, or were in league with, this band of robbers, who systematically exploited the national wealth for their own benefit. These financial jackals seized upon everything they could lay their hands on, it mattered not what – church revenues, fiscal monies, feudal estates. The result naturally was the sudden and rapid growth of a propertyless proletariat. Such was the state of things which confronted Babeuf when his political career began, and such was the population to whom the gospel of Babeuf appeared as a godsend. Thousands of persons in Paris and in other towns of France were on the brink of starvation. The economic situation in Paris under the Directory and the subsequent years was as desperate as any that has been known in the world’s history.
Babeuf had and made many friends and sympathisers in Arras; amongst them was the family of the ex-proconsul there during the Terror, Joseph Lebon, who seem to have become enthusiastic adherents, which is significant, considering Lebon’s association with the party of Robespierre, and Babeuf’s severe attacks on the Robespierrists and even on Lebon personally, in the earlier numbers of the Tribun. This is more noteworthy, seeing that Lebon was undoubtedly one of the most ferocious agents of the Terror, and that Babeuf, however much he may have modified his view of the character of Robespierre in general, had never as yet withdrawn his strictures of the system of the Terror itself, which was entirely opposed to the humanitarian principles he had hitherto professed. However this may be, his acquaintance with the Lebons had an important result for the movement, for it was in their house Babeuf first met Darthé, his subsequent colleague and right hand in the Society of the Pantheon, and in the conspiracy of the Equals, which was its sequel.
Augustin Alexandre Darthé was a native of St Pol, in the department of the Pas-de-Calais. Darthé had played a certain public role during the Revolution, had taken part in the affair of the Bastille, and had been afterwards a member of the directing body of his department. In consequence of his services in this capacity he had been decreed to have “merited well of the country” He subsequently became public prosecutor to the revolutionary tribunals of Arras and Cambrai, where his incorruptibility and frugality were recognised by all. He was a supporter of Robespierre, and is described as of severe morals and of a compassionate heart!
During the time of Babeuf’s detention at Arras the town was rent by the feud between the Thermidoreans, including the old aristocratic party, now reconciled to the wealthier middle-class in their abhorrence of the Terror, and the Sansculottes. The younger and more ardent members of the reactionary coalition, under the name of the Jeunesse dorée, had adopted an extravagant costume and long tresses. The partisans of the revolutionary regime were now indiscriminately termed Jacobins. At the Theatre disturbances took place between the two sides. One such disturbance, in which the son of the guillotined émigré, the Comte de Bethune, with some of his associates, took part, led to the arrest of the latter, and their detention as prisoners, in company with Babeuf and his friends. Babeuf describes the young aristocrat as a smooth-faced young man, with an attractive but deceptive manner. He continued the centre of the reactionary movement in Arras, where he held a kind of court, distributing the current paper money (assignats) lavishly amongst his fellows.
On the 24th of Fructidor, ann. IV (16th September 1795), Babeuf, and his friend Charles Germain, with whom an intimacy had been established in the prison of Arras, and who was subsequently to become Babeuf’s ardent and strenuous colleague in the conspiracy of the Equals, were transferred by the authorities to Paris, where shortly after they were released by an amnesty proclaimed by the National Convention at its closing sitting. It is now that the great period of Gracchus Babeuf’s political activity, terminating only with his death, begins.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
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Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
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As part of my comment here, dated October 20, 2011, I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the “new world” we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked to were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work checks and balances form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one. In that sense previous historical models come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
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Recently (see October 22, 2011 comment above) I noted the following while arguing for the General Assembly concept as a form of alternate government using historic examples like the Paris Commune (1871), the early soviets in Russia (1905 and 1917), and the early days of the antifascist militias in the Spanish Civil War (1936-37):
“However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.”
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lesson Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
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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. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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Ernest Belfort Bax
Gracchus Babeuf
III. Vicissitudes of Fortune and Ripening of Ideas
As already stated, shortly after the fall of Robespierre, Babeuf reappeared in Paris and founded the Journal de la liberté de la presse, in which he played the part of political free lance, attacking in turn the Robespierrists and the Thermidoreans. At first, however, the whole of his energies seem to have been directed against the party of Robespierre and the old revolutionary government. He was indeed at this time on terms of intimacy with several of the Thermidorean leaders, notably Tallien and Fouché, who subsequently became his bitter enemies. Before long, however, his general journalistic attitude caused the absurd suspicion to fall upon him of being a royalist agent in disguise. This was enhanced by his public speaking, at which he now became very assiduous, more particularly in the club of his quarter, where he nightly attacked the authority of the Convention, and especially the leading Thermidoreans. In this way Babeuf made himself the enemy alike of the Jacobins and of the parties now dominant in the Convention. The former were incensed by a pamphlet issued by him at this time, Du système de depopulation ou la vie et Les crimes de Carrier, in which the methods of Carrier, his noyades, republican marriages, etc., were denounced in the most violent language.
The journal itself was consecrated to the cause implied by its name, and, as already stated, although first directed mainly against the “tail of Robespierre”, as the partisans of the fallen dictator were now termed, soon took to criticising with equal severity the successful faction in the recent struggle. The tenth number merits notice, inasmuch as Babeuf reproduced therein the address of the popular society of Arras to the National Convention, containing a kind of manifesto on the liberty of the press, coupled with a denunciation of Barère, the notorious ex-member of the Committee of Public Safety. As is well known, it was drawn up by Babeuf himself. It concluded with the words: “Men of the 9th of Thermidor, we declare before you, on behalf of our fellow-citizens, that they, deadened by a long lethargy, demand their freedom, claiming that the fall of tyrants shall render to us our eternal rights, that liberty shall step forth in the full glory of its power from the tomb of the dictator. Representatives, the men of the north, who have muzzled that devouring ogre, whose furies have desolated our country during five months, will prove themselves raised to your level, in denouncing to you the revolutionary phantom behind which Joseph Lebon has sheltered himself, in order to battle victoriously against the victims who struggle to escape his fury. We denounce to you Barère, that vile slave of Robespierre.” The document proceeds to stigmatise, in a few phrases, the horrors of “the Terror” as exercised at Arras.
The above, in the oratorical manner of the time, is a good specimen of Babeuf’s writing, in what we may term the “grand” style of manifesto. The journal from the first excited the adverse attention of the authorities, and it had been published little more than two months before the violence of its language caused action to be taken by the “Committee of General Security”, and on the 13th of October 1794 an attempt was made to stop the paper and seize the person of Babeuf. Warned in time, however, he succeeded in hiding himself, and what is more, from a secret retreat, in publishing his paper under a new title. It now appeared as the Tribun du Peuple. Otherwise it remained unchanged, either in shape or character, being avowedly the continuation of the original enterprise.
It is to be remarked that a notable change began about this time to take place in the opinions of Babeuf in regard to the old revolutionary leaders and their policy. He no longer attacked them indiscriminately. We give Babeuf’s opinion of Robespierre at this turning-point of his career. “This Robespierre,” he says, “whose memory to-day is unjustly abhorred, this Robespierre is one in whom we must distinguish two persons – Robespierre the sincere patriot, a friend of just principles down to 1793, and Robespierre the ambitious tyrant, and the worst of criminals since that epoch. This Robespierre, I say, so long as he was a citizen, is perhaps the best source in which to seek great truths and powerful arguments for the rights of the press.” He goes on to point out that the declaration of the Rights of Man the nation really owes to Robespierre. “We cannot fail to esteem the work,” he continues, “though we forget the workman,” or rather, as he had already said, “let us distinguish between Robespierre the apostle of liberty, and Robespierre the most infamous of tyrants!”
During this time the paper seems to have appeared mostly without the printer’s name, though the deputy Guffroy was undoubtedly the printer of several numbers. Number 33 never appeared, the manuscript having been seized by the authorities. It contained a violent attack of the most convincing character on the Thermidorean reaction. All this time the police were unable to lay hands upon Babeuf himself, but, in revenge, they were zealous in arresting the distributors of the journal. Amongst these was one Anne Treillard, who played a leading part in the distribution. This woman was subjected to a close interrogation as to the whereabouts of Babeuf. She denied all knowledge of his domicile, and stated that he himself brought her the packages containing the numbers to a place in the Jardin de l’Égalité. Asked if she would know Babeuf if she saw him, she replied that she had never observed him closely, but that he was of medium stature, with a long, thin, serious-looking face. Asked, still further, where the first numbers were sold, she replied that they were fetched from somewhere near the Place des Piques, and that it was from thence that the Journal de la liberté de la presse had been sent out.
By an irony of fate, it was his recent friend Tallien who had now become the sworn enemy of the late revolutionary government and of Jacobin principles generally, and whom Babeuf had also attacked in his journal, who was the instrument of obtaining Babeuf’s arrest. In a speech in the Convention on this occasion, Tallien denounced Babeuf as the tool of Fouché, whose enemy Tallien had now become. It was the 10th of Pluviose, year III (29th January 1795), that Tallien brought forward his motion for Babeuf’s arrest, on the ground of his having outraged the national representation in his articles. The Convention giving its consent, the arrest was effected by the executive authorities a few days later.
Owing to the hints obtained from the woman Anne Treillard, the committee, acting presumably on the motion carried by Tallien before the Convention a fortnight before, succeeded by means of its police in discovering and seizing Babeuf on the 12th of February 1795. While in prison, their victim, however, was successful in smuggling out and getting distributed a manifesto entitled Babeuf, the Tribune of the People, to his Fellow Citizens. It consisted in a vigorous defence of his public and private conduct, not forgetting the affair at Montdidier. But it was without effect, for, together with other members of his staff, a few days later he was conveyed from Paris to Arras, where the imprisonment was continued. It should be noted, as regards this, that Babeuf and his colleagues were imprisoned in a purely arbitrary manner, as no definite charge had been formulated against them, and no idea of a trial at any definite time seems to have been even entertained, as it certainly never took place.
Babeuf’s companions in the prison at Arras were Lebois, the editor of Le Journal de l’égalité; Taffoureau, a friend of Babeuf’s, probably from the days of the Correspondant Picard, who had been arrested as a partisan of the Terror in his native town of St Omer; and Cochet, also a native of St Omer, who was doubtless in gaol for the same reason. There were other partisans of the fallen party of the Mountain, who subsequently joined Babeuf’s movement, and who were detained in another prison at Arras. Already, in 1787, in a letter to his old correspondent Dubois de Fosseux, Babeuf indicates that his mind was occupied with the question of the communisation of the land and the products of industry, but at that time it was in the form of a problem only. It was in the prison of Arras, singularly enough, the town where his old correspondent resided, that the root ideas of the communism subsequently embodied in the programme of the Equals of the year V were first definitely formulated. The first impulse, or at all events the first definite notion of communism as the economic ideal of human society, seems to have been derived by Babeuf from a study of Morelly’s work, Le Code de la nature et le véritable esprit de ses lois de tout temps négligé ou inconnu.
This work of Morelly, an obscure author of whom little is known, was written about 1755, and seems to have had a certain vogue for a time, probably in part owing to the fact that it was for long attributed to Diderot. The work of Morelly was undoubtedly, both intrinsically and in effect, the most important of the precursors, not only of Babouvism, but of the Utopian Socialism of the early nineteenth century; its influence, either direct or indirect, on Fourier and Cabet being specially noticeable. In accordance with eighteenth-century anthropology, Morelly starts with the classical notion of the “golden age”, which he deduces from the theory that the primitive instincts of all men are good. The present state of inequality and its accompanying human misery is due, not to any intrinsic defect in human nature, but to the institution of private property. It was the inroads of the latter upon the communism originally reigning among the children of men that was the source and fountain of all evil. So soon as individuals began to use more than their share of the common goods, then began all the miseries that had afflicted mankind.
Morelly accepted the principle of Helvetius, that the root of all conduct was self-love, but argued that, since no man can be happy by himself alone without the aid of his fellow-men, recognition of the claims of others – in other words, moral rectitude – is the only certain means of promoting one’s own happiness. As a direct consequence of this principle, Morelly insisted upon the common ownership of all wealth, and the equal enjoyment of the good things of life by all alike. It is curious that this old eighteenth-century writer seems to have been the first to put forward the subsequently well-known maxim “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”. He undoubtedly made this the basis of his social construction. For his scheme is plainly built throughout upon this principle. The only advantage accruing to talent is, according to Morelly’s system, to be the honour of directing the industry and the affairs of the community in general. The natural products of different districts are the paths from one to the other, by a natural system of exchange, founded upon mutual accommodation.
Notwithstanding Morelly’s conviction of the intrinsic goodness of human nature, coercion is assumed as necessary, to prevent the backsliding of individual members of the new society. Strong fortresses are spoken of in deserted places where criminal or recalcitrant persons are to be confined for a time, or, in extreme cases, for life. As regards marriage, Morelly insists that every citizen who has attained to man’s estate shall be compelled to marry. Celibacy is only to be allowed after the fortieth year has been attained. At the beginning of every year the festival of marriage is to be celebrated for all those who have attained the requisite age. “The young persons of both sexes will be gathered together, and, in presence of the senate of the city, every youth will choose the maiden that pleases him, and as soon as he has received her consent, will take her to wife.” The first marriage is to be indissoluble during ten years. Afterwards divorce is to be allowed, by consent of both, or even on the demand of one only, of the parties concerned. The divorced persons are not to be allowed to marry again before the expiration of one year, and they will not be permitted to be reunited to each other under any circumstances. They cannot marry younger persons than themselves, or than the divorced partner of the original marriage. Only widows and widowers are to have this liberty.
As might be expected, there are traces of the influence of the first, and, for a long time, sole exponent of Utopianism – Thomas More. As already stated, many of Fourier’s specific doctrines are anticipated by Morelly, e.g. that the moral world is governed by civil laws, as the physical is by natural laws. In the physical world, argues Morelly, power of attraction, i.e. gravitation, is dominant; in the moral world, the place of gravitation is supplied by that of self-love. There is also a strong analogy between the “city” of Morelly and the phalanstère of Fourier. The division of the various elements of society on a fixed mechanical and arithmetical scheme, founded on a decimal basis, so characteristic of Fourier, is also note-worthy in Morelly. Even Fourier’s description of the arrangement of his ideal phalanstère bears unmistakable traces of Morelly’s work. According to the latter, in the centre of the city is to be a great open space, surrounded by storehouses and public buildings; surrounding these, again, are to be the dwellings of the citizens; farther away, the buildings in which industrial operations are carried on; still further away are the dwelling-places of the peasantry, together with the farm buildings. But these details, interesting as they are in view of the later developments of Utopian Socialism, have no special significance or importance for the movement inaugurated by Babeuf. The chief thing in this connection is the importance of the influence of Morelly’s book in furnishing the groundwork for the definite communistic principles of the Society of the Equals. These ideas ripened in Babeuf’s mind undoubtedly, and, through him, in those of his associates, during their imprisonment at Arras, early in the year 1795. Outside, the party of the Mountain and the Jacobins were throughout France at this time a defeated and a persecuted faction.
Communistic ideas, properly so called, though undoubtedly present in a loose and vague way in the minds of individual members of the old revolutionary party, were never formally recognised by the party as such, which always, in the main, was a party of the small middle-class, and the small independent master-workman, who economically at this time formed part of that class. Hence it represented, as such, economically, the interests of the small property-holder as against the feudal landlord, and all that appertained to him, in the first place; and in the second place, as against the new wealthy manufacturer, contractor, and man of finance. But the proletariat, as we understand it to-day, was too young and immature to have, strictly speaking, a definite class-consciousness of its own, still less determinate principles of political action. Nevertheless, so far as it was possible, Babeuf’s new movement constituted for the moment the rallying point, as for a last effort, of all the revolutionary sections of the French people.
The formation of a new class of wealthy bourgeois to step into the place economically and politically of the displaced feudal aristocracy had already begun. It was already evident that the aim of the Thermidorean leaders, i.e. of those who had been instrumental in the overthrow of Robespierre and of the old revolutionary regime, was to place themselves at the head of such a new aristocracy of wealth. The process of the formation and consolidation of this new monied class was, as we all know, completed under the regime of the first Empire, but, as already said, it began unmistakably immediately after the overthrow of the system of the Terror. It dates, indeed, really from long before, in fact from the end of 1789, when the first sale of the nationalised ecclesiastical lands took place.
Syndicates were formed to compete with private individuals in the scramble for the landed property of the Church. As only a small percentage of the purchase-money had to be paid at once, the way of the astute speculator was smoothed for him. In the not unfounded hopes of evading the payment of the second instalment, many of these adventurers favoured the Revolution, and were specially eager in urging on the Austrian war. After the overthrow of the monarchy on the 10th of August 1792 it was decided that the lands of the emigrant nobles should be sold only in small lots, and not in huge sections, as had been the case with the ecclesiastical lands.
Here we see the effects of the new revolutionary regime, in which the influence of the small middle and working class was dominant. The speculators and financiers were for the moment cowed. But this did not prevent these same speculators and jobbers, during the ensuing winter, from evading the law and making money, by means of sham sales and other arts of trickery, out of the costly furniture and movable effects of the fugitive nobles. But although arranged for on paper, the actual partition of the lands remain unaffected long as the “moderate” party of the Girondins continued to be the official repositories of political power. After their fall, the sale of the lands was definitely ordered on the conditions already described. But the decree of the Convention was again hampered in its execution owing to the intervention of the second great campaign against the coalition of Europe of the autumn of 1793. France became for the nonce a “gigantic armed camp”, and the one thought was the national defence. But though few transfers, in the sense intended, were made, this did not prevent individual agents of the government from improving the situation to their own advantage by sales which evaded the conditions imposed. Two-thirds of the houses in Paris had now become national property.
Finally, the Committee of Public Safety, early in 1794, while ordering the sale of the confiscated lands to be continued with greater despatch than heretofore, and while advising the principle of partition on a small scale should be adhered to as far as possible, did not make the latter an absolute sine qua non, the result being that the victuallers of the army and the contractors for war material generally, who had become suddenly rich by the malpractices usual with their tribe, had succeeded in annexing considerable tracts of French territory for nominal sums in cash. Other means were now adopted for enabling the new privileged classes to raise themselves economically at the expense of the bas people, foremost among which was the hocussing of the currency by the issuing of a limitless mass of a practically worthless paper.
These and other forms of robbery on the part of the new financial middle-class flourished still more exceedingly during the heyday of this class – the period of the Consulate and Empire. It was, then, this new middle-class which from the Revolution of Thermidor onwards gave intellectual, moral, and political tone to French life. The active opposition to their sway was constituted by the remains of the old revolutionary party, which were momentarily gathered together in the movement of which our François Noel, or Gracchus, Babeuf, as he now called himself, was the life and soul.
Babeuf himself alludes in his famous 43rd number of the Tribun to the object-lesson as to the turn things were taking, such as “he that runs could read”, to be found in the comparison between the present and former fortunes of many of the old revolutionary leaders, now termed “Thermidoreans”.
Barras had acquired five estates. Merlin de Thionville possessed two chateaux and immense landed property, and could afford to give 300,000 francs a month to his mistress. Tallien had made an alliance with a Spanish woman of wealth and title. Legendre, the ci-devant butcher, the former friend of Danton, had come into possession of a large estate, which he kept up at vast expense. During the five revolutionary years before the 9th of Thermidor the issue of paper money (assignats), although disastrous enough in its economic effects, was nevertheless kept within bounds, and, it has been computed, amounted to not more than seven milliards. A certain relative proportion between the guarantee security and the paper money was never quite lost sight of during all the issues dating from before the fall of Robespierre. It was only under the reaction which set in shortly after the last event that all idea of proportion was cast to the winds in favour of absolutely reckless swindling. While, as above said, during the first five years of the Revolution, it has been estimated that at most seven milliards of paper was issued within two years following July 1794, the amount of paper poured into circulation has been reckoned to have been not less than thirty-eight milliards; of which thirty milliards belong to the first six months of the Constitution of the year III, that is, to the Government of the Directory.
It was indeed evident that all these “nouveaux riches”, thieves on a great scale, constituted the real and sole effective power in the country. The five directors were their mandatories.
The Directory and all the prominent politicians of the time were hand in glove with a clique of speculative financiers, whose sole aim was to enrich themselves. Their nefarious influence may be seen in most of the laws passed, and is indeed traceable right up to the year 1814. The bulk of the governing classes – under Barras, Bonaparte, the Bourbons – were dominated by, or were in league with, this band of robbers, who systematically exploited the national wealth for their own benefit. These financial jackals seized upon everything they could lay their hands on, it mattered not what – church revenues, fiscal monies, feudal estates. The result naturally was the sudden and rapid growth of a propertyless proletariat. Such was the state of things which confronted Babeuf when his political career began, and such was the population to whom the gospel of Babeuf appeared as a godsend. Thousands of persons in Paris and in other towns of France were on the brink of starvation. The economic situation in Paris under the Directory and the subsequent years was as desperate as any that has been known in the world’s history.
Babeuf had and made many friends and sympathisers in Arras; amongst them was the family of the ex-proconsul there during the Terror, Joseph Lebon, who seem to have become enthusiastic adherents, which is significant, considering Lebon’s association with the party of Robespierre, and Babeuf’s severe attacks on the Robespierrists and even on Lebon personally, in the earlier numbers of the Tribun. This is more noteworthy, seeing that Lebon was undoubtedly one of the most ferocious agents of the Terror, and that Babeuf, however much he may have modified his view of the character of Robespierre in general, had never as yet withdrawn his strictures of the system of the Terror itself, which was entirely opposed to the humanitarian principles he had hitherto professed. However this may be, his acquaintance with the Lebons had an important result for the movement, for it was in their house Babeuf first met Darthé, his subsequent colleague and right hand in the Society of the Pantheon, and in the conspiracy of the Equals, which was its sequel.
Augustin Alexandre Darthé was a native of St Pol, in the department of the Pas-de-Calais. Darthé had played a certain public role during the Revolution, had taken part in the affair of the Bastille, and had been afterwards a member of the directing body of his department. In consequence of his services in this capacity he had been decreed to have “merited well of the country” He subsequently became public prosecutor to the revolutionary tribunals of Arras and Cambrai, where his incorruptibility and frugality were recognised by all. He was a supporter of Robespierre, and is described as of severe morals and of a compassionate heart!
During the time of Babeuf’s detention at Arras the town was rent by the feud between the Thermidoreans, including the old aristocratic party, now reconciled to the wealthier middle-class in their abhorrence of the Terror, and the Sansculottes. The younger and more ardent members of the reactionary coalition, under the name of the Jeunesse dorée, had adopted an extravagant costume and long tresses. The partisans of the revolutionary regime were now indiscriminately termed Jacobins. At the Theatre disturbances took place between the two sides. One such disturbance, in which the son of the guillotined émigré, the Comte de Bethune, with some of his associates, took part, led to the arrest of the latter, and their detention as prisoners, in company with Babeuf and his friends. Babeuf describes the young aristocrat as a smooth-faced young man, with an attractive but deceptive manner. He continued the centre of the reactionary movement in Arras, where he held a kind of court, distributing the current paper money (assignats) lavishly amongst his fellows.
On the 24th of Fructidor, ann. IV (16th September 1795), Babeuf, and his friend Charles Germain, with whom an intimacy had been established in the prison of Arras, and who was subsequently to become Babeuf’s ardent and strenuous colleague in the conspiracy of the Equals, were transferred by the authorities to Paris, where shortly after they were released by an amnesty proclaimed by the National Convention at its closing sitting. It is now that the great period of Gracchus Babeuf’s political activity, terminating only with his death, begins.
Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor American Communist Leader James P. Cannon- How We Overcame Ultraleftism in Defense Work-On The Early Days Of Communist Defense Work
Markin comment:
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.
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How We Overcame Ultraleftism in Defense Work
The following interview with James P. Cannon, the founder of the American Trotskyist movement, was granted to Syd Stapleton October 29, 1973.
The interview begins with a reference to the Political Rights Defense Fund. This is a committee seeking public support for a $27-million suit for damages filed last July 18 by the Socialist Workers party and the Young Socialist Alliance against Nixon and other government officials. The suit charges that government agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, carried out illegal wiretapping, mail tampering, job discrimination, and harassment of SWP and YSA members and supporters. It also cites incidents of SWP campaign headquarters being fire-bombed, bombed, and burglarized.
Question. What is your opinion of the Political Rights Defense Fund?
Answer. It's a proper and correct procedure to exploit every possibility to utilize what cracks there are in the bourgeois-democratic system to advance our ideas. It's
participating in part in their elections. It’s wise to utilize a situation like this to explain our ideas to a wider audience. This wasn't known to the old radical movement. The old radical movement tended toward the ultraleft view that courts are crooked instruments of the capitalist class, so why bother? Ignore them. Including the elections. That was the prevailing opinion of the syndicalists and red-socialist wing in which I was.
But I don't blame myself for being an ultraleftist in those days. I didn't know any better and there was nobody to teach us better. The only ones who spoke the other way were the right-wing socialists who thought you could accomplish everything through the ballot box. We were pretty sure that was false.
It was not until after the Russian revolution and Lenin wrote his pamphlet on the infantile sickness, explaining how revolutionists could utilize parliamentary action effectively, that we got straightened out on that. It was so damned simple and so convincing that I don't have any patience with people who still repeat the old arguments of the ultraleft before the Russian revolution.
I can recall instances in the early days where Lenin's approach could have been effective. One was the Lawrence. Massachusetts, textile strike of 1912. That was sixty-one years ago. It was a famous IWW strike. Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, Joe Ettor, Arturo Giovannitti were involved in it.
Retrospectively, I recall one incidence that has a bearing on this question of whether you should utilize bourgeois-democratic institutions. At that time Victor Berger was a Socialist congressman from Milwaukee. He was the first Socialist congressman in the United States. But he was a right-winger. He was the leader you might call the ultra-right wing of the Socialist party. Notwithstanding that, the strike leaders were able to use his position to gain tremendous publicity for the strike. They cooked up a wonderful idea for publicity —to take the children of the strikers on the train to socialist sympathizers in various places to be kept during the strike. It caused a great sensation. The Lawrence authorities interfered and tried to put a stop to it. The use of the police created a furor.
Then Victor Berger introduced a resolution in Congress to investigate the Lawrence strike. He got an official committee set up, and Haywood and the leaders brought the kids and women to the congressional hearings to testify about conditions. It was a wonderful publicity job that helped win the strike.
But it was not a normal procedure. Retrospectively I see it as a good example of how to use a bourgeois parliamentary institution.
Another example I recall was in 1917 when the Socialist party came out against the war. Morris Hillquit, in the New York municipal elections that year, ran for mayor and made the war question his main issue. It got tremendous publicity across the country.
I didn't realize it then because I was still a hidebound syndicalist, but I look back on it as a wonderful illustration of how even a municipal campaign can be utilized for a national political purpose.
I really rejoice over the way our party goes into these elections, national, state, and local —any place they can get an edge in and get up some kind of an audience, newspaper space, some TV or radio time, and do it without giving away anything. That's all for free.
I see all these ultrawise, ultraleft groups. What do they do? They stand around with their mouths open while we exploit the cracks and crevices in the bourgeois-democratic system without paying the slightest respect to it. You know, they can't run a bourgeois-democratic system without giving a little opening here and there. So, we take advantage of it; and we're 100 percent right!
Q. In the history of the radical movement has there ever been a crisis in government with the kind of impact that the Nixon-Watergate crisis has had? Why do you think this Nixon thing has developed to the degree it has?
A. That's what Nixon would like to know. There have been some attempts to compare it to the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration. But that was a pure-and-simple graft scandal involving cabinet members and some oil companies. Public sentiment was rather "So what? Don't they all steal?"
The Communist party ran its first presidential candidates in 1924. Foster and Gitlow were the candidates. It was only a token campaign; but one of the slogans we started out with was "Down with the Capitalist Teapot Dome!
Vote for Communist candidates for president."
Our comrades were somewhat taken aback by the reception to that. People would say, "You mean to tell us that if your guy got in there he wouldn't steal? All politicians steal." There was absolute cynicism, more or less indifference. "What the hell; so they stole a few million dollars."
I think that would have been the attitude now if Watergate had been limited to graft. What's involved in this case is the extent of the bugging, espionage, and intimidation. A large section of the population, including a large section of the middle and upper classes, got apprehensive about it.
It's not the same as the Teapot Dome scandal. There is a genuine public reaction to this scandal. You might say multiple scandals. Every day, you expect something new to be revealed.
A columnist named Kraft. Do you know him?
Q. Joseph Kraft. He's the fellow who went to Paris and was followed by the CIA, I believe.
A. He's a prominent national columnist. He wrote an article summarizing the whole thing in one of the liberal magazines. His opinion was that this Nixon outfit and the hatchetmen he had around him were actually moving in the direction of a police state. The ruling powers in this country don't think they need that yet. The opposition comes, you know, not only from the workers. It comes from practically all circles of society. The New York Times and the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are all hostile to this administration. They represent real money in this country. If there is a conflict in the upper circles, the difference between the old money and the new may be involved, I think. The new tycoons don't know where to stop; they haven't learned moderation, or the need for concessions. The older ones think it's better to give a little in order to keep a lot.
Q. When the International Labor Defense had to fight, cases like Sacco-Vanzetti and Mooney-Billings, was it able to take advantage of any divisions like that in the ruling class over how to react to the labor movement? Was it able to build up support for its cases through both mass propaganda work and things like endorsements?
A. Yes, there were many endorsements and they were utilized. Even lawyers were outraged at the violations of the rules of law. The Sacco and Vanzetti case was a frame-up. Everybody knew it was a damned frame-up from beginning to end.
The witch-hunt began in the early 1920s. There was a tremendous red scare and they arrested thousands of people overnight in the Palmer raids. They deported whole shiploads of immigrants who were suspected of subversion or of being connected in any way with the radical, movement. They just hit on Sacco and Vanzetti in the course of a general investigation. They had no case against them at all. They framed it.
The judge was outspokenly prejudicial in all his rulings and so on. They went through with it. It was delayed by one appeal after another and by public protest for seven years. It was not till 1927 that they finally executed them. And there were deep feelings in the movement of protest.
A couple of years ago a book was published that tried to justify the killing of Sacco and Vanzetti. The author tried to prove that Carlo Tresca had stated in one instance that while one of them was innocent the other was guilty. And since Carlo Tresca was a prominent anarchist, he thought that this was big news. He said also that I knew about it —that I thought they were guilty despite the fact that I was organizing the campaign of the International Labor Defense. He made these statements in The New Republic.
I immediately wrote a reply which they published under the heading "What Cannon Didn't Think."
Judge Musmano, who had been connected with the Sacco-Vanzetti Committee, and later became a prominent judge in Pennsylvania, wrote me a very, very warm letter congratulating me on my protest in The New Republic. Which is an indication he still had strong convictions about the case although he was by no means sympathetic to anarchism or any other radical idea.
Q. As a result of the tapes controversy and the whole development of this struggle around Nixon's role in Watergate, there's quite a bit of sentiment in various circles, from George Meany to radical students, to impeach Nixon. As far as I know, that's a totally new phenomenon. Do you have any opinion about how revolutionists should relate to demands for impeachment?
A. The only other case involved was that of President Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln. That was in 1866, over a hundred years ago. No, there has been nothing like the exposure of the Nixon administration.
He's committed to something that's unforgivable in the eyes of the moneyed rulers of this country. He's gone too far; he's stirred up too much trouble. They want to rule the country rather calmly. They're getting plenty of benefits the way it's working. They're not ready to use police-state methods to the extent Nixon has used them.
And then there's been some bad luck. One thing leads to another. A witness incidentally mentions to the Ervin Committee that they kept tape recordings of all the conversations. My god, is that so? Accidental things like that led from one revelation to the next.
I think our press is doing all right in covering Watergate and should keep hammering away on it from our own special viewpoint that this is just an unusually flagrant example of what capitalist rule and politics are really like.
We should watch out for oversimplification. Some issues of The Militant may have given the impression that it was being treated like another Teapot Dome scandal, "Well, they all do it; don't they?"
But Watergate goes beyond anything previous. Even Supreme Court Justice Douglas says he suspects they tapped the Supreme Court, and Johnson suspected that his phone was tapped.
If the ruling class thought all this was necessary, they would be for it, but at present they're not for such extensive use of police-state methods. So I think we should recognize this, and without making any concessions in principle, deal more fully with the way Nixon has embarrassed the real rulers of America.
But, as I say, that's marginal. It's not a fundamental criticism of our handling of the case. I think The Militant is doing very well, harping on it all they can, speaking about it all they can.
This morning I received a copy of the Workers Vanguard.
Q. That's Robertson's paper.
A. Do you know what they say on the headline? "Impeachment is not enough!" (Laughs.)
Q. He has to be hanged by the thumbs, or something?
A. (Laughs.) Returning to what the attitude of the radical movement used to be toward utilizing the judicial and parliamentary system for revolutionary purposes. Our actions used to be purely defensive. Even in the Sacco-Vanzetti case we took a defensive position. The same was (rue of the Mooney case and going all the way back to the Haymarket martyrs. They were all defensive actions.
The tendency was to say the courts are crooked, influenced by the capitalist class, and so keep away from them. For instance, the idea of utilizing the courts was not known to me. I recall distinctly in the terrible persecution of the IWW during the First World War. They arrested active Wobblies wherever they could find them. They had so many they put whole groups on trial. Around eighty to one hundred were tried in Chicago. There was another big group in Sacramento, California, and another in Kansas City, Kansas, the Witchita Case, they called it.
This gives you an idea of the decentralization of the IWW and the ultraleft approach to the question of utilizing the courts. In the Chicago and Kansas cases they put up a legal defense with lawyers. But in Sacramento they adopted the policy of a "silent defense." Did you ever hear of that?
Q. Where they refused to speak?
A. A silent defense. They didn't have any lawyers; they used no witnesses; they didn't use cross-examination. They ignored the court. They just sat there. Just to show their contempt.
They got stiff sentences like the others, but all they accomplished by their silent defense and their refusal to employ any lawyers was to lose the possibility of appealing, getting some of their people out on bail while the appeals were pending, and organizing an effective campaign. It was a negative action. It represented the prevailing attitude of the left-wing movement that you couldn't get anything out of the courts.
Now, our policy today is different. We base ourselves on the fact that it's not a police state, it's a bourgeois-democratic state, which a lot of people think is really democratic. In order to maintain that illusion the ruling class has to give you a little leeway here and there.
The intelligent thing, as Lenin explained in his pamphlet on the infantile sickness, is that we utilize these crevices for our own purposes. The suit filed by our party in the Watergate case is a very correct tactic, a serious move to exploit the bourgeois-democratic system in an offensive action in the courts. It's correctness is self-evident when you look at it.
I noticed the New York papers carried reports of the press conference about the filing of the suit. You're going around the country speaking to audiences who wouldn't be there this issue didn't appeal to them the way it does.
And what are ultralefts doing? Doing nothing except occasionally yapping at us.
Of course we should explain in our general propaganda that we don't expect to get much justice from the capitalist courts. The whole thing is rigged against us. But in order to maintain some illusion of democracy they've got to show some respect for law and order, so we'll take advantage of that and we'll test it out.
The Kutcher case is a wonderful example of how sometimes such a course can be successful.
Q. Why do you think there was such a big difference between the outcome of the Kutcher case and the outcome of the Smith Act trials of the leaders of the Communist party during the same period?
A. Well, the Smith Act trials began with our being tried in Minneapolis. All of these trials were, from the point of view of the letter of the law, illegal and unconstitutional. We were convicted of expressing certain opinions. We were not accused of any actions. The same held true for the Communist party defendants. The political climate —the war, and later the cold war —made it possible for them to get away with it. And they did. But there aren't any Smith Act cases today, are there?
Q. No.
A. We appealed to the Supreme Court. We kept out of jail for two years after our conviction with one appeal after another and the final decision was no decision at all. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Did you know that? So it left undecided whether the law was unconstitutional. Later they finally agreed to hear another case and threw out a large section of it. You don't hear a lot about the Smith Act trials any more.
Q. Well, the question that I was raising, the reason 1 posed it in relation to the Communist party, is that it seems to me that because of the SWP's position of political opposition to the war, there was a clear, nearly unanimous sentiment on the part of the capitalist class that the SWF should be prevented from expressing that point of view. But later, during the witch-hunt, Jimmy Kutcher, a member of the SWP, gained enough support to win, while members of the CP like the Rosenbergs and the Smith Act defendants were virtually isolated. Obviously the question of their relationship to the Soviet Union during the cold-war period of "containing Communism" had something to do with it, but I wondered if there were other questions involved.
A. I don't give the ruling class credit for unanimity of opinion in everything they do. Different judges act in different ways, and the Communist party was particularly unpopular during the cold war because of their connection with the Soviet Union. The witch-hunters thought they could get away with it because of the political climate, and they did.
We're not fighting this case, I hope, with the idea that we're going to get justice. We're fighting to see if we can get a little something out of the pretense of a democratic society. If they make things absolutely airtight, and there's no chance to win any kind of a legal process and so on, then they can't make a pretense of having a democratic order. There's a great distinction between a police state and a bourgeois-democratic system. One has loopholes in it and the other is airtight, until it's overthrown.
Q. Some ultralefts have argued that it's ridiculous for socialists to try to defend legal rights that they have formally under a bourgeois government. We touched on some of those questions before in terms of the Sacramento trial of the IWW. But there are a lot of parallels between this argument and the kind of argument that it seems to me Grandizo Munis was presenting in his criticisms of your conduct in the Smith Act trial and so I wonder if you hare any comment on whether or not his criticism and your answer would have any relevance to legal actions like the SWP suit today. You were making the point that there is some necessity for the ruling class to grant some democratic rights.
A They had to grant us a trial which they wouldn't have had to do under a police state. And taking advantage of that, we used the courtroom for a forum. To do that effectively, we conducted a very prudent, dignified defense. We had our own lawyer, Albert Goldman, who was a member of the movement and on trial himself. We worked out together the questions he would ask and answers we would give. And in general we exploited the trial to the full for propaganda purposes.
I thought the Communist party made a mess of their big case in New York by engaging in so many squabbles with the judge on technicalities. The public became impatient and that hurt the defendants.
In contrast to that, our idea was just to get all the propaganda advantage possible out of the case. I don't know how long I was on the stand. Enough to make a small book. All those questions that Goldman put tome —these had all been worked out in advance. And, as far as I can remember, we didn't concede a damned thing to them. We just denied that what we were doing was illegal.
We used defensive formulas. We didn't go in there and shout for the right to use violence or anything like that. We just said the workers have a right to defend themselves and do such things as form a workers defense guard in the Minneapolis strikes.
When the prosecutor kept prodding me on it, and I kept answering defensively, I finally ended, "I think the workers have a right to defend themselves. And if that's treason, you can make the most of it!" I stood up and shouted that at them.
And the whole goddamn courtroom was stunned and he just said, "That's well spoken," and stopped.
When he questioned me about the Russian revolution, he was flabbergasted by my contention that it was a legal act. "What the devil are you talking about?" He didn't say that, but put it in lawyer's language.
I gave some more calculated arguments about revolutions and their legality, and finally said, "I don't think you'll find a more legal revolution than that!"
He said, "That's all." He just threw up his hands. "That's all."
The pamphlet we made of that testimony has been the most circulated of all our publications. I've been told many times that it's most effective in talking with new contacts: Socialism on Trial.
Q. I think it's being reissued along with the debate with Munis.
A. Yes, I've heard that.
Q. I have one other question. We've had a lot of experience with defense committees like the one we've set up in this case, the Political Rights Defense Fund. I'd like to know more about the ILD. How did that idea develop? Did it come from some earlier experience in the radical movement in the United States, or was it from international experience?
A. You might say it came about by accident. There was a tradition in America of solidarity in defense cases. The IWW had a defense committee called the General Defense Committee. It was strictly an IWW committee.
Going back to the Haywood case, where I first became involved in the movement as a 16-year-old kid in 1906. The Socialist party in those days was pretty strong and growing, and The Appeal to Reason, the socialist paper, with half a million circulation, made the Haywood trial the weekly front-page event.
Then—I don't know where it originated but it proliferated all over the country — Moyer-Haywood conferences were held of delegated bodies of the Socialist party, sympathetic trade unions, Workmen Circles, and so on. Meetings and demonstrations were organized for the defense of Haywood.
He was made candidate for the governor of Colorado while he was on trial. That was a very good stunt.
They employed the best lawyers. Clarence Darrow headed the defense. He was big news himself, he was so famous. The central national defense was controlled by the union because they had to collect a lot of money.
The general procedure was that when someone was arrested, his own organization would set up a defense committee. They'd ask for the support of others, but they didn't broaden out the defense committee. The Sacco-Vanzetti defense committee, in fact, was a little group of Boston anarchists, who kept tight control of everything. The campaign didn't get under way until the International Labor Defense came in on the propaganda side. We didn't participate on the legal and financial side.
In the early twenties, after the uprisings that followed the Russian revolution, the Russian party first set up an organization of their own in Russia to collect funds and so on for the victims of the white terror in Eastern Europe.
In early 1925, when we were there to attend a plenum, a proposal was made to organize international support for the victims of the white terror. The organization was to be called the International Red Aid. It's primary function would be to collect funds and to protest on behalf of the victims of the white terror. We talked about this in our delegation. We had the custom of congregating in Bill Haywood's room in the Hotel Lux. Bill Haywood and I were talking about it one day, and we came up with, "By God, we ought to do something about the American prisoners." There were a lot of them. There were over a hundred men still in jail from the old prosecution, and new criminal-syndicalist prosecutions were under way in various states. "We ought to do something about the Americans. We ought to broaden this thing out and make the committee take responsibility for the American prisoners — really Americanize the American section."
The more we talked about it, the more the idea took hold. I was then a member of the Political Committee of the Communist party and all I had in mind was just to promote the idea. Get it accepted in Moscow and then, when we came back, have the PC endorse it, take the initiative, get hold of somebody, and do it.
Well, when we got back, I went before the Political Committee for the first meeting, explained what had developed in Moscow, what the proposal was. The fact is that while we were in Moscow, they had sent delegates to the different countries to promote the International Red Aid idea. Their representative here had presented a formal motion that the PC support it. International Red Aid membership cards had already been printed. A very quiet, inoffensive operation—they were going to organize a few committees, get a few dollars for the victims, and let it go at that.
Well, my idea was to expand the operation and make something out of it. The committee immediately adopted my plan. "My idea," I said, "is not only just to have party members. Let's go out and get some prominent people to support it."
There was a defense committee in Pittsburgh on a special case there. There was a defense committee in Chicago on some still pending case of the Communist party. Some old Wobblies might become interested because they had friends still in prison.
I got Ralph Chaplin interested. He wasn't active in the IWW but he was sympathetic. And so were two or three other prominent ex-Wobblies. An ex-Wobbly was not somebody who had repudiated the movement, but somebody who had simply dropped out for personal reasons. They were well-known people.
We made them members of the Executive Committee. And in fact in the Executive Committee, as we laid it out in our plans, the majority would consist of nonmembers of the Communist party, people who were sympathetic to the general idea.
The more we talked about it, the more enthusiasm grew. We finally decided that we wouldn't just proclaim this committee; we would organize a national conference to launch the International Labor Defense. We projected publishing a magazine. As I say, the thing simply got out of hand. I recall one meeting just before the conference was called. We were laying out the plans and came to a point about the secretary of the Chicago Defense Committee possibly being named national secretary. Some Wobbly said, "Uh, uh; you got it all wrong."
"What do you mean?"
"You're going to be secretary. You want us to hustle? Well, we're not going to hustle for some fellow we don't know. We know you and we'll support you."
Then it became evident to everybody that I had gotten so deeply involved in the thing and I was so much better known than ^any of the other potential candidates that I would have to take over. I had never planned on that at all.
Then Rose Karsner said she would like to come in and run the office. She was the head of another organization called the International Workers Aid, which had originally been called the Friends of Soviet Russia. It was organized during the famine of 1921 and had continued as a fund-raising organization for different countries and different movements in need of financial help, where there were famines and persecution, etc.
Q. So it had a separate office with its own staff?
A. Yes. We were going to set up a national office with a secretary and an office manager. We planned it as a big operation. She would come in and run the office so that I'd be free to travel and organize locals and one thing or another.
So it culminated in a good-sized first national conference of the International Labor Defense. We had the endorsement of a lot of prominent people, including Upton Sinclair. We announced that we were defending all prisoners — what we called class-war prisoners — in connection with labor. And there were quite a bunch of them. There was a large number of IWWs in different cases. Mooney and Billings were in prison. The Centralia fight had resulted in a dozen Wobblies being imprisoned. Then we discovered that in Texas, Cline and Rangel, who had been helping Mexican revolutionists, had been framed up and were serving long sentences. In San Quentin were a lot of people who had been sent up under state criminal-syndicalist laws. Up in Maine there was a case. It added up to about 140 people. We said we will help all of them; we'll raise money to send a monthly stipend of $5 a month to every prisoner for commissary.
A commissary is a place in prison where you can buy a little extra stuff. It's very important. You get the routine meal. But if you have a little money you can buy candy bars, cigarettes, cookies, apples, oranges, and things like that. It makes a big difference.
We would send $5 a month to each prisoner and we would send $25 a month to their families, if they had a family. Then we would plan — without promising definitely — we would plan to raise a Christmas fund to give a bonus of $25 or $50 to every prisoner for Christmas. We would publicize all their cases through our magazine and other media. It was a very enthusiastic national conference.
The plan outlined in the constitution made it a membership organization. Anybody sympathetic to the cause could join. Ten cents a month dues and donate whatever you could and if you had a little extra money, send it in to the national office.
We organized locals all over the country and not only that, we put in full-time district organizers in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and places like that—Cleveland. Full-time organizers! They coordinated local branches and stirred up activity. The thing took hold and was quite well received.
In 1925 we started the Labor Defender. It was an illustrated monthly magazine. In the magazine, on which Max Shachtman was the editor and worked full time, we decided to revive all the old cases. We told the story of the Haymarket martyrs, and Mooney and Billings. We put out a special edition on the lynching of Frank Little in Butte, Montana. We publicized the Sacco-Vanzetti case and campaigned on other cases. It was the most popular magazine in the radical movement. Sold wider than the party press.
The second national conference was in 1926. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was brought in. She had been very prominent in the IWW. She became national chairwoman and was sent on a national tour. The third national conference in 1927 was held under the slogan: "Third National Conference of the International Labor Defense, Fortieth Anniversary of the Haymarket Martyrs." Lucy Parsons, the widow of the martyr, was the guest of honor. These things were very effective in stimulating a sense of solidarity in the radical movement.
And throughout all that period we kept up our obligation. We sent $5 a month to every one of the one hundred prisoners regardless of what organization they belonged to; but we didn't send it over the head of their own committee. For example, for members of the IWW, we sent it in a lump sum to their general defense committee to distribute; so that we were not interfering with the work of any of the other committees.
Our work was propaganda and agitation, and legal defense only if it was needed. Quite a few cases were brought to us and we had quite a number of those. Our Christmas fund was very popular.
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.
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How We Overcame Ultraleftism in Defense Work
The following interview with James P. Cannon, the founder of the American Trotskyist movement, was granted to Syd Stapleton October 29, 1973.
The interview begins with a reference to the Political Rights Defense Fund. This is a committee seeking public support for a $27-million suit for damages filed last July 18 by the Socialist Workers party and the Young Socialist Alliance against Nixon and other government officials. The suit charges that government agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, carried out illegal wiretapping, mail tampering, job discrimination, and harassment of SWP and YSA members and supporters. It also cites incidents of SWP campaign headquarters being fire-bombed, bombed, and burglarized.
Question. What is your opinion of the Political Rights Defense Fund?
Answer. It's a proper and correct procedure to exploit every possibility to utilize what cracks there are in the bourgeois-democratic system to advance our ideas. It's
participating in part in their elections. It’s wise to utilize a situation like this to explain our ideas to a wider audience. This wasn't known to the old radical movement. The old radical movement tended toward the ultraleft view that courts are crooked instruments of the capitalist class, so why bother? Ignore them. Including the elections. That was the prevailing opinion of the syndicalists and red-socialist wing in which I was.
But I don't blame myself for being an ultraleftist in those days. I didn't know any better and there was nobody to teach us better. The only ones who spoke the other way were the right-wing socialists who thought you could accomplish everything through the ballot box. We were pretty sure that was false.
It was not until after the Russian revolution and Lenin wrote his pamphlet on the infantile sickness, explaining how revolutionists could utilize parliamentary action effectively, that we got straightened out on that. It was so damned simple and so convincing that I don't have any patience with people who still repeat the old arguments of the ultraleft before the Russian revolution.
I can recall instances in the early days where Lenin's approach could have been effective. One was the Lawrence. Massachusetts, textile strike of 1912. That was sixty-one years ago. It was a famous IWW strike. Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, Joe Ettor, Arturo Giovannitti were involved in it.
Retrospectively, I recall one incidence that has a bearing on this question of whether you should utilize bourgeois-democratic institutions. At that time Victor Berger was a Socialist congressman from Milwaukee. He was the first Socialist congressman in the United States. But he was a right-winger. He was the leader you might call the ultra-right wing of the Socialist party. Notwithstanding that, the strike leaders were able to use his position to gain tremendous publicity for the strike. They cooked up a wonderful idea for publicity —to take the children of the strikers on the train to socialist sympathizers in various places to be kept during the strike. It caused a great sensation. The Lawrence authorities interfered and tried to put a stop to it. The use of the police created a furor.
Then Victor Berger introduced a resolution in Congress to investigate the Lawrence strike. He got an official committee set up, and Haywood and the leaders brought the kids and women to the congressional hearings to testify about conditions. It was a wonderful publicity job that helped win the strike.
But it was not a normal procedure. Retrospectively I see it as a good example of how to use a bourgeois parliamentary institution.
Another example I recall was in 1917 when the Socialist party came out against the war. Morris Hillquit, in the New York municipal elections that year, ran for mayor and made the war question his main issue. It got tremendous publicity across the country.
I didn't realize it then because I was still a hidebound syndicalist, but I look back on it as a wonderful illustration of how even a municipal campaign can be utilized for a national political purpose.
I really rejoice over the way our party goes into these elections, national, state, and local —any place they can get an edge in and get up some kind of an audience, newspaper space, some TV or radio time, and do it without giving away anything. That's all for free.
I see all these ultrawise, ultraleft groups. What do they do? They stand around with their mouths open while we exploit the cracks and crevices in the bourgeois-democratic system without paying the slightest respect to it. You know, they can't run a bourgeois-democratic system without giving a little opening here and there. So, we take advantage of it; and we're 100 percent right!
Q. In the history of the radical movement has there ever been a crisis in government with the kind of impact that the Nixon-Watergate crisis has had? Why do you think this Nixon thing has developed to the degree it has?
A. That's what Nixon would like to know. There have been some attempts to compare it to the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration. But that was a pure-and-simple graft scandal involving cabinet members and some oil companies. Public sentiment was rather "So what? Don't they all steal?"
The Communist party ran its first presidential candidates in 1924. Foster and Gitlow were the candidates. It was only a token campaign; but one of the slogans we started out with was "Down with the Capitalist Teapot Dome!
Vote for Communist candidates for president."
Our comrades were somewhat taken aback by the reception to that. People would say, "You mean to tell us that if your guy got in there he wouldn't steal? All politicians steal." There was absolute cynicism, more or less indifference. "What the hell; so they stole a few million dollars."
I think that would have been the attitude now if Watergate had been limited to graft. What's involved in this case is the extent of the bugging, espionage, and intimidation. A large section of the population, including a large section of the middle and upper classes, got apprehensive about it.
It's not the same as the Teapot Dome scandal. There is a genuine public reaction to this scandal. You might say multiple scandals. Every day, you expect something new to be revealed.
A columnist named Kraft. Do you know him?
Q. Joseph Kraft. He's the fellow who went to Paris and was followed by the CIA, I believe.
A. He's a prominent national columnist. He wrote an article summarizing the whole thing in one of the liberal magazines. His opinion was that this Nixon outfit and the hatchetmen he had around him were actually moving in the direction of a police state. The ruling powers in this country don't think they need that yet. The opposition comes, you know, not only from the workers. It comes from practically all circles of society. The New York Times and the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are all hostile to this administration. They represent real money in this country. If there is a conflict in the upper circles, the difference between the old money and the new may be involved, I think. The new tycoons don't know where to stop; they haven't learned moderation, or the need for concessions. The older ones think it's better to give a little in order to keep a lot.
Q. When the International Labor Defense had to fight, cases like Sacco-Vanzetti and Mooney-Billings, was it able to take advantage of any divisions like that in the ruling class over how to react to the labor movement? Was it able to build up support for its cases through both mass propaganda work and things like endorsements?
A. Yes, there were many endorsements and they were utilized. Even lawyers were outraged at the violations of the rules of law. The Sacco and Vanzetti case was a frame-up. Everybody knew it was a damned frame-up from beginning to end.
The witch-hunt began in the early 1920s. There was a tremendous red scare and they arrested thousands of people overnight in the Palmer raids. They deported whole shiploads of immigrants who were suspected of subversion or of being connected in any way with the radical, movement. They just hit on Sacco and Vanzetti in the course of a general investigation. They had no case against them at all. They framed it.
The judge was outspokenly prejudicial in all his rulings and so on. They went through with it. It was delayed by one appeal after another and by public protest for seven years. It was not till 1927 that they finally executed them. And there were deep feelings in the movement of protest.
A couple of years ago a book was published that tried to justify the killing of Sacco and Vanzetti. The author tried to prove that Carlo Tresca had stated in one instance that while one of them was innocent the other was guilty. And since Carlo Tresca was a prominent anarchist, he thought that this was big news. He said also that I knew about it —that I thought they were guilty despite the fact that I was organizing the campaign of the International Labor Defense. He made these statements in The New Republic.
I immediately wrote a reply which they published under the heading "What Cannon Didn't Think."
Judge Musmano, who had been connected with the Sacco-Vanzetti Committee, and later became a prominent judge in Pennsylvania, wrote me a very, very warm letter congratulating me on my protest in The New Republic. Which is an indication he still had strong convictions about the case although he was by no means sympathetic to anarchism or any other radical idea.
Q. As a result of the tapes controversy and the whole development of this struggle around Nixon's role in Watergate, there's quite a bit of sentiment in various circles, from George Meany to radical students, to impeach Nixon. As far as I know, that's a totally new phenomenon. Do you have any opinion about how revolutionists should relate to demands for impeachment?
A. The only other case involved was that of President Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln. That was in 1866, over a hundred years ago. No, there has been nothing like the exposure of the Nixon administration.
He's committed to something that's unforgivable in the eyes of the moneyed rulers of this country. He's gone too far; he's stirred up too much trouble. They want to rule the country rather calmly. They're getting plenty of benefits the way it's working. They're not ready to use police-state methods to the extent Nixon has used them.
And then there's been some bad luck. One thing leads to another. A witness incidentally mentions to the Ervin Committee that they kept tape recordings of all the conversations. My god, is that so? Accidental things like that led from one revelation to the next.
I think our press is doing all right in covering Watergate and should keep hammering away on it from our own special viewpoint that this is just an unusually flagrant example of what capitalist rule and politics are really like.
We should watch out for oversimplification. Some issues of The Militant may have given the impression that it was being treated like another Teapot Dome scandal, "Well, they all do it; don't they?"
But Watergate goes beyond anything previous. Even Supreme Court Justice Douglas says he suspects they tapped the Supreme Court, and Johnson suspected that his phone was tapped.
If the ruling class thought all this was necessary, they would be for it, but at present they're not for such extensive use of police-state methods. So I think we should recognize this, and without making any concessions in principle, deal more fully with the way Nixon has embarrassed the real rulers of America.
But, as I say, that's marginal. It's not a fundamental criticism of our handling of the case. I think The Militant is doing very well, harping on it all they can, speaking about it all they can.
This morning I received a copy of the Workers Vanguard.
Q. That's Robertson's paper.
A. Do you know what they say on the headline? "Impeachment is not enough!" (Laughs.)
Q. He has to be hanged by the thumbs, or something?
A. (Laughs.) Returning to what the attitude of the radical movement used to be toward utilizing the judicial and parliamentary system for revolutionary purposes. Our actions used to be purely defensive. Even in the Sacco-Vanzetti case we took a defensive position. The same was (rue of the Mooney case and going all the way back to the Haymarket martyrs. They were all defensive actions.
The tendency was to say the courts are crooked, influenced by the capitalist class, and so keep away from them. For instance, the idea of utilizing the courts was not known to me. I recall distinctly in the terrible persecution of the IWW during the First World War. They arrested active Wobblies wherever they could find them. They had so many they put whole groups on trial. Around eighty to one hundred were tried in Chicago. There was another big group in Sacramento, California, and another in Kansas City, Kansas, the Witchita Case, they called it.
This gives you an idea of the decentralization of the IWW and the ultraleft approach to the question of utilizing the courts. In the Chicago and Kansas cases they put up a legal defense with lawyers. But in Sacramento they adopted the policy of a "silent defense." Did you ever hear of that?
Q. Where they refused to speak?
A. A silent defense. They didn't have any lawyers; they used no witnesses; they didn't use cross-examination. They ignored the court. They just sat there. Just to show their contempt.
They got stiff sentences like the others, but all they accomplished by their silent defense and their refusal to employ any lawyers was to lose the possibility of appealing, getting some of their people out on bail while the appeals were pending, and organizing an effective campaign. It was a negative action. It represented the prevailing attitude of the left-wing movement that you couldn't get anything out of the courts.
Now, our policy today is different. We base ourselves on the fact that it's not a police state, it's a bourgeois-democratic state, which a lot of people think is really democratic. In order to maintain that illusion the ruling class has to give you a little leeway here and there.
The intelligent thing, as Lenin explained in his pamphlet on the infantile sickness, is that we utilize these crevices for our own purposes. The suit filed by our party in the Watergate case is a very correct tactic, a serious move to exploit the bourgeois-democratic system in an offensive action in the courts. It's correctness is self-evident when you look at it.
I noticed the New York papers carried reports of the press conference about the filing of the suit. You're going around the country speaking to audiences who wouldn't be there this issue didn't appeal to them the way it does.
And what are ultralefts doing? Doing nothing except occasionally yapping at us.
Of course we should explain in our general propaganda that we don't expect to get much justice from the capitalist courts. The whole thing is rigged against us. But in order to maintain some illusion of democracy they've got to show some respect for law and order, so we'll take advantage of that and we'll test it out.
The Kutcher case is a wonderful example of how sometimes such a course can be successful.
Q. Why do you think there was such a big difference between the outcome of the Kutcher case and the outcome of the Smith Act trials of the leaders of the Communist party during the same period?
A. Well, the Smith Act trials began with our being tried in Minneapolis. All of these trials were, from the point of view of the letter of the law, illegal and unconstitutional. We were convicted of expressing certain opinions. We were not accused of any actions. The same held true for the Communist party defendants. The political climate —the war, and later the cold war —made it possible for them to get away with it. And they did. But there aren't any Smith Act cases today, are there?
Q. No.
A. We appealed to the Supreme Court. We kept out of jail for two years after our conviction with one appeal after another and the final decision was no decision at all. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Did you know that? So it left undecided whether the law was unconstitutional. Later they finally agreed to hear another case and threw out a large section of it. You don't hear a lot about the Smith Act trials any more.
Q. Well, the question that I was raising, the reason 1 posed it in relation to the Communist party, is that it seems to me that because of the SWP's position of political opposition to the war, there was a clear, nearly unanimous sentiment on the part of the capitalist class that the SWF should be prevented from expressing that point of view. But later, during the witch-hunt, Jimmy Kutcher, a member of the SWP, gained enough support to win, while members of the CP like the Rosenbergs and the Smith Act defendants were virtually isolated. Obviously the question of their relationship to the Soviet Union during the cold-war period of "containing Communism" had something to do with it, but I wondered if there were other questions involved.
A. I don't give the ruling class credit for unanimity of opinion in everything they do. Different judges act in different ways, and the Communist party was particularly unpopular during the cold war because of their connection with the Soviet Union. The witch-hunters thought they could get away with it because of the political climate, and they did.
We're not fighting this case, I hope, with the idea that we're going to get justice. We're fighting to see if we can get a little something out of the pretense of a democratic society. If they make things absolutely airtight, and there's no chance to win any kind of a legal process and so on, then they can't make a pretense of having a democratic order. There's a great distinction between a police state and a bourgeois-democratic system. One has loopholes in it and the other is airtight, until it's overthrown.
Q. Some ultralefts have argued that it's ridiculous for socialists to try to defend legal rights that they have formally under a bourgeois government. We touched on some of those questions before in terms of the Sacramento trial of the IWW. But there are a lot of parallels between this argument and the kind of argument that it seems to me Grandizo Munis was presenting in his criticisms of your conduct in the Smith Act trial and so I wonder if you hare any comment on whether or not his criticism and your answer would have any relevance to legal actions like the SWP suit today. You were making the point that there is some necessity for the ruling class to grant some democratic rights.
A They had to grant us a trial which they wouldn't have had to do under a police state. And taking advantage of that, we used the courtroom for a forum. To do that effectively, we conducted a very prudent, dignified defense. We had our own lawyer, Albert Goldman, who was a member of the movement and on trial himself. We worked out together the questions he would ask and answers we would give. And in general we exploited the trial to the full for propaganda purposes.
I thought the Communist party made a mess of their big case in New York by engaging in so many squabbles with the judge on technicalities. The public became impatient and that hurt the defendants.
In contrast to that, our idea was just to get all the propaganda advantage possible out of the case. I don't know how long I was on the stand. Enough to make a small book. All those questions that Goldman put tome —these had all been worked out in advance. And, as far as I can remember, we didn't concede a damned thing to them. We just denied that what we were doing was illegal.
We used defensive formulas. We didn't go in there and shout for the right to use violence or anything like that. We just said the workers have a right to defend themselves and do such things as form a workers defense guard in the Minneapolis strikes.
When the prosecutor kept prodding me on it, and I kept answering defensively, I finally ended, "I think the workers have a right to defend themselves. And if that's treason, you can make the most of it!" I stood up and shouted that at them.
And the whole goddamn courtroom was stunned and he just said, "That's well spoken," and stopped.
When he questioned me about the Russian revolution, he was flabbergasted by my contention that it was a legal act. "What the devil are you talking about?" He didn't say that, but put it in lawyer's language.
I gave some more calculated arguments about revolutions and their legality, and finally said, "I don't think you'll find a more legal revolution than that!"
He said, "That's all." He just threw up his hands. "That's all."
The pamphlet we made of that testimony has been the most circulated of all our publications. I've been told many times that it's most effective in talking with new contacts: Socialism on Trial.
Q. I think it's being reissued along with the debate with Munis.
A. Yes, I've heard that.
Q. I have one other question. We've had a lot of experience with defense committees like the one we've set up in this case, the Political Rights Defense Fund. I'd like to know more about the ILD. How did that idea develop? Did it come from some earlier experience in the radical movement in the United States, or was it from international experience?
A. You might say it came about by accident. There was a tradition in America of solidarity in defense cases. The IWW had a defense committee called the General Defense Committee. It was strictly an IWW committee.
Going back to the Haywood case, where I first became involved in the movement as a 16-year-old kid in 1906. The Socialist party in those days was pretty strong and growing, and The Appeal to Reason, the socialist paper, with half a million circulation, made the Haywood trial the weekly front-page event.
Then—I don't know where it originated but it proliferated all over the country — Moyer-Haywood conferences were held of delegated bodies of the Socialist party, sympathetic trade unions, Workmen Circles, and so on. Meetings and demonstrations were organized for the defense of Haywood.
He was made candidate for the governor of Colorado while he was on trial. That was a very good stunt.
They employed the best lawyers. Clarence Darrow headed the defense. He was big news himself, he was so famous. The central national defense was controlled by the union because they had to collect a lot of money.
The general procedure was that when someone was arrested, his own organization would set up a defense committee. They'd ask for the support of others, but they didn't broaden out the defense committee. The Sacco-Vanzetti defense committee, in fact, was a little group of Boston anarchists, who kept tight control of everything. The campaign didn't get under way until the International Labor Defense came in on the propaganda side. We didn't participate on the legal and financial side.
In the early twenties, after the uprisings that followed the Russian revolution, the Russian party first set up an organization of their own in Russia to collect funds and so on for the victims of the white terror in Eastern Europe.
In early 1925, when we were there to attend a plenum, a proposal was made to organize international support for the victims of the white terror. The organization was to be called the International Red Aid. It's primary function would be to collect funds and to protest on behalf of the victims of the white terror. We talked about this in our delegation. We had the custom of congregating in Bill Haywood's room in the Hotel Lux. Bill Haywood and I were talking about it one day, and we came up with, "By God, we ought to do something about the American prisoners." There were a lot of them. There were over a hundred men still in jail from the old prosecution, and new criminal-syndicalist prosecutions were under way in various states. "We ought to do something about the Americans. We ought to broaden this thing out and make the committee take responsibility for the American prisoners — really Americanize the American section."
The more we talked about it, the more the idea took hold. I was then a member of the Political Committee of the Communist party and all I had in mind was just to promote the idea. Get it accepted in Moscow and then, when we came back, have the PC endorse it, take the initiative, get hold of somebody, and do it.
Well, when we got back, I went before the Political Committee for the first meeting, explained what had developed in Moscow, what the proposal was. The fact is that while we were in Moscow, they had sent delegates to the different countries to promote the International Red Aid idea. Their representative here had presented a formal motion that the PC support it. International Red Aid membership cards had already been printed. A very quiet, inoffensive operation—they were going to organize a few committees, get a few dollars for the victims, and let it go at that.
Well, my idea was to expand the operation and make something out of it. The committee immediately adopted my plan. "My idea," I said, "is not only just to have party members. Let's go out and get some prominent people to support it."
There was a defense committee in Pittsburgh on a special case there. There was a defense committee in Chicago on some still pending case of the Communist party. Some old Wobblies might become interested because they had friends still in prison.
I got Ralph Chaplin interested. He wasn't active in the IWW but he was sympathetic. And so were two or three other prominent ex-Wobblies. An ex-Wobbly was not somebody who had repudiated the movement, but somebody who had simply dropped out for personal reasons. They were well-known people.
We made them members of the Executive Committee. And in fact in the Executive Committee, as we laid it out in our plans, the majority would consist of nonmembers of the Communist party, people who were sympathetic to the general idea.
The more we talked about it, the more enthusiasm grew. We finally decided that we wouldn't just proclaim this committee; we would organize a national conference to launch the International Labor Defense. We projected publishing a magazine. As I say, the thing simply got out of hand. I recall one meeting just before the conference was called. We were laying out the plans and came to a point about the secretary of the Chicago Defense Committee possibly being named national secretary. Some Wobbly said, "Uh, uh; you got it all wrong."
"What do you mean?"
"You're going to be secretary. You want us to hustle? Well, we're not going to hustle for some fellow we don't know. We know you and we'll support you."
Then it became evident to everybody that I had gotten so deeply involved in the thing and I was so much better known than ^any of the other potential candidates that I would have to take over. I had never planned on that at all.
Then Rose Karsner said she would like to come in and run the office. She was the head of another organization called the International Workers Aid, which had originally been called the Friends of Soviet Russia. It was organized during the famine of 1921 and had continued as a fund-raising organization for different countries and different movements in need of financial help, where there were famines and persecution, etc.
Q. So it had a separate office with its own staff?
A. Yes. We were going to set up a national office with a secretary and an office manager. We planned it as a big operation. She would come in and run the office so that I'd be free to travel and organize locals and one thing or another.
So it culminated in a good-sized first national conference of the International Labor Defense. We had the endorsement of a lot of prominent people, including Upton Sinclair. We announced that we were defending all prisoners — what we called class-war prisoners — in connection with labor. And there were quite a bunch of them. There was a large number of IWWs in different cases. Mooney and Billings were in prison. The Centralia fight had resulted in a dozen Wobblies being imprisoned. Then we discovered that in Texas, Cline and Rangel, who had been helping Mexican revolutionists, had been framed up and were serving long sentences. In San Quentin were a lot of people who had been sent up under state criminal-syndicalist laws. Up in Maine there was a case. It added up to about 140 people. We said we will help all of them; we'll raise money to send a monthly stipend of $5 a month to every prisoner for commissary.
A commissary is a place in prison where you can buy a little extra stuff. It's very important. You get the routine meal. But if you have a little money you can buy candy bars, cigarettes, cookies, apples, oranges, and things like that. It makes a big difference.
We would send $5 a month to each prisoner and we would send $25 a month to their families, if they had a family. Then we would plan — without promising definitely — we would plan to raise a Christmas fund to give a bonus of $25 or $50 to every prisoner for Christmas. We would publicize all their cases through our magazine and other media. It was a very enthusiastic national conference.
The plan outlined in the constitution made it a membership organization. Anybody sympathetic to the cause could join. Ten cents a month dues and donate whatever you could and if you had a little extra money, send it in to the national office.
We organized locals all over the country and not only that, we put in full-time district organizers in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and places like that—Cleveland. Full-time organizers! They coordinated local branches and stirred up activity. The thing took hold and was quite well received.
In 1925 we started the Labor Defender. It was an illustrated monthly magazine. In the magazine, on which Max Shachtman was the editor and worked full time, we decided to revive all the old cases. We told the story of the Haymarket martyrs, and Mooney and Billings. We put out a special edition on the lynching of Frank Little in Butte, Montana. We publicized the Sacco-Vanzetti case and campaigned on other cases. It was the most popular magazine in the radical movement. Sold wider than the party press.
The second national conference was in 1926. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was brought in. She had been very prominent in the IWW. She became national chairwoman and was sent on a national tour. The third national conference in 1927 was held under the slogan: "Third National Conference of the International Labor Defense, Fortieth Anniversary of the Haymarket Martyrs." Lucy Parsons, the widow of the martyr, was the guest of honor. These things were very effective in stimulating a sense of solidarity in the radical movement.
And throughout all that period we kept up our obligation. We sent $5 a month to every one of the one hundred prisoners regardless of what organization they belonged to; but we didn't send it over the head of their own committee. For example, for members of the IWW, we sent it in a lump sum to their general defense committee to distribute; so that we were not interfering with the work of any of the other committees.
Our work was propaganda and agitation, and legal defense only if it was needed. Quite a few cases were brought to us and we had quite a number of those. Our Christmas fund was very popular.
Sunday, February 05, 2012
Photo Report Via Boston Indy Media On The February 4th Hands Off Iran March And Rally-Hands Off Iran!
Click on the headline to line to a Boston IndyMedia entry for the February 4, 2012 March and Rally for Hands Off Iran!
Markin comment:
A good, if small, start toward mass opposition to the next step in the American (and its allies) imperialist state's march to war. Enough! Hand Off Iran!
Markin comment:
A good, if small, start toward mass opposition to the next step in the American (and its allies) imperialist state's march to war. Enough! Hand Off Iran!
In The Centenary Year Of His Birth-A Populist Folk Singer For The Ages- The Dust Bowl Refugee- Woody Guthrie
Click On The Title To Link To A YouTube Film Clip Of Woody Guthrie Performing This Land Is Your Land.
CD REVIEW
Woody Guthrie; Dust Bowl Ballads, Woody Guthrie, Buddha Records, 2000
Although this space is mainly dedicated to reviewing political books and commenting on past and current political issues literary output is hardly the only form of political creation. Occasionally in the history of the American and international left musicians, artists and playwrights have given voice or provided visual reminders to the face of political struggle. With that thought in mind, every once in a while I have used this space to review those kinds of political expression.
This review was originally used to take an end around look at some previously unknown, if not hidden, Woody Guthrie work from the 1940 and 1950s that were not songs, but poems, reflections, and “speak-outs” that came to mind when Woody he had his lucid moments, an album entitled Note Of Hope. Best of all for those, like me, who worry about the future of folk music as the generation of ’68 dwindles these works were recreated and put to music (including producer Rob Wasserman’s fatalistic bass, yes, bass work) by some younger artists who will carry the torch forward. And that album brought me back to a Woody hunger and hence a refreshed look at his Okie dust bowl ballads.
My musical tastes were formed, as were many of those of the generation of 1968, by Rock & Roll music exemplified by The Rolling Stones and Beatles and by the blues revival, both Delta and Chicago style. However, those forms as much as they gave pleasure were only marginally political at best. In short, these were entertainers performing material that spoke to us. In the most general sense that is all one should expect of a performer. Thus, for the most part, that music need not be reviewed here. Those who thought that a new musical sensibility laid the foundations for a cultural or political revolution have long ago been proven wrong.
That said, in the early 1960’s there nevertheless was another form of musical sensibility that was directly tied to radical political expression- the folk revival. This entailed a search for roots and relevancy in musical expression. While not all forms of folk music lent themselves to radical politics it is hard to see the 1960’s cultural rebellion without giving a nod to such figures as Dave Van Ronk, the early Bob Dylan, Utah Phillips, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and others. Whatever entertainment value these performers provided they also spoke to and prodded our political development. They did have a message and an agenda and we responded as such. That some of these musicians’ respective agendas proved inadequate and/or short-lived does not negate their affect on the times.
As I have noted elsewhere in a review of Dave Van Ronk’s work when I first heard folk music in my youth I felt unsure about whether I liked it or not. As least against my strong feelings about The Rolling Stones and my favorite blues artists such as Howlin' Wolf and Elmore James. Then on some late night radio folk show here in Boston I heard Dave Van Ronk singing Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies and that was it. From that time to the present folk music has been a staple of my musical tastes. From there I expanded my play list of folk artists with a political message.
Although I had probably heard Woody’s This Land is Your Land at some earlier point I actually learned about his music second-hand from early Bob Dylan covers of his work. While his influence has had its ebbs and flows since that time each succeeding generation of folk singers still seems to be drawn to his simple, honest tunes about the outlaws, outcasts and the forgotten people that made this country, for good or evil, what it is today. Since Woody did not have a particularly good voice nor was he an exceptional guitar player the message delivered by his songs is his real legacy.
And now we have a second legacy look for the ages from the hard-edged American populist. Stick outs here include Tom Goad I and II (basically John Steinbeck’s Grape of Wrath in lyric form), California dreamin’ Do Re Mi, the outlaw love song Pretty Boy Floyd and I Ain’t Got No Home. A tip of the hat to Woody.
This Land Is Your Land-Woody Guthrie
This land is your land This land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and Me.
As I was walking that ribbon of highway,
I saw above me that endless skyway:
I saw below me that golden valley:
This land was made for you and me.
I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding:
This land was made for you and me.
When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.
As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.
CD REVIEW
Woody Guthrie; Dust Bowl Ballads, Woody Guthrie, Buddha Records, 2000
Although this space is mainly dedicated to reviewing political books and commenting on past and current political issues literary output is hardly the only form of political creation. Occasionally in the history of the American and international left musicians, artists and playwrights have given voice or provided visual reminders to the face of political struggle. With that thought in mind, every once in a while I have used this space to review those kinds of political expression.
This review was originally used to take an end around look at some previously unknown, if not hidden, Woody Guthrie work from the 1940 and 1950s that were not songs, but poems, reflections, and “speak-outs” that came to mind when Woody he had his lucid moments, an album entitled Note Of Hope. Best of all for those, like me, who worry about the future of folk music as the generation of ’68 dwindles these works were recreated and put to music (including producer Rob Wasserman’s fatalistic bass, yes, bass work) by some younger artists who will carry the torch forward. And that album brought me back to a Woody hunger and hence a refreshed look at his Okie dust bowl ballads.
My musical tastes were formed, as were many of those of the generation of 1968, by Rock & Roll music exemplified by The Rolling Stones and Beatles and by the blues revival, both Delta and Chicago style. However, those forms as much as they gave pleasure were only marginally political at best. In short, these were entertainers performing material that spoke to us. In the most general sense that is all one should expect of a performer. Thus, for the most part, that music need not be reviewed here. Those who thought that a new musical sensibility laid the foundations for a cultural or political revolution have long ago been proven wrong.
That said, in the early 1960’s there nevertheless was another form of musical sensibility that was directly tied to radical political expression- the folk revival. This entailed a search for roots and relevancy in musical expression. While not all forms of folk music lent themselves to radical politics it is hard to see the 1960’s cultural rebellion without giving a nod to such figures as Dave Van Ronk, the early Bob Dylan, Utah Phillips, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and others. Whatever entertainment value these performers provided they also spoke to and prodded our political development. They did have a message and an agenda and we responded as such. That some of these musicians’ respective agendas proved inadequate and/or short-lived does not negate their affect on the times.
As I have noted elsewhere in a review of Dave Van Ronk’s work when I first heard folk music in my youth I felt unsure about whether I liked it or not. As least against my strong feelings about The Rolling Stones and my favorite blues artists such as Howlin' Wolf and Elmore James. Then on some late night radio folk show here in Boston I heard Dave Van Ronk singing Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies and that was it. From that time to the present folk music has been a staple of my musical tastes. From there I expanded my play list of folk artists with a political message.
Although I had probably heard Woody’s This Land is Your Land at some earlier point I actually learned about his music second-hand from early Bob Dylan covers of his work. While his influence has had its ebbs and flows since that time each succeeding generation of folk singers still seems to be drawn to his simple, honest tunes about the outlaws, outcasts and the forgotten people that made this country, for good or evil, what it is today. Since Woody did not have a particularly good voice nor was he an exceptional guitar player the message delivered by his songs is his real legacy.
And now we have a second legacy look for the ages from the hard-edged American populist. Stick outs here include Tom Goad I and II (basically John Steinbeck’s Grape of Wrath in lyric form), California dreamin’ Do Re Mi, the outlaw love song Pretty Boy Floyd and I Ain’t Got No Home. A tip of the hat to Woody.
This Land Is Your Land-Woody Guthrie
This land is your land This land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and Me.
As I was walking that ribbon of highway,
I saw above me that endless skyway:
I saw below me that golden valley:
This land was made for you and me.
I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding:
This land was made for you and me.
When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.
As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.
Hoagy Carmichael’s Playing My Blues-Magical Realism 101
A couple of years ago, I guess it was the winter of 2010 after Josh Breslin got back from covering that year’s Democratic election debacle, I came across a half-moth-eaten, mildewy, old dust jacket cover of a Hoagy Carmichael Bluebird label, hence a rag-timey, jazzy, swingy, pre-be-bop, non-be-boppy album that I found in the back hall closet of my old compadre’s hide-away damp and cold log cabin up in wintry snowbound interior Maine on one of my visits. Although Josh, Joshua Lawrence Breslin, for those who have followed his quirky byline in half the radical chic and public vision alternative newsprints like the early pre-gloss, pre-sellout Rolling Stone, The Bard, the old Barb, the early Phoenix, Mother Planet , that kind of thing, around this country over the past forty years, articles mainly found in trendy progressive homes, unread, turning mildewy in their own back hall closets, does not figure in this story the effects of his take-no-prisoners- kind of left-handed writing certainly do and should be quickly and quietly acknowledged here. Done.
The picture on the album cover, or the essence of the picture since some parts were, candidly, not viewable, was classic, maybe late 1930s, early 1940s, Hoagy Carmichael at piano, manically at piano, naturally. On his head, tilted back, back just short of falling off on some whiskey-stained, or maybe better, depending on the night, the place he was holding forth in, and whether and how bad he needed the dough, beer-stained floor was his trademark Stetson-like hat, or in any case a soft hat as they used to call them back when my grandfather worn one. And on his face, his craggy, not beautiful but useful face, a smoldering cigarette, unfiltered of course in those manly days, hanging off, a lip, and like the hat, always almost ready to fall until he breathed some life into it and seemingly like magic placed it upright between those browned tobacco lips. The piano, nondescript from the look of it, but descript in any gin mill in the world, descript that it is no Steinway or any shock harm-able such instrument but rather just good enough to play sudsy, heart-rendering, or jazzed-up show tunes for the hoi polloi as they sink deeper in that glazed haze good night and thoughts of the next day’s hard manual labor.
And Hoagy, sphinx-like, wry-like, sly-like, world-weary, world-wary, and just that nano-second before yellow-jaded. Trying to live down some Tin Pan Alley tune, a cover probably, that every fool kept insisting that he play for the umpteenth time and if he had a gun he would know how to use it and how much to use it. And looking, looking intently out at the crooked door, or what passed for a door, at Café Joey’s. You know Café Joey’s, right? Hoagy’s old winter time tropical paradise, tropical paradise for the swells and other assorted Carib fauna and flora, nightclub down in the lesser Antilles, Port-of-France to be precise. Everybody though he was just the piano player but no he owned the joint, owned it outright or close to it, maybe only a few wise-guy silent partners. In those days Café Joey’s always had a rogue’s gallery clientele of runaway brides-to-be looking for a last fling, decayed debutantes, rundown dentists with failed practices trying to “get well” at the roulette wheel, and half the snub-nosed guys from such winter spots as Cicero, Joliet, and the big town, you name the big town. Plus assorted local drifters, grifters, and midnight shifters just to keep things interesting. In short hold on very tightly to your wallets. From the look on Hoagy’s face the door at that moment looked to produce more of the same.
Then she came in.
All thoughts of Hoagy, his humdrum musical problems, his nefarious business arrangements, and even his existence kind of fled to some darkened forgotten corner recesses once she hit the door. Every man in the room, every red-blooded man if you get my drift, although the other kind found a cozy, no questions asked, just don’t flaunt it, refuge at the cafe and maybe they looked too just to see what they were missing, sharpened his eyes in her direction. So you can say, just like with old Josh Breslin, our boy Hoagy does not figure much from here on in but the story makes no sense without a bow for him. Or without me either.
See I was standing at the bar when she came in. As usual, just drowning my maddened sorrows, listening to Hoagy fighting off the demons in front of him, and within him, with his usual eight or twelve rum sours, or colas, or whatever he used to take some of the bite out of that high-proof island rum. I was sitting at my “reserved” seat, about the fifth guy down the line, give or take a couple of bar-girls in between the guys, when she walked in and drew a bee-line to Hoagy, or what I thought at first was a bee-line to Hoagy anyway. Slim, hell let’s just call her Slim and get it over with although her real name was Marie, or Anne-Marie, something like that. So already you can see, and don’t smirk, that I got nowhere with her, nada, no time, so I will join the line of guys who this story is not about, okay. But I am telling the story so I figure in the mix somewhere.
Ya, She came in. She came in like some tropical breeze, some Jamaica trade-wind breeze, light and airy on the outside, the only side she showed in public you could tell but some smolder underneath if you every got that far, and a few guys had, had got part way anyway, and she had just kind of landed here. Story unknown, parts unknown, islands past unknown, former companions unknown except there was just enough run-down about her, mainly around the eyes, to know that while she was not fugitive, she had had a handle on some pretty unsavory characters. But as she walked down the aisle she blew that past off, that hard past part, like so much lint off her sleeve. Came in like a breeze, like the world wasn’t just a wicked old place after all if it took time to create her or even the possibilities of her. A Jamaica trade-wind breeze just the same.
Like I say she was slim, slender, whatever you want to call a gal who fills out a dress or suit in a subtle way that makes a guy’s temperature rise even if she is not all buxom and twenty-seven curves like most guys like them. Not any Lana Turner, all sultry and no substance, no way, no way in hell, but nothing but pure femme fatale just the same. If you could learn to handle her just right you could, well, let’s just keep describing her and leave that part for later. She had that long brown, brunette I guess you call it, hair, hair that fell over one part of her forehead like the gals wore it just then, and maybe still do, although I don’t keep up with the girlish, or womanish, fashion trends. And those eyes, well, those eyes, and we can leave it at that for a minute too.
Just an ordinary good-looking girl, you say. A dime a dozen, you say. Well, maybe I am not the best guy to describe her, her physical looks, but that’s not what I am getting at. It was the walk, the way she walked not all strutting butterfly swirling stuff, but gracefully, angelically, and with a purposefulness that said loud and clean no inferior guy, no run-of-the mill-guy sitting seersucker suit sweaty in some hothouse rum joint better even look in her direction or maybe be in the same place, palace or joint, as her. And that golden stride was accompanied by this look, this look that I saw her give him, give him many times and made me call for another double-whiskey straight up, no chaser, or maybe just water, every time I saw her do it later. Give it to him only. That way she arched her right eyebrow, with that little glean look in her eye that meant you had it made brother and you had better do something about it, or else. Ya, that’s the look.
That look, and that walk, as it went by me, me with my half-flicked match ready to light that cigarette, that unknown, unfiltered cigarette, which she was now fusing through her pocketbook for as she headed to the depths of this wicked old joint. That look, that walk, and that unfiltered, unlit cigarette as she passed several feet away from me was, moreover, accompanied by some vagrant fragrance I still can’t figure out except it was like I was just swished or splashed by some Eden nectar. And that look, that walk, that smell was accompanied by the sound of silk, some silk slip under her dress that hid those slender thighs, and maddened, middle of the night dream maddened, half the guys in the joint.
But see that look, and the rest of the package, was dead-aimed at this old bent-over sea captain, some guy just off some uncle Neptune voyages who was swilling down whatever was put in front of him just then, looked like some sweet rum, straight up, to me. He still looked pretty sober though although I swear he could not have seen her coming because his head was half-cocked in the other direction when she walked up to him and asked him point blank for a match, and an off-hand drink. Whatever he was drinking, if I heard right. And cool, cool as a cucumber like they say, he flicked a match toward the cigarette, unfiltered in case you forgot, on the edge of her ruby red lips and said “Andy, bring the lady a drink, and be quick about it, ” like he said it everyday, and twice on Sunday. And I am sunk, me and my poor heart.
That grizzled old sea captain, Captain Bogie I found out later was his name, later after all the shooting and commotion was over and they, yes, he and Slim, were long gone to some island safe-haven further up the island chain with their precious human cargo safely tucked below deck, was some kind of hell-bent for leather sea captain of big ships a few years back except he let one get away from him in a storm, a huge perfect wave of a storm from what legend said, and he got blacklisted or whatever they call it when they don’t want you to steer ships, big ships anyway, anymore. And he had settled down to safe seas and rums running a low-rent scene fishing boat out of Port-of-Spain. Dusty, dirty, damp, soggy Port-of-Spain where I had just come from myself a few week before.
Here’s the funny part. I wasn’t so smart about things after all because that whole scene when she walked in and drew a bee-line to Captain Bogie had some history behind it. Ya, Hoagy (and Andy the waiter too) filled me in one night when I, and maybe we, although you could never be too sure about Hoagy because he dismissed dames, good-looking, willing dames too, once the rum ran through their veins, left and right for no good reason, were in our cups and in a mood to talk about the now legendary Captain Bogie, his exploits and his rare find Slim. Slim and Bogie had actually met, although that might be too strong a term, earlier in the day, that afternoon, down at the dock where the Captain has his fishing boat, the Laura or Lauren, something like that, I think it was called. She, as I could sense when she walked into Café Joey’s, was down on her luck. Down enough to start asking guys, stranger guys, but guys still with eyes, for some favors. Her request. She needed to get to Porto del Cortes, or somewhere not Port-of-France, quick.
And the way Hoagy told this part of the story to us Slim was in such a hurry she was willing to return favor for favor in the way any man, any red-blooded man, would appreciate, no questions asked. Our Captain though turned her down flat just for the sake of turning her down right then. Just to see what she was up to. And to see what she would do next. See the other thing I could sense watching old Captain as she had approached his table was maybe he had been water-logged once too many times and maybe had been in one too many sea wrecks but he had been around the block more than once with dames, although maybe not quite so often with one like this slightly soiled but rare dame.
Well, you already know what she did next. And you might as well already know now too that she had her hooks into him bad, if not in that afternoon encounter then by the time he flicked that match to her ruby red lips to light that cigarette that night in dankest Café Joey’s. Yes, he would go through many hoops, maybe take a bullet or two, and gladly, before she was through with him just to be around that walk, that look, and that edenic smell.
What? You want to know about the shooting and commotion part? Hell, I thought you wanted me to skip that. No? Well, I will make it short and sweet because it is a story like a million others in this wicked old wartime world what with things, cruel Nazi things, jumping all over Europe and every place else. But to tell the story, or really the way Hoagy with an assist by Andy to fill in the details told the story, is to step back before that afternoon encounter between Slim and the Captain. And bring some politics into it, hold your nose local politics between, hey, let’s just call them the “ins” and “outs” and be done with it. You’ll get the drift without going into all those sordid details.
See, as I said before Slim was, like many frails femme fatales or not, down on her luck a little when she hit Port-of-France. When she checked in a few days before into the Hotel Falcon with a little light luggage the manager, a supporter of the “ins,” got suspicious and called in his dear friend, the police perfect to check out Slim’s status. Her dough situation. Not only did the police perfect order her out of town when he found she was light on dough but he roughed her up just enough for her to get the message. Now already you should hate the ins, and not just because they are ins but because they are blind and stupid. A woman like Slim is not going to, in this wicked old world, have any problem making her room rent at anytime or in anyplace. Not as long as guys have eyes, or a pulse, or the semblance of a pulse. No, her looks are like finding money on the ground, unless of course Slim decides otherwise. Oh did I say that Slim, beside that walk, look and smell thing liked to call her own shots. That is why, after she checked around, she headed for the Captain’s berth. And called her shots.
You already know about that afternoon and that night, or the public part of it. What you don’t know is that Captain, strictly for cash to keep the rum demons away and the banks from foreclosing on his life-line boat, had been running guns and other chores for the outs. And the ins had an idea that he was doing it. So that next morning Slim and the Captain found themselves front and center down at police headquarters. Not knowing Slim’s newfound relationship with our boy Bogie the dear police prefect starts to rough Slim up again in front of him. Ya, stupid, real stupid. Bogie tried to cut the blows but got blackjacked for his efforts. All this, however, was just a warning on the police perfect’s part and he let them go. But don’t kid yourself this cop is doomed, doomed big time. And soon too.
Bogie then contacted his outs friends with a proposition. He now would take some local bigwig agents that need to get to the United States fast for some dough and safe passage out for Slim. Deal. Everything was going fine until some stoolie, a stoolie who used to hang a couple of seats away from me at Café Joey’s, exposed the plans to our police perfect. So instead of a quick painless getaway the police perfect with his squad show up at the dock, some gunfire plays out, and Captain Bogie takes a bullet in the play. But the ins are now posting for a new police perfect. Hopefully a smarter one. And that was the last anyone saw of the Captain and Slim.
So here I am tonight, twelfth night in a row, still here, maybe the fourth seat in now moving up in seniority at Café Joey’s now that the stoolie is persona non grata, listening to Hoagy playing his signature song, Stardust, while he is sucking up another lip-edged cigarette and another rum cola, keeping the dames at bay, while I sit here thinking, temperature rising, thinking about Slim, and wishing to high heaven that I knew point one about boats instead of selling textiles to old gruff guys sweat-shop laboring the natives to make a few bucks off some cheapjack shirts and dresses. And wishing too I didn’t have that wife and three hungry kids back in the States. And wondering too about Captain Bogie and how a monkey of a guy with a fast fist, a little dead aim, and some fugitive getaway boat had all the luck. Don’t blame Hoagy for my troubles though. Okay.
The picture on the album cover, or the essence of the picture since some parts were, candidly, not viewable, was classic, maybe late 1930s, early 1940s, Hoagy Carmichael at piano, manically at piano, naturally. On his head, tilted back, back just short of falling off on some whiskey-stained, or maybe better, depending on the night, the place he was holding forth in, and whether and how bad he needed the dough, beer-stained floor was his trademark Stetson-like hat, or in any case a soft hat as they used to call them back when my grandfather worn one. And on his face, his craggy, not beautiful but useful face, a smoldering cigarette, unfiltered of course in those manly days, hanging off, a lip, and like the hat, always almost ready to fall until he breathed some life into it and seemingly like magic placed it upright between those browned tobacco lips. The piano, nondescript from the look of it, but descript in any gin mill in the world, descript that it is no Steinway or any shock harm-able such instrument but rather just good enough to play sudsy, heart-rendering, or jazzed-up show tunes for the hoi polloi as they sink deeper in that glazed haze good night and thoughts of the next day’s hard manual labor.
And Hoagy, sphinx-like, wry-like, sly-like, world-weary, world-wary, and just that nano-second before yellow-jaded. Trying to live down some Tin Pan Alley tune, a cover probably, that every fool kept insisting that he play for the umpteenth time and if he had a gun he would know how to use it and how much to use it. And looking, looking intently out at the crooked door, or what passed for a door, at Café Joey’s. You know Café Joey’s, right? Hoagy’s old winter time tropical paradise, tropical paradise for the swells and other assorted Carib fauna and flora, nightclub down in the lesser Antilles, Port-of-France to be precise. Everybody though he was just the piano player but no he owned the joint, owned it outright or close to it, maybe only a few wise-guy silent partners. In those days Café Joey’s always had a rogue’s gallery clientele of runaway brides-to-be looking for a last fling, decayed debutantes, rundown dentists with failed practices trying to “get well” at the roulette wheel, and half the snub-nosed guys from such winter spots as Cicero, Joliet, and the big town, you name the big town. Plus assorted local drifters, grifters, and midnight shifters just to keep things interesting. In short hold on very tightly to your wallets. From the look on Hoagy’s face the door at that moment looked to produce more of the same.
Then she came in.
All thoughts of Hoagy, his humdrum musical problems, his nefarious business arrangements, and even his existence kind of fled to some darkened forgotten corner recesses once she hit the door. Every man in the room, every red-blooded man if you get my drift, although the other kind found a cozy, no questions asked, just don’t flaunt it, refuge at the cafe and maybe they looked too just to see what they were missing, sharpened his eyes in her direction. So you can say, just like with old Josh Breslin, our boy Hoagy does not figure much from here on in but the story makes no sense without a bow for him. Or without me either.
See I was standing at the bar when she came in. As usual, just drowning my maddened sorrows, listening to Hoagy fighting off the demons in front of him, and within him, with his usual eight or twelve rum sours, or colas, or whatever he used to take some of the bite out of that high-proof island rum. I was sitting at my “reserved” seat, about the fifth guy down the line, give or take a couple of bar-girls in between the guys, when she walked in and drew a bee-line to Hoagy, or what I thought at first was a bee-line to Hoagy anyway. Slim, hell let’s just call her Slim and get it over with although her real name was Marie, or Anne-Marie, something like that. So already you can see, and don’t smirk, that I got nowhere with her, nada, no time, so I will join the line of guys who this story is not about, okay. But I am telling the story so I figure in the mix somewhere.
Ya, She came in. She came in like some tropical breeze, some Jamaica trade-wind breeze, light and airy on the outside, the only side she showed in public you could tell but some smolder underneath if you every got that far, and a few guys had, had got part way anyway, and she had just kind of landed here. Story unknown, parts unknown, islands past unknown, former companions unknown except there was just enough run-down about her, mainly around the eyes, to know that while she was not fugitive, she had had a handle on some pretty unsavory characters. But as she walked down the aisle she blew that past off, that hard past part, like so much lint off her sleeve. Came in like a breeze, like the world wasn’t just a wicked old place after all if it took time to create her or even the possibilities of her. A Jamaica trade-wind breeze just the same.
Like I say she was slim, slender, whatever you want to call a gal who fills out a dress or suit in a subtle way that makes a guy’s temperature rise even if she is not all buxom and twenty-seven curves like most guys like them. Not any Lana Turner, all sultry and no substance, no way, no way in hell, but nothing but pure femme fatale just the same. If you could learn to handle her just right you could, well, let’s just keep describing her and leave that part for later. She had that long brown, brunette I guess you call it, hair, hair that fell over one part of her forehead like the gals wore it just then, and maybe still do, although I don’t keep up with the girlish, or womanish, fashion trends. And those eyes, well, those eyes, and we can leave it at that for a minute too.
Just an ordinary good-looking girl, you say. A dime a dozen, you say. Well, maybe I am not the best guy to describe her, her physical looks, but that’s not what I am getting at. It was the walk, the way she walked not all strutting butterfly swirling stuff, but gracefully, angelically, and with a purposefulness that said loud and clean no inferior guy, no run-of-the mill-guy sitting seersucker suit sweaty in some hothouse rum joint better even look in her direction or maybe be in the same place, palace or joint, as her. And that golden stride was accompanied by this look, this look that I saw her give him, give him many times and made me call for another double-whiskey straight up, no chaser, or maybe just water, every time I saw her do it later. Give it to him only. That way she arched her right eyebrow, with that little glean look in her eye that meant you had it made brother and you had better do something about it, or else. Ya, that’s the look.
That look, and that walk, as it went by me, me with my half-flicked match ready to light that cigarette, that unknown, unfiltered cigarette, which she was now fusing through her pocketbook for as she headed to the depths of this wicked old joint. That look, that walk, and that unfiltered, unlit cigarette as she passed several feet away from me was, moreover, accompanied by some vagrant fragrance I still can’t figure out except it was like I was just swished or splashed by some Eden nectar. And that look, that walk, that smell was accompanied by the sound of silk, some silk slip under her dress that hid those slender thighs, and maddened, middle of the night dream maddened, half the guys in the joint.
But see that look, and the rest of the package, was dead-aimed at this old bent-over sea captain, some guy just off some uncle Neptune voyages who was swilling down whatever was put in front of him just then, looked like some sweet rum, straight up, to me. He still looked pretty sober though although I swear he could not have seen her coming because his head was half-cocked in the other direction when she walked up to him and asked him point blank for a match, and an off-hand drink. Whatever he was drinking, if I heard right. And cool, cool as a cucumber like they say, he flicked a match toward the cigarette, unfiltered in case you forgot, on the edge of her ruby red lips and said “Andy, bring the lady a drink, and be quick about it, ” like he said it everyday, and twice on Sunday. And I am sunk, me and my poor heart.
That grizzled old sea captain, Captain Bogie I found out later was his name, later after all the shooting and commotion was over and they, yes, he and Slim, were long gone to some island safe-haven further up the island chain with their precious human cargo safely tucked below deck, was some kind of hell-bent for leather sea captain of big ships a few years back except he let one get away from him in a storm, a huge perfect wave of a storm from what legend said, and he got blacklisted or whatever they call it when they don’t want you to steer ships, big ships anyway, anymore. And he had settled down to safe seas and rums running a low-rent scene fishing boat out of Port-of-Spain. Dusty, dirty, damp, soggy Port-of-Spain where I had just come from myself a few week before.
Here’s the funny part. I wasn’t so smart about things after all because that whole scene when she walked in and drew a bee-line to Captain Bogie had some history behind it. Ya, Hoagy (and Andy the waiter too) filled me in one night when I, and maybe we, although you could never be too sure about Hoagy because he dismissed dames, good-looking, willing dames too, once the rum ran through their veins, left and right for no good reason, were in our cups and in a mood to talk about the now legendary Captain Bogie, his exploits and his rare find Slim. Slim and Bogie had actually met, although that might be too strong a term, earlier in the day, that afternoon, down at the dock where the Captain has his fishing boat, the Laura or Lauren, something like that, I think it was called. She, as I could sense when she walked into Café Joey’s, was down on her luck. Down enough to start asking guys, stranger guys, but guys still with eyes, for some favors. Her request. She needed to get to Porto del Cortes, or somewhere not Port-of-France, quick.
And the way Hoagy told this part of the story to us Slim was in such a hurry she was willing to return favor for favor in the way any man, any red-blooded man, would appreciate, no questions asked. Our Captain though turned her down flat just for the sake of turning her down right then. Just to see what she was up to. And to see what she would do next. See the other thing I could sense watching old Captain as she had approached his table was maybe he had been water-logged once too many times and maybe had been in one too many sea wrecks but he had been around the block more than once with dames, although maybe not quite so often with one like this slightly soiled but rare dame.
Well, you already know what she did next. And you might as well already know now too that she had her hooks into him bad, if not in that afternoon encounter then by the time he flicked that match to her ruby red lips to light that cigarette that night in dankest Café Joey’s. Yes, he would go through many hoops, maybe take a bullet or two, and gladly, before she was through with him just to be around that walk, that look, and that edenic smell.
What? You want to know about the shooting and commotion part? Hell, I thought you wanted me to skip that. No? Well, I will make it short and sweet because it is a story like a million others in this wicked old wartime world what with things, cruel Nazi things, jumping all over Europe and every place else. But to tell the story, or really the way Hoagy with an assist by Andy to fill in the details told the story, is to step back before that afternoon encounter between Slim and the Captain. And bring some politics into it, hold your nose local politics between, hey, let’s just call them the “ins” and “outs” and be done with it. You’ll get the drift without going into all those sordid details.
See, as I said before Slim was, like many frails femme fatales or not, down on her luck a little when she hit Port-of-France. When she checked in a few days before into the Hotel Falcon with a little light luggage the manager, a supporter of the “ins,” got suspicious and called in his dear friend, the police perfect to check out Slim’s status. Her dough situation. Not only did the police perfect order her out of town when he found she was light on dough but he roughed her up just enough for her to get the message. Now already you should hate the ins, and not just because they are ins but because they are blind and stupid. A woman like Slim is not going to, in this wicked old world, have any problem making her room rent at anytime or in anyplace. Not as long as guys have eyes, or a pulse, or the semblance of a pulse. No, her looks are like finding money on the ground, unless of course Slim decides otherwise. Oh did I say that Slim, beside that walk, look and smell thing liked to call her own shots. That is why, after she checked around, she headed for the Captain’s berth. And called her shots.
You already know about that afternoon and that night, or the public part of it. What you don’t know is that Captain, strictly for cash to keep the rum demons away and the banks from foreclosing on his life-line boat, had been running guns and other chores for the outs. And the ins had an idea that he was doing it. So that next morning Slim and the Captain found themselves front and center down at police headquarters. Not knowing Slim’s newfound relationship with our boy Bogie the dear police prefect starts to rough Slim up again in front of him. Ya, stupid, real stupid. Bogie tried to cut the blows but got blackjacked for his efforts. All this, however, was just a warning on the police perfect’s part and he let them go. But don’t kid yourself this cop is doomed, doomed big time. And soon too.
Bogie then contacted his outs friends with a proposition. He now would take some local bigwig agents that need to get to the United States fast for some dough and safe passage out for Slim. Deal. Everything was going fine until some stoolie, a stoolie who used to hang a couple of seats away from me at Café Joey’s, exposed the plans to our police perfect. So instead of a quick painless getaway the police perfect with his squad show up at the dock, some gunfire plays out, and Captain Bogie takes a bullet in the play. But the ins are now posting for a new police perfect. Hopefully a smarter one. And that was the last anyone saw of the Captain and Slim.
So here I am tonight, twelfth night in a row, still here, maybe the fourth seat in now moving up in seniority at Café Joey’s now that the stoolie is persona non grata, listening to Hoagy playing his signature song, Stardust, while he is sucking up another lip-edged cigarette and another rum cola, keeping the dames at bay, while I sit here thinking, temperature rising, thinking about Slim, and wishing to high heaven that I knew point one about boats instead of selling textiles to old gruff guys sweat-shop laboring the natives to make a few bucks off some cheapjack shirts and dresses. And wishing too I didn’t have that wife and three hungry kids back in the States. And wondering too about Captain Bogie and how a monkey of a guy with a fast fist, a little dead aim, and some fugitive getaway boat had all the luck. Don’t blame Hoagy for my troubles though. Okay.
On The 51st Anniversary Of The Freedom Riders- All Honor To Those Who Took To The Buses "Heading South"
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the Freedom Riders, a group of civil rights workers who valiantly tried, by example, to integrate interstate transportation in the South. We are not so far removed from those events even today, North or South.
February Is Black History Month
Markin comment:
I was in high school at the time of the freedom rides and was part of a support group sponsored by the Americans For Democratic Action (ADA, then an anti-Soviet Cold War left-liberal organization but very pro-civil rights in the South) that was raising money in order to sent more civil rights workers "heading South." Heading toward the danger not away from it. Honor those black liberation fighters.
February Is Black History Month
Markin comment:
I was in high school at the time of the freedom rides and was part of a support group sponsored by the Americans For Democratic Action (ADA, then an anti-Soviet Cold War left-liberal organization but very pro-civil rights in the South) that was raising money in order to sent more civil rights workers "heading South." Heading toward the danger not away from it. Honor those black liberation fighters.
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