Recently in Boston, as part of a nation-wide effort a demonstration was called for Saturday February 4, 2012 with a central slogan of “Hands Off Iran,” an appropriate action considering the incessant drum-beat coming from important imperialist sources about the need for someone, somehow to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity (Guess who?). Of course the “ usual suspects” showed up for the demo- the assorted peace groups well-known to this writer, the socialists of various hues also known to this writer, and new, well, fairly new, the now familiar contingents from the Occupy movement.
What was unusual was the presence of a contingent of supporters of Ron Paul, the Republican Congressman and current presidential contender. Unusual in that when push comes to shove we of the left be on opposite sides of the barricades (and in that same position with other more “leftist” elements as well). But not that day. That day the central slogan of “Hands Off Iran” applied as a draw to hardened anti-imperialist leftists and quirky right-wing libertarians alike. So while no one needed to buy into the Ron Paul rationale (see leaflet from demonstration below) for being there and the Ron Paul supporter who spoke received some boos, some justly deserved boos, this was a principled united front. See, on some rare occasions you can unite with the devil and his (or her) grandmother. Let that be a leftist politics 101 lesson for young, and old.
***********
What Should Antiwar Progressives do in 2012?
By now most everyone at this Day of Action knows that Obama is not the lesser evil. He is in fact the "more effective evil" as Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report labels him since he has carried on and expanded the wars in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa while largely silencing opposition from progressives.
What is to be done then? Let us begin with the proposition that the highest duty of those of us living in the heart of the U.S. Empire is to stop the sanctions and endless wars that kill so many people - over a million in Iraq alone and that after hundreds of thousands more died there, 500,000 children among them, in the Clinton era sanctions. A second obligation is to preserve our civil liberties so that we can fight against war and for whatever we think is decent at home.
Only one candidate for the presidential race stands for these two principles and has done so consistently for decades. That candidate is Ron Paul.
But, you may say, Ron Paul is not a progressive and I am.
Elections must be approached tactically not theologically. First of all Ron Paul is not for eliminating Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security. So those who rely now on the social safety net are safe. But Paul does want to allow young people to opt out of these programs should he wish to do so. As long as we have our freedoms - of speech and assembly -he will not succeed in that. We will win that argument. And the Dems as an opposition might even start to fight for those programs rather than undermine them as they are doing now - with Obama's cuts in the payroll tax which finances these programs. People hang on to these programs once they have them.
So we have a moral obligation to support Ron Paul in order to stop the slaughter of innocents worldwide by the US Empire,
What should we do? Here in MA one should vote for Paul in the primary. There is no real contest in the Dem primary and no sense in voting for someone there. It is far better for Ron Paul to get the nomination than Newt or Mitt, the latter being a near perfect clone of Obama. And every vote for Ron Paul moves the Republican Party closer to principles of civil liberties and anti-interventionism.
You can vote in the Republican primary if you are registered as "unenrolled" or Republican. We should all do so as soon as possible. And it would be better to register as Republican since in that case one can have a voice in determining the delegates to the Republican convention. The delegates are pledged to the winner of the primary ON THE FIRST BALLOT at the nominating convention. After that they are free to vote as they see fit. If there is a deadlocked convention, Ron Paul can win if enough delegates are in his camp. Do you want to influence the process? Then REGISTER REPUBLICAN BY FEBRUARY 15. That is the first step. To find out more, contact John.Endwar@gmail.com
Finally this is not just a candidacy, but a movement with a plan to grow and a dedicated following of young voters. Help build this movement. Register "R" and support Ron Paul. Deadline is Feb. 15.
Join us in the Boston Chapter of ComeHomeAmerica. http://www.meetup.com/CHA-Boston/
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-SYC Speaker at NY Holiday Appeal-Only Workers Revolution Can End Capitalist Immiseration- A Critique Of The Occupy Movement
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
Workers Vanguard No. 995
3 February 2012
SYC Speaker at NY Holiday Appeal-Only Workers Revolution Can End Capitalist Immiseration
(Young Spartacus pages)
We print below a speech, edited for publication, by Rosie Gonzalez of the New York Spartacus Youth Club. The speech was given on January 6 at the Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners in New York.
Welcome! My name is Rosie and this is my third Holiday Appeal. I joined the Spartacus Youth Club a little over a year ago, after I broke from radical-liberal activism. I came to understand the class nature of the capitalist state, the social power of the labor movement, and based on this I learned that it is simply not enough to just have good intentions and to put your body on the street. One must have a party based on a Marxist program, developed through the study of victories and defeats of the past. Now I can stand here and say: We Trotskyists of the Spartacus Youth Clubs demand the immediate freedom of all class-war prisoners and all fighters against capitalist oppression! We say they should not have spent one second in jail.
We do not rely on the capitalist injustice system to free these brave men and women. The SYCs fight against any illusions in the bourgeois state on the campuses, in demonstrations, and in the streets. We fight to win youth to the side of the working class—this is where the social power lies in the struggle for the liberation of blacks, women and all of the oppressed. We of the SYC understand that only through workers revolution will the racist horrors of American capitalism be tossed into the dustbin of history—all the fighters against oppression, the women and men that are behind bars today, tomorrow will be free.
The Spartacus Youth Clubs are the youth groups of the Trotskyist Spartacist League, the U.S. section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). We intervene into social struggles armed with a revolutionary-internationalist program. At Zuccotti Park we intervened into different demonstrations surrounding the “Occupy” movement. We did sales, gave a presentation about Marxism to a left-wing group called “Class War Camp” and we protested the police repression of the Occupiers.
We also took students and other youth with us to the Verizon strike pickets to show them some class struggle and why the defense of unions is so central. The working class has been on the defensive for years now, particularly since the capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. At the same time, every strike is an opening for the Spartacist League to show the need to fight for class-struggle leadership.
The politics of the protesters whom we met at Occupy Wall Street ranged anywhere from open patriotism to anarchoid idealism. We found that the best way to show them the power of the revolutionary working class was to study the Russian Revolution. We encountered real interest at our class series on the Russian Revolution at City College (CCNY). We presented the lessons of this world-historic working-class victory as a counterposition to the stupefying, populist, anti-Marxist slogan of “We are the 99 percent,” which does not recognize the sharp class divisions in society and instead disguises the class nature of the capitalist state and all of its political parties. It lumps the working class together with the petty bourgeoisie and even parts of the capitalist class as well. The truth is that the problem is not the “greed” of the bankers (although there is plenty of that); the problem is the whole capitalist system itself. What is really necessary is the mobilization of the working class against the property-owning capitalist class. The working class has the social power and the historic interest to overthrow the whole capitalist profit system and lay the basis for a socialist society free from exploitation and oppression.
The Russian Revolution showed us how the Bolsheviks led the workers, organized in soviets, to power and threw off the chains of oppressive imperial Russia. The working class took state power and got rid of the capitalist profit system altogether. This is our model—for new October Revolutions worldwide!
This sets us apart from so-called socialists like Workers World Party and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) who are lapping up the liberal politics of the Occupy movement. Workers World called the Occupy protests a “fledgling revolution” and the ISO recently stated that they had “fundamentally shifted the political landscape in the U.S.” Tell that to workers like the militant ILWU pickets in Longview, Washington, who were attacked by the cops last year. That’s the political landscape! So the question is why would these self-proclaimed socialist organizations be uncritically hailing a movement that has no intention of dismantling capitalism? Because they have no interest in dismantling capitalism. In essence, these groups lend ardent support to bourgeois democracy. Just take, for example, the enthusiastic support the ISO gave to the Libyan “rebels” last year. These “rebel” forces were supported by U.S. imperialism and its Commander-in-Chief, Obama, who bombed Tripoli in the name of “democracy.” At home, the reformist left’s support to the Occupy movement is just another expression of its “fight the right” agenda, which amounts to nothing more than building illusions in and support for the Democrats.
The Occupy protesters constantly talk about “reclaiming our democracy.” This country was founded on the enslavement of blacks and the genocide of Native Americans. Its history is riddled with the bodies of working-class fighters killed at the hands of the police or the courts. The purpose of this government has always been to defend the property and profits of the ruling class.
We, as communist revolutionaries, always ask the question—democracy for which class? The facade of democracy serves to obscure the fact that the capitalist state is an instrument of organized violence—at its core the police, military, courts and prisons—for maintaining capitalist rule. From CCNY to Zuccotti Park, we are constantly arguing against illusions in the cops. Cops are not workers—they are strikebreakers who act in the interest of the fundamentally racist ruling class, the bourgeoisie. And that’s why we read and teach Lenin’s The State and Revolution.
In November, at a demonstration at City College, students protested a planned tuition hike and we led the chants, “Cops off campus! Free quality education! Abolish the administration!” We raised the call for worker/teacher/student control of the schools. The student protesters, many of whom were black and Latino, had picked up some of our slogans. These chants were counterposed to the politics of the liberal leadership of the demonstration, Students United for a Free CUNY, who accept the framework of capitalism by begging for a few crumbs.
Our starting point is to have a clear class opposition to capitalist politicians like Obama and the Democratic Party. The Democrats were once the party in defense of slavery and later the party of Jim Crow. They aim, as does the bourgeoisie as a whole, to “divide and conquer” so their profits will rise. Racism is all part and parcel of the maintenance of the capitalist order. The “war on terror,” the “war on drugs,” the war against abortion rights—these are wars on blacks, women and the working class as a whole! Just look at Obama’s outrageous ban on over-the-counter access to morning-after pills for teenagers. These are young women under 17 years old who will not have easy access to a simple pill, making it harder for them to avoid having children. This is criminal! It serves to tighten the grip of social control and enforce the sexual repression of young women. Again and again you can see that the Democrats are really just the other party of capitalism and war. This is why we have always and consistently raised the slogan “Break with the Democrats!” and why we call to build a multiracial workers party that fights for a workers government.
The only way out of this hell is through workers revolution. The victory of the socialist revolution in this country will be achieved only through the struggle of the multiracial working class, under the leadership of the revolutionary vanguard party. In the course of the struggle, unbreakable bonds will be forged between these different sections of the working class. Then, we will ensure at last the end of wage slavery, racism, and exploitation. Join this fight! Join the Spartacus Youth Club!
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
Workers Vanguard No. 995
3 February 2012
SYC Speaker at NY Holiday Appeal-Only Workers Revolution Can End Capitalist Immiseration
(Young Spartacus pages)
We print below a speech, edited for publication, by Rosie Gonzalez of the New York Spartacus Youth Club. The speech was given on January 6 at the Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners in New York.
Welcome! My name is Rosie and this is my third Holiday Appeal. I joined the Spartacus Youth Club a little over a year ago, after I broke from radical-liberal activism. I came to understand the class nature of the capitalist state, the social power of the labor movement, and based on this I learned that it is simply not enough to just have good intentions and to put your body on the street. One must have a party based on a Marxist program, developed through the study of victories and defeats of the past. Now I can stand here and say: We Trotskyists of the Spartacus Youth Clubs demand the immediate freedom of all class-war prisoners and all fighters against capitalist oppression! We say they should not have spent one second in jail.
We do not rely on the capitalist injustice system to free these brave men and women. The SYCs fight against any illusions in the bourgeois state on the campuses, in demonstrations, and in the streets. We fight to win youth to the side of the working class—this is where the social power lies in the struggle for the liberation of blacks, women and all of the oppressed. We of the SYC understand that only through workers revolution will the racist horrors of American capitalism be tossed into the dustbin of history—all the fighters against oppression, the women and men that are behind bars today, tomorrow will be free.
The Spartacus Youth Clubs are the youth groups of the Trotskyist Spartacist League, the U.S. section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). We intervene into social struggles armed with a revolutionary-internationalist program. At Zuccotti Park we intervened into different demonstrations surrounding the “Occupy” movement. We did sales, gave a presentation about Marxism to a left-wing group called “Class War Camp” and we protested the police repression of the Occupiers.
We also took students and other youth with us to the Verizon strike pickets to show them some class struggle and why the defense of unions is so central. The working class has been on the defensive for years now, particularly since the capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. At the same time, every strike is an opening for the Spartacist League to show the need to fight for class-struggle leadership.
The politics of the protesters whom we met at Occupy Wall Street ranged anywhere from open patriotism to anarchoid idealism. We found that the best way to show them the power of the revolutionary working class was to study the Russian Revolution. We encountered real interest at our class series on the Russian Revolution at City College (CCNY). We presented the lessons of this world-historic working-class victory as a counterposition to the stupefying, populist, anti-Marxist slogan of “We are the 99 percent,” which does not recognize the sharp class divisions in society and instead disguises the class nature of the capitalist state and all of its political parties. It lumps the working class together with the petty bourgeoisie and even parts of the capitalist class as well. The truth is that the problem is not the “greed” of the bankers (although there is plenty of that); the problem is the whole capitalist system itself. What is really necessary is the mobilization of the working class against the property-owning capitalist class. The working class has the social power and the historic interest to overthrow the whole capitalist profit system and lay the basis for a socialist society free from exploitation and oppression.
The Russian Revolution showed us how the Bolsheviks led the workers, organized in soviets, to power and threw off the chains of oppressive imperial Russia. The working class took state power and got rid of the capitalist profit system altogether. This is our model—for new October Revolutions worldwide!
This sets us apart from so-called socialists like Workers World Party and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) who are lapping up the liberal politics of the Occupy movement. Workers World called the Occupy protests a “fledgling revolution” and the ISO recently stated that they had “fundamentally shifted the political landscape in the U.S.” Tell that to workers like the militant ILWU pickets in Longview, Washington, who were attacked by the cops last year. That’s the political landscape! So the question is why would these self-proclaimed socialist organizations be uncritically hailing a movement that has no intention of dismantling capitalism? Because they have no interest in dismantling capitalism. In essence, these groups lend ardent support to bourgeois democracy. Just take, for example, the enthusiastic support the ISO gave to the Libyan “rebels” last year. These “rebel” forces were supported by U.S. imperialism and its Commander-in-Chief, Obama, who bombed Tripoli in the name of “democracy.” At home, the reformist left’s support to the Occupy movement is just another expression of its “fight the right” agenda, which amounts to nothing more than building illusions in and support for the Democrats.
The Occupy protesters constantly talk about “reclaiming our democracy.” This country was founded on the enslavement of blacks and the genocide of Native Americans. Its history is riddled with the bodies of working-class fighters killed at the hands of the police or the courts. The purpose of this government has always been to defend the property and profits of the ruling class.
We, as communist revolutionaries, always ask the question—democracy for which class? The facade of democracy serves to obscure the fact that the capitalist state is an instrument of organized violence—at its core the police, military, courts and prisons—for maintaining capitalist rule. From CCNY to Zuccotti Park, we are constantly arguing against illusions in the cops. Cops are not workers—they are strikebreakers who act in the interest of the fundamentally racist ruling class, the bourgeoisie. And that’s why we read and teach Lenin’s The State and Revolution.
In November, at a demonstration at City College, students protested a planned tuition hike and we led the chants, “Cops off campus! Free quality education! Abolish the administration!” We raised the call for worker/teacher/student control of the schools. The student protesters, many of whom were black and Latino, had picked up some of our slogans. These chants were counterposed to the politics of the liberal leadership of the demonstration, Students United for a Free CUNY, who accept the framework of capitalism by begging for a few crumbs.
Our starting point is to have a clear class opposition to capitalist politicians like Obama and the Democratic Party. The Democrats were once the party in defense of slavery and later the party of Jim Crow. They aim, as does the bourgeoisie as a whole, to “divide and conquer” so their profits will rise. Racism is all part and parcel of the maintenance of the capitalist order. The “war on terror,” the “war on drugs,” the war against abortion rights—these are wars on blacks, women and the working class as a whole! Just look at Obama’s outrageous ban on over-the-counter access to morning-after pills for teenagers. These are young women under 17 years old who will not have easy access to a simple pill, making it harder for them to avoid having children. This is criminal! It serves to tighten the grip of social control and enforce the sexual repression of young women. Again and again you can see that the Democrats are really just the other party of capitalism and war. This is why we have always and consistently raised the slogan “Break with the Democrats!” and why we call to build a multiracial workers party that fights for a workers government.
The only way out of this hell is through workers revolution. The victory of the socialist revolution in this country will be achieved only through the struggle of the multiracial working class, under the leadership of the revolutionary vanguard party. In the course of the struggle, unbreakable bonds will be forged between these different sections of the working class. Then, we will ensure at last the end of wage slavery, racism, and exploitation. Join this fight! Join the Spartacus Youth Club!
On The 41st Anniversary Of The Death Of Black Panther George Jackson-From San Quentin To Attica To Pelican Bay- Never Forget!
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the black liberation fighter and Black Panther Party leader, George Jackson.
Bob Dylan- George Jackson Lyrics
I woke up this morning
There were tears in my bed
They killed a man I really loved
Shot him through the head
Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground
Sent him off to prison
For a seventy dollar robbery
Closed the door behind him
And they threw away the key
Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground
He wouldn't take shit from no one
He wouldn't bow down or kneel
Authorities, they hated him
Because he was just too real
Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground
Prison guards, they cursed him
As they watched him from above
But they were frightened of his power
They were scared of his love
Lord, Lord, so they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground
Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards
Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground
Bob Dylan- George Jackson Lyrics
I woke up this morning
There were tears in my bed
They killed a man I really loved
Shot him through the head
Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground
Sent him off to prison
For a seventy dollar robbery
Closed the door behind him
And they threw away the key
Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground
He wouldn't take shit from no one
He wouldn't bow down or kneel
Authorities, they hated him
Because he was just too real
Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground
Prison guards, they cursed him
As they watched him from above
But they were frightened of his power
They were scared of his love
Lord, Lord, so they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground
Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards
Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground
*Black Studies Pioneer Professor John Hope Franklin Passes On- A Belated Tribute
Click on the headline to link to a "The New York Times" obituary, dated March 25, 2009, for the pioneer black studies scholar, Professor John Hope Franklin.
February Is Black History Month
Markin comment:
Somehow I missed the passing of this great black studies academic pioneer last year, a vital source for my knowledge of black history in my youth when this kind of information was not readily available, or had not been "discovered". My missing his passing is strange as well since last February (2009) I reviewed his "Black Reconstruction" as part of Black History Month. I make belated amends here. Hats off to Professor Franklin.
February Is Black History Month
Markin comment:
Somehow I missed the passing of this great black studies academic pioneer last year, a vital source for my knowledge of black history in my youth when this kind of information was not readily available, or had not been "discovered". My missing his passing is strange as well since last February (2009) I reviewed his "Black Reconstruction" as part of Black History Month. I make belated amends here. Hats off to Professor Franklin.
Just When You Thought It Was Safe To… Be-Bop-No Doo-Wop
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Capris performing There's A Moon Out Tonight.
Confused by the headline? Don’t be. All it does is refer to a previous seemingly endless series of Oldies But GoodiesCD reviews in this space a while back. (Cold war, red scare, jail break-out 1950s-1960s , there at the creation, there when Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Wanda and their brethren were young and hungry and we were too, oldies but goodies, just so you know.) That gargantuan task required sifting through ten, no, fifteen volumes of material that by the end left me limping, and crying uncle. Christ who am I kidding I was ready for the sweet safe confines of some convalescent home just to ‘dry out” a little and prepare myself for yet another twelve-step “recovery” program and I haven’t even gotten to 1960 before I went off the deep end. See, as I explained in the last few reviews of the series, just when I thought I was done at Volume Ten I found that it was a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. In any case I whipped off those last five reviews in one shot and was done with it. Praise be and all of that.
The reason for such haste at that point seemed self-explanatory. After all how much could we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories, teen memories, teen high school memories mainly, from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs, others have died, mercifully died, and gone to YouTube heaven to be clicked “like” by about three people, including the up-loader, maybe) in the reviewed compilations. How many times could one read about guys with two social left feet (and I won’t even mention geeky clothes and shoes brought on by an onslaught of, well, family poverty in my case), the social conventions of dancing close (and not being hip to mouthwash and deodorant wisdom, although very hip to that fragrance a certain she was wearing, that maddening come hither fragrance), wallflowers (and their invisibleness) , the avoidance of wallflower-dom (at all costs, including cutting loose on long time friendships with geeky future lawyers, professors and doctors, jesus) , meaningful sighs (ho-hum), meaningless sighs (ah, gee), the longings, eternal longings from tween to twenty, for certain obviously unattainable shes (or hes for those of the opposite sex then, or maybe even same sex but that was a book sealed with seven seals, maybe more ), the trials and tribulations associated with high school gymnasium crepe paper-adorned dances, moonlight-driven dream thoughts of after dance doings, and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. And there and then I threw in the towel, I thought. Bastante.
Well now I have “recovered” enough to take a little different look at the music of this period-the doo wop sound that hovered in the background radio of every kid, every kid who had a radio, a transistor radio, to keep parental prying ears at arms length, and who was moonstruck enough to have been searching, high and low, for a sound that was not just the same old, same old that his or her parents listened to. Early rock and rock, especially that early Sun Record stuff, and plenty of rhythm and blues met that need but so did, for a time, old doo wop-the silky sounds of lead singer-driven, lyrics-driven, vocal-meshing harmony that was the stuff of teenage “petting” parties and staid old hokey school dances, mainly, in my case, elementary school dances.
As I mentioned in the oldies but goodies reviews not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to, or meant to be, playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability, slow danceabilty, to make any Jack or Jill start snapping fingers then, or now. As I asked in that previous series and is appropriate to ask here as well what about the now seeming mandatory question of the best song of the times-doo-wop variation. The one that stands out as the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar).
Here The Capris’ There’s A Moon Out Tonight fills the bill. And, yes, I know, this is one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or like before he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
Confused by the headline? Don’t be. All it does is refer to a previous seemingly endless series of Oldies But GoodiesCD reviews in this space a while back. (Cold war, red scare, jail break-out 1950s-1960s , there at the creation, there when Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Wanda and their brethren were young and hungry and we were too, oldies but goodies, just so you know.) That gargantuan task required sifting through ten, no, fifteen volumes of material that by the end left me limping, and crying uncle. Christ who am I kidding I was ready for the sweet safe confines of some convalescent home just to ‘dry out” a little and prepare myself for yet another twelve-step “recovery” program and I haven’t even gotten to 1960 before I went off the deep end. See, as I explained in the last few reviews of the series, just when I thought I was done at Volume Ten I found that it was a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. In any case I whipped off those last five reviews in one shot and was done with it. Praise be and all of that.
The reason for such haste at that point seemed self-explanatory. After all how much could we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories, teen memories, teen high school memories mainly, from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs, others have died, mercifully died, and gone to YouTube heaven to be clicked “like” by about three people, including the up-loader, maybe) in the reviewed compilations. How many times could one read about guys with two social left feet (and I won’t even mention geeky clothes and shoes brought on by an onslaught of, well, family poverty in my case), the social conventions of dancing close (and not being hip to mouthwash and deodorant wisdom, although very hip to that fragrance a certain she was wearing, that maddening come hither fragrance), wallflowers (and their invisibleness) , the avoidance of wallflower-dom (at all costs, including cutting loose on long time friendships with geeky future lawyers, professors and doctors, jesus) , meaningful sighs (ho-hum), meaningless sighs (ah, gee), the longings, eternal longings from tween to twenty, for certain obviously unattainable shes (or hes for those of the opposite sex then, or maybe even same sex but that was a book sealed with seven seals, maybe more ), the trials and tribulations associated with high school gymnasium crepe paper-adorned dances, moonlight-driven dream thoughts of after dance doings, and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. And there and then I threw in the towel, I thought. Bastante.
Well now I have “recovered” enough to take a little different look at the music of this period-the doo wop sound that hovered in the background radio of every kid, every kid who had a radio, a transistor radio, to keep parental prying ears at arms length, and who was moonstruck enough to have been searching, high and low, for a sound that was not just the same old, same old that his or her parents listened to. Early rock and rock, especially that early Sun Record stuff, and plenty of rhythm and blues met that need but so did, for a time, old doo wop-the silky sounds of lead singer-driven, lyrics-driven, vocal-meshing harmony that was the stuff of teenage “petting” parties and staid old hokey school dances, mainly, in my case, elementary school dances.
As I mentioned in the oldies but goodies reviews not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to, or meant to be, playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability, slow danceabilty, to make any Jack or Jill start snapping fingers then, or now. As I asked in that previous series and is appropriate to ask here as well what about the now seeming mandatory question of the best song of the times-doo-wop variation. The one that stands out as the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar).
Here The Capris’ There’s A Moon Out Tonight fills the bill. And, yes, I know, this is one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or like before he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Victory To The Greek Workers- Build Workers Councils Now-Fight For A Workers Government!
Click on the headline to link to an Socialist Alternative (CWI)website analysis of the pre-revolutionary situation in Greece.
Markin comment:
The situation in Greece today cries out to high heaven for a revolution and a revolutionary party to intervene and lead the damn thing. Enough of one day general strikes. General strikes only pose the question of power, of dual power. Who shall rule. We say labor must rule. Strike the final blow. Back to the communist road. The Greek workers are just this minute the vanguard, yes, terrible word to some, vanguard of the international working class struggle. Forward to victory.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010-Repost from American Left History blog
*Be Still My Heart- On Calling For The Greek Communist Parties And Trade Unions To Take Power
Markin comment:
On May 10, 2010 I posted an entry on the situation in Greece in response to a post from the International Marxist Tendency’s Greek section’s analysis of the tasks that confront revolutionaries today. I agreed with the comment in the post that general strikes were of limited value if they did not, at some point, pose the question of who shall rule- working people or the capitalists. I went further and proposed two propaganda points that revolutionaries in Greece, and their supporters internationally, should be fighting for. Right now.
The first point revolved around the fight to create workers councils, committees of action or factory committees in order to fight for a revolutionary perspective. That program, the specifics which are better to left to those on the ground, needs to include refusal to pay the capitalists debts, under whatever guise, defense of the hard fought social welfare gains of the past, the struggle against the current government’s austerity program, the fight against any taint of popular frontism (opposition to alliances, at this critical juncture, with non-working class forces where the working class is the donkey and the small capitalist parties are the riders), and prepare to pose the question of who shall rule. Thus there is plenty of work that needs to be started now while the working masses are mobilized and in a furor over the current situation.
The second point, which flows out of the first, is the call for the Communist parties and trade unions to take power in their own right and in the interest of the working class. Now, clearly, and this is where some confusion has entered the picture, this is TODAY a propaganda call but is a concrete way to pose the question of who shall rule. Of course, we revolutionaries should have no illusions in the Stalinists and ex-Stalinists who run those parties and who, in previous times, have lived very comfortably with their various popular front, anti-monopolist strategies that preserve capitalism. However, today those organizations call for anti-governmental action and are listened to by the masses in the streets.
The point is to call their political bluff, carefully, but insistently. In that sense we are talking over the heads of the leaders to their social bases. Now that tactic is always proper for revolutionaries to gain authority but today we have to have a more concrete way to do so. In short, call on the Greek labor militants to call on their parties and unions to take power. And if not, then follow us. This is not some exotic formula from nowhere but reflects the sometimes painful experience, at least since the European revolutions of 1848.
Note: I headed today’s headline with the expression “be still my heart” for a reason. It has been a very long time since we have been able to, even propagandistically, call for workers parties on the European continent to take power. Especially, after the demise of the Soviet Union, for Stalinist (reformed or otherwise) parties to do so. Frankly, I did not think, as a practical matter, that I would be making such a call in Europe again in my lifetime. All proportions guarded, this may be the first wave of a new revolutionary upsurge on that continent. But, hell, its nice just to be able to, rationally, make that political call. In any case, the old utopian dream of a serious capitalist United States of Europe is getting ready to go into the dustbin of history. Let’s replace it with a Socialist Federation of Europe- and Greece today is the “epicenter”. SYRIZA-KKE to power!
Markin comment:
The situation in Greece today cries out to high heaven for a revolution and a revolutionary party to intervene and lead the damn thing. Enough of one day general strikes. General strikes only pose the question of power, of dual power. Who shall rule. We say labor must rule. Strike the final blow. Back to the communist road. The Greek workers are just this minute the vanguard, yes, terrible word to some, vanguard of the international working class struggle. Forward to victory.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010-Repost from American Left History blog
*Be Still My Heart- On Calling For The Greek Communist Parties And Trade Unions To Take Power
Markin comment:
On May 10, 2010 I posted an entry on the situation in Greece in response to a post from the International Marxist Tendency’s Greek section’s analysis of the tasks that confront revolutionaries today. I agreed with the comment in the post that general strikes were of limited value if they did not, at some point, pose the question of who shall rule- working people or the capitalists. I went further and proposed two propaganda points that revolutionaries in Greece, and their supporters internationally, should be fighting for. Right now.
The first point revolved around the fight to create workers councils, committees of action or factory committees in order to fight for a revolutionary perspective. That program, the specifics which are better to left to those on the ground, needs to include refusal to pay the capitalists debts, under whatever guise, defense of the hard fought social welfare gains of the past, the struggle against the current government’s austerity program, the fight against any taint of popular frontism (opposition to alliances, at this critical juncture, with non-working class forces where the working class is the donkey and the small capitalist parties are the riders), and prepare to pose the question of who shall rule. Thus there is plenty of work that needs to be started now while the working masses are mobilized and in a furor over the current situation.
The second point, which flows out of the first, is the call for the Communist parties and trade unions to take power in their own right and in the interest of the working class. Now, clearly, and this is where some confusion has entered the picture, this is TODAY a propaganda call but is a concrete way to pose the question of who shall rule. Of course, we revolutionaries should have no illusions in the Stalinists and ex-Stalinists who run those parties and who, in previous times, have lived very comfortably with their various popular front, anti-monopolist strategies that preserve capitalism. However, today those organizations call for anti-governmental action and are listened to by the masses in the streets.
The point is to call their political bluff, carefully, but insistently. In that sense we are talking over the heads of the leaders to their social bases. Now that tactic is always proper for revolutionaries to gain authority but today we have to have a more concrete way to do so. In short, call on the Greek labor militants to call on their parties and unions to take power. And if not, then follow us. This is not some exotic formula from nowhere but reflects the sometimes painful experience, at least since the European revolutions of 1848.
Note: I headed today’s headline with the expression “be still my heart” for a reason. It has been a very long time since we have been able to, even propagandistically, call for workers parties on the European continent to take power. Especially, after the demise of the Soviet Union, for Stalinist (reformed or otherwise) parties to do so. Frankly, I did not think, as a practical matter, that I would be making such a call in Europe again in my lifetime. All proportions guarded, this may be the first wave of a new revolutionary upsurge on that continent. But, hell, its nice just to be able to, rationally, make that political call. In any case, the old utopian dream of a serious capitalist United States of Europe is getting ready to go into the dustbin of history. Let’s replace it with a Socialist Federation of Europe- and Greece today is the “epicenter”. SYRIZA-KKE to power!
Victory To The Greek Workers- Build Workers Councils Now-Fight For A Workers Government!
Click on the headline to link to an International Marxist Tendency website analysis of the pre-revolutionary situation in Greece.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
*Avenge The Communist Defeat In The Greek Civil War Of 1946-49- The Lessons Of History
Markin comment:
Politics is sometimes a strange business. We all recognize that history does not exactly repeat itself. And it is also true that humankind makes its own history- although not always to its liking. Some things though, like the communist defeat in the Greek Civil War, despite our disagreements with its Stalinist leadership, were definitely not to our liking, but may be capable of reversal. Or at least of a modicum of historical justice. That is the backdrop of today's fight by the working class in the streets of Greece. May they win, and win big.
Avenge the lost in the 1946-49 civil war!
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
*Avenge The Communist Defeat In The Greek Civil War Of 1946-49- The Lessons Of History
Markin comment:
Politics is sometimes a strange business. We all recognize that history does not exactly repeat itself. And it is also true that humankind makes its own history- although not always to its liking. Some things though, like the communist defeat in the Greek Civil War, despite our disagreements with its Stalinist leadership, were definitely not to our liking, but may be capable of reversal. Or at least of a modicum of historical justice. That is the backdrop of today's fight by the working class in the streets of Greece. May they win, and win big.
Avenge the lost in the 1946-49 civil war!
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Black Oppression & Proletarian Revolution-Part 6: The American Communist Party And Black Struggles In The American Great Depression Of The 1930s ("Young Spartacus," September 1974)
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American for Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*********
From Young Spartacus, September, 1974
Black Oppression & Proletarian Revolution-Part 6: The American Communist Party And Black Struggles In The American Great Depression Of The 1930s
[Markin: Title somewhat expanded for today's young audience who may not have been able to decipher the abbreviated original title]
Communist Party black work in the 1930's took place in the context of the so-called "Third Period." The Sixth World Congress of the by-then Stalin-ized Communist International (CI), held in 1928, heralded an impending "Third Period" of inevitable and final capitalist collapse in which the struggle for reforms was no longer possible. Thus, all reformist organizations, especially the "yellow" trade unions and social-democratic parties (which contained the majority of the organized labor movement), were now considered to be "social-fascist" organizations. Much of the CPUSA's work in this period was thus marked by sectarianism and ultraleftism.
While the CP of this period was deformed by dishonesty, political zigzags and egregious departures from Marxism, nonetheless in the area of black work the 1930's represents the CP's heroic period. Despite the erroneous "Black Belt" theory and the call for "Negro self-determination" in this territory (a call which was never raised agitationally but remained part of the CP's written propaganda), the CP's work in practice combined a proletarian orientation with an awareness of the strategic need to fight racial oppression throughout all layers of American society, especially to address the problems of poor and unemployed blacks.
Thus, the CP's black work took place in the labor movement, among the unemployed, in the South and in the area of legal defense. This work stands in stark contrast to the CP's subsequent plunge into abject opportunism (and even adaptation to Jim Crowism in WWII) and is rich in lessons on how to conduct and how not to conduct a genuine Leninist struggle against racial oppression.
The Depression, Blacks and the Communist Party
The catastrophic impact of the Great Depression on the U.S. working class was keenly felt by its most oppressed members, black workers. By March 1933 the Bureau of Labor Standards reported that 25 percent of the workforce, or 17 million workers, were unemployed. For those who could find work, wages on the average had fallen 45 percent. While separate statistics on the black population were not kept at this time, the National Urban League estimated that black unemployment exceeded white joblessness by 30 to 60 percent (a figure which has grown larger: since the Depression). Most black employment was in marginal "service" jobs: 25 percent of the black non-farm, wage-earning population were domestics. T. Arnold Hill of the Urban League pointed out:
"Heretofore [the black's] employment problem has been chiefly one of advancement to positions commensurate with his ability. Today he is endeavoring to hold the line against advancing armies of white workers intent upon gaining and content to accept occupations which were once thought too menial for white hands."
—quoted in Raymond Walters, Negroes and the Great Depression
The Depression was a period of massive social struggle on the part of workers and the unemployed in which blacks played a leading role. Much of this social struggle took place outside of the American Federation of Labor-dominated established labor movement. Only 10 percent of the non-farm workforce was organized and, of the 1.5 million non-farm black workers, only a little more than 3 percent or 50,000 workers were organized and one-half of the unionized black workers belonged to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
Much of this social struggle, especially on the part of blacks, was dominated by the Communist Party. At the very beginning of the Depression the CP launched National Unemployed Councils and by 6 March 1930 was able to organize demonstrations in major American cities with 1,250,000 participants.
CP defense work, conducted through its defense arm, the International Labor Defense (ILD), was in the forefront of the struggle against Southern lynch "justice," a struggle which found its most dramatic expression in the Scottsboro defense case. The CP was the first organization since the populist Southern Alliance and the Colored National Farmers Alliance of the 1890's to go into the South to fight lynch law and vigilante terror, and to organize southern sharecroppers and tenant farmers. The CP's launching of the weekly Southern Worker in Chattanooga reflected the commitment to work in the South. During 1930 the CP recruited its first substantial number of black members—1,000 blacks joined the party. The moribund CP black organization, the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC) was transformed into the League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR) at a convention held in November 1930 and the irregular publication of the ANLC, the Negro Champion, was transformed into a regular weekly,
The Liberator, edited by Cyril Briggs. The CP's struggle against Jim Crowism in the unions, though often conducted through the erroneous and sectarian "red unions" of the "Third Period," laid the foundation for the later success of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in organizing basic industry on a bi-racial basis.
The "Third Period" and CP Black Work
The Sixth World Congress of the CI, where the "Third Period" policies were laid out, also passed a "Resolution on the Negro Question in the U.S." which established the "Negro Self-Determination in the Black Belt" position. This was to haunt the CP until it was finally dropped in 1959 (see "Negro Self-Determination in the Black Belt," Young Spartacus, May-June 1974). But it was also this Congress and its special commission on the black question which spurred the CP into an aggressive orientation toward black work.
Prior to 1930 the CP had never had more than 50 black members. The "Resolution on the Negro Question" stated that the moribund ANLC "continues to exist only nominally" and called for the CP to "strengthen this organization as a medium through which we can extend the work of the party among the Negro masses and mobilize the Negro workers under our leadership."
The next national convention of the ANLC was not held until November 1930, where the ANLC was transformed into the LSNA. This convention capped a recruitment drive which had brought in 1,000 black members. Harry Haywood, the most faithful and consistent advocate of the "Black Belt" position, was made chairman of the LSNR.
In his report on the LSNR founding convention, Cyril Briggs, editor of the Liberator, defined the LSNR as follows:
"To begin with, it is a mistake to lay stress on the LSNR as a mass organization. The LSNR consists of groups of active supporters and followers of the Liberator. The aim is not to build a mass organization, but to build the Liberator into a mass organizer or the agitator and organizer of the Negro liberation movement. "The LSNR supports the Communist Party as the only political party carrying on a struggle against Negro oppression, but the LSNR is not a political party. Nor is it a substitute for any political party. The LSNR supports the revolutionary trade unions of the Trade Union Unity League in opposition to the treacherous, reformist and Jim Crow policies of the American Federation of Labor with its fascist leadership. But the LSNR is not a substitute for the TUUL or any of its unions." —Liberator, 11 November 1930
Part of the problem was that the CI under Stalin transformed the Leninist transitional organization from a vehicle for mass work into a substitute for mass work. Lenin saw the. need for special methods of work among the specially oppressed, e.g., blacks and women, and argued that the CPs should set up transitional organizations—led by party cadre and functioning as arms of the party— which would address the special needs of minorities and women and attempt to bring them into the communist movement. Depending upon the period, such organizations might or might not obtain a mass character. The CP under Stalin opted for the creation of front groups that only created the illusion (and probably only for CP members) of mass work but in fact represented an abandonment of genuine mass work. The problem of front-groupism was complicated by the tendency toward sectoralism or poly-vanguardism (a la the present-day Socialist Workers Party), as expressed in the 1928 "Resolution on the Negro Question":
"It is the duty of Negro workers to organize through the mobilization of the broad masses of the Negro population the struggle of the agricultural laborers and tenant farmers against all forms of semi-feudal oppression. On the other hand, it is the duty of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. to mobilize and rally the broad masses of the white workers for active participation in this struggle." This poly-vanguardism flowed from the attempt to fit the dynamic of the American revolution into Stalin's "two-stage revolution."
The first, “national-democratic" stage would be carried out by blacks in the "Black Belt" against "semi-feudal oppression." Hence, the principal axis of the black question was seen as agrarian, concentrated in the "Black Belt," and the principal enemy of blacks was not capitalism but "semi-feudal oppression"!!
It is easy to see from this schema how the ultraleft rhetoric of the "Third Period" in which Roosevelt, the NAACP and the AFL leadership were all considered "fascists," was easily converted in the post-1935 "People's Front" period where political blocs with the NAACP, Roosevelt and the AFL bureaucracy became "progressive."
To its credit the CP transcended in practice its poly-vanguardist theories and insisted on the bi-racial character of the LSNR. However, the CP could not decide whether to restrict the LSNR to a newspaper support club or to create a real black transitional organization, with its own organizational life and linked to the party through its leading and most conscious members.
CP Sectarianism on the United Front
The relationship between the LSNR and other black and non-CP labor organizations was shaped by the "Third Period" concept of the united front. Since, according to the CP, the acuteness of the capitalist crisis had converted the leaderships of all non-CP-led organizations into fascists, there could be no agreements with such leaderships, even for common action (the united front from above). Instead there could only be "united fronts from below," i.e., between the CP's Trade Union Unity League and the ranks of the AFL around the TUUL program, between the LSNR and the ranks of the NAACP or Pan-African Congress around the LSNR program.
Several years later when the CP had liquidated the LSNR into the pro-Rooseveltian National Negro Congress, James W. Ford, leader of CP black work during the "People's Front" period, stated:
"The original weaknesses of the LSNR were identical with those of the American Negro Labor Congress. Calling for affiliation on the basis of the complete program, the LSNR tended to make the ANLC. Its demands ran from a "boycott of newspapers and radios that portrayed the Negro in a derogatory manner" to "armed self-defense."
There was in fact enormous confusion in the CP on just what the LSNR was supposed to be aside from a weekly newspaper. While the Briggs report denied that the LSNR was supposed to be a mass organization, subsequent CP reports presented the LSNR in another guise. For example, the CP Party Organizer for May-June 1932 reports: "We have in the Party in Chicago alone approximately 500 members....We organized 13 groups of the LSNR with over 1,000 members, 80percent non-party, 20 percent Negroes."
In reality the weakness of the LSNR was that it was not transformed into a genuine Leninist transitional organization, seeking to recruit both individuals and groups to its complete program and at the same time pursuing agreements for common action even with the "social-fascist" leaders of the petty-bourgeois black organizations and the reformist trade unions. By attempting to address the ranks of these organizations without politically confronting 'their leaderships, the LSNR assisted the reformists in maintaining a hold on their memberships.
TUUL and CP Black Work
The LSNR was made additionally superfluous because many of the tasks which might have fallen to a transitional black organization were absorbed by the "Third Period" "revolutionary unions. “While the Sixth Congress still exhorted Communists to work in the "social-fascist"-led reformist unions, the CPs were expected to organize their own "revolutionary unions" even where reformist unions already existed.
In order to carry out this new turn the old industrial arm of the CP, the Trade Union Educational League, was converted into the Trade Union Unity League, at a convention in Cleveland in 1929. Departments of the TUEL, often no larger than the CP fraction in that particular industry were converted into "red unions." These unions were supposed to be more than just the most militant defenders of the economic interests of workers. They were to organize the unemployed, organize the unorganized, champion black rights and directly struggle for power. The program of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (which, like the TUEL and TUUL, was affiliated to the Red International of Trade Unions, the industrial arm of the CI) called for "Special Unions of Negro Workers" in the following cases:
"a. where white unions refuse Negro workers, b. in unions where Negroes are admitted but treated as second class members, without equal rights and privileges, special unions must be organized."
It combined the call for special black trade unions with the demand for "Negro Self-Determination in the Black Belt."
However, the CP" revolutionary dual unions" were the first serious effort to organize black workers and the first serious outside challenge to AFL Jim Crow unions since the demise of the IWW. The importance of this work was based on an objective reality which "was in direct contradiction to the CI's characterization of the black question as an agrarian question, namely, two-thirds of the blacks gainfully employed by 1930 were not in agriculture.
While many were in the marginal service sector, blacks were also concentrated in unskilled jobs in basic industry, previously considered too "menial" for whites but which were becoming increasingly important to modern industrial capitalism. In mining blacks composed 7.6 percent of the workforce, in transport 10.3 percent, in steel 16.2 percent, in the building trades 22.7 percent and in the unskilled jobs in meatpacking, 25 percent.
Communist Black Work in the South
One exhortation of the "Resolution on the Negro Question" was "the beginning of systematic work in the South." Such work required the greatest courage, tenacity and self-sacrifice. In the 1930's the South still contained a large majority of the black population, two-thirds of which lived in rural areas. A large portion of the black rural population was composed of the elderly, the young and the unemployed—capitalism’s "surplus population."
Those blacks who could find work on the land were subjected to peonage,
debt and convict slavery, vagrancy laws, disenfranchisements, segregation, lynching and mob violence. In the spring of 1931 the CP organized the Sharecroppers Union (SCU) in Tallapoosa and Lee Counties, Alabama. According to the Birmingham News of 20 July 1931, the unions were organizing blacks to demand "social equality with the white race, $2 a day for work, and not ask but 'demand what you want, and if you don't get it, take it'" (quoted in Jamieson, Labor Unions in American Agriculture).
The struggle to organize the SCU was conducted in a state of perpetual civil war with both "legal" and extra-legal armed vigilante groups. One of the most serious events in this war was the shoot-oat with vigilante gangs organized by the planters at Camp Hill, Tallapoosa County, in December 1932. Four blacks were murdered, twenty were wounded and five were given long prison sentences. The SCU was finally able to launch its first strike in the fall of 1934 when 500 cotton pickers struck for a wage rate of 75 cents per hundredweight, a demand won in a few areas. By 1935 the SCU claimed 10,000 members. In the spring of that year it led a strike of 1,500 cotton pickers for almost a month for a basic wage of $l/day.
The Scottsboro Case
The most famous CP black work during the Depression centered around a defense case: the Scottsboro nine. On 21 March 1931 nine black youth, all under the age of 21 (the youngest was 13) were charged with raping two white girls on a freight train and were jailed in Scottsboro, Alabama. Despite contradictory testimony at the trial, a local court found eight of them guilty and sentenced them to death. The CP, through its defense arm, the International Labor Defense, rapidly rallied to the defense of the Scottsboro youths and turned their case into an international symbol of the horrors of southern lynch law.
The ILD was begun by James Cannon, who later became the founder of American Trotskyism. At the time of his expulsion from the CP in 1928 for Trotskyism, Cannon was also removed from the ILD. The ILD rapidly followed the "Third Period" drift into ultraleft, phrasemongering and the sectarian "united front only from below" policies.
Thus, the ILD sent a telegram to the first trial judge threatening that he would be held "personally responsible unless the defendants were immediately released." Needless to say, such empty threats did nothing to win the release of the Scottsboro defendants. Just before he became the most groveling spokesman for the application of the "People's Front" to black work, James W. Ford wrote in an article inappropriately titled, "The United Front in the Field of Negro Work" (Communist, February 1935):
"... among liberal groups who still believe in democratic and civil rights, support will be gained when the fight for Scottsboro is bound up with the national liberation of the Negro people and with the struggle of the entire American working class for the dictatorship of the proletariat."
Nevertheless even the CP/ILD's most persistent and nagging critic at the time, the NAACP, gave the CP and ILD grudging support for the power and effectiveness of their defense efforts. For example, the NAACP publication Crisis (December 1935) stated: "The exploitation of Negroes by the South has been pitilessly exposed to the world. An important legal victory has been won against the lily-white jury system, As far as propaganda is concerned the whole Negro race is far ahead of where it would have been had not the Communists fought the case in the way they did."
The Scottsboro defendants were not executed, but were nevertheless given long prison terms; the last of the Scottsboro defendants was not released from prison until 1950.
CP Polemics in the Black Movement
There are important lessons for revolutionaries today in the CP's polemics with other tendencies in the black movement and in its ability to assimilate and transform a rapidly acquired black membership into a communist cadre. And in this area a most useful document is Harry Haywood's report on black work to the Eighth Convention of the CP in 1934, subsequently reprinted under a title which is in itself a polemic: The Road to Negro Liberation: The Tasks of the Communist Party in Winning Working Class Leadership of the Negro Liberation Struggles and tine Fight Against Reactionary Nationalist-Reformist Movements among the Negro People. Haywood's attack on black nationalism, especially the "self-help" schemes of cultural nationalists and community-control advocates, still rings true to-day:
"These movements for the most part advocate a voluntary acceptance of segregation and Jim Crowism as inevitable. The fight against it is a folly, make the best of it. The Negroes must draw in upon themselves, build
up their own life within the Jim Crow ghettoes. Hence they propose fantastic schemes for building self-sufficing economies among Negroes within the walls of segregation, in the Black Belt of the cities, under the leadership of businessmen and professionals, advancing all sorts of illusionary schemes for the establishment of cooperatives and industry along Jim Crow lines, holding forth the bourgeois Utopian perspective of eventually establishing industries which will be owned and operated by Negroes and furnish employment to Negro workers .... Here presumably... [black petty bourgeois] will have the opportunity of exploiting 'their own masses' free from competition and develop into a full-fledged bourgeoisie." Ironically, while no one denounced more vehemently than Haywood the "reactionary-Utopian schemes" of the black petty bourgeoisie to build up a black self-sufficient economy in the "Black Belt" of the urban ghettoes, there was also no stronger advocate of the reactionary-Utopian scheme of black "self-determination" in the rural ghetto of the southern "Black Belt." This highlights the contradiction between CP black work in practice and the erroneous theories developed to analyze the condition of southern blacks.
Party, Race and Cadre
CP black work during the Depression, work among tenants and sharecroppers, among the unemployed, the unorganized black proletariat, tenants' councils, and so on, attracted thousands of black members to its ranks. But the enduring test of the party which aspires to lead the proletariat to power is its ability to transform members into- cadre—into lifelong professional revolutionaries. And it is here that the CP in its "Third Period" may be judged and found wanting.
Many joined the CP but few stayed. Part of the problem was objective:
Social oppression which is the fuel or the spontaneous indignation and rebellion of the masses, the motor force of revolution, also cuts "across lie all-sided development of human capacities which are demanded of the professional revolutionary. A few individuals rise above their circumstances. But the evicted tenant, the
downtrodden sharecropper, a spinner working the 14-hour days of the Gas-
Tonai mills, found the yoke of social oppression so great that they could only follow the CP for the short-term struggle.
But part of the problem was with the CP itself. No matter how aggressively it might champion the black liberation struggle and call forth from its membership enormous dedication and sacrifice, the CP was bureaucratized arty which was led by men who had traded their revolutionary perspective and integrity for Stalin's good favor, and this loss of integrity and perspective permeated all sides of the organization.
Thus when the Seventh CI Congress heralded the new period of the " People's Front" where yesterday's "social fascists" became today's "friends" of democracy,” labor or blacks, surprisingly little commotion occurred within the CP—few left or expressed >position to this major turn. The "principle" of unprincipledness had already been established. The party members and leadership had become inured to the necessity (i.e., if one intended to stay in the party or, in some cases, stay alive) of going along with Stalin's previous turns and zigzags somewhat minor relative to the 1935 turn)—many of which contained the political kernel of the future "People's Front" policies.
The cynicized CPUSA went on to rather discredit itself by its adaption to Jim Crowism in WWII. The triumphant revolutionary proletariat will bring the CP leadership to account for its many crimes, not the least of which was squandering a whole generation of Black recruits.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American for Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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From Young Spartacus, September, 1974
Black Oppression & Proletarian Revolution-Part 6: The American Communist Party And Black Struggles In The American Great Depression Of The 1930s
[Markin: Title somewhat expanded for today's young audience who may not have been able to decipher the abbreviated original title]
Communist Party black work in the 1930's took place in the context of the so-called "Third Period." The Sixth World Congress of the by-then Stalin-ized Communist International (CI), held in 1928, heralded an impending "Third Period" of inevitable and final capitalist collapse in which the struggle for reforms was no longer possible. Thus, all reformist organizations, especially the "yellow" trade unions and social-democratic parties (which contained the majority of the organized labor movement), were now considered to be "social-fascist" organizations. Much of the CPUSA's work in this period was thus marked by sectarianism and ultraleftism.
While the CP of this period was deformed by dishonesty, political zigzags and egregious departures from Marxism, nonetheless in the area of black work the 1930's represents the CP's heroic period. Despite the erroneous "Black Belt" theory and the call for "Negro self-determination" in this territory (a call which was never raised agitationally but remained part of the CP's written propaganda), the CP's work in practice combined a proletarian orientation with an awareness of the strategic need to fight racial oppression throughout all layers of American society, especially to address the problems of poor and unemployed blacks.
Thus, the CP's black work took place in the labor movement, among the unemployed, in the South and in the area of legal defense. This work stands in stark contrast to the CP's subsequent plunge into abject opportunism (and even adaptation to Jim Crowism in WWII) and is rich in lessons on how to conduct and how not to conduct a genuine Leninist struggle against racial oppression.
The Depression, Blacks and the Communist Party
The catastrophic impact of the Great Depression on the U.S. working class was keenly felt by its most oppressed members, black workers. By March 1933 the Bureau of Labor Standards reported that 25 percent of the workforce, or 17 million workers, were unemployed. For those who could find work, wages on the average had fallen 45 percent. While separate statistics on the black population were not kept at this time, the National Urban League estimated that black unemployment exceeded white joblessness by 30 to 60 percent (a figure which has grown larger: since the Depression). Most black employment was in marginal "service" jobs: 25 percent of the black non-farm, wage-earning population were domestics. T. Arnold Hill of the Urban League pointed out:
"Heretofore [the black's] employment problem has been chiefly one of advancement to positions commensurate with his ability. Today he is endeavoring to hold the line against advancing armies of white workers intent upon gaining and content to accept occupations which were once thought too menial for white hands."
—quoted in Raymond Walters, Negroes and the Great Depression
The Depression was a period of massive social struggle on the part of workers and the unemployed in which blacks played a leading role. Much of this social struggle took place outside of the American Federation of Labor-dominated established labor movement. Only 10 percent of the non-farm workforce was organized and, of the 1.5 million non-farm black workers, only a little more than 3 percent or 50,000 workers were organized and one-half of the unionized black workers belonged to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
Much of this social struggle, especially on the part of blacks, was dominated by the Communist Party. At the very beginning of the Depression the CP launched National Unemployed Councils and by 6 March 1930 was able to organize demonstrations in major American cities with 1,250,000 participants.
CP defense work, conducted through its defense arm, the International Labor Defense (ILD), was in the forefront of the struggle against Southern lynch "justice," a struggle which found its most dramatic expression in the Scottsboro defense case. The CP was the first organization since the populist Southern Alliance and the Colored National Farmers Alliance of the 1890's to go into the South to fight lynch law and vigilante terror, and to organize southern sharecroppers and tenant farmers. The CP's launching of the weekly Southern Worker in Chattanooga reflected the commitment to work in the South. During 1930 the CP recruited its first substantial number of black members—1,000 blacks joined the party. The moribund CP black organization, the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC) was transformed into the League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR) at a convention held in November 1930 and the irregular publication of the ANLC, the Negro Champion, was transformed into a regular weekly,
The Liberator, edited by Cyril Briggs. The CP's struggle against Jim Crowism in the unions, though often conducted through the erroneous and sectarian "red unions" of the "Third Period," laid the foundation for the later success of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in organizing basic industry on a bi-racial basis.
The "Third Period" and CP Black Work
The Sixth World Congress of the CI, where the "Third Period" policies were laid out, also passed a "Resolution on the Negro Question in the U.S." which established the "Negro Self-Determination in the Black Belt" position. This was to haunt the CP until it was finally dropped in 1959 (see "Negro Self-Determination in the Black Belt," Young Spartacus, May-June 1974). But it was also this Congress and its special commission on the black question which spurred the CP into an aggressive orientation toward black work.
Prior to 1930 the CP had never had more than 50 black members. The "Resolution on the Negro Question" stated that the moribund ANLC "continues to exist only nominally" and called for the CP to "strengthen this organization as a medium through which we can extend the work of the party among the Negro masses and mobilize the Negro workers under our leadership."
The next national convention of the ANLC was not held until November 1930, where the ANLC was transformed into the LSNA. This convention capped a recruitment drive which had brought in 1,000 black members. Harry Haywood, the most faithful and consistent advocate of the "Black Belt" position, was made chairman of the LSNR.
In his report on the LSNR founding convention, Cyril Briggs, editor of the Liberator, defined the LSNR as follows:
"To begin with, it is a mistake to lay stress on the LSNR as a mass organization. The LSNR consists of groups of active supporters and followers of the Liberator. The aim is not to build a mass organization, but to build the Liberator into a mass organizer or the agitator and organizer of the Negro liberation movement. "The LSNR supports the Communist Party as the only political party carrying on a struggle against Negro oppression, but the LSNR is not a political party. Nor is it a substitute for any political party. The LSNR supports the revolutionary trade unions of the Trade Union Unity League in opposition to the treacherous, reformist and Jim Crow policies of the American Federation of Labor with its fascist leadership. But the LSNR is not a substitute for the TUUL or any of its unions." —Liberator, 11 November 1930
Part of the problem was that the CI under Stalin transformed the Leninist transitional organization from a vehicle for mass work into a substitute for mass work. Lenin saw the. need for special methods of work among the specially oppressed, e.g., blacks and women, and argued that the CPs should set up transitional organizations—led by party cadre and functioning as arms of the party— which would address the special needs of minorities and women and attempt to bring them into the communist movement. Depending upon the period, such organizations might or might not obtain a mass character. The CP under Stalin opted for the creation of front groups that only created the illusion (and probably only for CP members) of mass work but in fact represented an abandonment of genuine mass work. The problem of front-groupism was complicated by the tendency toward sectoralism or poly-vanguardism (a la the present-day Socialist Workers Party), as expressed in the 1928 "Resolution on the Negro Question":
"It is the duty of Negro workers to organize through the mobilization of the broad masses of the Negro population the struggle of the agricultural laborers and tenant farmers against all forms of semi-feudal oppression. On the other hand, it is the duty of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. to mobilize and rally the broad masses of the white workers for active participation in this struggle." This poly-vanguardism flowed from the attempt to fit the dynamic of the American revolution into Stalin's "two-stage revolution."
The first, “national-democratic" stage would be carried out by blacks in the "Black Belt" against "semi-feudal oppression." Hence, the principal axis of the black question was seen as agrarian, concentrated in the "Black Belt," and the principal enemy of blacks was not capitalism but "semi-feudal oppression"!!
It is easy to see from this schema how the ultraleft rhetoric of the "Third Period" in which Roosevelt, the NAACP and the AFL leadership were all considered "fascists," was easily converted in the post-1935 "People's Front" period where political blocs with the NAACP, Roosevelt and the AFL bureaucracy became "progressive."
To its credit the CP transcended in practice its poly-vanguardist theories and insisted on the bi-racial character of the LSNR. However, the CP could not decide whether to restrict the LSNR to a newspaper support club or to create a real black transitional organization, with its own organizational life and linked to the party through its leading and most conscious members.
CP Sectarianism on the United Front
The relationship between the LSNR and other black and non-CP labor organizations was shaped by the "Third Period" concept of the united front. Since, according to the CP, the acuteness of the capitalist crisis had converted the leaderships of all non-CP-led organizations into fascists, there could be no agreements with such leaderships, even for common action (the united front from above). Instead there could only be "united fronts from below," i.e., between the CP's Trade Union Unity League and the ranks of the AFL around the TUUL program, between the LSNR and the ranks of the NAACP or Pan-African Congress around the LSNR program.
Several years later when the CP had liquidated the LSNR into the pro-Rooseveltian National Negro Congress, James W. Ford, leader of CP black work during the "People's Front" period, stated:
"The original weaknesses of the LSNR were identical with those of the American Negro Labor Congress. Calling for affiliation on the basis of the complete program, the LSNR tended to make the ANLC. Its demands ran from a "boycott of newspapers and radios that portrayed the Negro in a derogatory manner" to "armed self-defense."
There was in fact enormous confusion in the CP on just what the LSNR was supposed to be aside from a weekly newspaper. While the Briggs report denied that the LSNR was supposed to be a mass organization, subsequent CP reports presented the LSNR in another guise. For example, the CP Party Organizer for May-June 1932 reports: "We have in the Party in Chicago alone approximately 500 members....We organized 13 groups of the LSNR with over 1,000 members, 80percent non-party, 20 percent Negroes."
In reality the weakness of the LSNR was that it was not transformed into a genuine Leninist transitional organization, seeking to recruit both individuals and groups to its complete program and at the same time pursuing agreements for common action even with the "social-fascist" leaders of the petty-bourgeois black organizations and the reformist trade unions. By attempting to address the ranks of these organizations without politically confronting 'their leaderships, the LSNR assisted the reformists in maintaining a hold on their memberships.
TUUL and CP Black Work
The LSNR was made additionally superfluous because many of the tasks which might have fallen to a transitional black organization were absorbed by the "Third Period" "revolutionary unions. “While the Sixth Congress still exhorted Communists to work in the "social-fascist"-led reformist unions, the CPs were expected to organize their own "revolutionary unions" even where reformist unions already existed.
In order to carry out this new turn the old industrial arm of the CP, the Trade Union Educational League, was converted into the Trade Union Unity League, at a convention in Cleveland in 1929. Departments of the TUEL, often no larger than the CP fraction in that particular industry were converted into "red unions." These unions were supposed to be more than just the most militant defenders of the economic interests of workers. They were to organize the unemployed, organize the unorganized, champion black rights and directly struggle for power. The program of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (which, like the TUEL and TUUL, was affiliated to the Red International of Trade Unions, the industrial arm of the CI) called for "Special Unions of Negro Workers" in the following cases:
"a. where white unions refuse Negro workers, b. in unions where Negroes are admitted but treated as second class members, without equal rights and privileges, special unions must be organized."
It combined the call for special black trade unions with the demand for "Negro Self-Determination in the Black Belt."
However, the CP" revolutionary dual unions" were the first serious effort to organize black workers and the first serious outside challenge to AFL Jim Crow unions since the demise of the IWW. The importance of this work was based on an objective reality which "was in direct contradiction to the CI's characterization of the black question as an agrarian question, namely, two-thirds of the blacks gainfully employed by 1930 were not in agriculture.
While many were in the marginal service sector, blacks were also concentrated in unskilled jobs in basic industry, previously considered too "menial" for whites but which were becoming increasingly important to modern industrial capitalism. In mining blacks composed 7.6 percent of the workforce, in transport 10.3 percent, in steel 16.2 percent, in the building trades 22.7 percent and in the unskilled jobs in meatpacking, 25 percent.
Communist Black Work in the South
One exhortation of the "Resolution on the Negro Question" was "the beginning of systematic work in the South." Such work required the greatest courage, tenacity and self-sacrifice. In the 1930's the South still contained a large majority of the black population, two-thirds of which lived in rural areas. A large portion of the black rural population was composed of the elderly, the young and the unemployed—capitalism’s "surplus population."
Those blacks who could find work on the land were subjected to peonage,
debt and convict slavery, vagrancy laws, disenfranchisements, segregation, lynching and mob violence. In the spring of 1931 the CP organized the Sharecroppers Union (SCU) in Tallapoosa and Lee Counties, Alabama. According to the Birmingham News of 20 July 1931, the unions were organizing blacks to demand "social equality with the white race, $2 a day for work, and not ask but 'demand what you want, and if you don't get it, take it'" (quoted in Jamieson, Labor Unions in American Agriculture).
The struggle to organize the SCU was conducted in a state of perpetual civil war with both "legal" and extra-legal armed vigilante groups. One of the most serious events in this war was the shoot-oat with vigilante gangs organized by the planters at Camp Hill, Tallapoosa County, in December 1932. Four blacks were murdered, twenty were wounded and five were given long prison sentences. The SCU was finally able to launch its first strike in the fall of 1934 when 500 cotton pickers struck for a wage rate of 75 cents per hundredweight, a demand won in a few areas. By 1935 the SCU claimed 10,000 members. In the spring of that year it led a strike of 1,500 cotton pickers for almost a month for a basic wage of $l/day.
The Scottsboro Case
The most famous CP black work during the Depression centered around a defense case: the Scottsboro nine. On 21 March 1931 nine black youth, all under the age of 21 (the youngest was 13) were charged with raping two white girls on a freight train and were jailed in Scottsboro, Alabama. Despite contradictory testimony at the trial, a local court found eight of them guilty and sentenced them to death. The CP, through its defense arm, the International Labor Defense, rapidly rallied to the defense of the Scottsboro youths and turned their case into an international symbol of the horrors of southern lynch law.
The ILD was begun by James Cannon, who later became the founder of American Trotskyism. At the time of his expulsion from the CP in 1928 for Trotskyism, Cannon was also removed from the ILD. The ILD rapidly followed the "Third Period" drift into ultraleft, phrasemongering and the sectarian "united front only from below" policies.
Thus, the ILD sent a telegram to the first trial judge threatening that he would be held "personally responsible unless the defendants were immediately released." Needless to say, such empty threats did nothing to win the release of the Scottsboro defendants. Just before he became the most groveling spokesman for the application of the "People's Front" to black work, James W. Ford wrote in an article inappropriately titled, "The United Front in the Field of Negro Work" (Communist, February 1935):
"... among liberal groups who still believe in democratic and civil rights, support will be gained when the fight for Scottsboro is bound up with the national liberation of the Negro people and with the struggle of the entire American working class for the dictatorship of the proletariat."
Nevertheless even the CP/ILD's most persistent and nagging critic at the time, the NAACP, gave the CP and ILD grudging support for the power and effectiveness of their defense efforts. For example, the NAACP publication Crisis (December 1935) stated: "The exploitation of Negroes by the South has been pitilessly exposed to the world. An important legal victory has been won against the lily-white jury system, As far as propaganda is concerned the whole Negro race is far ahead of where it would have been had not the Communists fought the case in the way they did."
The Scottsboro defendants were not executed, but were nevertheless given long prison terms; the last of the Scottsboro defendants was not released from prison until 1950.
CP Polemics in the Black Movement
There are important lessons for revolutionaries today in the CP's polemics with other tendencies in the black movement and in its ability to assimilate and transform a rapidly acquired black membership into a communist cadre. And in this area a most useful document is Harry Haywood's report on black work to the Eighth Convention of the CP in 1934, subsequently reprinted under a title which is in itself a polemic: The Road to Negro Liberation: The Tasks of the Communist Party in Winning Working Class Leadership of the Negro Liberation Struggles and tine Fight Against Reactionary Nationalist-Reformist Movements among the Negro People. Haywood's attack on black nationalism, especially the "self-help" schemes of cultural nationalists and community-control advocates, still rings true to-day:
"These movements for the most part advocate a voluntary acceptance of segregation and Jim Crowism as inevitable. The fight against it is a folly, make the best of it. The Negroes must draw in upon themselves, build
up their own life within the Jim Crow ghettoes. Hence they propose fantastic schemes for building self-sufficing economies among Negroes within the walls of segregation, in the Black Belt of the cities, under the leadership of businessmen and professionals, advancing all sorts of illusionary schemes for the establishment of cooperatives and industry along Jim Crow lines, holding forth the bourgeois Utopian perspective of eventually establishing industries which will be owned and operated by Negroes and furnish employment to Negro workers .... Here presumably... [black petty bourgeois] will have the opportunity of exploiting 'their own masses' free from competition and develop into a full-fledged bourgeoisie." Ironically, while no one denounced more vehemently than Haywood the "reactionary-Utopian schemes" of the black petty bourgeoisie to build up a black self-sufficient economy in the "Black Belt" of the urban ghettoes, there was also no stronger advocate of the reactionary-Utopian scheme of black "self-determination" in the rural ghetto of the southern "Black Belt." This highlights the contradiction between CP black work in practice and the erroneous theories developed to analyze the condition of southern blacks.
Party, Race and Cadre
CP black work during the Depression, work among tenants and sharecroppers, among the unemployed, the unorganized black proletariat, tenants' councils, and so on, attracted thousands of black members to its ranks. But the enduring test of the party which aspires to lead the proletariat to power is its ability to transform members into- cadre—into lifelong professional revolutionaries. And it is here that the CP in its "Third Period" may be judged and found wanting.
Many joined the CP but few stayed. Part of the problem was objective:
Social oppression which is the fuel or the spontaneous indignation and rebellion of the masses, the motor force of revolution, also cuts "across lie all-sided development of human capacities which are demanded of the professional revolutionary. A few individuals rise above their circumstances. But the evicted tenant, the
downtrodden sharecropper, a spinner working the 14-hour days of the Gas-
Tonai mills, found the yoke of social oppression so great that they could only follow the CP for the short-term struggle.
But part of the problem was with the CP itself. No matter how aggressively it might champion the black liberation struggle and call forth from its membership enormous dedication and sacrifice, the CP was bureaucratized arty which was led by men who had traded their revolutionary perspective and integrity for Stalin's good favor, and this loss of integrity and perspective permeated all sides of the organization.
Thus when the Seventh CI Congress heralded the new period of the " People's Front" where yesterday's "social fascists" became today's "friends" of democracy,” labor or blacks, surprisingly little commotion occurred within the CP—few left or expressed >position to this major turn. The "principle" of unprincipledness had already been established. The party members and leadership had become inured to the necessity (i.e., if one intended to stay in the party or, in some cases, stay alive) of going along with Stalin's previous turns and zigzags somewhat minor relative to the 1935 turn)—many of which contained the political kernel of the future "People's Front" policies.
The cynicized CPUSA went on to rather discredit itself by its adaption to Jim Crowism in WWII. The triumphant revolutionary proletariat will bring the CP leadership to account for its many crimes, not the least of which was squandering a whole generation of Black recruits.
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!- A Five Point Program For Discussion
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 we get a better grip of the importance of the labor movement to winning victories in our struggles.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to immiserate the mass of society for the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
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.
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 we get a better grip of the importance 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!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to immiserate the mass of society for the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
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 13, 2012
In The Time Of Laura’s Time-Ms. LaVern Baker Is In The House
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of LaVern Baker performing her 1950s classic Tomorrow Night.
“Tomorrow night, tomorrow night, will you still say the things you said tonight- a line from LaVern Baker’s song Tomorrow Night.
Walking down the narrow stairs leading to the admission window booth at Johnny Fleet’s in good old Harvard Square on this cold Columbus Day 1978 night, jesus 1978 is almost gone already, I was suddenly depressed by this thought-how many times lately had I walked down these very stairs looking, looking for what, looking, as Tom Waits says in his song, for the heart of Saturday night, looking recently every night from Monday to Sunday and not just Saturday. Looking, not hard looking, not right now hard looking anyway after my last nitwit affair, but looking for a man who at least has a job, doesn’t have another girlfriend or ten, and who wants to settle down a little, settle down with me a little. Yes, if you really need to know, want to know, I’ve got those late twenties getting just a touch worried old maid blues.
My parents, my straight-arrow, god-fearing, Methodist god-fearing and that is a fierce fearing, hard-working, lost in some 1950s dreamland parents, my mother really, my father just keeps his own counsel between shots of whiskey and trying to read the latest seed catalogues that keep him and his business alive through the haze, keeps badgering me about finding a nice young man. Yes, easy for you to say you don’t know the nitwits who are out there and they ain’t Rickey Nelson dream jukebox guys, Mother. And then she starts on the coming home, coming home to cranky Mechanicsville (that’s in upstate New York, near Albany, if you don’t believe me) and finding some farmer-grown boy from high school and X, Y, and Z, farmer boys all, still asks about me. No thanks, jesus, that is why I fled to Boston right after college in 1972 (and fled to a far-away, and a no living at home college too but don’t tell them that) and not just because I wanted to get my social worker master’s degree like I told them. And so here I am, a few years later, walking down these skinny stairs again, sigh, yet again.
Johnny’s (nobody calls it Johnny Fleet’s except for one-time people or tourists) isn’t a bad place to hang your hat, as my father always likes to say, when he finds that one or two places in the universe outside of the farm where he feels comfortable enough to stay more than ten minutes before getting the “I’ve got to go water the greenhouse plants” or something itch (read: drink itch). Not a bad place for a woman, a twenty–eight year old woman with college degrees and some aims in life beyond some one-night stand every now and again. Or not a bad place for a pair of women, if my friend and roommate, Priscilla, decides she is man-hungry enough to make the trip to Harvard Square from the wilds of Watertown, and can stand the heavy smoke, mainly cigarette smoke as far as I know, but after a few drinks who knows, that fills the air before the night is half over.
Tonight Priscilla is with me because she has a “crush” on Albie St John, the lead singer for the featured local rock group, The Haystraws. And the last time she was here he was giving her that look like he was game for something although he is known around the Square as strictly a “for fun” guy. And that is okay with Priscilla because she has some guy back home some guy from upstate New York where she is from near Utica, some fresh from the farm guy who she has known since about third grade, who will marry her if and when she says the word.
Here is the funny thing though alone, or like tonight with Priscilla, this funky old bar is the only place around where a woman can find a guy who is the least bit presentable to the folks back home, wherever back home is. I’ve met a couple of decent guys in here, although like I said before, things didn’t work out for some reason because they were one-night stand guys or already loaded down with girlfriends and I am in no mood to take a ticket, stuff like that. So you can see what desperate straits I am in still trying to meet that right guy, or something close, without a lot of overhead. My standards may be a little high for the times but I’m chipping away at them by the day.
Moreover, this place, this Johnny’s is the only place around that has the kind of music I like, a little country although not Grand Ole Opry country stuff like my parents go for, you know George Jones or Aunt Bee, or someone, a little bit folkie, kind of left-handed folkie, more like local favorite Eric Andersen folk rock, and a little old time let it rip 1950s rock and roll, like the Haystraws cover, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, those guys, that I never knew anything about when I was a kid since I never got past Rickey Nelson and Bobby Darin, darn him, out in the farm field sticks. Upstate New York, like I said, not far out of Albany but it might as well have been a million miles away with me picking my sting beans, tomatoes, and whatever else pa grew to keep us from hunger’s door.
Not for me this trendy disco stuff, not my style at all, no way, although I love to dance and even took belly dancing lessons even though I am not voluptuous, more just left of skinny if I say it but really voluptuous Priscilla calls me just skinny. Also my kind of guy would never, never wear an open shirt and some chainy medallion around his neck. Jesus, no way. Plus, a big plus, Johnny’s has a jukebox for intermissions filled with all kinds of odd-ball songs, real country, stuff, late 1950s rock and roll (the Rickey Nelson/Bobby Vee/Bobby Darin stuff) that nobody but me probably ever heard of unless, of course, you were from Mechanicsville, or a place like that.
After going through mandatory license check and admission fee stuff, saying “hi” to the waitresses that I know now by name, and Priscilla does too, and the regular bartenders as we pass by we find our seats, kind of “reserved” seats for us where we can sit and not be hassled by guys, or be hassled if something interesting comes along. I have been in kind of a dry spell, outside the occasional minute affair if one could really call some of the “affairs” even that, for about six months now. Ever since I started to work, work doing social work, my profession, if you need to know. That’s what I am trained to do anyway although when I first came to town a few years ago I was, as one beau back then said, “serving them off the arm” in a spaghetti joint over the other side of Cambridge. Strictly a family fare menu, and plenty of college guys, including a few who I wound up dating, low on funds doing the cheap Saturday night date circuit. All in all a “no tips” situation anyway you cut it, although plenty of guff, a lot of come ons, and extra helpings of “get me this and get me that.”
Before that, out in Rochester in college, and later after a short stop at hometown Mechanicsville it was nothing but wanna-be cowboy losers, an occasionally low-rent dope dealer, some wanna-be musicians, farmer brown farmers, and married guys looking for a little something on a cold night. Ya, I know, I asked for it but a girl gets cold and lonely too. Not just guys, not these days anyway. But I am still pitching, although very low-key. That is my public style (some say, say right to my face, prim but that’s only to fend off the losers).
“Laura, what are you having, tonight honey?’ asked my “regular” waitress, Lannie, and then asked Priscilla the same. “Two Rusty Nails,” we replied. Tonight, from a quick glance around the room even though it is a Columbus Day holiday night, looks like it is going to be a hard-drinking night from the feel of it. That means on my budget and my capacity about three drinks, max. About the same for Priscilla unless she s real man-hungry. But that is just between us, okay. Lannie, as is her habit, knowing that we are good tippers (the bonds of waitress sisterhood as Priscilla has also “served them off the arm”) brought the drinks right away. And so we settled in get ready to listen to The Haystraws coming up in a while for their first set. Or rather I did the settling in. Priscilla was looking, looking hard at Albie, and he was looking right back. I guess I will be driving home alone tonight.
As I settled in I noticed that some guy was playing the jukebox like crazy. Like crazy for real. He kept playing about three old timey LaVern Baker songs, Jim Dandy of course, and See See Rider but also about six times in a row her Tomorrow Night. I was kind of glad when the band, like I said, these really good rockers, The Haystraws, began their first set. And so the evening was off, good, bad, or indifferent.
About half way through the set I noticed this jukebox guy kept kind of looking at me, kind of “checking” me out without being rude about it. You know those little half-looks and then look away kind of like kid hide-and-seek and back again. Now I have around long enough to know that I am not bad to look at even if I am a little skinny and I take time to get ready when I go out, especially lately, and although times have been tough lately I am easy to get to know but this guy kind of put me on my guard a little. He was about thirty, neatly bearded which I like and okay for looks, I have been with worst. But what I couldn’t figure out, and it bothered me a little even when I tried to avoid his peeks (as he “avoided” mine) is why he was in this place.
Johnny’s, despite its locale in the heart of Harvard Square, is kind of an oasis for country girls like me, or half-country girls like Priscilla (from upstate New York too, Utica, in case you forgot) and guys the same way although once in a while a Harvard guy from the sticks comes around (or a guy who says he goes to Harvard. I have met some who made the claim who I don’t think could spell the name of the college, I swear). This guy looked like Harvard Square was his home turf and if he found himself five feet from a well-lighted street, a library, or a bookstore he would freak out big time. He might have been an old folkie, maybe early Dylan or Dave Von Ronk that nasal hard to understand kind of stuff, he had that feel, or maybe a bluesy kind of guy, Muddy Waters maybe, but he was strictly a city boy and was just cruising this joint.
But here is where the jukebox joe story gets interesting. At intermission Priscilla had to run to the ladies’ room and on the way this guy, Allan Jackman, as I found out later when he introduced himself to me, stopped her and said that her brunette friend looked very nice in her white pants and blouse. He then said to her that he would like to meet me. Priscilla, a veteran of the Laura wars (and I of hers), had the snappy answer ready, “Go introduce yourself, yourself.” And he did start to come over but I kind of turned away to avoid him just in case he had escaped from somewhere (ya, like I said before my luck has been running a little rough lately so I am a little gun-shy). Still he worked his way over.
And this is the every first thing that Allan ever said to me. “I noticed that you kind of perked up when I played LaVern Baker’s Tomorrow Night. Have you been disappointed when things didn’t work out after that first night of promise too, like in the song?” Not an original line, but close. I answered almost automatically, “Yes.” Then he introduced himself and just kind of stood there not trying to sit down or anything like that waiting for me to make the next move. Then Priscilla came back and said she had run into Albie St. John and he wanted to “talk” to her before the band came back for a second set (she said with a certain twist like she was doing him this big favor and not like she was practically drooling at the idea. Like I said I am definitely driving home alone today.). She left and Allan was still standing there, a little ill at ease from his look. Befuddled by his soft non-threatening manner, and soft manners, I was not sure if I wanted him to sit down or not but then I said what the hell, he seems nice enough and at least he was not drunk.
So he sat down, and gently, actually very gently, shook my hand and said “thank you” for letting me let him sit at the table. In the flush of reaction to that gentle handshake, I swear no man had ever taken my hand in such a manly manner without guile or gimme something before, I relaxed a little and asked him, not an origin question but I was curious, what brought him to Johnny’s. He started to tell me about his country minute, about finding out about the wild boys of country music, about Hank Williams (I winched, that was my father’s music) about this guy Townes Van Zandt and so on.
And then he said he was looking for me. I winched again. Not another crazy. No, not me exactly, but me as a person who he sensed had been kind of beaten down in the love game lately like he had. He said he saw that look in my face, in my eyes, when he kind of half-checked (I made him laugh when I said we were kid-hide-and-seeking earlier) me out at the jukebox. I said I thought he had fully “checked me out” but he would only confess to the half. We both laughed at that one.
And after that opening, strange to say, because being a country girl, and being brought up in a Methodist-etched household to keep my thoughts to myself, or else, or else Dad would have a fit, I started to talk to him about my troubles lately. And he listened and kept asking more questions, not in your face questions, but questions like he was really interested in the answers and not as some fiendish experiment to take advantage of a simple girl. And then I asked him a few things and before we knew it the evening’s entertainment was over and Lannie kept telling us that we had to go. I still had some doubts about this guy, this city boy and his city ways, and his fierce piercing blue eyes that could be true or truly devilish.
As we got up to leave he asked, kind of sheepishly with a little stutter, asked, for my telephone number. No “my place or your place, honey,” or “let’s go down the Charles and have some fun,” or “I brought you six drinks (we had each bought our own) and so I expect something more” or any of that usual end of the night stuff that I have become somewhat inured to. He simply, softly, said he wanted it because he wanted to call me up tomorrow night. We kind of laughed at that seeing the way we met, before we met. I hesitated just a minute and he, sensing my dilemma, started to turn to leave. A guy who knows how to take no for an answer, or the possibility of no, without recrimination or fuss. Wait a minute, Laura. Before he took two steps I blurted out my number. And then put it on a cocktail napkin for him. As I passed the glass wet napkin to him he said he would call about seven if that was okay. I said yes. And then he shook my hand, shook it even more gently than when he introduced himself, if that was possible. I flushed again as he headed to the door. Something in that handshake said you had better not let this one get away. Something that said you had better be near the phone at 7:00 PM tomorrow night waiting for his call. And I will be.
“Tomorrow night, tomorrow night, will you still say the things you said tonight- a line from LaVern Baker’s song Tomorrow Night.
Walking down the narrow stairs leading to the admission window booth at Johnny Fleet’s in good old Harvard Square on this cold Columbus Day 1978 night, jesus 1978 is almost gone already, I was suddenly depressed by this thought-how many times lately had I walked down these very stairs looking, looking for what, looking, as Tom Waits says in his song, for the heart of Saturday night, looking recently every night from Monday to Sunday and not just Saturday. Looking, not hard looking, not right now hard looking anyway after my last nitwit affair, but looking for a man who at least has a job, doesn’t have another girlfriend or ten, and who wants to settle down a little, settle down with me a little. Yes, if you really need to know, want to know, I’ve got those late twenties getting just a touch worried old maid blues.
My parents, my straight-arrow, god-fearing, Methodist god-fearing and that is a fierce fearing, hard-working, lost in some 1950s dreamland parents, my mother really, my father just keeps his own counsel between shots of whiskey and trying to read the latest seed catalogues that keep him and his business alive through the haze, keeps badgering me about finding a nice young man. Yes, easy for you to say you don’t know the nitwits who are out there and they ain’t Rickey Nelson dream jukebox guys, Mother. And then she starts on the coming home, coming home to cranky Mechanicsville (that’s in upstate New York, near Albany, if you don’t believe me) and finding some farmer-grown boy from high school and X, Y, and Z, farmer boys all, still asks about me. No thanks, jesus, that is why I fled to Boston right after college in 1972 (and fled to a far-away, and a no living at home college too but don’t tell them that) and not just because I wanted to get my social worker master’s degree like I told them. And so here I am, a few years later, walking down these skinny stairs again, sigh, yet again.
Johnny’s (nobody calls it Johnny Fleet’s except for one-time people or tourists) isn’t a bad place to hang your hat, as my father always likes to say, when he finds that one or two places in the universe outside of the farm where he feels comfortable enough to stay more than ten minutes before getting the “I’ve got to go water the greenhouse plants” or something itch (read: drink itch). Not a bad place for a woman, a twenty–eight year old woman with college degrees and some aims in life beyond some one-night stand every now and again. Or not a bad place for a pair of women, if my friend and roommate, Priscilla, decides she is man-hungry enough to make the trip to Harvard Square from the wilds of Watertown, and can stand the heavy smoke, mainly cigarette smoke as far as I know, but after a few drinks who knows, that fills the air before the night is half over.
Tonight Priscilla is with me because she has a “crush” on Albie St John, the lead singer for the featured local rock group, The Haystraws. And the last time she was here he was giving her that look like he was game for something although he is known around the Square as strictly a “for fun” guy. And that is okay with Priscilla because she has some guy back home some guy from upstate New York where she is from near Utica, some fresh from the farm guy who she has known since about third grade, who will marry her if and when she says the word.
Here is the funny thing though alone, or like tonight with Priscilla, this funky old bar is the only place around where a woman can find a guy who is the least bit presentable to the folks back home, wherever back home is. I’ve met a couple of decent guys in here, although like I said before, things didn’t work out for some reason because they were one-night stand guys or already loaded down with girlfriends and I am in no mood to take a ticket, stuff like that. So you can see what desperate straits I am in still trying to meet that right guy, or something close, without a lot of overhead. My standards may be a little high for the times but I’m chipping away at them by the day.
Moreover, this place, this Johnny’s is the only place around that has the kind of music I like, a little country although not Grand Ole Opry country stuff like my parents go for, you know George Jones or Aunt Bee, or someone, a little bit folkie, kind of left-handed folkie, more like local favorite Eric Andersen folk rock, and a little old time let it rip 1950s rock and roll, like the Haystraws cover, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, those guys, that I never knew anything about when I was a kid since I never got past Rickey Nelson and Bobby Darin, darn him, out in the farm field sticks. Upstate New York, like I said, not far out of Albany but it might as well have been a million miles away with me picking my sting beans, tomatoes, and whatever else pa grew to keep us from hunger’s door.
Not for me this trendy disco stuff, not my style at all, no way, although I love to dance and even took belly dancing lessons even though I am not voluptuous, more just left of skinny if I say it but really voluptuous Priscilla calls me just skinny. Also my kind of guy would never, never wear an open shirt and some chainy medallion around his neck. Jesus, no way. Plus, a big plus, Johnny’s has a jukebox for intermissions filled with all kinds of odd-ball songs, real country, stuff, late 1950s rock and roll (the Rickey Nelson/Bobby Vee/Bobby Darin stuff) that nobody but me probably ever heard of unless, of course, you were from Mechanicsville, or a place like that.
After going through mandatory license check and admission fee stuff, saying “hi” to the waitresses that I know now by name, and Priscilla does too, and the regular bartenders as we pass by we find our seats, kind of “reserved” seats for us where we can sit and not be hassled by guys, or be hassled if something interesting comes along. I have been in kind of a dry spell, outside the occasional minute affair if one could really call some of the “affairs” even that, for about six months now. Ever since I started to work, work doing social work, my profession, if you need to know. That’s what I am trained to do anyway although when I first came to town a few years ago I was, as one beau back then said, “serving them off the arm” in a spaghetti joint over the other side of Cambridge. Strictly a family fare menu, and plenty of college guys, including a few who I wound up dating, low on funds doing the cheap Saturday night date circuit. All in all a “no tips” situation anyway you cut it, although plenty of guff, a lot of come ons, and extra helpings of “get me this and get me that.”
Before that, out in Rochester in college, and later after a short stop at hometown Mechanicsville it was nothing but wanna-be cowboy losers, an occasionally low-rent dope dealer, some wanna-be musicians, farmer brown farmers, and married guys looking for a little something on a cold night. Ya, I know, I asked for it but a girl gets cold and lonely too. Not just guys, not these days anyway. But I am still pitching, although very low-key. That is my public style (some say, say right to my face, prim but that’s only to fend off the losers).
“Laura, what are you having, tonight honey?’ asked my “regular” waitress, Lannie, and then asked Priscilla the same. “Two Rusty Nails,” we replied. Tonight, from a quick glance around the room even though it is a Columbus Day holiday night, looks like it is going to be a hard-drinking night from the feel of it. That means on my budget and my capacity about three drinks, max. About the same for Priscilla unless she s real man-hungry. But that is just between us, okay. Lannie, as is her habit, knowing that we are good tippers (the bonds of waitress sisterhood as Priscilla has also “served them off the arm”) brought the drinks right away. And so we settled in get ready to listen to The Haystraws coming up in a while for their first set. Or rather I did the settling in. Priscilla was looking, looking hard at Albie, and he was looking right back. I guess I will be driving home alone tonight.
As I settled in I noticed that some guy was playing the jukebox like crazy. Like crazy for real. He kept playing about three old timey LaVern Baker songs, Jim Dandy of course, and See See Rider but also about six times in a row her Tomorrow Night. I was kind of glad when the band, like I said, these really good rockers, The Haystraws, began their first set. And so the evening was off, good, bad, or indifferent.
About half way through the set I noticed this jukebox guy kept kind of looking at me, kind of “checking” me out without being rude about it. You know those little half-looks and then look away kind of like kid hide-and-seek and back again. Now I have around long enough to know that I am not bad to look at even if I am a little skinny and I take time to get ready when I go out, especially lately, and although times have been tough lately I am easy to get to know but this guy kind of put me on my guard a little. He was about thirty, neatly bearded which I like and okay for looks, I have been with worst. But what I couldn’t figure out, and it bothered me a little even when I tried to avoid his peeks (as he “avoided” mine) is why he was in this place.
Johnny’s, despite its locale in the heart of Harvard Square, is kind of an oasis for country girls like me, or half-country girls like Priscilla (from upstate New York too, Utica, in case you forgot) and guys the same way although once in a while a Harvard guy from the sticks comes around (or a guy who says he goes to Harvard. I have met some who made the claim who I don’t think could spell the name of the college, I swear). This guy looked like Harvard Square was his home turf and if he found himself five feet from a well-lighted street, a library, or a bookstore he would freak out big time. He might have been an old folkie, maybe early Dylan or Dave Von Ronk that nasal hard to understand kind of stuff, he had that feel, or maybe a bluesy kind of guy, Muddy Waters maybe, but he was strictly a city boy and was just cruising this joint.
But here is where the jukebox joe story gets interesting. At intermission Priscilla had to run to the ladies’ room and on the way this guy, Allan Jackman, as I found out later when he introduced himself to me, stopped her and said that her brunette friend looked very nice in her white pants and blouse. He then said to her that he would like to meet me. Priscilla, a veteran of the Laura wars (and I of hers), had the snappy answer ready, “Go introduce yourself, yourself.” And he did start to come over but I kind of turned away to avoid him just in case he had escaped from somewhere (ya, like I said before my luck has been running a little rough lately so I am a little gun-shy). Still he worked his way over.
And this is the every first thing that Allan ever said to me. “I noticed that you kind of perked up when I played LaVern Baker’s Tomorrow Night. Have you been disappointed when things didn’t work out after that first night of promise too, like in the song?” Not an original line, but close. I answered almost automatically, “Yes.” Then he introduced himself and just kind of stood there not trying to sit down or anything like that waiting for me to make the next move. Then Priscilla came back and said she had run into Albie St. John and he wanted to “talk” to her before the band came back for a second set (she said with a certain twist like she was doing him this big favor and not like she was practically drooling at the idea. Like I said I am definitely driving home alone today.). She left and Allan was still standing there, a little ill at ease from his look. Befuddled by his soft non-threatening manner, and soft manners, I was not sure if I wanted him to sit down or not but then I said what the hell, he seems nice enough and at least he was not drunk.
So he sat down, and gently, actually very gently, shook my hand and said “thank you” for letting me let him sit at the table. In the flush of reaction to that gentle handshake, I swear no man had ever taken my hand in such a manly manner without guile or gimme something before, I relaxed a little and asked him, not an origin question but I was curious, what brought him to Johnny’s. He started to tell me about his country minute, about finding out about the wild boys of country music, about Hank Williams (I winched, that was my father’s music) about this guy Townes Van Zandt and so on.
And then he said he was looking for me. I winched again. Not another crazy. No, not me exactly, but me as a person who he sensed had been kind of beaten down in the love game lately like he had. He said he saw that look in my face, in my eyes, when he kind of half-checked (I made him laugh when I said we were kid-hide-and-seeking earlier) me out at the jukebox. I said I thought he had fully “checked me out” but he would only confess to the half. We both laughed at that one.
And after that opening, strange to say, because being a country girl, and being brought up in a Methodist-etched household to keep my thoughts to myself, or else, or else Dad would have a fit, I started to talk to him about my troubles lately. And he listened and kept asking more questions, not in your face questions, but questions like he was really interested in the answers and not as some fiendish experiment to take advantage of a simple girl. And then I asked him a few things and before we knew it the evening’s entertainment was over and Lannie kept telling us that we had to go. I still had some doubts about this guy, this city boy and his city ways, and his fierce piercing blue eyes that could be true or truly devilish.
As we got up to leave he asked, kind of sheepishly with a little stutter, asked, for my telephone number. No “my place or your place, honey,” or “let’s go down the Charles and have some fun,” or “I brought you six drinks (we had each bought our own) and so I expect something more” or any of that usual end of the night stuff that I have become somewhat inured to. He simply, softly, said he wanted it because he wanted to call me up tomorrow night. We kind of laughed at that seeing the way we met, before we met. I hesitated just a minute and he, sensing my dilemma, started to turn to leave. A guy who knows how to take no for an answer, or the possibility of no, without recrimination or fuss. Wait a minute, Laura. Before he took two steps I blurted out my number. And then put it on a cocktail napkin for him. As I passed the glass wet napkin to him he said he would call about seven if that was okay. I said yes. And then he shook my hand, shook it even more gently than when he introduced himself, if that was possible. I flushed again as he headed to the door. Something in that handshake said you had better not let this one get away. Something that said you had better be near the phone at 7:00 PM tomorrow night waiting for his call. And I will be.
A Call To Action-1st Mass Occupy General Assembly-Occupy Groups in the Greater Boston Area-UNITE!
Click on the headline to link to the Mass Occupy Facebook page.
When: Saturday, February 18, 2012 Time: 12:00pm until 4:00pm
Where: Boston Teachers Union Hall, 180 Mount Vernon Street, Dorchester, Massachusetts
Child Care will be provided.
Fight MBTA Fare Hikes and Cuts!
Other proposals on the proposed agenda include:
• International Women's Day action
• March 1st Solidarity actions for public education
• May 1st General strike actions
• Time will be allotted for all proposals.
Facebook link: htrps://www.facebook.com/events/177231922382590/
When: Saturday, February 18, 2012 Time: 12:00pm until 4:00pm
Where: Boston Teachers Union Hall, 180 Mount Vernon Street, Dorchester, Massachusetts
Child Care will be provided.
Fight MBTA Fare Hikes and Cuts!
Other proposals on the proposed agenda include:
• International Women's Day action
• March 1st Solidarity actions for public education
• May 1st General strike actions
• Time will be allotted for all proposals.
Facebook link: htrps://www.facebook.com/events/177231922382590/
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