Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 1001
27 April 2012
Revitalize the Unions! For Class-Struggle Leadership!-Transit Workers Under the Gun-New York City
Emboldened by the anti-union offensive against public employees in Wisconsin, Indiana and many other states, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) has in its crosshairs the 34,000 NYC subway and bus workers organized in Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100. With negotiations over the union contract that expired on January 15 dragging out, the transit bosses have not wavered in their major giveback demands: a three-year wage freeze, the near-doubling of worker-paid health care costs and the creation of additional workforce tiers. From slashed wages and looted pensions to massive job cuts, public workers in New York and across the country are facing similar attacks carried out by both Democrats and Republicans.
But Local 100 is not just any municipal workers union. For more than a century, New York’s mass transit system has been integral to the city’s economy. To this day, commerce in the financial center of U.S. imperialism remains heavily reliant on the dense subway and bus network and the commuter rail lines that feed it. When transit workers withhold their labor, it causes a crisis for the city bosses.
A transit strike in 1966 brought the bosses and bankers to their knees, winning a pension for workers after 20 years of service and setting the standard for better wages and working conditions throughout the city. It reduced the New York State Condon-Wadlin Act, which banned strikes by government employees, to a paper tiger. Strikes in 1980 and 2005, deemed “illegal” by the capitalist rulers but widely popular among working people and the poor, also put the union’s might on display. However, the TWU tops caved in to the bosses and their political and judicial enforcers, folding the strikes as the bourgeoisie was really beginning to feel the pinch.
Today, Local 100 finds itself in a weakened state, thanks in no small part to the disastrous policies of its leadership. The union is still deeply fractured from the betrayal of the 2005 strike, which was called off by Local 100 president Roger Toussaint without a contract in hand or an amnesty protecting strikers and the union from the reprisals that soon followed. Recently, Toussaint and his successor as Local 100 president, John Samuelsen, have taken to pleading their grievances against one another through interviews with the Wall Street Journal, the house organ of the capitalist class enemy.
Samuelsen goes so far as to disavow the 2005 strike, declaring it “detrimental to the union’s ongoing ability to organize members in a fight-back.” It is all too typical of labor’s misleaders to renounce strikes and other tools of labor struggle, which are central to the very existence of unions. Consequently, in New York transit workers face the losing proposition of either binding arbitration, where the bosses call the shots, or a negotiated sellout in the stalled contract talks.
Against this backdrop, it is not uncommon to hear transit workers question the value of even having a union. It is a mistake to identify the unions—the basic defense organizations of the working class—with their pro-capitalist misleadership, whose policies impede the ranks from resisting the attacks of their exploiters. While those like Toussaint and Samuelsen may have their differences on secondary matters, the union bureaucrats are in full agreement on the essentials, namely, adherence to the capitalist profit system. Politically, this is expressed through support to the Democratic Party, which no less than the Republicans is a party of capitalist rule.
The unions, which have been gravely undermined by the labor tops, were built through fierce class battles involving mass pickets and secondary boycotts in defiance of anti-labor laws and court injunctions. Revitalizing them will take the same kind of hard class struggle. And that will pose a fight to oust the hidebound labor officials and replace them with a new leadership, one that understands that the working class and the capitalist class have no common interests. Such a class-struggle leadership would play a crucial role in building a workers party that fights for a workers government.
Why Workers Risked Their Lives for a Union
The TWU’s own history shows that a union makes a life-and-death difference in the workplace. Before the TWU was forged in the 1930s, the largely immigrant, mainly Irish workforce was subject to poverty-level wages, brutal management practices and deadly conditions. Seven-day workweeks and split shifts spanning 14 hours were commonplace. Dozens of transit workers died on the job each year. With the union, workers won a means to wrest a living wage from the transit bosses, beat back punitive measures and assert some control over safety.
The establishment of the TWU as an industrial union was the culmination of many decades of bitter struggle. Beginning with organizing drives by the Knights of Labor at the end of the 19th century, trolley, bus and subway strikes pitted workers against the owners of the private lines that evolved into the current municipal system. Strikers risked their lives in pitched street battles with cops, company agents and National Guardsmen.
Organized by Mike Quill as well as other Communist Party (CP) supporters and Irish Republicans, the TWU emerged amid the outpouring of class militancy across the country that would give rise to the CIO. Erupting in the period of the Great Depression, this militancy reflected a broader social ferment out of which a workers party could have taken root. But the very leaders of the new industrial union movement, not least the CP Stalinists, crippled it through their support to Roosevelt’s Democratic Party and its “New Deal coalition.”
Quill himself was repeatedly elected to the New York City Council as a part of the New Deal coalition. He continued his political service to the ruling class in the post-World War II Cold War against the Soviet Union, breaking with the CP and launching an anti-Communist purge of the TWU. Throughout Quill’s career, he worked in cahoots with the city’s Democratic Party machine. It is no accident that the first citywide TWU strike coincided with the inauguration of liberal Republican mayor John Lindsay in 1966.
On the eve of the strike, Quill ripped up an anti-strike court order. He is especially known for going to jail rather than calling off the strike, proclaiming, “The judge can drop dead in his black robes.” The union returned to work only on the condition that there would be no reprisals, forcing the government to revoke its threats to fire strikers under the Condon-Wadlin Act. Soon after, the law was repealed. However, Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller announced that he was “determined that this should never happen again,” and in 1967 the Taylor Law was enacted, substituting massive fines of union members and the union itself for mass firings as penalties for striking.
Backed by the rest of labor, strike action by transit workers, teachers, sanitation or other public workers could render the Taylor Law a dead letter. In the course of such a struggle, the unions would need to draw behind them the ghetto and barrio poor, who suffer disproportionately from the service cuts that accompany the attacks on public workers. Mobilizing the power of labor to champion the interests of the oppressed would also strike a blow against the racial and ethnic hostilities whipped up by the rulers to divide and weaken working people.
The Sellout of the 2005 Strike
The December 2005 strike was reluctantly called by the Toussaint leadership, which was caught between an intransigent MTA on the one side and a restive membership on the other. Unfolding at the height of the holiday shopping season, the walkout stunned the arrogant capitalist rulers and drew immediate blowback from the government. As Democratic state attorney general Eliot Spitzer moved to issue a series of Taylor Law injunctions, a chorus of bourgeois politicians and their media mouthpieces railed against the strikers. Billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg called strike leaders “thuggish” in a clear attempt to stir up racist animosity against Local 100, whose membership is heavily black and immigrant, and its leader Toussaint, who was born in Trinidad.
On the picket lines, transit workers were pumped up, solid and determined. Other city workers with expired union contracts intently followed the strike. The shutdown of transit drew support from working people across the city and beyond at a time when U.S. imperialism was waist deep in its occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and outrage at the racist abandonment of black people after Hurricane Katrina was still simmering. Pickets were cheered in poor and working-class areas near maintenance barns and bus depots. As revolutionary Marxist leader V.I. Lenin commented a century ago, whereas liberals “tell the workers: ‘You are strong when you have the sympathy of “society”,’ the Marxist tells the workers something different, namely: ‘You have the sympathy of “society” when you are strong’” (“Economic and Political Strikes,” May 1912).
Strike headquarters should have dispatched flying pickets to shut down the Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North, New Jersey Transit and PATH commuter lines, cutting off public transport in and out of Manhattan. That did not happen. By the second day of the strike, the Local 100 leadership was under mounting pressure not only from the class enemy but also from numerous labor officials to throw in the towel. The city union tops let Local 100 hang out to dry, refusing even to mouth support for the strike, while the scabherders of the TWU International told strikers to return to work.
By issuing anti-strike injunctions and fines, the courts provided an object lesson in their role as part of the repressive capitalist state apparatus, together with the cops and prisons. Even as it was feeling the pressure from the capitalist state agencies, the Local 100 bureaucracy remained firmly committed to its class-collaborationist strategy. For the umpteenth time, it trotted out Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president Pat Lynch as the union’s “ally,” reinforcing the suicidal notion that the cops, whose job is to break strikes and terrorize the ghettos, are fellow workers. Local 100 officials went on to endorse Democrat Spitzer, the single person most responsible for bringing the hammer down on the TWU, in his gubernatorial bid the following year.
After barely 60 hours, the TWU leadership folded the strike with no real gains to show for it. The sellout encouraged Spitzer and the courts to slam individual strikers and Local 100 with heavy fines. The Toussaint leadership only complained about the “excessive” character of the state’s vendetta against the unions. A substandard contract was eventually forced on transit workers through a nearly year-long arbitration process after they first voted it down. With the union in retreat, the automatic dues checkoff was punitively taken away by the courts in June 2007. It was restored 17 months later only after Toussaint agreed to sign a “no strike” pledge.
Ending the popular walkout as it was on the upswing had a corrosive effect on many workers, as the consciousness of labor’s power they acquired during the strike rapidly eroded. Moving from feeling strong on the picket lines to becoming increasingly cynical about the union, many drew the wrong lessons. Out of anger at Toussaint & Co., half the membership fell behind in their dues after the checkoff system was stopped. With one-third of the workforce still in arrears, the cohesiveness of the union has been torn and its financial resources diminished.
Across the country, the abolition of dues checkoff, along with “right to work” laws, is being wielded as a club against unions. When the capitalists and their state agencies take away dues checkoff, these efforts to bankrupt the unions must be combatted. But dues checkoff is actually a form of financial blackmail, leaving a union’s money in the hands of the bosses. The arrangement allows labor officials to evade the responsibility of facing the membership to collect dues. It also expresses the bureaucrats’ desire for harmony with the bosses, since making the companies the unions’ bankers undercuts the capacity to strike. Of course, the labor traitors are generally more interested in wasting the union war chest on electing capitalist politicians. Workers must fight for the unions to directly control dues collection.
For a Class-Struggle Perspective!
The lie of the partnership of labor and capital preached by the TWU bureaucrats finds expression in their patriotic salute to U.S. imperialism’s “national interests” and their enlisting the union to act as an adjunct to the cops in the reactionary “war on terror.” In every election, the labor officialdom mobilizes votes for the Democrats, sowing the vain hope that these representatives of capital will come to the unions’ aid. Then like clockwork, TWU leaders dispatch teams to go to Albany and Washington to beg for mercy.
With Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo slashing the pensions of state employees, John Samuelsen has hailed the fact that transit new-hires were kept from suffering the worst of the cuts as vindication of such lobbying efforts. But the deal brokered for future transit workers is a concession by the union that further fragments an increasingly divided workforce. While many municipal new-hires will have to work to age 63 to retire, new transit workers retain the right to retire at full pension at age 55 after 25 years of service. However, they will pay more and get less than current transit workers. Refusal to sell out “the unborn” (future hires) was one of the issues that sparked the 2005 strike. Now the bureaucracy is packaging its betrayal of the same workers as a victory.
The Samuelsen leadership has also acquiesced to the reintroduction of the racist union-busting “workfare” program first rolled out by the MTA in a deal cut with the union in the 1990s. The Work Experience Program (WEP) compels welfare recipients to do work normally done by TWU cleaners in exchange for their paltry government checks. Drafted into near slavery, the WEP workers are treated with racist contempt by the bosses. The TWU must fight to bring WEP workers into the union at full union pay, protections and rights. More broadly, the labor movement should fight for union control of hiring.
Class collaboration is the calling card of all wings of the TWU bureaucracy. Take, for example, Train Operators Chair and Executive Board member Steve Downs, who is supported by the fake-socialist outfit Solidarity. Downs was a founding member of the now defunct New Directions caucus, an instrument for promoting the careers of phony “militants” inside the union. Before helping propel Toussaint into office, for years New Directions brought court suits against their opponents in the union, treacherous actions that opened up the TWU to meddling and intervention by the bosses’ state. Continuing to do his part in chaining workers to the capitalist system, on March 30 Downs voted in favor of an executive board motion to endorse imperialist Commander-in-Chief Obama in the 2012 presidential race. We will not hold our breath waiting for Solidarity to chastise Downs for crossing the class line. In 2008, these reformists supported Cynthia McKinney, the presidential candidate of the small-time capitalist Green Party.
In a March 30 letter to Obama, Samuelsen pledges “to do everything we can to help you continue your vision for the future of our nation on all the pressing issues of our time,” including “economic justice for the 99 percent.” Obama is a Wall Street Democrat whose “vision” has meant engineering a bailout for the auto bosses that slashed workers’ wages, expanding domestic repression in the name of the “war on terror,” and raining devastation down on Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. Alarmed by Obama’s waning popularity, the Local 100 tops were in the vanguard of those union officials who threw support to the Occupy protests last year. The labor bureaucracy sees in Occupy’s populism a vehicle to rekindle enthusiasm for the Democrats in the November elections.
The global economic crisis that set the current union-busting assault on public workers in motion is the product of the anarchic capitalist system of production for profit. From transit workers clinging to their pensions to families trying to keep their homes, working people are being sacrificed to the vultures of finance capital.
There is a burning need for a working-class counteroffensive—including a fight for free, quality health care and education for all, for all pensions to be guaranteed by the government, for free mass transit and other vital services. A struggle by public workers to defend their hard-won gains and expand social services could mobilize broad support among working people and the poor. A determined, militant campaign to organize the masses of unorganized workers would go a long way to breathing new life into the unions. In waging such struggles, the unions will have to champion the fight for black freedom and the defense of foreign-born workers, demanding full citizenship rights for all immigrants.
To transform the unions into class-struggle battalions will require breaking the chains that tie them to the exploiters, above all the support to the Democratic Party. The key to unchaining the power of the working class is the building of a revolutionary workers party. Such a party would not only fight against the immediate ravages of capitalism but also would lead the struggle to expropriate the parasitic bourgeoisie through socialist revolution, establishing a workers government where those who labor rule.
Saturday, May 05, 2012
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Trayvon Martin Case: Black Oppression and Gun Laws in America-No to Gun Control! Down With Racist Vigilantism!
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 1001
27 April 2012
Trayvon Martin Case: Black Oppression and Gun Laws in America-No to Gun Control! Down With Racist Vigilantism!
On February 26, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was gunned down in cold blood by a racist vigilante in Sanford, Florida. For six weeks, state authorities allowed the killer, George Zimmerman, to walk the streets. Amid an outpouring of nationwide protest sparked by Martin’s parents’ desire merely to see Zimmerman forced to answer charges in court, he was finally indicted for second-degree murder on April 11 and jailed. With Zimmerman’s arraignment scheduled for May 8, he has been released on a $150,000 bond.
After Zimmerman’s arrest, the liberal bourgeois press breathed a collective sigh of relief, concerned that black people, for whom this country remains the same “American nightmare” described by Malcolm X nearly 50 years ago, weren’t buying the myth of a “post-racial America.” Black New York Times columnist Charles Blow, who has often compellingly described the racist workings of the criminal justice system, declared: “The wheels of justice are finally turning.... In this case, America seems to be finally getting it right because equal justice under the law is one of her greatest ideals” (“Justice for Trayvon,” 13 April).
There is no justice for the black masses in racist America! Like countless black men, women and children before him, Trayvon Martin was the victim of a capitalist system that was built on slavery and is maintained on a bedrock of black oppression. Since the beginning of the year, the list of black people killed by cops includes Ramarley Graham in the Bronx, Stephon Watts and Rekia Boyd in the Chicago area, and Dane Scott Jr. in Oklahoma. This time it was wannabe cop Zimmerman, rather than the police themselves, who targeted Trayvon and pulled the trigger. We can’t predict the outcome of Zimmerman’s trial—if one actually takes place. But until America’s capitalist rulers are swept away by proletarian socialist revolution, there will be no justice for Trayvon Martin nor for the multitudes of black and Latino youth, who on a daily basis are stalked by the cops, stopped, frisked, beaten and, if they survive the encounter, framed up and railroaded to prison hell.
It took some weeks before Trayvon’s killing was widely known. Then what followed was an outpouring of goodwill for the family and protests tying the killing to the racist victimization of black youth everywhere. His parents, Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton, made the rounds of news shows. Hip-hop/reggae artist Wyclef Jean composed a song for Trayvon. Hoodies were widely worn on campuses and even in churches to protest racist profiling. Sympathetic accounts were initially splashed on newspaper front pages across the country, some of which alluded to the routine cop terrorization of ghettoized youth.
But more recently, a vicious racist backlash has been gaining steam. Efforts to portray Trayvon Martin as a thug proliferated, starting with the release of school records showing that he had been temporarily suspended for having some marijuana residue in a baggie inside his book bag. The Web site of right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin posted a picture, falsely identified as Trayvon Martin, of a shirtless black teen with his boxers hanging out of his pants flipping the bird to the camera. Meanwhile, reactionary media mouthpiece Ann Coulter has denounced press coverage of calls for Zimmerman’s arrest as “a lynch mob.” Amid the media blitz equating black youth lifestyles with criminality, an eighth-grade teacher in Michigan was fired for encouraging students to plan a wear-a-hoodie-to-school day in honor of Martin and advocating they raise money for his family.
Gun Control Kills Blacks
Providing some high-toned fuel for the racist backlash was a Wall Street Journal (6 April) opinion piece, “The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin,” by black conservative Shelby Steele, who argued: “America has greatly evolved since the 1960s. There are no longer any respectable advocates of racial segregation.” His conclusion: “Blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites,” so why not “a movement against blacks who kill other blacks”? Bill Cosby chimed in by telling CNN that the debate over Trayvon Martin’s killing by a neighborhood watch volunteer should be focused on guns, not race.
These despicable comments by Cosby, who likes to lecture black people that they’re responsible for their own oppression, were echoed in one way or another by a cadre of liberal pundits and black Democratic Party politicians railing against the proliferation of guns. Liberals are especially trying to steer opposition to Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, under which Zimmerman claimed self-defense, into assaults on the Second Amendment right to bear arms. This view was expressed by labor bureaucrat George Gresham of SEIU 1199 in the “Union Matters” column in the Amsterdam News (12 April), in which he called to put on trial “Florida’s shoot-first ‘Stand Your Ground’ law and the dangerous prevalence of handguns in our nation.”
In “Trayvon Martin: Killed for Being Black in America” (WV No. 999, 30 March), we explained why as Marxists we oppose Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, “which, in removing retreat as a criterion for self-defense, sanctions vigilantism, including murder.” At the same time, we stressed that “the working class and the black population must zealously defend the Constitutional right to bear arms, a product of the Revolutionary War against British colonial rule.” Upholding the right to armed self-defense, Marxists oppose gun control laws, which are a means to enforce a monopoly of violence in the hands of the capitalist state. Gun control leaves guns in the hands of cops, criminals, vigilantes and Klansmen. Gun control kills, and it kills black people in particular.
In the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, the most democratic period for black people in America’s history, many recalcitrant Southern state governments tried to outlaw possession of firearms by blacks. In response, the federal Freedmen’s Bureau widely distributed circulars that read in part, “All men, without distinction of color, have the right to keep arms to defend their homes, families, or themselves.”
The Northern bourgeoisie, acting on its class interests, went on to make peace with the Southern planters, and blacks were forced into backbreaking labor on the land as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Following the end of Union Army occupation of the South during Reconstruction, naked white-supremacist rule was restored. Jim Crow segregation was enforced by police-state repression, supplemented by the extralegal terror of the Ku Klux Klan. As race-terror swept the South in the late 19th century, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells wrote:
“The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.
“The lesson this teaches and which every Afro American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”
— quoted in Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900 (Jacqueline J. Royster, ed. [1997])
Black self-defense has historically been met with frenzied state repression. The earliest 20th-century gun control laws were passed in states like South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi as a way to disarm blacks in the face of KKK terror.
An article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker (23 April) aptly points out, “In the nineteen-sixties, gun ownership as a constitutional right was less the agenda of the N.R.A. [National Rifle Association] than of black nationalists.” In 1965, the New York City Council passed a bill especially to keep Malcolm X from carrying a carbine for his protection; he was assassinated shortly afterward. In 1967, the California legislature banned the carrying of a loaded gun after a demonstration by the Black Panthers, who were legally carrying guns, at the state capitol in Sacramento. The Panthers had been patrolling the Oakland ghetto, where police terror was rampant.
The state’s ban was followed by gun control laws nationwide, especially after the ghetto upheavals that broke out following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968. As Lepore notes, gun control, “along with a great deal of subsequent law-and-order legislation, was intended to fight crime, control riots, and solve what was called, in the age of the Moynihan report, the ‘Negro problem.’ The regulations that are part of these laws—firearms restrictions, mandatory-sentencing guidelines, abolition of parole, and the ‘war on drugs’—are now generally understood to be responsible for the dramatic rise in the U.S. incarceration rate.”
“Stand Your Ground”: License to Kill
Florida’s Stand Your Ground law eliminated the historic requirement that in order to claim self-defense, a person facing deadly force must first try to remove himself, if feasible, before himself using such force. Passed in 2005 amid a campaign to “get tough on crime”—code for targeting black people—the law is an open invitation to just the kind of racist vigilante violence that killed Trayvon Martin.
To see the racist intent of Florida’s law, one need look no further than its authors. The law was drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing think tank founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, who was also a founder of the Heritage Foundation and, with the reactionary religious bigot Jerry Falwell, co-founder of the Moral Majority. ALEC has been the driving force behind the voter ID laws that are intended to overwhelmingly disenfranchise black people and the poor and has played a key role in expanding the burgeoning prison population, pioneering mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders and “three strikes” laws.
Over 20 state governments, centered on the states of the slaveholders’ Confederacy, have passed such laws, with bipartisan support. In doing so, they certainly did not have black self-defense in mind. A case in point occurred in 2005 in Georgia, a “Stand Your Ground” state. John McNeil, a black man, was rushed in front of his home by a white man who had been threatening his family with a knife. McNeil fired a warning shot but his assailant continued toward him. McNeil fired again and killed him. Initially, he was not charged in the killing. But prosecutors went after him a year later, and now McNeil is serving a life sentence.
In Florida and other states, possessing firearms is illegal for minors as well as for adults who have been convicted on drug charges or were, as youths, judged delinquent on such charges. Under racist U.S. “law and order,” these categories are overwhelmingly applicable to black people. Since he was under 18, Trayvon Martin had no legal right to be carrying a firearm, and thus no right to use one in self-defense. If he had been armed during his encounter with George Zimmerman, he might be alive today. But in this racist society, his survival may also have been a ticket to prison and possibly death row.
Material Roots of Black Oppression
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have seized on Trayvon Martin’s killing to trot out the call for a “new civil rights movement,” towing the reformist “socialists” in their slipstream. For decades, Jackson and Sharpton have promoted themselves as spokesmen against racist abuse and police attacks in order to douse the flames of struggle and divert anger among black people into Democratic Party electoral politics and illusions in the capitalist “justice” system. And this is precisely their intention in regard to protests over the Martin killing. Jackson declared at a press conference last month, “I would hope that movement would turn into Trayvon Martin voter-registration rallies.” Sharpton chimed in by telling a convention of his National Action Network on April 11, “We must make the justice system work. Otherwise the movement is for nothing.”
Singing the same tune are the reformists of the International Socialist Organization (ISO). In an article headlined “Building a New Movement for Racial Justice” (Socialist Worker online, 18 April), the ISO calls for organizing to demand “justice and accountability when African Americans are brutalized—or worse—by police.” The hard fact is that the police are “accountable” only to the capitalist ruling class that employs them to repress the working class, black people and other minorities through organized violence.
Sharpton, Jackson and others have likened Trayvon Martin’s killing to the 1955 lynching in Mississippi of 14-year-old Emmett Till for the offense of appearing to whistle at a white woman. The lynching became a catalyst for the civil rights upheavals that rocked the Jim Crow South and reverberated throughout the U.S. As we explain in depth in the article on page 6 of this issue, the heroic struggles to break the color bar were channeled by the liberal civil rights leadership into reliance on the capitalist courts and the Democratic Party. Legalized Jim Crow was dismantled, but this development did not—and could not—address the poverty, unemployment, rotten housing, segregated education and rampant cop terror that afflict the bulk of the black population. These conditions are materially rooted in the U.S. capitalist system, in which the mass of the black population is segregated at the bottom of society.
Black oppression will be smashed only when the capitalist profit system is overthrown by the multiracial working class and replaced with a planned, socialist economy, in which the productive wealth of society will be used to satisfy human needs. Opposing this revolutionary perspective, liberals and reformists reduce the struggle against racist violence and misery to simply combating racial prejudice and stereotypes—i.e., the ideological reflections of black oppression. Thus, at an April 11 panel discussion in Chicago with Jesse Jackson’s Operation Push and others, the ISO’s Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor declared: “The stereotypes about Black youth that are generated from officially sanctioned racial profiling and from the overrepresentation of young Black people in the criminal justice system because of racism and corruption among police and in the courts has [sic] created the conditions under which something like the murder of Trayvon Martin and the murder of so many others happened” (Socialist Worker online, 16 April).
Such liberal notions were refuted more than half a century ago by American Trotskyist Richard Fraser. In his 1953 lectures titled “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution” (printed in “In Memoriam: Richard S. Fraser,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3 [1990]), Fraser noted that for bourgeois moralists the source of the exploitation of labor was “the greed of the capitalist.” Karl Marx, he pointed out, proved that “it was not greed but property relations which make it possible for exploitation to exist.” He continued:
“When applied to the Negro question, the theory of morality means that the root of the problem of discrimination and white supremacy is prejudice. This is the reigning theory of American liberalism and is the means by which the capitalists throw the responsibility for the Jim Crow system upon the population as a whole. If people weren’t prejudiced there would be no Negro problem. This contention is fundamentally false.”
Fraser concluded: “Education against prejudice has its importance in the Negro struggle. But only the destruction of the economic and social foundation upon which prejudice is built will eliminate it. This will be accomplished only by the socialist revolution.” The Spartacist League is committed to forging the revolutionary workers party that is necessary to achieve this goal.
Workers Vanguard No. 1001
27 April 2012
Trayvon Martin Case: Black Oppression and Gun Laws in America-No to Gun Control! Down With Racist Vigilantism!
On February 26, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was gunned down in cold blood by a racist vigilante in Sanford, Florida. For six weeks, state authorities allowed the killer, George Zimmerman, to walk the streets. Amid an outpouring of nationwide protest sparked by Martin’s parents’ desire merely to see Zimmerman forced to answer charges in court, he was finally indicted for second-degree murder on April 11 and jailed. With Zimmerman’s arraignment scheduled for May 8, he has been released on a $150,000 bond.
After Zimmerman’s arrest, the liberal bourgeois press breathed a collective sigh of relief, concerned that black people, for whom this country remains the same “American nightmare” described by Malcolm X nearly 50 years ago, weren’t buying the myth of a “post-racial America.” Black New York Times columnist Charles Blow, who has often compellingly described the racist workings of the criminal justice system, declared: “The wheels of justice are finally turning.... In this case, America seems to be finally getting it right because equal justice under the law is one of her greatest ideals” (“Justice for Trayvon,” 13 April).
There is no justice for the black masses in racist America! Like countless black men, women and children before him, Trayvon Martin was the victim of a capitalist system that was built on slavery and is maintained on a bedrock of black oppression. Since the beginning of the year, the list of black people killed by cops includes Ramarley Graham in the Bronx, Stephon Watts and Rekia Boyd in the Chicago area, and Dane Scott Jr. in Oklahoma. This time it was wannabe cop Zimmerman, rather than the police themselves, who targeted Trayvon and pulled the trigger. We can’t predict the outcome of Zimmerman’s trial—if one actually takes place. But until America’s capitalist rulers are swept away by proletarian socialist revolution, there will be no justice for Trayvon Martin nor for the multitudes of black and Latino youth, who on a daily basis are stalked by the cops, stopped, frisked, beaten and, if they survive the encounter, framed up and railroaded to prison hell.
It took some weeks before Trayvon’s killing was widely known. Then what followed was an outpouring of goodwill for the family and protests tying the killing to the racist victimization of black youth everywhere. His parents, Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton, made the rounds of news shows. Hip-hop/reggae artist Wyclef Jean composed a song for Trayvon. Hoodies were widely worn on campuses and even in churches to protest racist profiling. Sympathetic accounts were initially splashed on newspaper front pages across the country, some of which alluded to the routine cop terrorization of ghettoized youth.
But more recently, a vicious racist backlash has been gaining steam. Efforts to portray Trayvon Martin as a thug proliferated, starting with the release of school records showing that he had been temporarily suspended for having some marijuana residue in a baggie inside his book bag. The Web site of right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin posted a picture, falsely identified as Trayvon Martin, of a shirtless black teen with his boxers hanging out of his pants flipping the bird to the camera. Meanwhile, reactionary media mouthpiece Ann Coulter has denounced press coverage of calls for Zimmerman’s arrest as “a lynch mob.” Amid the media blitz equating black youth lifestyles with criminality, an eighth-grade teacher in Michigan was fired for encouraging students to plan a wear-a-hoodie-to-school day in honor of Martin and advocating they raise money for his family.
Gun Control Kills Blacks
Providing some high-toned fuel for the racist backlash was a Wall Street Journal (6 April) opinion piece, “The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin,” by black conservative Shelby Steele, who argued: “America has greatly evolved since the 1960s. There are no longer any respectable advocates of racial segregation.” His conclusion: “Blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites,” so why not “a movement against blacks who kill other blacks”? Bill Cosby chimed in by telling CNN that the debate over Trayvon Martin’s killing by a neighborhood watch volunteer should be focused on guns, not race.
These despicable comments by Cosby, who likes to lecture black people that they’re responsible for their own oppression, were echoed in one way or another by a cadre of liberal pundits and black Democratic Party politicians railing against the proliferation of guns. Liberals are especially trying to steer opposition to Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, under which Zimmerman claimed self-defense, into assaults on the Second Amendment right to bear arms. This view was expressed by labor bureaucrat George Gresham of SEIU 1199 in the “Union Matters” column in the Amsterdam News (12 April), in which he called to put on trial “Florida’s shoot-first ‘Stand Your Ground’ law and the dangerous prevalence of handguns in our nation.”
In “Trayvon Martin: Killed for Being Black in America” (WV No. 999, 30 March), we explained why as Marxists we oppose Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, “which, in removing retreat as a criterion for self-defense, sanctions vigilantism, including murder.” At the same time, we stressed that “the working class and the black population must zealously defend the Constitutional right to bear arms, a product of the Revolutionary War against British colonial rule.” Upholding the right to armed self-defense, Marxists oppose gun control laws, which are a means to enforce a monopoly of violence in the hands of the capitalist state. Gun control leaves guns in the hands of cops, criminals, vigilantes and Klansmen. Gun control kills, and it kills black people in particular.
In the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, the most democratic period for black people in America’s history, many recalcitrant Southern state governments tried to outlaw possession of firearms by blacks. In response, the federal Freedmen’s Bureau widely distributed circulars that read in part, “All men, without distinction of color, have the right to keep arms to defend their homes, families, or themselves.”
The Northern bourgeoisie, acting on its class interests, went on to make peace with the Southern planters, and blacks were forced into backbreaking labor on the land as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Following the end of Union Army occupation of the South during Reconstruction, naked white-supremacist rule was restored. Jim Crow segregation was enforced by police-state repression, supplemented by the extralegal terror of the Ku Klux Klan. As race-terror swept the South in the late 19th century, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells wrote:
“The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.
“The lesson this teaches and which every Afro American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”
— quoted in Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900 (Jacqueline J. Royster, ed. [1997])
Black self-defense has historically been met with frenzied state repression. The earliest 20th-century gun control laws were passed in states like South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi as a way to disarm blacks in the face of KKK terror.
An article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker (23 April) aptly points out, “In the nineteen-sixties, gun ownership as a constitutional right was less the agenda of the N.R.A. [National Rifle Association] than of black nationalists.” In 1965, the New York City Council passed a bill especially to keep Malcolm X from carrying a carbine for his protection; he was assassinated shortly afterward. In 1967, the California legislature banned the carrying of a loaded gun after a demonstration by the Black Panthers, who were legally carrying guns, at the state capitol in Sacramento. The Panthers had been patrolling the Oakland ghetto, where police terror was rampant.
The state’s ban was followed by gun control laws nationwide, especially after the ghetto upheavals that broke out following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968. As Lepore notes, gun control, “along with a great deal of subsequent law-and-order legislation, was intended to fight crime, control riots, and solve what was called, in the age of the Moynihan report, the ‘Negro problem.’ The regulations that are part of these laws—firearms restrictions, mandatory-sentencing guidelines, abolition of parole, and the ‘war on drugs’—are now generally understood to be responsible for the dramatic rise in the U.S. incarceration rate.”
“Stand Your Ground”: License to Kill
Florida’s Stand Your Ground law eliminated the historic requirement that in order to claim self-defense, a person facing deadly force must first try to remove himself, if feasible, before himself using such force. Passed in 2005 amid a campaign to “get tough on crime”—code for targeting black people—the law is an open invitation to just the kind of racist vigilante violence that killed Trayvon Martin.
To see the racist intent of Florida’s law, one need look no further than its authors. The law was drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing think tank founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, who was also a founder of the Heritage Foundation and, with the reactionary religious bigot Jerry Falwell, co-founder of the Moral Majority. ALEC has been the driving force behind the voter ID laws that are intended to overwhelmingly disenfranchise black people and the poor and has played a key role in expanding the burgeoning prison population, pioneering mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders and “three strikes” laws.
Over 20 state governments, centered on the states of the slaveholders’ Confederacy, have passed such laws, with bipartisan support. In doing so, they certainly did not have black self-defense in mind. A case in point occurred in 2005 in Georgia, a “Stand Your Ground” state. John McNeil, a black man, was rushed in front of his home by a white man who had been threatening his family with a knife. McNeil fired a warning shot but his assailant continued toward him. McNeil fired again and killed him. Initially, he was not charged in the killing. But prosecutors went after him a year later, and now McNeil is serving a life sentence.
In Florida and other states, possessing firearms is illegal for minors as well as for adults who have been convicted on drug charges or were, as youths, judged delinquent on such charges. Under racist U.S. “law and order,” these categories are overwhelmingly applicable to black people. Since he was under 18, Trayvon Martin had no legal right to be carrying a firearm, and thus no right to use one in self-defense. If he had been armed during his encounter with George Zimmerman, he might be alive today. But in this racist society, his survival may also have been a ticket to prison and possibly death row.
Material Roots of Black Oppression
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have seized on Trayvon Martin’s killing to trot out the call for a “new civil rights movement,” towing the reformist “socialists” in their slipstream. For decades, Jackson and Sharpton have promoted themselves as spokesmen against racist abuse and police attacks in order to douse the flames of struggle and divert anger among black people into Democratic Party electoral politics and illusions in the capitalist “justice” system. And this is precisely their intention in regard to protests over the Martin killing. Jackson declared at a press conference last month, “I would hope that movement would turn into Trayvon Martin voter-registration rallies.” Sharpton chimed in by telling a convention of his National Action Network on April 11, “We must make the justice system work. Otherwise the movement is for nothing.”
Singing the same tune are the reformists of the International Socialist Organization (ISO). In an article headlined “Building a New Movement for Racial Justice” (Socialist Worker online, 18 April), the ISO calls for organizing to demand “justice and accountability when African Americans are brutalized—or worse—by police.” The hard fact is that the police are “accountable” only to the capitalist ruling class that employs them to repress the working class, black people and other minorities through organized violence.
Sharpton, Jackson and others have likened Trayvon Martin’s killing to the 1955 lynching in Mississippi of 14-year-old Emmett Till for the offense of appearing to whistle at a white woman. The lynching became a catalyst for the civil rights upheavals that rocked the Jim Crow South and reverberated throughout the U.S. As we explain in depth in the article on page 6 of this issue, the heroic struggles to break the color bar were channeled by the liberal civil rights leadership into reliance on the capitalist courts and the Democratic Party. Legalized Jim Crow was dismantled, but this development did not—and could not—address the poverty, unemployment, rotten housing, segregated education and rampant cop terror that afflict the bulk of the black population. These conditions are materially rooted in the U.S. capitalist system, in which the mass of the black population is segregated at the bottom of society.
Black oppression will be smashed only when the capitalist profit system is overthrown by the multiracial working class and replaced with a planned, socialist economy, in which the productive wealth of society will be used to satisfy human needs. Opposing this revolutionary perspective, liberals and reformists reduce the struggle against racist violence and misery to simply combating racial prejudice and stereotypes—i.e., the ideological reflections of black oppression. Thus, at an April 11 panel discussion in Chicago with Jesse Jackson’s Operation Push and others, the ISO’s Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor declared: “The stereotypes about Black youth that are generated from officially sanctioned racial profiling and from the overrepresentation of young Black people in the criminal justice system because of racism and corruption among police and in the courts has [sic] created the conditions under which something like the murder of Trayvon Martin and the murder of so many others happened” (Socialist Worker online, 16 April).
Such liberal notions were refuted more than half a century ago by American Trotskyist Richard Fraser. In his 1953 lectures titled “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution” (printed in “In Memoriam: Richard S. Fraser,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3 [1990]), Fraser noted that for bourgeois moralists the source of the exploitation of labor was “the greed of the capitalist.” Karl Marx, he pointed out, proved that “it was not greed but property relations which make it possible for exploitation to exist.” He continued:
“When applied to the Negro question, the theory of morality means that the root of the problem of discrimination and white supremacy is prejudice. This is the reigning theory of American liberalism and is the means by which the capitalists throw the responsibility for the Jim Crow system upon the population as a whole. If people weren’t prejudiced there would be no Negro problem. This contention is fundamentally false.”
Fraser concluded: “Education against prejudice has its importance in the Negro struggle. But only the destruction of the economic and social foundation upon which prejudice is built will eliminate it. This will be accomplished only by the socialist revolution.” The Spartacist League is committed to forging the revolutionary workers party that is necessary to achieve this goal.
On The 100th Anniversary Of The 1912 Presidential Election- From The Pen Of Early American Socialist Leader Eugene V. Debs-The Federal Government And The Pullman Strike- A Reply To Grover Cleveland (1904)
Click on the headline to link to the Eugene V. Debs Marxist Internet Archive website article listed in the headline..
Markin comment on this From The Pen Of Eugene V. Debs series:
The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature of the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed “root and branch” and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Debs was above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. For details of why that was so and a strong biographic sketch it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself and moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests” of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state. For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the “hippie” experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day. The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high-level expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist Party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised in and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, wild boys and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Debs had a life-long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialist movement have shown, sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinist argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal pay his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, nevertheless deserves a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
Markin comment on this From The Pen Of Eugene V. Debs series:
The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature of the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed “root and branch” and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Debs was above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. For details of why that was so and a strong biographic sketch it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself and moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests” of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state. For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the “hippie” experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day. The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high-level expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist Party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised in and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, wild boys and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Debs had a life-long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialist movement have shown, sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinist argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal pay his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, nevertheless deserves a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
On The 100th Anniversary Of The 1912 Presidential Election- From The Pen Of Early American Socialist Leader Eugene V. Debs- The Socialist Party And The Working Class (1904)
Click on the headline to link to the Eugene V. Debs Marxist Internet Archive website article listed in the headline..
Markin comment on this From The Pen Of Eugene V. Debs series:
The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature of the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed “root and branch” and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Debs was above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. For details of why that was so and a strong biographic sketch it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself and moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests” of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state. For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the “hippie” experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day. The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high-level expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist Party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised in and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, wild boys and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Debs had a life-long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialist movement have shown, sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinist argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal pay his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, nevertheless deserves a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
Markin comment on this From The Pen Of Eugene V. Debs series:
The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature of the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed “root and branch” and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Debs was above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. For details of why that was so and a strong biographic sketch it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself and moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests” of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state. For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the “hippie” experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day. The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high-level expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist Party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised in and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, wild boys and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Debs had a life-long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialist movement have shown, sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinist argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal pay his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, nevertheless deserves a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
On The 100th Anniversary Of The 1912 Presidential Election- From The Pen Of Early American Socialist Leader Eugene V. Debs- The Western (U.S.) Labor Movement (1902)
Click on the headline to link to the Eugene V. Debs Marxist Internet Archive website article listed in the headline..
Markin comment on this From The Pen Of Eugene V. Debs series:
The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature of the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed “root and branch” and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Debs was above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. For details of why that was so and a strong biographic sketch it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself and moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests” of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state. For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the “hippie” experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day. The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high-level expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist Party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised in and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, wild boys and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Debs had a life-long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialist movement have shown, sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinist argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal pay his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, nevertheless deserves a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
Markin comment on this From The Pen Of Eugene V. Debs series:
The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature of the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed “root and branch” and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Debs was above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. For details of why that was so and a strong biographic sketch it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself and moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests” of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state. For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the “hippie” experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day. The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high-level expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist Party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised in and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, wild boys and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Debs had a life-long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialist movement have shown, sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinist argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal pay his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, nevertheless deserves a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
Out In The Be-Bop Night- First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage, Then Comes X With a Baby Carriage- In Honor Of The 50th Anniversary Of "The Pill"-An Encore
Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964 commen:
A couple of years ago , as many of you may have been be aware at the time , marked the 50th anniversary of the introduction of “The Pill.” (If you need any further explanation for that term then perhaps you should skip this little piece.) The Pill that heralded in the s-xual (just in case mother, the very young, or the clergy are reading this, although the young are hip to this thing already) revolution of the 1960s to the joy (and relief) of many, the yawns of a few, and the fervent scorn of those with traditional religious or philosophical scruples on the matter of human reproduction. In short though, s-x (ditto above) now no longer had to be absolutely tied in with procreation, and with fear and loathing.
That said, I am trying to offend no one's sensibilities here, although I make no apologies for being glad, glad as hell, for the Pill and would encourage as many scientific breakthroughs as possible to make it even safer and easier. This little screed rather is more, since we are children of the 1960's and came of age, most of us anyway, by 1960, about our woeful ignorance of sex, the actual acts of sex and their consequences. (There I said it, praise be. Sex. Sensitive souls can take shelter elsewhere.)
Someone recently told me a story that placed this ignorance and confusion notion in stark relief, and hit a nerve that required me to make, no, impelled me to make this commentary. On a trip, some kind of group social outing up into New Hampshire, a state that has a younger marriage eligibility age than Massachusetts, a young teenage couple, deeply in love, in love its seems the old-fashioned 1940s movies way (you know Bogie and Bacall, Hepburn and Tracey, etc.) the way it was described to me, but probably too young for marriage anyway, decided on a whim to get married.
Off they go to some Podunk town up there seeking a Justice of the Peace. They find him in some dead of night situation and fill in the paperwork. Before the blessed ceremony the "has been through it all before" JP asked whether the young couple were "expecting," you know, in the family way. Here is the kicker though, their reply, "Expecting what?" On reflection, once they got the gist of what the JP meant, they, innocently I am sure, also said, "we don't know about that stuff." The laughing, but wise, old JP told the kids to come back in a year, or so, and he would be more than happy to marry them.
Ya, that's a cute story and I still chuckle over it but, my friends, I will argue that you and I could tell such stories as well. Well, maybe not about getting all the way to the altar clueless but nevertheless filled with every kind of misinformation, every kind of fear tactic, and every kind of prohibition. All while our hormones were raging, raging to the point of distraction, out of control.
I will make my own public disclosure here. Did I learn about sex from my parents giving me careful information about the birds and the bees, seeing that they had plenty of experience having given birth to three sons? No. Did I learn about the do's and don't of sex from the Roman Catholic Church of my youth? Hell no, not about the do part anyway. No, I learned about it "on the streets" (and in the junior high and high school gym locker rooms) just like most of you. And later, much later and more interestingly, from some women friends (and the Karma Sutra). Whoa. Let's just put it this way, I many times thanked a disapproving god for the Pill back in those young and careless days. Ya, that “The Pill.”
Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964 commen:
A couple of years ago , as many of you may have been be aware at the time , marked the 50th anniversary of the introduction of “The Pill.” (If you need any further explanation for that term then perhaps you should skip this little piece.) The Pill that heralded in the s-xual (just in case mother, the very young, or the clergy are reading this, although the young are hip to this thing already) revolution of the 1960s to the joy (and relief) of many, the yawns of a few, and the fervent scorn of those with traditional religious or philosophical scruples on the matter of human reproduction. In short though, s-x (ditto above) now no longer had to be absolutely tied in with procreation, and with fear and loathing.
That said, I am trying to offend no one's sensibilities here, although I make no apologies for being glad, glad as hell, for the Pill and would encourage as many scientific breakthroughs as possible to make it even safer and easier. This little screed rather is more, since we are children of the 1960's and came of age, most of us anyway, by 1960, about our woeful ignorance of sex, the actual acts of sex and their consequences. (There I said it, praise be. Sex. Sensitive souls can take shelter elsewhere.)
Someone recently told me a story that placed this ignorance and confusion notion in stark relief, and hit a nerve that required me to make, no, impelled me to make this commentary. On a trip, some kind of group social outing up into New Hampshire, a state that has a younger marriage eligibility age than Massachusetts, a young teenage couple, deeply in love, in love its seems the old-fashioned 1940s movies way (you know Bogie and Bacall, Hepburn and Tracey, etc.) the way it was described to me, but probably too young for marriage anyway, decided on a whim to get married.
Off they go to some Podunk town up there seeking a Justice of the Peace. They find him in some dead of night situation and fill in the paperwork. Before the blessed ceremony the "has been through it all before" JP asked whether the young couple were "expecting," you know, in the family way. Here is the kicker though, their reply, "Expecting what?" On reflection, once they got the gist of what the JP meant, they, innocently I am sure, also said, "we don't know about that stuff." The laughing, but wise, old JP told the kids to come back in a year, or so, and he would be more than happy to marry them.
Ya, that's a cute story and I still chuckle over it but, my friends, I will argue that you and I could tell such stories as well. Well, maybe not about getting all the way to the altar clueless but nevertheless filled with every kind of misinformation, every kind of fear tactic, and every kind of prohibition. All while our hormones were raging, raging to the point of distraction, out of control.
I will make my own public disclosure here. Did I learn about sex from my parents giving me careful information about the birds and the bees, seeing that they had plenty of experience having given birth to three sons? No. Did I learn about the do's and don't of sex from the Roman Catholic Church of my youth? Hell no, not about the do part anyway. No, I learned about it "on the streets" (and in the junior high and high school gym locker rooms) just like most of you. And later, much later and more interestingly, from some women friends (and the Karma Sutra). Whoa. Let's just put it this way, I many times thanked a disapproving god for the Pill back in those young and careless days. Ya, that “The Pill.”
A couple of years ago , as many of you may have been be aware at the time , marked the 50th anniversary of the introduction of “The Pill.” (If you need any further explanation for that term then perhaps you should skip this little piece.) The Pill that heralded in the s-xual (just in case mother, the very young, or the clergy are reading this, although the young are hip to this thing already) revolution of the 1960s to the joy (and relief) of many, the yawns of a few, and the fervent scorn of those with traditional religious or philosophical scruples on the matter of human reproduction. In short though, s-x (ditto above) now no longer had to be absolutely tied in with procreation, and with fear and loathing.
That said, I am trying to offend no one's sensibilities here, although I make no apologies for being glad, glad as hell, for the Pill and would encourage as many scientific breakthroughs as possible to make it even safer and easier. This little screed rather is more, since we are children of the 1960's and came of age, most of us anyway, by 1960, about our woeful ignorance of sex, the actual acts of sex and their consequences. (There I said it, praise be. Sex. Sensitive souls can take shelter elsewhere.)
Someone recently told me a story that placed this ignorance and confusion notion in stark relief, and hit a nerve that required me to make, no, impelled me to make this commentary. On a trip, some kind of group social outing up into New Hampshire, a state that has a younger marriage eligibility age than Massachusetts, a young teenage couple, deeply in love, in love its seems the old-fashioned 1940s movies way (you know Bogie and Bacall, Hepburn and Tracey, etc.) the way it was described to me, but probably too young for marriage anyway, decided on a whim to get married.
Off they go to some Podunk town up there seeking a Justice of the Peace. They find him in some dead of night situation and fill in the paperwork. Before the blessed ceremony the "has been through it all before" JP asked whether the young couple were "expecting," you know, in the family way. Here is the kicker though, their reply, "Expecting what?" On reflection, once they got the gist of what the JP meant, they, innocently I am sure, also said, "we don't know about that stuff." The laughing, but wise, old JP told the kids to come back in a year, or so, and he would be more than happy to marry them.
Ya, that's a cute story and I still chuckle over it but, my friends, I will argue that you and I could tell such stories as well. Well, maybe not about getting all the way to the altar clueless but nevertheless filled with every kind of misinformation, every kind of fear tactic, and every kind of prohibition. All while our hormones were raging, raging to the point of distraction, out of control.
I will make my own public disclosure here. Did I learn about sex from my parents giving me careful information about the birds and the bees, seeing that they had plenty of experience having given birth to three sons? No. Did I learn about the do's and don't of sex from the Roman Catholic Church of my youth? Hell no, not about the do part anyway. No, I learned about it "on the streets" (and in the junior high and high school gym locker rooms) just like most of you. And later, much later and more interestingly, from some women friends (and the Karma Sutra). Whoa. Let's just put it this way, I many times thanked a disapproving god for the Pill back in those young and careless days. Ya, that “The Pill.”
Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964 commen:
A couple of years ago , as many of you may have been be aware at the time , marked the 50th anniversary of the introduction of “The Pill.” (If you need any further explanation for that term then perhaps you should skip this little piece.) The Pill that heralded in the s-xual (just in case mother, the very young, or the clergy are reading this, although the young are hip to this thing already) revolution of the 1960s to the joy (and relief) of many, the yawns of a few, and the fervent scorn of those with traditional religious or philosophical scruples on the matter of human reproduction. In short though, s-x (ditto above) now no longer had to be absolutely tied in with procreation, and with fear and loathing.
That said, I am trying to offend no one's sensibilities here, although I make no apologies for being glad, glad as hell, for the Pill and would encourage as many scientific breakthroughs as possible to make it even safer and easier. This little screed rather is more, since we are children of the 1960's and came of age, most of us anyway, by 1960, about our woeful ignorance of sex, the actual acts of sex and their consequences. (There I said it, praise be. Sex. Sensitive souls can take shelter elsewhere.)
Someone recently told me a story that placed this ignorance and confusion notion in stark relief, and hit a nerve that required me to make, no, impelled me to make this commentary. On a trip, some kind of group social outing up into New Hampshire, a state that has a younger marriage eligibility age than Massachusetts, a young teenage couple, deeply in love, in love its seems the old-fashioned 1940s movies way (you know Bogie and Bacall, Hepburn and Tracey, etc.) the way it was described to me, but probably too young for marriage anyway, decided on a whim to get married.
Off they go to some Podunk town up there seeking a Justice of the Peace. They find him in some dead of night situation and fill in the paperwork. Before the blessed ceremony the "has been through it all before" JP asked whether the young couple were "expecting," you know, in the family way. Here is the kicker though, their reply, "Expecting what?" On reflection, once they got the gist of what the JP meant, they, innocently I am sure, also said, "we don't know about that stuff." The laughing, but wise, old JP told the kids to come back in a year, or so, and he would be more than happy to marry them.
Ya, that's a cute story and I still chuckle over it but, my friends, I will argue that you and I could tell such stories as well. Well, maybe not about getting all the way to the altar clueless but nevertheless filled with every kind of misinformation, every kind of fear tactic, and every kind of prohibition. All while our hormones were raging, raging to the point of distraction, out of control.
I will make my own public disclosure here. Did I learn about sex from my parents giving me careful information about the birds and the bees, seeing that they had plenty of experience having given birth to three sons? No. Did I learn about the do's and don't of sex from the Roman Catholic Church of my youth? Hell no, not about the do part anyway. No, I learned about it "on the streets" (and in the junior high and high school gym locker rooms) just like most of you. And later, much later and more interestingly, from some women friends (and the Karma Sutra). Whoa. Let's just put it this way, I many times thanked a disapproving god for the Pill back in those young and careless days. Ya, that “The Pill.”
Ancient dreams, dreamed-The Long Road Home-Redux- Magical Realism 101
A bridge too far, an un-arched, un-steeled (or is it un-ironed), unsparing (no question on that one), unnerved bridge too far. A divided heart metaphor, perhaps, an overused metaphor, maybe, but sometimes that dividing line, dividing lines really, represented by a childhood bridge’s span is the only way to describe what is what. And more importantly is the only way to describe physically, hero of this saga, although hero is maybe just too large a word evoking greek gods, hubris and serious testing of fates, the bicycle boy’s dilemma.
One speed bicycle boy, handed-down Schwinn diamond blue red bicycle boy with pedal foot-slammed brakes to guide against crashes, stray dogs, swerving autos making diagonal rather than right hand- cornered turns and absent-minded pedestrians carelessly crossing in designated crosswalks just when he gathered speed, one speed, pushed on toward that divided bridge and the latest version of his the point of no return test.
Wearing a Fruit of The Loom tee-shirt, white, with a trace outline of wetness showing for all the world, all the looking world, to see up under arms. Hell it is summer and humid already, maybe a dog day July or probably August, they, the days and months, all rolling together and he has made this trip before in such weathers, in fact all weathers except hard northern winter gale snow squalls. And dungarees, faded from hundred times washed hand-me-down whirlpool washing machine use of older brothers in hardscrabble no work for father, or not much work, and mother wish working her stale life away in some franchise donut shop, serving coffee and off the arm to working class customers going to and fro working spots and leaving, leaving working class-sized tips, meaning not much, not much at all. Except wish dreams, and work damns.
Dungarees, faded or not, rolled up against dog bites, no question anymore since last summer, he Schwinn bicycle boy, had actually been bitten once by a stray alert dog who came out of some foggy mist seaside house without warning and without provocation, and rolled up guarded against geared meshes of cloth and metal, but you knew that, or you knew that your mother warned you against such a fate if you left the world unrolled, oh well, ya ma dismissal, at least one hundred times.
Yak, now bicycle boy, we no longer need to identify him as Schwinn, or wearing white tee-shirts or faded dungarees bicycle boy, is up to speed, safely past dog house and moving along friendlier shore roads this riding across seaside town day to get that eternally thankful breeze blowing off Adamsville Bay. Now churning through endless tar pit heated, sweated, beads of sweat coming off the manhole cover to match, did I say match, no to trump, his own heat and underarm circle wetness, no handkerchief, damn of all days to forget a handkerchief, streets. No railroad man’s soiled sweated, stink handkerchief, red, solid red, found in some forgotten railroad track siding when he made another leap to break out of the hard-edged 1950s be-bop night and day dream of freedom, and track smoke.
Street names passing, all the parts of ships, taffrails, captains walks, quarterdecks, sextant-blasted wheelhouses, galleys, even the planks, a special place where treasure , and betrayal, fight it out for tribal loyalties or some stick, stick signifying simply youth, not stick-in-the-mudness, not yet anyway, maiden’s blushed kiss, stolen treasure worthy of more than railroad handkerchief, red, solid red, wipe. Bicycle boy laughed to himself as he rode, thinking of backlogged thoughts in sunnier (and less humid) times. And some stray blushed kiss that would not let him be, would disturb his sleep on more than one night.
Street names, all the seven seas, atlantic, pacific, indian, artic, coral, china, ah he forgot the order, not a good sign, must be the humid-numbing weather, for a boy who could make a joke, and make stick (remember stick signifying youth only) maidens unashamed of blushed kisses laugh at the thought, of knowing enough geography and knowing exactly where to find the place on the map to call himself the Prince of Lvov once. And know too that he wished to “discover” all those seas, and their names not just from maps, if only, if only he could get out of the stinking projects. The stinking born in projects from which he at one time, although not now course did believe could ever be escaped from (and he later realized that maybe, just maybe he couldn’t). And funny he had gotten out or better had moved out, or his family had with him in tow, and still he was wishing about those seas even if he had forgotten the order of the names, and half-forgotten prince lvov kisses that had turned to ashes. And he still wished about getting out of that stinking project, ya, getting the stink blown off his back from that low-rent scene.
Street names, all the fishes of the seas, tetra, halibut, cod, of course, grown and harvested just some miles, not bicycle miles but automobile miles, a few miles down the road, mackerel, holy or not, he laughed to himself at that, scrod, pickled herring, jesus, who could eat that, oil-soaked sardines, ditto, red scrupper, macko some shark, infinite sea oceans names to go with seven seas and adventures, hardly wait to get out of town adventures but just now needing, desperately needing to get back to back born places, to get some familiar ground under his feet, to take the curse off that stink that has clouded his mind, the one to match the low-tide mephitic stinks down by the shore that he was then passing. And fetid swollen river swamps and reedy mud-caked straw wind marshes breezing that life-saving sea breeze too.
Street names, all the fauna of the sea, seaweed, algae, sea salad, sea cucumbers, see sea, all mixed up, all washed rumble tumble to shore in rushing torrid, churned-up waves crashing aimlessly but relentlessly to shore. But not today, today no crashing waves to help along the slight lip sweat-forming wheels churning boy, a displaced boy(no need to speak of bicycles anymore either) except for that tepid splashed flat pancake of a wave that also heads aimlessly to the waiting shore million year stones waiting to turn to sand , to wash them clean a while. He laughed at that too, washed clean alright. Not him, never him.
Names.
Twelve-years old, almost thirteen, hard-churned boy numberless miles to go before sleep, after the bridge battle, which way home or the sea. Which way, find the hidden quest route to Chinese splendor or buried treasure beneath those stones, at least in his mind, and go back to old time haunts, and small age memories of, okay, stick maidens, blushed kisses (this time his) and “going to the plank.” Ah, memory, memory-etched memory be good (and do not disturb goodnight sleeps, for once).
Searching, ever searching for the wombic home, is there such a word, and should he say it, should he write it, or should he even think it in his sin-heavy world. Searching for the certainties (silly childhood certainties he knew, but could do nothing about except search), for the old haunts (secret mirror caves, seaside rest graveyards before those sea breeze marsh grasses , and dank cellars filled with stolen kisses, and small wave booty trinkets, but don’t tell), for the plank, for the seaside graveyards with the dusted, rotting bones of ancient mariners, tars all, who filled the seven seas with their desires, their venom, and their hubris. He knew there was such a word as that, that hubris, because he had looked it up, and had actually, personally seen it in action more than once, although the acts seen had nothing, nothing in this wicked old world, to do with greek godly things. With titanic struggles to roll rocks up hills, to right wrongs against the powerful misbegotten night, to challenge god things, and fates. He didn’t laugh at that word though, but turned red first with anger, anger that he would duck things rather churn up waves, and offend no gods. No sir.
Searching, once again for other Schwinn travel friends (de riguer Schwinn, logo-conscious), for the old friends, the old drifter, grifter, midnight shifter petty larceny friends, the heist boys, the “clip” artist boys snatching penny candy, valentine may day boxes of candy, onyx rings with diamonds in the center, five and dime trinkets, anything that fit into speak of love (not lvov), faded dungaree pockets, and didn’t bulge too much , that’s all it was, petty and maybe larceny, but it had cemented them together for “eternity,” boyhood projects eternity broken when he wrong-crossed that bridge span, and didn’t turn back.
Ya, bicycle boy this day is searching, searching hard against the named ships, hard against the named seas, hard against the named fishes, hard against the named fauna, searching see.
And searching hard too against the unnamed angst, hard against those unnamed, maybe unnamable, changes that kind of hit one sideways all at once like some mack the knife smack devilish thing and no bridge can stop that, not on this hot humid day, and maybe not ever but he would have to see about that, see about that it as it came along.
One speed bicycle boy, handed-down Schwinn diamond blue red bicycle boy with pedal foot-slammed brakes to guide against crashes, stray dogs, swerving autos making diagonal rather than right hand- cornered turns and absent-minded pedestrians carelessly crossing in designated crosswalks just when he gathered speed, one speed, pushed on toward that divided bridge and the latest version of his the point of no return test.
Wearing a Fruit of The Loom tee-shirt, white, with a trace outline of wetness showing for all the world, all the looking world, to see up under arms. Hell it is summer and humid already, maybe a dog day July or probably August, they, the days and months, all rolling together and he has made this trip before in such weathers, in fact all weathers except hard northern winter gale snow squalls. And dungarees, faded from hundred times washed hand-me-down whirlpool washing machine use of older brothers in hardscrabble no work for father, or not much work, and mother wish working her stale life away in some franchise donut shop, serving coffee and off the arm to working class customers going to and fro working spots and leaving, leaving working class-sized tips, meaning not much, not much at all. Except wish dreams, and work damns.
Dungarees, faded or not, rolled up against dog bites, no question anymore since last summer, he Schwinn bicycle boy, had actually been bitten once by a stray alert dog who came out of some foggy mist seaside house without warning and without provocation, and rolled up guarded against geared meshes of cloth and metal, but you knew that, or you knew that your mother warned you against such a fate if you left the world unrolled, oh well, ya ma dismissal, at least one hundred times.
Yak, now bicycle boy, we no longer need to identify him as Schwinn, or wearing white tee-shirts or faded dungarees bicycle boy, is up to speed, safely past dog house and moving along friendlier shore roads this riding across seaside town day to get that eternally thankful breeze blowing off Adamsville Bay. Now churning through endless tar pit heated, sweated, beads of sweat coming off the manhole cover to match, did I say match, no to trump, his own heat and underarm circle wetness, no handkerchief, damn of all days to forget a handkerchief, streets. No railroad man’s soiled sweated, stink handkerchief, red, solid red, found in some forgotten railroad track siding when he made another leap to break out of the hard-edged 1950s be-bop night and day dream of freedom, and track smoke.
Street names passing, all the parts of ships, taffrails, captains walks, quarterdecks, sextant-blasted wheelhouses, galleys, even the planks, a special place where treasure , and betrayal, fight it out for tribal loyalties or some stick, stick signifying simply youth, not stick-in-the-mudness, not yet anyway, maiden’s blushed kiss, stolen treasure worthy of more than railroad handkerchief, red, solid red, wipe. Bicycle boy laughed to himself as he rode, thinking of backlogged thoughts in sunnier (and less humid) times. And some stray blushed kiss that would not let him be, would disturb his sleep on more than one night.
Street names, all the seven seas, atlantic, pacific, indian, artic, coral, china, ah he forgot the order, not a good sign, must be the humid-numbing weather, for a boy who could make a joke, and make stick (remember stick signifying youth only) maidens unashamed of blushed kisses laugh at the thought, of knowing enough geography and knowing exactly where to find the place on the map to call himself the Prince of Lvov once. And know too that he wished to “discover” all those seas, and their names not just from maps, if only, if only he could get out of the stinking projects. The stinking born in projects from which he at one time, although not now course did believe could ever be escaped from (and he later realized that maybe, just maybe he couldn’t). And funny he had gotten out or better had moved out, or his family had with him in tow, and still he was wishing about those seas even if he had forgotten the order of the names, and half-forgotten prince lvov kisses that had turned to ashes. And he still wished about getting out of that stinking project, ya, getting the stink blown off his back from that low-rent scene.
Street names, all the fishes of the seas, tetra, halibut, cod, of course, grown and harvested just some miles, not bicycle miles but automobile miles, a few miles down the road, mackerel, holy or not, he laughed to himself at that, scrod, pickled herring, jesus, who could eat that, oil-soaked sardines, ditto, red scrupper, macko some shark, infinite sea oceans names to go with seven seas and adventures, hardly wait to get out of town adventures but just now needing, desperately needing to get back to back born places, to get some familiar ground under his feet, to take the curse off that stink that has clouded his mind, the one to match the low-tide mephitic stinks down by the shore that he was then passing. And fetid swollen river swamps and reedy mud-caked straw wind marshes breezing that life-saving sea breeze too.
Street names, all the fauna of the sea, seaweed, algae, sea salad, sea cucumbers, see sea, all mixed up, all washed rumble tumble to shore in rushing torrid, churned-up waves crashing aimlessly but relentlessly to shore. But not today, today no crashing waves to help along the slight lip sweat-forming wheels churning boy, a displaced boy(no need to speak of bicycles anymore either) except for that tepid splashed flat pancake of a wave that also heads aimlessly to the waiting shore million year stones waiting to turn to sand , to wash them clean a while. He laughed at that too, washed clean alright. Not him, never him.
Names.
Twelve-years old, almost thirteen, hard-churned boy numberless miles to go before sleep, after the bridge battle, which way home or the sea. Which way, find the hidden quest route to Chinese splendor or buried treasure beneath those stones, at least in his mind, and go back to old time haunts, and small age memories of, okay, stick maidens, blushed kisses (this time his) and “going to the plank.” Ah, memory, memory-etched memory be good (and do not disturb goodnight sleeps, for once).
Searching, ever searching for the wombic home, is there such a word, and should he say it, should he write it, or should he even think it in his sin-heavy world. Searching for the certainties (silly childhood certainties he knew, but could do nothing about except search), for the old haunts (secret mirror caves, seaside rest graveyards before those sea breeze marsh grasses , and dank cellars filled with stolen kisses, and small wave booty trinkets, but don’t tell), for the plank, for the seaside graveyards with the dusted, rotting bones of ancient mariners, tars all, who filled the seven seas with their desires, their venom, and their hubris. He knew there was such a word as that, that hubris, because he had looked it up, and had actually, personally seen it in action more than once, although the acts seen had nothing, nothing in this wicked old world, to do with greek godly things. With titanic struggles to roll rocks up hills, to right wrongs against the powerful misbegotten night, to challenge god things, and fates. He didn’t laugh at that word though, but turned red first with anger, anger that he would duck things rather churn up waves, and offend no gods. No sir.
Searching, once again for other Schwinn travel friends (de riguer Schwinn, logo-conscious), for the old friends, the old drifter, grifter, midnight shifter petty larceny friends, the heist boys, the “clip” artist boys snatching penny candy, valentine may day boxes of candy, onyx rings with diamonds in the center, five and dime trinkets, anything that fit into speak of love (not lvov), faded dungaree pockets, and didn’t bulge too much , that’s all it was, petty and maybe larceny, but it had cemented them together for “eternity,” boyhood projects eternity broken when he wrong-crossed that bridge span, and didn’t turn back.
Ya, bicycle boy this day is searching, searching hard against the named ships, hard against the named seas, hard against the named fishes, hard against the named fauna, searching see.
And searching hard too against the unnamed angst, hard against those unnamed, maybe unnamable, changes that kind of hit one sideways all at once like some mack the knife smack devilish thing and no bridge can stop that, not on this hot humid day, and maybe not ever but he would have to see about that, see about that it as it came along.
Thursday, May 03, 2012
The “Heroic” Age of the Democratic Party-Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party
Book Review
Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party, Robert V. Remini, W.W. Norton and Co., New York, 1951
For those political propagandists, including this writer, interested in an independent working-class political realignment in American politics an important point to understand is the way that political realignments are created- and taken advantage of. Thus a little look at history, in this case the history of American parliamentary politics, is called for. For openers a study will show that such dramatic shifts do not occur often so that we had better be prepared when and if it happens. Elsewhere in this space I have commented on the creation of the Republican Party from the remnants of the Whigs, Free Soilers and other forces just prior to the Civil War. (See Review of Free Soil, Free Labor by Eric Foner in an entry entitled The Heroic Age of the Republican Party). The book under review here is a detailed look at the creation of the Democratic Party in the mid 1820’s that was solidified by the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. And what better place to look at how that occurred that at the career of the master-mind of that creation, Martin Van Buren, who would ultimately benefit by that realignment himself both as Vice President in Jackson’s second term and as his immediate successor as president in 1836.
This book is narrowly focused on the creation of the Democratic Party and Van Buren’s role in it. Thus the time frame for the work is essentially the elections of 1824 and 1828. The story as it unfolds here shows that Van Buren did not come to prominence out of thin air but has done yeoman’s work in creating the embryo of the Democratic Party in New York State with the famous Albany Regency that controlled, or attempted to control, New York politics during this period. The strength of the Regency lay in its control of patronage, its adhesion to a policy of only rewarding its friends and devotees, its adherence to a uniform political line and of fighting for organization, organization and again organization. Those are not bad lessons to learn even today. Strangely in reading about this organization and its rules and regulations I was reminded of a proto-Leninist vanguard organization-without its revolutionary aims.
Of course strong organization only helps if you have some access, or potential access, to power and in American politics the coin of the realm is control of the American presidency. And for that purpose the election of 1824 gives a text book lesson in all the strengths and weakness of the presidential electoral process. Many changes had occurred in the first fifty years of the American Republic as it moved away from the bucolic agrarian/mercantile society of the 1780’s. These included the relentless driving of the frontier westward, the increased role of capitalist production and technology in linking communications and transportation systems and the cry of the masses for more political participation in the electoral process. Those factors were the social basis for Jackson’s ultimate victory.
But not in 1824. At that point the Monroe presidency and its so-called “Era of Good Feeling” had theoretically blunted the political party concept at a time when, as now, the class divide was growing. One of the strange things about the 1824 election is that the several candidates all professed to be of the same ‘party’ from the closet monarchist John Quincy Adams to the plebeian hero Jackson. Something had to give. What gave immediately, to Jackson’s detriment, was the popular outcry against the Congressional caucus system where that body essentially provided the official candidate. Van Buren was the master of that system and it died hard with him. In any case no candidate got a majority of the Electoral College votes and thus the election was thrown into the House of Representatives for settlement. In the end Henry Clay’s electoral votes and whatever promises he received from Adams determined Adams’s victory. 1828 would be a different story
Van Buren learned the lesson of that defeat well. He went through out the country trying to build a coalition of forces that would create a national party based on a set of principles, essentially taken from Jefferson’s philosophy of government and a strict constructionist school of interpretation of the Constitution. In the process Van Buren basically formed the modern political party by uniting forces from the West, the South and New York to give the New England-centered Adams a thumping. Having a popular candidate like Jackson obviously did not hurt. One can argue with the author about the weight of Van Buren’s role in the Jackson victory however one cannot argue that Van Buren knew which way the wind was blowing and created a powerful plebeian party that fought for power up until the Civil War with some success. For good or evil Van Buren also became the proto-type for the professional politician that we have today come to know and loathe. But that is a separate story. All “honor” to the old Red Fox of Kinderhook.
Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party, Robert V. Remini, W.W. Norton and Co., New York, 1951
For those political propagandists, including this writer, interested in an independent working-class political realignment in American politics an important point to understand is the way that political realignments are created- and taken advantage of. Thus a little look at history, in this case the history of American parliamentary politics, is called for. For openers a study will show that such dramatic shifts do not occur often so that we had better be prepared when and if it happens. Elsewhere in this space I have commented on the creation of the Republican Party from the remnants of the Whigs, Free Soilers and other forces just prior to the Civil War. (See Review of Free Soil, Free Labor by Eric Foner in an entry entitled The Heroic Age of the Republican Party). The book under review here is a detailed look at the creation of the Democratic Party in the mid 1820’s that was solidified by the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. And what better place to look at how that occurred that at the career of the master-mind of that creation, Martin Van Buren, who would ultimately benefit by that realignment himself both as Vice President in Jackson’s second term and as his immediate successor as president in 1836.
This book is narrowly focused on the creation of the Democratic Party and Van Buren’s role in it. Thus the time frame for the work is essentially the elections of 1824 and 1828. The story as it unfolds here shows that Van Buren did not come to prominence out of thin air but has done yeoman’s work in creating the embryo of the Democratic Party in New York State with the famous Albany Regency that controlled, or attempted to control, New York politics during this period. The strength of the Regency lay in its control of patronage, its adhesion to a policy of only rewarding its friends and devotees, its adherence to a uniform political line and of fighting for organization, organization and again organization. Those are not bad lessons to learn even today. Strangely in reading about this organization and its rules and regulations I was reminded of a proto-Leninist vanguard organization-without its revolutionary aims.
Of course strong organization only helps if you have some access, or potential access, to power and in American politics the coin of the realm is control of the American presidency. And for that purpose the election of 1824 gives a text book lesson in all the strengths and weakness of the presidential electoral process. Many changes had occurred in the first fifty years of the American Republic as it moved away from the bucolic agrarian/mercantile society of the 1780’s. These included the relentless driving of the frontier westward, the increased role of capitalist production and technology in linking communications and transportation systems and the cry of the masses for more political participation in the electoral process. Those factors were the social basis for Jackson’s ultimate victory.
But not in 1824. At that point the Monroe presidency and its so-called “Era of Good Feeling” had theoretically blunted the political party concept at a time when, as now, the class divide was growing. One of the strange things about the 1824 election is that the several candidates all professed to be of the same ‘party’ from the closet monarchist John Quincy Adams to the plebeian hero Jackson. Something had to give. What gave immediately, to Jackson’s detriment, was the popular outcry against the Congressional caucus system where that body essentially provided the official candidate. Van Buren was the master of that system and it died hard with him. In any case no candidate got a majority of the Electoral College votes and thus the election was thrown into the House of Representatives for settlement. In the end Henry Clay’s electoral votes and whatever promises he received from Adams determined Adams’s victory. 1828 would be a different story
Van Buren learned the lesson of that defeat well. He went through out the country trying to build a coalition of forces that would create a national party based on a set of principles, essentially taken from Jefferson’s philosophy of government and a strict constructionist school of interpretation of the Constitution. In the process Van Buren basically formed the modern political party by uniting forces from the West, the South and New York to give the New England-centered Adams a thumping. Having a popular candidate like Jackson obviously did not hurt. One can argue with the author about the weight of Van Buren’s role in the Jackson victory however one cannot argue that Van Buren knew which way the wind was blowing and created a powerful plebeian party that fought for power up until the Civil War with some success. For good or evil Van Buren also became the proto-type for the professional politician that we have today come to know and loathe. But that is a separate story. All “honor” to the old Red Fox of Kinderhook.
Voodoo Blues From The Bayou- The "Voodoo Daddy" Lonnie Brooks Is On Stage -When Lonnie Brooks Rocked The Blues House-‘Lonnie Brooks”- A CD Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Lonnie Brooks performing Too Little, Too Late.
CD Review
Lonnie Brooks: The Voodoo Daddy, Lonnie Brooks (and son Ronnie Baker), Alligator records, 1997
When reviewing various blues artist over the past year in this space I have spilled much ink on places like the Mississippi Delta, Chicago, Memphis and Texas. I have spent very little time talking about Cajun country, the bayous of Louisiana or the Mississippi port town of News Orleans as sources of the blues tradition. When one thinks of the bayous one tends to think of the Cajun-centered accordion or Zydeco music. New Orleans brings to mind jazz more than the blues, except maybe some barrelhouse influence. That omission seems now to have been flat out wrong as the artist under review, ‘The Voodoo Daddy” Lonnie Brooks, amply demonstrates.
Sure, Lonnie (and on this album his son Ronnie Baker as well) has mastered basic blues lines as any successful electric blues guitarist must but his music has that little extra “funky” edge that one gets when listening to better New Orleans jazz and Zydeco music, especially that big old sax blaring out to beat the band. That is what the Voodoo Daddy brings to the table. Here it starts right out with the first track “Jealous Man” carries through to “Hoodoo She Do” the aptly named “Zydeco” and finishes up nicely with “Rolling Of The Tumbling Dice.” More on this kind of bayou-derived music, especially under the influence of Clifton Chenier who was instrumental in jump starting Lonnie’s career later. For now listen here- you can heard those swamp sounds from those Lake Charles and environs boys now, can’t you?
Watch out, watch out like crazy or those boys will take you for everything you have. And laugh about it.
"Got Lucky Last Night"
Pretend you're mean as a lion
Wild like a tiger cat
Been lovin' mem so good last night
I almost had a heart attack
chorus:
I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night
Played your little game and I got lucky last night
Pretend you're mean and evil
Stubborn like a Georgia mule
Been lovin' me so good last night
You had me on private school
(chorus)
Pretend you can be sweet
Pretend you can be kind
But when it come to lovin' girl
You don't draw the line
(chorus)
I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night
Played a little game and I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night, tryin' to get lucky tonight
"Wife For Tonight"
Is is that string bikini?
Or the sun that's makin' me hot?
Whatever thing to cool me with baby
They gonna take a hell of a lot
I feel the need for some down home lovin' tonight
Oh I could gonna pretend that I'm your husband
If you'd only pretend you'll be my wife tonight
Yeah
I'll build us a playhouse
Into my bedroom
So you can play the bride baby
While I play the groom
I feel the need for some down home lovin' tonight
Oh I could gonna pretend that I'm your husband
If you'd only pretend you'll be my wife tonight
All right...
You can come on over
There'll be no strings attached
If you like what I'm doin' to you baby
You can always come back
I feel the need for some down home lovin' tonight
Oh I could gonna pretend that I'm your husband
If you'd only pretend you'll be my wife tonight
CD Review
Lonnie Brooks: The Voodoo Daddy, Lonnie Brooks (and son Ronnie Baker), Alligator records, 1997
When reviewing various blues artist over the past year in this space I have spilled much ink on places like the Mississippi Delta, Chicago, Memphis and Texas. I have spent very little time talking about Cajun country, the bayous of Louisiana or the Mississippi port town of News Orleans as sources of the blues tradition. When one thinks of the bayous one tends to think of the Cajun-centered accordion or Zydeco music. New Orleans brings to mind jazz more than the blues, except maybe some barrelhouse influence. That omission seems now to have been flat out wrong as the artist under review, ‘The Voodoo Daddy” Lonnie Brooks, amply demonstrates.
Sure, Lonnie (and on this album his son Ronnie Baker as well) has mastered basic blues lines as any successful electric blues guitarist must but his music has that little extra “funky” edge that one gets when listening to better New Orleans jazz and Zydeco music, especially that big old sax blaring out to beat the band. That is what the Voodoo Daddy brings to the table. Here it starts right out with the first track “Jealous Man” carries through to “Hoodoo She Do” the aptly named “Zydeco” and finishes up nicely with “Rolling Of The Tumbling Dice.” More on this kind of bayou-derived music, especially under the influence of Clifton Chenier who was instrumental in jump starting Lonnie’s career later. For now listen here- you can heard those swamp sounds from those Lake Charles and environs boys now, can’t you?
Watch out, watch out like crazy or those boys will take you for everything you have. And laugh about it.
"Got Lucky Last Night"
Pretend you're mean as a lion
Wild like a tiger cat
Been lovin' mem so good last night
I almost had a heart attack
chorus:
I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night
Played your little game and I got lucky last night
Pretend you're mean and evil
Stubborn like a Georgia mule
Been lovin' me so good last night
You had me on private school
(chorus)
Pretend you can be sweet
Pretend you can be kind
But when it come to lovin' girl
You don't draw the line
(chorus)
I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night
Played a little game and I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night
I got lucky last night, tryin' to get lucky tonight
"Wife For Tonight"
Is is that string bikini?
Or the sun that's makin' me hot?
Whatever thing to cool me with baby
They gonna take a hell of a lot
I feel the need for some down home lovin' tonight
Oh I could gonna pretend that I'm your husband
If you'd only pretend you'll be my wife tonight
Yeah
I'll build us a playhouse
Into my bedroom
So you can play the bride baby
While I play the groom
I feel the need for some down home lovin' tonight
Oh I could gonna pretend that I'm your husband
If you'd only pretend you'll be my wife tonight
All right...
You can come on over
There'll be no strings attached
If you like what I'm doin' to you baby
You can always come back
I feel the need for some down home lovin' tonight
Oh I could gonna pretend that I'm your husband
If you'd only pretend you'll be my wife tonight
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