From THe #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)Archives-General Assembly-The Embryo Of An Alternate Government-Learn The Lessons Of History, Recent History-OB Consents to Trial of Weekly Action Assembly
http://occupyboston.com/
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
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Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call themselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
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Markin comment January 15, 2012
In several recent comments (in late December) in this space my old radical friend and alternative newspaper commentator, Josh Breslin, noted that the Occupy movement seemed to have lost energy and was , as he vividly described it, a movement of generals without a army. I, initially, argued with him about that characterization saying that this was just a period of growing pains and things would sort themselves out over the next several months. Then a series of disturbing events occurred topped off by what I will here call the “sex registry question” to make me thing that old Josh, once again, was right. Only I would characterize things, unlike Josh, as a succumbing to the circle spirit and as yet another example of the revolution devouring its own. In either case not a healthy situation.
With that said, I have long noted that although I believed that the General Assembly concept was potentially the embryo of an alternate form of government that would drive our vision for a new society there were some structural problems with the concept as practiced. Among those criticisms were the simple notions that majority rule and representative government based on political positions were concepts better suited to the struggle. Well, apparently others have, in the crucible of struggle, learned some of those lessons. Lessons that, perhaps, needed to be painfully worked through in practice before their shortcomings could be exposed. In any case this latest news from OB about a willingness to think about other governing forms is welcome news. Whether we remain generals without an army can now be hashed out but one thing seems certain this will go a long way toward breaking out of the circle spirit.
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As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
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OB Consents to Trial of Weekly Action Assembly
January 13th, 2012 • mhacker • Passed Resolutions No comments
The General Assembly of Occupy Boston consented to the following proposal on January 12, 2012:
Modify Sunday GA, creating a Strategic Action Assembly
Purpose:
1) To help Occupy Boston develop thoughtful and powerful messages that speak to the entire 99%.
2) To provide a time for Occupy Boston to come together, reflect on, and plan targeted direct actions and campaigns that will help maintain the occupation of the public conscience in the post-Dewey era.
3) To provide a more appropriate meeting format for the discussion of political, economic, and societal issues.
4) To enhance collaboration across and between working groups in movement-wide outreach and direct action campaigns and to aid the formation of affinity groups.
Proposal: We propose that Occupy Boston radically modify the format of the Sunday GA, creating what will be called a Strategic Action Assembly (aka Action Assembly or SAA). The new assembly format will experiment with new forms of process in order to brainstorm, facilitate, and organize direct actions. The SAA will not seek consensus on proposals or make decisions on behalf of the Occupy Boston movement.
Because it has the potential to reshape our GA process, we are proposing it with a 3-week trial period and an opportunity to reconsider afterwards. There will be a time to give feedback and an 80% temp check to continue this change.
The SAA working group will continue to explore space options that will work best for this meeting type.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
The Latest From The “Occupy Oakland” Website-This Is Class War-We Say No More-Take The Offensive- Defend The Oakland Commune!- A Five Point Program For Discussion
Click on the headline to link to Occupy Oakland website for the latest from the Bay Area vanguard battleground in the struggle for social justice.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.
The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions, is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.
Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to the 2012 presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the- back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer (2011) when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections, like in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya and other proxy wars) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in Iran in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
Guest Commentary- From Chapter Eight Of Leon Trotsky's Literature and Revolution:
"The personal dreams of a few enthusiasts today for making life more dramatic and for educating man himself rhythmically, find a proper and real place in this outlook. Having rationalized his economic system, that is, having saturated it with consciousness and planfulness, man will not leave a trace of the present stagnant and worm-eaten domestic life. The care for food and education, which lies like a millstone on the present-day family, will be removed, and will become the subject of social initiative and of an endless collective creativeness. Woman will at last free herself from her semi-servile condition. Side by side with technique, education, in the broad sense of the psycho-physical molding of new generations, will take its place as the crown of social thinking. Powerful “parties” will form themselves around pedagogic systems. Experiments in social education and an emulation of different methods will take place to a degree which has not been dreamed of before. Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral islands, but will be built consciously, will be tested by thought, will be directed and corrected.
Life will cease to be elemental, and for this reason stagnant. Man, who will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build peoples’ palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be able to add to his own life richness, brilliancy and intensity, but also a dynamic quality of the highest degree. The shell of life will hardly have time to form before it will burst open again under the pressure of new technical and cultural inventions and achievements. Life in the future will not be monotonous.
More than that. Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk and his play. He will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution. Man first drove the dark elements out of industry and ideology, by displacing barbarian routine by scientific technique, and religion by science. Afterwards he drove the unconscious out of politics, by overthrowing monarchy and class with democracy and rationalist parliamentarianism and then with the clear and open Soviet dictatorship. The blind elements have settled most heavily in economic relations, but man is driving them out from there also, by means of the Socialist organization of economic life. This makes it possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life.
Finally, the nature of man himself is hidden in the deepest and darkest corner of the unconscious, of the elemental, of the sub-soil. Is it not self-evident that the greatest efforts of investigative thought and of creative initiative will be in that direction? The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection! Emancipated man will want to attain a greater equilibrium in the work of his organs and a more proportional developing and wearing out of his tissues, in order to reduce the fear of death to a rational reaction of the organism towards danger. There can be no doubt that man’s extreme anatomical and physiological disharmony, that is, the extreme disproportion in the growth and wearing out of organs and tissues, give the life instinct the form of a pinched, morbid and hysterical fear of death, which darkens reason and which feeds the stupid and humiliating fantasies about life after death.
Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.
It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts – literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise."
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As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
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Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.
The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions, is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.
Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to the 2012 presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the- back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer (2011) when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections, like in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya and other proxy wars) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in Iran in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
Guest Commentary- From Chapter Eight Of Leon Trotsky's Literature and Revolution:
"The personal dreams of a few enthusiasts today for making life more dramatic and for educating man himself rhythmically, find a proper and real place in this outlook. Having rationalized his economic system, that is, having saturated it with consciousness and planfulness, man will not leave a trace of the present stagnant and worm-eaten domestic life. The care for food and education, which lies like a millstone on the present-day family, will be removed, and will become the subject of social initiative and of an endless collective creativeness. Woman will at last free herself from her semi-servile condition. Side by side with technique, education, in the broad sense of the psycho-physical molding of new generations, will take its place as the crown of social thinking. Powerful “parties” will form themselves around pedagogic systems. Experiments in social education and an emulation of different methods will take place to a degree which has not been dreamed of before. Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral islands, but will be built consciously, will be tested by thought, will be directed and corrected.
Life will cease to be elemental, and for this reason stagnant. Man, who will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build peoples’ palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be able to add to his own life richness, brilliancy and intensity, but also a dynamic quality of the highest degree. The shell of life will hardly have time to form before it will burst open again under the pressure of new technical and cultural inventions and achievements. Life in the future will not be monotonous.
More than that. Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk and his play. He will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution. Man first drove the dark elements out of industry and ideology, by displacing barbarian routine by scientific technique, and religion by science. Afterwards he drove the unconscious out of politics, by overthrowing monarchy and class with democracy and rationalist parliamentarianism and then with the clear and open Soviet dictatorship. The blind elements have settled most heavily in economic relations, but man is driving them out from there also, by means of the Socialist organization of economic life. This makes it possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life.
Finally, the nature of man himself is hidden in the deepest and darkest corner of the unconscious, of the elemental, of the sub-soil. Is it not self-evident that the greatest efforts of investigative thought and of creative initiative will be in that direction? The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection! Emancipated man will want to attain a greater equilibrium in the work of his organs and a more proportional developing and wearing out of his tissues, in order to reduce the fear of death to a rational reaction of the organism towards danger. There can be no doubt that man’s extreme anatomical and physiological disharmony, that is, the extreme disproportion in the growth and wearing out of organs and tissues, give the life instinct the form of a pinched, morbid and hysterical fear of death, which darkens reason and which feeds the stupid and humiliating fantasies about life after death.
Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.
It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts – literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise."
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As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
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Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Working Class! Take The Offensive! - A Five Point Program For Discussion
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will occasionally post important updates in this space if they appear on that site.
Markin comment, dated December 20, 2011:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on that date this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era. Some of that will get sorted out in the future, some of it won’t if the Occupy movement doesn’t not more consistently line I with labor’s struggles, as well get a better grip of the important of the labor movement to winning victories in our struggles.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.
The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions, is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.
Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to the 2012 presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the- back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer (2011) when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections, like in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya and other proxy wars) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in Iran in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
Guest Commentary- From Chapter Eight Of Leon Trotsky's Literature and Revolution:
"The personal dreams of a few enthusiasts today for making life more dramatic and for educating man himself rhythmically, find a proper and real place in this outlook. Having rationalized his economic system, that is, having saturated it with consciousness and planfulness, man will not leave a trace of the present stagnant and worm-eaten domestic life. The care for food and education, which lies like a millstone on the present-day family, will be removed, and will become the subject of social initiative and of an endless collective creativeness. Woman will at last free herself from her semi-servile condition. Side by side with technique, education, in the broad sense of the psycho-physical molding of new generations, will take its place as the crown of social thinking. Powerful “parties” will form themselves around pedagogic systems. Experiments in social education and an emulation of different methods will take place to a degree which has not been dreamed of before. Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral islands, but will be built consciously, will be tested by thought, will be directed and corrected.
Life will cease to be elemental, and for this reason stagnant. Man, who will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build peoples’ palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be able to add to his own life richness, brilliancy and intensity, but also a dynamic quality of the highest degree. The shell of life will hardly have time to form before it will burst open again under the pressure of new technical and cultural inventions and achievements. Life in the future will not be monotonous.
More than that. Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk and his play. He will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution. Man first drove the dark elements out of industry and ideology, by displacing barbarian routine by scientific technique, and religion by science. Afterwards he drove the unconscious out of politics, by overthrowing monarchy and class with democracy and rationalist parliamentarianism and then with the clear and open Soviet dictatorship. The blind elements have settled most heavily in economic relations, but man is driving them out from there also, by means of the Socialist organization of economic life. This makes it possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life.
Finally, the nature of man himself is hidden in the deepest and darkest corner of the unconscious, of the elemental, of the sub-soil. Is it not self-evident that the greatest efforts of investigative thought and of creative initiative will be in that direction? The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection! Emancipated man will want to attain a greater equilibrium in the work of his organs and a more proportional developing and wearing out of his tissues, in order to reduce the fear of death to a rational reaction of the organism towards danger. There can be no doubt that man’s extreme anatomical and physiological disharmony, that is, the extreme disproportion in the growth and wearing out of organs and tissues, give the life instinct the form of a pinched, morbid and hysterical fear of death, which darkens reason and which feeds the stupid and humiliating fantasies about life after death.
Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.
It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts – literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise."
************
As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
**********
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Markin comment, dated December 20, 2011:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on that date this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era. Some of that will get sorted out in the future, some of it won’t if the Occupy movement doesn’t not more consistently line I with labor’s struggles, as well get a better grip of the important of the labor movement to winning victories in our struggles.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.
The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions, is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.
Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to the 2012 presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the- back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer (2011) when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections, like in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya and other proxy wars) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in Iran in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
Guest Commentary- From Chapter Eight Of Leon Trotsky's Literature and Revolution:
"The personal dreams of a few enthusiasts today for making life more dramatic and for educating man himself rhythmically, find a proper and real place in this outlook. Having rationalized his economic system, that is, having saturated it with consciousness and planfulness, man will not leave a trace of the present stagnant and worm-eaten domestic life. The care for food and education, which lies like a millstone on the present-day family, will be removed, and will become the subject of social initiative and of an endless collective creativeness. Woman will at last free herself from her semi-servile condition. Side by side with technique, education, in the broad sense of the psycho-physical molding of new generations, will take its place as the crown of social thinking. Powerful “parties” will form themselves around pedagogic systems. Experiments in social education and an emulation of different methods will take place to a degree which has not been dreamed of before. Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral islands, but will be built consciously, will be tested by thought, will be directed and corrected.
Life will cease to be elemental, and for this reason stagnant. Man, who will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build peoples’ palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be able to add to his own life richness, brilliancy and intensity, but also a dynamic quality of the highest degree. The shell of life will hardly have time to form before it will burst open again under the pressure of new technical and cultural inventions and achievements. Life in the future will not be monotonous.
More than that. Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk and his play. He will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution. Man first drove the dark elements out of industry and ideology, by displacing barbarian routine by scientific technique, and religion by science. Afterwards he drove the unconscious out of politics, by overthrowing monarchy and class with democracy and rationalist parliamentarianism and then with the clear and open Soviet dictatorship. The blind elements have settled most heavily in economic relations, but man is driving them out from there also, by means of the Socialist organization of economic life. This makes it possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life.
Finally, the nature of man himself is hidden in the deepest and darkest corner of the unconscious, of the elemental, of the sub-soil. Is it not self-evident that the greatest efforts of investigative thought and of creative initiative will be in that direction? The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection! Emancipated man will want to attain a greater equilibrium in the work of his organs and a more proportional developing and wearing out of his tissues, in order to reduce the fear of death to a rational reaction of the organism towards danger. There can be no doubt that man’s extreme anatomical and physiological disharmony, that is, the extreme disproportion in the growth and wearing out of organs and tissues, give the life instinct the form of a pinched, morbid and hysterical fear of death, which darkens reason and which feeds the stupid and humiliating fantasies about life after death.
Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.
It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts – literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise."
************
As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
**********
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- The Hills And Hollows Of “Home”- A CD Review (Of Sorts)
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Norman Blake performing.
CD Review
Norman Blake: Whiskey Before Breakfast, Norman Blake, Rounder Records, 1993
Norman Blake’s flat-picking style was an acquired taste, although not for the obvious reasons that you might thing that an ocean view yankee small city (Olde Saco up in Maine, for those who are interested) dweller might have hesitated over previously. I had heard Norman Blake’s music for years, from way back, from way back at least to the 1970s and the old Hillbilly At Harvard program aired on Saturday mornings where I, passively, learned about mountain, cowboy, and western music when I was, like my old friend, Peter Paul Markin in something he called his “country” minute.
And passive learning at that time was actually a step up, previously any time such music came on, or was performed at a concert that I was attending, or that some heathen faux hillbilly got all warm about and insisted I stopped dead in my tracks. Reason? Hell, the reason was simple enough, and requires no advanced degree in psychology to describe it. This stuff (Hank Williams, Doc Watson, Hazel Dickens, The Carter Family, including June and Johnny Cash, among others) was my father’s music.
My father from the hills and hollows (yes, I am perfectly aware that it is nothing but hollas but what is an old yankee reprobate to do) of Appalachia. Down where the wind sings through the mountains passes and all that stuff. The stuff of Saturday night barn dances complete with fiddle, banjo, flute, maybe, after a hard-scrabble week in the mines, or trying to get one last damn crop out of that worn-out barren ground. The stuff of sweet-talking some mountain maid out of her virtue, of white lightening whiskey too hard to put in a bottle but just right from some ball jar. No thank you.
Then, as if by magic, I grew up, kind of. On a trip down through those dear Appalachians Mountains with a sweet Ohio River woman that I took a fancy to a while back I started to hear that whining sing-song fiddle, the strum of that banjo, and could, I swear, smell that, rotgut whisky coming out of the ground of those hills and hollows (yes, still hollows), and the wind coming down through the passes. And I knew then I was home. And could listen to some flat-picking North Carolina (I think) guy, who knew and played with now revered June Carter and Johnny Cash, for hours when I am in the mood. Go figure.
CD Review
Norman Blake: Whiskey Before Breakfast, Norman Blake, Rounder Records, 1993
Norman Blake’s flat-picking style was an acquired taste, although not for the obvious reasons that you might thing that an ocean view yankee small city (Olde Saco up in Maine, for those who are interested) dweller might have hesitated over previously. I had heard Norman Blake’s music for years, from way back, from way back at least to the 1970s and the old Hillbilly At Harvard program aired on Saturday mornings where I, passively, learned about mountain, cowboy, and western music when I was, like my old friend, Peter Paul Markin in something he called his “country” minute.
And passive learning at that time was actually a step up, previously any time such music came on, or was performed at a concert that I was attending, or that some heathen faux hillbilly got all warm about and insisted I stopped dead in my tracks. Reason? Hell, the reason was simple enough, and requires no advanced degree in psychology to describe it. This stuff (Hank Williams, Doc Watson, Hazel Dickens, The Carter Family, including June and Johnny Cash, among others) was my father’s music.
My father from the hills and hollows (yes, I am perfectly aware that it is nothing but hollas but what is an old yankee reprobate to do) of Appalachia. Down where the wind sings through the mountains passes and all that stuff. The stuff of Saturday night barn dances complete with fiddle, banjo, flute, maybe, after a hard-scrabble week in the mines, or trying to get one last damn crop out of that worn-out barren ground. The stuff of sweet-talking some mountain maid out of her virtue, of white lightening whiskey too hard to put in a bottle but just right from some ball jar. No thank you.
Then, as if by magic, I grew up, kind of. On a trip down through those dear Appalachians Mountains with a sweet Ohio River woman that I took a fancy to a while back I started to hear that whining sing-song fiddle, the strum of that banjo, and could, I swear, smell that, rotgut whisky coming out of the ground of those hills and hollows (yes, still hollows), and the wind coming down through the passes. And I knew then I was home. And could listen to some flat-picking North Carolina (I think) guy, who knew and played with now revered June Carter and Johnny Cash, for hours when I am in the mood. Go figure.
Monday, June 25, 2012
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Did You Hear John Hurt?
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Mississippi John Hurt performing.
CD Review
The Best Of The Mississippi Blues, various artists, Fuel Records, 2000
I remember my reaction the first time my old friend met in the summer of love, 1967, Peter Paul Markin asked me if I had heard John Hurt. It was simply. Who? Or my answer was simply but the two hour (maybe more but I am giving old Pee-Pee the benefit of the doubt) explanation about the basics of the blues, country version, was anything but simple. As so that night that, maybe late August, 1967, summer of love night I got “religion.” Got it big time as Pee-Pee (then going under the moniker of Be-Bop Benny, by the way) rolled out record after record, all scratchy from abuse, or probably over- playing of Mississippi John Hurt stuff like Creole Belle, Spoonful, Albert and Frankie, his version of Stag-o-lee and so on. I was hooked.
See growing up in Olde Saco, away from the Pee-Pee folk-drenched Cambridge folk revival minute that featured “discovery” of all these roots Mississippi country from hunger blues players, my thing was maybe some Beatles, some serious Stones, and some vanilla pop stuff that would make you weep, guys like Bobby Darren or gals like Brenda Lee (and you had better have known her stuff if you wanted any chance at that last dance school dance she you had been eyeing all night). Goof stuff when it came right down to it singing about how some Johnny or Janie got away in the love game and life was not going to be the same, boohoo.
Put that up against the lyrics theses blues guys from hunger sang about, hard days under sweating suns on some cotton fields plantation trying to put something over on the captain (the boss man), some two-timing woman who ran off with your used-to-be best friend who you will surely cut if she ever comes back, some hard-drinking, hard –loving Saturday juke joint nights sweating out before early Sunday morning and revival, church version, cutting up some guy because he looked twice, hell, maybe only once at your best gal, the usual bust-up prison time for some Podunk crime, and best of all making that deal with the devil to get out from under that harping woman, that damn boss, that demon rotgut whiskey, and that eyeball looking guy.
So the next time that somebody asks you did you hear John Hurt you will know where to point him or her.
CD Review
The Best Of The Mississippi Blues, various artists, Fuel Records, 2000
I remember my reaction the first time my old friend met in the summer of love, 1967, Peter Paul Markin asked me if I had heard John Hurt. It was simply. Who? Or my answer was simply but the two hour (maybe more but I am giving old Pee-Pee the benefit of the doubt) explanation about the basics of the blues, country version, was anything but simple. As so that night that, maybe late August, 1967, summer of love night I got “religion.” Got it big time as Pee-Pee (then going under the moniker of Be-Bop Benny, by the way) rolled out record after record, all scratchy from abuse, or probably over- playing of Mississippi John Hurt stuff like Creole Belle, Spoonful, Albert and Frankie, his version of Stag-o-lee and so on. I was hooked.
See growing up in Olde Saco, away from the Pee-Pee folk-drenched Cambridge folk revival minute that featured “discovery” of all these roots Mississippi country from hunger blues players, my thing was maybe some Beatles, some serious Stones, and some vanilla pop stuff that would make you weep, guys like Bobby Darren or gals like Brenda Lee (and you had better have known her stuff if you wanted any chance at that last dance school dance she you had been eyeing all night). Goof stuff when it came right down to it singing about how some Johnny or Janie got away in the love game and life was not going to be the same, boohoo.
Put that up against the lyrics theses blues guys from hunger sang about, hard days under sweating suns on some cotton fields plantation trying to put something over on the captain (the boss man), some two-timing woman who ran off with your used-to-be best friend who you will surely cut if she ever comes back, some hard-drinking, hard –loving Saturday juke joint nights sweating out before early Sunday morning and revival, church version, cutting up some guy because he looked twice, hell, maybe only once at your best gal, the usual bust-up prison time for some Podunk crime, and best of all making that deal with the devil to get out from under that harping woman, that damn boss, that demon rotgut whiskey, and that eyeball looking guy.
So the next time that somebody asks you did you hear John Hurt you will know where to point him or her.
Stop The Boston MBTA Fare Hikes-They Say "Fare Hike" We Say FARE STRIKE! -JULY 1ST, 2012
FARE STRIKE!
The object of a fare strike is to convince the MBTA that they are going to lose more money because of the fare strike than they are going to gain by raising the fare or cutting service. This is entirely possible if enough people participate.
The only way the MBTA will respond to our needs is if we can put real pressure on them—if we can disrupt business as usual. We have the power to do this. One third of MBTA's budget comes from fares. They depend on us as riders to pay fares, and as workers to collect fares. When riders refuse to pay, and workers refuse to; collect, that will really hit them where it hurts.
We can get where we need to go, have a free ride, and 'put pressure on them at the same time. If this happened on a large scale, they would move quickly to reverse the fare hikes.
Get on the bus anyway you can. Go in the front door or the back door, whatever feels right to you. Don't cause a scene. Just don't pay. Or, start a conversation with the driver and your fellow riders, and together decide to participate in the strike.
Whatever you do, be polite to the driver. They are not the enemy. They have a very difficult and stressful job. Fare hikes, service cuts, and layoffs make their job more difficult. Many, if not most, of the drivers are sympathetic to our efforts.
TOGETHER, RIDERS AND DRIVERS UNITED, WE CAN WIN!
How do we build a fare strike? Get in touch!
BOSTON FARE STRIKE
What is Boston Fare Strike? We're a coalition of Boston-area organizations and individuals that came together this Spring to meet the July 1st fare hikes with a fare strike. We see this action as a first step in a long-term struggle to not only defend our public transit, but to improve and expand it to better serve the people of Boston and the surrounding environment.
Join the struggle!
Email: BostonFareStrike@rilhip.net
Website: bostonfarestrike.tumblr.com
Find us on Facebook
Read more about the MBTA hikes here: http://
mbta.com/about the mbta/?id=23567
No Fare Hikes!
No Service
No Layoffs!
They Say "Fare Hike" We Say FARE STRIKE! -JULY 1ST, 2012-
*****************
FARE HIKE?
On July 1st, the MBTA will raise fares 23%. That means your bus trip will go from $1.25 to $1.50, your subway fare from $1.70 to $2.00, and Bus-Subway combo monthly passes from $59 to $70. This increase is not to fund better service, cleaner facilities, more seating, or even more jobs. It's to knock $33 million off of the MBTA's $185 million debt.
MBTA's debt is from years of mismanagement, bad decisions by the politicians, and a recession caused by big banks. But the MBTA is asking us who have the least to spare-working people, students, immigrants, unemployed, and other members of the working class—to reach deeper into our pockets.
This is just the beginning. While "The T's yearly operating budget is millions of dollars in the red," according to NECN's Eileen Curran, "the long-term debt is in the billions." That means that
July's hikes are only a glimpse of what we can expect down the road. MBTA employees, who escaped this round of cuts mostly unscathed, will likely face major layoffs and benefits cuts next year in addition to future fare hikes. Public transportation should be defended and *expanded* to create jobs, help working people, and benefit the environment. How can the people of Boston stop these cuts and defend our transit system and our jobs in the long term? We must build power and strength together. Riders and workers must band together to launch a fare strike on July 1st!
Dublin in 2003 the bus drivers union called a fare tree as part of an ongoing fight against privatization on the city's bus system.
In 1998, a fare strike in LA organized by the LA Bus Riders Unions not only stopped a fare strike, but pressured LA into buying more buses to reduce crowding.
In some French cities, organized rare evasion became so common, it was more expensive to pay the police to watch all the metros and buses than to just make transport free which is what then happened in a number of cities*
In Italy, fare strike widespread and sucessfully stopped fare increases all over the country.
1993: in San Francisco a fare evasion campaign pressured the city to bring
back transfers which they did.
This Spring, Occupy Wall Street and TWU in New York chained exit doors open during rush hour, giving thousands of commuters a free ride.
In Greece, transportation hikes were stopped through a massive non-payment of fares while uniting with demands of transit workers.
There are successful, ongoing fare evasion campaigns in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Helsinki
The object of a fare strike is to convince the MBTA that they are going to lose more money because of the fare strike than they are going to gain by raising the fare or cutting service. This is entirely possible if enough people participate.
The only way the MBTA will respond to our needs is if we can put real pressure on them—if we can disrupt business as usual. We have the power to do this. One third of MBTA's budget comes from fares. They depend on us as riders to pay fares, and as workers to collect fares. When riders refuse to pay, and workers refuse to; collect, that will really hit them where it hurts.
We can get where we need to go, have a free ride, and 'put pressure on them at the same time. If this happened on a large scale, they would move quickly to reverse the fare hikes.
Get on the bus anyway you can. Go in the front door or the back door, whatever feels right to you. Don't cause a scene. Just don't pay. Or, start a conversation with the driver and your fellow riders, and together decide to participate in the strike.
Whatever you do, be polite to the driver. They are not the enemy. They have a very difficult and stressful job. Fare hikes, service cuts, and layoffs make their job more difficult. Many, if not most, of the drivers are sympathetic to our efforts.
TOGETHER, RIDERS AND DRIVERS UNITED, WE CAN WIN!
How do we build a fare strike? Get in touch!
BOSTON FARE STRIKE
What is Boston Fare Strike? We're a coalition of Boston-area organizations and individuals that came together this Spring to meet the July 1st fare hikes with a fare strike. We see this action as a first step in a long-term struggle to not only defend our public transit, but to improve and expand it to better serve the people of Boston and the surrounding environment.
Join the struggle!
Email: BostonFareStrike@rilhip.net
Website: bostonfarestrike.tumblr.com
Find us on Facebook
Read more about the MBTA hikes here: http://
mbta.com/about the mbta/?id=23567
No Fare Hikes!
No Service
No Layoffs!
They Say "Fare Hike" We Say FARE STRIKE! -JULY 1ST, 2012-
*****************
FARE HIKE?
On July 1st, the MBTA will raise fares 23%. That means your bus trip will go from $1.25 to $1.50, your subway fare from $1.70 to $2.00, and Bus-Subway combo monthly passes from $59 to $70. This increase is not to fund better service, cleaner facilities, more seating, or even more jobs. It's to knock $33 million off of the MBTA's $185 million debt.
MBTA's debt is from years of mismanagement, bad decisions by the politicians, and a recession caused by big banks. But the MBTA is asking us who have the least to spare-working people, students, immigrants, unemployed, and other members of the working class—to reach deeper into our pockets.
This is just the beginning. While "The T's yearly operating budget is millions of dollars in the red," according to NECN's Eileen Curran, "the long-term debt is in the billions." That means that
July's hikes are only a glimpse of what we can expect down the road. MBTA employees, who escaped this round of cuts mostly unscathed, will likely face major layoffs and benefits cuts next year in addition to future fare hikes. Public transportation should be defended and *expanded* to create jobs, help working people, and benefit the environment. How can the people of Boston stop these cuts and defend our transit system and our jobs in the long term? We must build power and strength together. Riders and workers must band together to launch a fare strike on July 1st!
Dublin in 2003 the bus drivers union called a fare tree as part of an ongoing fight against privatization on the city's bus system.
In 1998, a fare strike in LA organized by the LA Bus Riders Unions not only stopped a fare strike, but pressured LA into buying more buses to reduce crowding.
In some French cities, organized rare evasion became so common, it was more expensive to pay the police to watch all the metros and buses than to just make transport free which is what then happened in a number of cities*
In Italy, fare strike widespread and sucessfully stopped fare increases all over the country.
1993: in San Francisco a fare evasion campaign pressured the city to bring
back transfers which they did.
This Spring, Occupy Wall Street and TWU in New York chained exit doors open during rush hour, giving thousands of commuters a free ride.
In Greece, transportation hikes were stopped through a massive non-payment of fares while uniting with demands of transit workers.
There are successful, ongoing fare evasion campaigns in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Helsinki
Saturday, June 23, 2012
From Un-Occupied Boston-From Archives Of Boston Occupier” –Newspaper Of “Occupy Boston” (OB)-A Report From Greece Via The Occupier- (June 15, 2012)
Click on the headline to link to the Boston Occupier Archives.
Markin comment:
Defend the Occupy movement! Hands Off All Occupy Protestors! Victory To The Greek Workers!
Markin comment:
Defend the Occupy movement! Hands Off All Occupy Protestors! Victory To The Greek Workers!
From Archives Of Boston Occupier” –Newspaper Of “Occupy Boston” (OB) Number Eight (June 2012)
Click on the headline to link to the Boston Occupier Archives.
Markin comment:
Defend the Occupy movement! Hands Off All Occupy Protestors!
Markin comment:
Defend the Occupy movement! Hands Off All Occupy Protestors!
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-The Port Huron Statement (SDS, 1962)
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the Port Huron Statement, a foundational document of Students For Democratic Society (SDS, 1960s version)
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American for Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view.
As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but just not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose for educational purposes only:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American for Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view.
As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but just not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose for educational purposes only:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
Songs to While Away The Time By- Big Joe Williams Has Got The Blues “Baby Please Don’t Go”
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Big Joe Williams (out of the million guys who have covered the song, or pleaded) performing Baby Please Don’t Go.
Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:
You know now that I am “officially” retired from the public prints I have plenty of time to write a little about things other than the latest war (or wars), the latest governmental abridgement of our civil rights, the latest poor boy kid framed up for something, or the latest environmental disaster brought to us courtesy of some anonymous thing “too big to fail.” Now I have time to write about things less pressing on the daily world calendar, things like old timey flames, coming to young manhood up in Olde Saco (that’s in Maine, folks), teenage boyhood worries about fitting in, not fitting or to use a generational term, my generation “be cool.” That’s what I have on my plate today-girls, long lost flame girls. And what they could do to a guy, could do to a guy six ways to Sunday, and still have him grinning, asking for more.
What got me jumped up on this subject was the other night I was talking, lazily half-joking, half-spinning wheels talking with my old friend, Peter Paul Markin (always known as Pee-Pee and not that odd-ball Peter Paul thing like some old time yankee Brahmin getting ready to crash on his damn Irish-driven head) and he brought up some story about how he had snagged a date with some high school chick (read: term of art, term of love art, in the be-bop 1960s teen night to use Pee-Pee’s term for a young woman, me I called them frails) based solely on his ability to intelligently talk about every known Bob Dylan song and lyric of the day. Jesus, who was that poor frail?
That story though later got me to thinking about Loretta, Loretta D’Amboise, from my old neighborhood up in Olde Saco back in that same 1960s day. Yes, Loretta was something else. Now while Pee-Pee and I were talking that night he mentioned, and I agreed, that lately we had been spending a hell of a lot of time talking about old time flames, our so-called conquests of said flames, and our, ah, ah, ultimate defeat at their hands. Call it old age with time of our hands, call it male vanity, once removed, call it evoking that one last chance for immortality, hell, call it acting like, ah, dirty old men, but there you have it. Pee-Pee’s Dylan date honey was wrapped up by some archaic Bob Dylan swish but Loretta, ancient mist Loretta, would never come within ten miles of that scene. She was strictly a jazzy blues breeze, just my type then.
Although Loretta had lived in the old neighborhood all through school (we had graduated together from Olde Saco High School in 1967) other than about sixteen million leers, unsuccessful leers, on my part she had not given me a tumble not even close. See she was full French-Canadian (F.A.) like most other people in Olde Saco who came down from Canada way back when to work the textile and paper mills. Unlike me, who was strictly half and half, and that difference I found out from later talk mattered in her family, and to her preference for be-bop F.A. guys (with fast cars, some dough, and a willingness to spent that dough on her).
So Loretta and I never met up until one night after I had gotten back home from summer of love San Francisco in late 1968 and I had run into her at Jimmy Jack’s Blues Club (don’t let the Jimmy Jack’s name fool you, the owner’s name was really Jean Jacques Dubois) over on Atlantic Avenue right across from Olde Saco Beach. Ran into her alone sitting all by herself at the bar putting coins into the jukebox and playing Big Joe Williams’ Baby Please Don’t Go about six times. Six times that I counted.
I’ll tell you the why in a minute but let me tell you first that she called me over, not a big hello, long time, no see, what have you been up to, come on over but a hey, I didn’t know you likes the blues, Josh, come on over. And well yes I did like the blues all the way back to the times in early high school when I would be up in my room around midnight and get The Big Bopper Blues Blast from some mega-station in Chicago on my transistor radio. So, of course, I used this arcane knowledge to make my big Loretta move. Naturally I tossed out Muddy’s, Howlin’ Wolf’s, Elmore James’, and about twelve other electric blues guys names to show I was for real. And just as naturally I knew that Big Joe Williams was performing this Baby Please Don’t Go number on his six, five, eleven or whatever number strings he used string guitar. That tidbit impressed her.
What I wanted to know, and if you have been paying attention you would too, was why she was sitting very alone in Jimmy Jack’s on that late summer Saturday night. Well, you know the old story, male or female, young or old. Her boyfriend, Jean-Paul LaCroix, a name I couldn’t place in the town’s scheme of things, but who worked in the MacAdams Textile Mills, made “good money,” had a “boss” 1964 Mustang, didn’t mind spending said “good money” on her and who also did not mind sitting a few nights a week in Jimmy Jack’s feeding the jukebox had dumped her. Dumped her for some red-headed low-down Irish girl from Kittery down the coast. Hence her solace in Big Joe’s song (and a sipped glass of white wine).
Needless to say I expressed my condolences but I also thought to myself that this Jean-Paul jerk had a screw loose. There are lots of reasons for a guy (or a gal for that matter) to dump a guy, who knows, the reasons are legion. But to dump Loretta D’Amboise, no way, no sane way. Like I said a screw loose. Now Loretta was not drop-dead beautiful, most F.A. girls aren’t. She was slender, long-brown hair and blue eyes, a decent shape, very nice legs and not afraid to show them, no real bosom like most F.A. girls. Nice, but not beautiful. But that isn’t what counted because she had this great smile and that look, that look that come hither fresh ocean breeze look, like a guy, a leering guy, young or old, would day dream, night dream, day-night dream, night-day dream about all day, every day.
And so, for a few weeks, that look held me in thrall, no, transfixed. But even from our first date (at Jimmy Jack’s the next week, me feeding the jukebox and her looking, well looking) I sensed she was elsewhere, probably Jean-Paul elsewhere, because those nickels, dimes and quarters I was feeding the machine kept coming up quite a bit on Baby Please Don’t Go and it was not me she was pleaded with to stay. So one night we decided, or maybe she decided and I agreed, that we would just be kiss-of-death friends.
A few weeks later I noticed, as I was sitting in Jimmy Jack’s Diner (ya, that Jimmy Jack, he owned the diner too), Loretta sitting very happy up on the front seat of a 1964 Mustang. So I put a nickel in the jukebox and played Baby Please Don’t Go for what might have been. And now almost fifty years later I am just now putting it on the old CD player. For what might have been.
Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:
You know now that I am “officially” retired from the public prints I have plenty of time to write a little about things other than the latest war (or wars), the latest governmental abridgement of our civil rights, the latest poor boy kid framed up for something, or the latest environmental disaster brought to us courtesy of some anonymous thing “too big to fail.” Now I have time to write about things less pressing on the daily world calendar, things like old timey flames, coming to young manhood up in Olde Saco (that’s in Maine, folks), teenage boyhood worries about fitting in, not fitting or to use a generational term, my generation “be cool.” That’s what I have on my plate today-girls, long lost flame girls. And what they could do to a guy, could do to a guy six ways to Sunday, and still have him grinning, asking for more.
What got me jumped up on this subject was the other night I was talking, lazily half-joking, half-spinning wheels talking with my old friend, Peter Paul Markin (always known as Pee-Pee and not that odd-ball Peter Paul thing like some old time yankee Brahmin getting ready to crash on his damn Irish-driven head) and he brought up some story about how he had snagged a date with some high school chick (read: term of art, term of love art, in the be-bop 1960s teen night to use Pee-Pee’s term for a young woman, me I called them frails) based solely on his ability to intelligently talk about every known Bob Dylan song and lyric of the day. Jesus, who was that poor frail?
That story though later got me to thinking about Loretta, Loretta D’Amboise, from my old neighborhood up in Olde Saco back in that same 1960s day. Yes, Loretta was something else. Now while Pee-Pee and I were talking that night he mentioned, and I agreed, that lately we had been spending a hell of a lot of time talking about old time flames, our so-called conquests of said flames, and our, ah, ah, ultimate defeat at their hands. Call it old age with time of our hands, call it male vanity, once removed, call it evoking that one last chance for immortality, hell, call it acting like, ah, dirty old men, but there you have it. Pee-Pee’s Dylan date honey was wrapped up by some archaic Bob Dylan swish but Loretta, ancient mist Loretta, would never come within ten miles of that scene. She was strictly a jazzy blues breeze, just my type then.
Although Loretta had lived in the old neighborhood all through school (we had graduated together from Olde Saco High School in 1967) other than about sixteen million leers, unsuccessful leers, on my part she had not given me a tumble not even close. See she was full French-Canadian (F.A.) like most other people in Olde Saco who came down from Canada way back when to work the textile and paper mills. Unlike me, who was strictly half and half, and that difference I found out from later talk mattered in her family, and to her preference for be-bop F.A. guys (with fast cars, some dough, and a willingness to spent that dough on her).
So Loretta and I never met up until one night after I had gotten back home from summer of love San Francisco in late 1968 and I had run into her at Jimmy Jack’s Blues Club (don’t let the Jimmy Jack’s name fool you, the owner’s name was really Jean Jacques Dubois) over on Atlantic Avenue right across from Olde Saco Beach. Ran into her alone sitting all by herself at the bar putting coins into the jukebox and playing Big Joe Williams’ Baby Please Don’t Go about six times. Six times that I counted.
I’ll tell you the why in a minute but let me tell you first that she called me over, not a big hello, long time, no see, what have you been up to, come on over but a hey, I didn’t know you likes the blues, Josh, come on over. And well yes I did like the blues all the way back to the times in early high school when I would be up in my room around midnight and get The Big Bopper Blues Blast from some mega-station in Chicago on my transistor radio. So, of course, I used this arcane knowledge to make my big Loretta move. Naturally I tossed out Muddy’s, Howlin’ Wolf’s, Elmore James’, and about twelve other electric blues guys names to show I was for real. And just as naturally I knew that Big Joe Williams was performing this Baby Please Don’t Go number on his six, five, eleven or whatever number strings he used string guitar. That tidbit impressed her.
What I wanted to know, and if you have been paying attention you would too, was why she was sitting very alone in Jimmy Jack’s on that late summer Saturday night. Well, you know the old story, male or female, young or old. Her boyfriend, Jean-Paul LaCroix, a name I couldn’t place in the town’s scheme of things, but who worked in the MacAdams Textile Mills, made “good money,” had a “boss” 1964 Mustang, didn’t mind spending said “good money” on her and who also did not mind sitting a few nights a week in Jimmy Jack’s feeding the jukebox had dumped her. Dumped her for some red-headed low-down Irish girl from Kittery down the coast. Hence her solace in Big Joe’s song (and a sipped glass of white wine).
Needless to say I expressed my condolences but I also thought to myself that this Jean-Paul jerk had a screw loose. There are lots of reasons for a guy (or a gal for that matter) to dump a guy, who knows, the reasons are legion. But to dump Loretta D’Amboise, no way, no sane way. Like I said a screw loose. Now Loretta was not drop-dead beautiful, most F.A. girls aren’t. She was slender, long-brown hair and blue eyes, a decent shape, very nice legs and not afraid to show them, no real bosom like most F.A. girls. Nice, but not beautiful. But that isn’t what counted because she had this great smile and that look, that look that come hither fresh ocean breeze look, like a guy, a leering guy, young or old, would day dream, night dream, day-night dream, night-day dream about all day, every day.
And so, for a few weeks, that look held me in thrall, no, transfixed. But even from our first date (at Jimmy Jack’s the next week, me feeding the jukebox and her looking, well looking) I sensed she was elsewhere, probably Jean-Paul elsewhere, because those nickels, dimes and quarters I was feeding the machine kept coming up quite a bit on Baby Please Don’t Go and it was not me she was pleaded with to stay. So one night we decided, or maybe she decided and I agreed, that we would just be kiss-of-death friends.
A few weeks later I noticed, as I was sitting in Jimmy Jack’s Diner (ya, that Jimmy Jack, he owned the diner too), Loretta sitting very happy up on the front seat of a 1964 Mustang. So I put a nickel in the jukebox and played Baby Please Don’t Go for what might have been. And now almost fifty years later I am just now putting it on the old CD player. For what might have been.
Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- A Tale To Sit Around The Soda Fountain By-Frankie Goes Wild
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Angels performing Cry Baby Cry.
Peter Paul Markin comment:
Recently I did, as part of a rock 'n' roll be-bop night record review, a little vignette about soda fountain life in the early 1960s, featuring my boyhood best friend, Frankie Riley, Frankie from our down at the heels and not going to get better as America deindustrialized no more shipyard busy working class neighborhood. Frankie of one thousand stories, Frankie of one thousand treacheries, about twenty-three of them directed toward me, and Frankie of a one thousand kindnesses, including about ninety-eight directed toward me and hence the longevity of our friendship. Somehow it did not seem right to leave Frankie hanging around that old review soda fountain and rather than leave him to that fate I have decided to rewrite the story with the commercial CD review tag removed, although lots of the old story will filter through here anyway:
See, it really is a truism by now, by 2010 teen-age now, that every “teenage nation” generation since they started to place teenage-hood as a distinct phase of life between childhood and young adulthood over a century, maybe two centuries, ago has developed its own tribal rituals and institutions. Today’s teens seem to have cornered food courts at the mall, video arcades and the ubiquitous Internet screen connections through various look-at techno-gadgets although, frankly, I am not fully current on all their mores, customs and tribal language. And moreover would trend very lightly, very lightly indeed, on that sacred ground.
What I am familiar with, very familiar with, is the teen institutions of my generation, the generation of ’68, that came of teen age in the early 1960s. Our places of rendezvous were the corners in front of mom and pop variety stores in the days before franchise 7/11 convenience stores came to dominate the quick stop one item shopping market, if we could squeeze room around the drifters, grifters and midnight sifters who frequented those holy sites and worried about "turf" and our being within ten miles of it; the ever present heaven-sent smell pizza parlor (hold the onions on that slice, please, always hold the onions, in case I get lucky with that certain she tonight) with its jump jukebox where coin was king and we deposited more than a few nickels, dimes and quarters to hear our favorites of the day or minute; for some of the dweebs, or if you wanted to get away with a “cheap” date, or thought you were doing somebody a favor to take his sister out, but only as a last resort, favor that is, the bowling alley; the open air drive-in restaurants complete with "hot" car hops who filled the night air with their cold sex, their faraway cold tip-driven sex, for more “expensive” dates (meaning take your eyes off the damn car hops, or else); and, for serious business, meaning serious girl and boy watching, the soda fountain, especially in car-less teen times. And not, in my case, just any soda fountain but the soda fountain at the local individually-owned and operated drug store (Doc’s Drug Store, for real, that was the name) that used the soda fountain to draw people (read, kids: what would we need prescription drugs for, those were for old people, we were invincible) into the store.
As part of that record review mentioned earlier I noted that the cover of the CD had an almost Edward Hooper Nighthawks At The Diner-like illustration of just such a classic soda fountain, complete with three whimsical teen-age frills (read girls, if you are not from my old working class neighborhood, beaten down, or not) all sipping their straws out of one, can you believe it, one cone-shaped paper cup while a faux Fabian-type looks on. Ah, be still my heart.
Needless to say this scene could have been from any town USA then, complete with its own jukebox setup (although not every drug store had them, ours didn’t although the local rock radio station was blasting away as we tapped out the beat at all hours), the booths with the vinyl-covered summer sweat-inducing seats and Formica top tables (dolled up with paper place settings, condiments, etc., just like home right), the soda fountain granite (maybe faux granite) counter, complete with swivel around stools that gave the odd boy or two (read: me and my corner boys, or rather, Frankie and his corner boys, including me) a better vantage point to watch the traffic come into the store (read: girls), and a Drink Coca-Cola-inscribed full length mirror just in case you missed a beat.
Said counter also complete with glassed-encased pie (or donut) cases; the various utensils for making frappes (that's a New England thing, look it up), milkshakes, banana splits, ice cream floats, and cherry-flavored Cokes; a small grille for hamburgers, hot dogs and fries (or the odd boy grilled cheese sandwich with bacon); and, well, of course, a soda jerk (usually a guy) to whip up the orders. Oh, did I say anything about girl and boy watching? Ya, I did. What do you think we were all there for? The ice cream and soda? Come on. Does it really take an hour, an hour and a half, or even two hours to drink a Pepsi even in teen-land?
But enough said about the décor because the mere mention of the term “soda jerk” brings to mind a Frankie, Frankie from the old neighborhood story, Frankie of a thousand stories and Frankie who was the king hill skirt-chaser (read: girl), and my best friend in middle school (a.k.a. junior high) and high school. I already "hipped" you to the “his treacheries” and “kindnesses.” Ya, that Frankie, or rather this time Frankie’s sister, although now that I think of it she is really the "stooge" in this thing.
Now when we were juniors in high school in the early 1960s, Frankie (as king of the hill) and I (as his lord chamberlain) , mainly held court at the local pizza parlor, a pizza parlor which was in the pecking order of town teen social life way above the soda fountain rookie camp teen life scene. That soda foundation stuff was for kids and dweebs, unless, of course, things were tough at the pizza joint (meaning girl-free) and we meandered up the street to Doc’s Drug Store soda fountain to check out the action there.
Of course, before we graduated to the “bigs” pizza parlor, which I will tell you about some other time because it plays no part in this heart-rendering tale, the old soda fountain side of that drug store (the other side had aisles of over-the-counter drugs and sundries, a couple of permanently in use enclosed telephone booths for those (read: teens) who had not telephone at home(like me much of the time) or didn’t want their business exposed on the “two-party” home line, and your regulation pharmacy area for the good legal doctor's note drug stuff) was just fine. And it did no harm, no harm at all, in those days to strike up friendships , or at least stay on the good side of the soda jerks so you could get an extra scoop of ice cream or a free refill on your Coke. See, the soda jerk was usually the guy (and like I said before it was always guys, girls would probably be too distracted by every high energy teen guy, including dweeb-types, trying to be “cool”) who connected the dots about who was who and what was what in the local scene (I do not have to tell you at this late point the focal point of that scene, right?). Moreover, later, after we found out about life a bit more (read: sex) the soda jerk acted as a “shill” for Doc for those teens looking for their first liquor (for medical purposes, of course) or, keep this quiet, okay, condoms. But the thing was, younger or older, that the soda jerk also had some cache with the girls, I guess it must have been the uniform. Wow! Personally I wouldn’t have been caught dead with that silly flap cap they wore.
So one night we are dried up (read: no girls) at the pizza parlor and decided, as usual, to meander up the street to Doc’s. We had heard earlier in the day that Doc had a new jerk on and we wanted to check him out anyway. As we entered who do we see but Frankie’s sister, Lorrie, Frankie’s fourteen year old sister, Lorrie, talking up a storm, all dewy-eyed, over this new jerk, who must have been about eighteen. And more than that this “cradle-robber” had his arm around, or kind of around, Lorrie. Old Frankie saw red, no double red, if not more, hell and back red.
I can hear the yawns already, especially from every guy who had a goofy, off-hand younger sister just starting to feel her oats (or for that matter every gal who had such a younger brother, or any other such combinations). See, though, and maybe it’s hard to explain if you didn’t live in those misbegotten times, Frankie was a guy who had more girls lined up that he could ever meet and be able to keep himself in one piece, although he had only one serious frail (read: girl again, okay) that kept his interest over time (Joanne that I told you about before when I did a thing on Roy "The Boy" Orbison). So Frankie was no stranger to the old male boy (and adult too, as we found out later) double standard of the age about boys being able to do whatever they wanted to but girls had to be true-blue or whatever color it was, but no messing around, especially in regard to his sister. But there you have it, and he was seeing that old red that meant no good, for somebody.
Now this sister, Lorrie, when I first meant her back in the days when I first met Frankie in middle school was nothing but a...sister, a Frankie, king of the hill, sister but still just a sister. Meaning I really never paid much attention to her. But this night I could see, dewy-eyed or not, that she has turned into not a bad looker, especially with that form-filling cashmere sweater all the girls were wearing those days and that I swear they were wearing so that guys would notice that form-filling part. And I could see that, while she took away from her "cool" in my eyes by the ubiquitous chewing of gum that made her seem about ten years old, that guys could go for her, eighteen or not, soda jerks or not. As to the soda jerk, Steve was his name as I found out later, who was not a bad looking guy and old Lorrie didn't need glasses to see that. He seemed like a lot of guys, a lot of Frankie and me guys, ready to chat up any skirt that would listen to him for two minutes, maybe less.
And see, as well, it is not like Frankie really had some old-fashioned medieval sense of honor, or some Catholic, which we and half the freaking town were then, or were trying to get away from then, hang-up about sex, teen-age or otherwise. So it was not that he was really protective of her as much as he was insulted (so he told me later) by some new “jerk” trying to make moves to become "king of the hill" by “courting” Frankie’s, Francis X. Riley’s sister. See that's the way that he operated, and for all I know maybe had to operate, to stay king. Maybe he read about it someplace, like in Machiavelli’s The Prince (Frankie and I were crazy for that kind of book in those days, Christ we even read Marx’s Communist Manifesto just to be “cool”), and figured he had to do things that way.
And Frankie, old wiry, slender, quick-fisted, and not bad–looking but no Steve McQueen, wrapping the girls up with his pseudo-beat patter Frankie was tough. Tougher than he looked (with his black chinos, flannel shirt, work boot and midnight sunglass regulation faux beat look). So naturally new boy “jerk” takes umbrage (nice word, right?) when Frankie starts to move “sis” away from him. Well the long and short of it was that Frankie and “jerk” started to beef a little but it is all over quickly and here is why. Frankie took an ice cream cone, a triple scoop, triple-flavored ice cream cone no less, that was sitting on the counter in a cup in front of a girl customer (a cute girl who I wound up checking out seriously later) and bops, no be-bops, no be-bop bops one soda jerk, new or not, with it.
Now if you have ever seen an eighteen year old guy, in uniform, I don’t care if it is only a soda jerk’s uniform, wearing about three kinds of ice cream (no, not what you think, some harlequin strawberry, vanilla, chocolate combo but frozen pudding, cherry vanilla, and mocha almond, hey, I really will have to check that girl out) on that uniform you know, you have to know that this guy’s persona non grata with the girls and “cool” guys in town forevermore.
Or so you would think. Frankie went out of town for a few days to do something on family business (not related) after this incident and one night near the edge of town as I was walking with that young girl customer whose ice cream Frankie scooped (I bought her another one that incident night, that same triple combo mentioned above, thank god I had a little cash on me, and that is why I was walking with her right then, thank you) when I saw one Lorrie, one very foxy cashmere sweater-wearing Lorrie, sitting, sitting like the Queen of Sheba, in Mr. Soda Jerk’s boss cherry red with full-chrome accessories 1959 Chevy listening to Cry Baby Cry by The Angels as “mood” music on the background car radio that I could faintly hear. Just don’t tell Frankie, okay.
Peter Paul Markin comment:
Recently I did, as part of a rock 'n' roll be-bop night record review, a little vignette about soda fountain life in the early 1960s, featuring my boyhood best friend, Frankie Riley, Frankie from our down at the heels and not going to get better as America deindustrialized no more shipyard busy working class neighborhood. Frankie of one thousand stories, Frankie of one thousand treacheries, about twenty-three of them directed toward me, and Frankie of a one thousand kindnesses, including about ninety-eight directed toward me and hence the longevity of our friendship. Somehow it did not seem right to leave Frankie hanging around that old review soda fountain and rather than leave him to that fate I have decided to rewrite the story with the commercial CD review tag removed, although lots of the old story will filter through here anyway:
See, it really is a truism by now, by 2010 teen-age now, that every “teenage nation” generation since they started to place teenage-hood as a distinct phase of life between childhood and young adulthood over a century, maybe two centuries, ago has developed its own tribal rituals and institutions. Today’s teens seem to have cornered food courts at the mall, video arcades and the ubiquitous Internet screen connections through various look-at techno-gadgets although, frankly, I am not fully current on all their mores, customs and tribal language. And moreover would trend very lightly, very lightly indeed, on that sacred ground.
What I am familiar with, very familiar with, is the teen institutions of my generation, the generation of ’68, that came of teen age in the early 1960s. Our places of rendezvous were the corners in front of mom and pop variety stores in the days before franchise 7/11 convenience stores came to dominate the quick stop one item shopping market, if we could squeeze room around the drifters, grifters and midnight sifters who frequented those holy sites and worried about "turf" and our being within ten miles of it; the ever present heaven-sent smell pizza parlor (hold the onions on that slice, please, always hold the onions, in case I get lucky with that certain she tonight) with its jump jukebox where coin was king and we deposited more than a few nickels, dimes and quarters to hear our favorites of the day or minute; for some of the dweebs, or if you wanted to get away with a “cheap” date, or thought you were doing somebody a favor to take his sister out, but only as a last resort, favor that is, the bowling alley; the open air drive-in restaurants complete with "hot" car hops who filled the night air with their cold sex, their faraway cold tip-driven sex, for more “expensive” dates (meaning take your eyes off the damn car hops, or else); and, for serious business, meaning serious girl and boy watching, the soda fountain, especially in car-less teen times. And not, in my case, just any soda fountain but the soda fountain at the local individually-owned and operated drug store (Doc’s Drug Store, for real, that was the name) that used the soda fountain to draw people (read, kids: what would we need prescription drugs for, those were for old people, we were invincible) into the store.
As part of that record review mentioned earlier I noted that the cover of the CD had an almost Edward Hooper Nighthawks At The Diner-like illustration of just such a classic soda fountain, complete with three whimsical teen-age frills (read girls, if you are not from my old working class neighborhood, beaten down, or not) all sipping their straws out of one, can you believe it, one cone-shaped paper cup while a faux Fabian-type looks on. Ah, be still my heart.
Needless to say this scene could have been from any town USA then, complete with its own jukebox setup (although not every drug store had them, ours didn’t although the local rock radio station was blasting away as we tapped out the beat at all hours), the booths with the vinyl-covered summer sweat-inducing seats and Formica top tables (dolled up with paper place settings, condiments, etc., just like home right), the soda fountain granite (maybe faux granite) counter, complete with swivel around stools that gave the odd boy or two (read: me and my corner boys, or rather, Frankie and his corner boys, including me) a better vantage point to watch the traffic come into the store (read: girls), and a Drink Coca-Cola-inscribed full length mirror just in case you missed a beat.
Said counter also complete with glassed-encased pie (or donut) cases; the various utensils for making frappes (that's a New England thing, look it up), milkshakes, banana splits, ice cream floats, and cherry-flavored Cokes; a small grille for hamburgers, hot dogs and fries (or the odd boy grilled cheese sandwich with bacon); and, well, of course, a soda jerk (usually a guy) to whip up the orders. Oh, did I say anything about girl and boy watching? Ya, I did. What do you think we were all there for? The ice cream and soda? Come on. Does it really take an hour, an hour and a half, or even two hours to drink a Pepsi even in teen-land?
But enough said about the décor because the mere mention of the term “soda jerk” brings to mind a Frankie, Frankie from the old neighborhood story, Frankie of a thousand stories and Frankie who was the king hill skirt-chaser (read: girl), and my best friend in middle school (a.k.a. junior high) and high school. I already "hipped" you to the “his treacheries” and “kindnesses.” Ya, that Frankie, or rather this time Frankie’s sister, although now that I think of it she is really the "stooge" in this thing.
Now when we were juniors in high school in the early 1960s, Frankie (as king of the hill) and I (as his lord chamberlain) , mainly held court at the local pizza parlor, a pizza parlor which was in the pecking order of town teen social life way above the soda fountain rookie camp teen life scene. That soda foundation stuff was for kids and dweebs, unless, of course, things were tough at the pizza joint (meaning girl-free) and we meandered up the street to Doc’s Drug Store soda fountain to check out the action there.
Of course, before we graduated to the “bigs” pizza parlor, which I will tell you about some other time because it plays no part in this heart-rendering tale, the old soda fountain side of that drug store (the other side had aisles of over-the-counter drugs and sundries, a couple of permanently in use enclosed telephone booths for those (read: teens) who had not telephone at home(like me much of the time) or didn’t want their business exposed on the “two-party” home line, and your regulation pharmacy area for the good legal doctor's note drug stuff) was just fine. And it did no harm, no harm at all, in those days to strike up friendships , or at least stay on the good side of the soda jerks so you could get an extra scoop of ice cream or a free refill on your Coke. See, the soda jerk was usually the guy (and like I said before it was always guys, girls would probably be too distracted by every high energy teen guy, including dweeb-types, trying to be “cool”) who connected the dots about who was who and what was what in the local scene (I do not have to tell you at this late point the focal point of that scene, right?). Moreover, later, after we found out about life a bit more (read: sex) the soda jerk acted as a “shill” for Doc for those teens looking for their first liquor (for medical purposes, of course) or, keep this quiet, okay, condoms. But the thing was, younger or older, that the soda jerk also had some cache with the girls, I guess it must have been the uniform. Wow! Personally I wouldn’t have been caught dead with that silly flap cap they wore.
So one night we are dried up (read: no girls) at the pizza parlor and decided, as usual, to meander up the street to Doc’s. We had heard earlier in the day that Doc had a new jerk on and we wanted to check him out anyway. As we entered who do we see but Frankie’s sister, Lorrie, Frankie’s fourteen year old sister, Lorrie, talking up a storm, all dewy-eyed, over this new jerk, who must have been about eighteen. And more than that this “cradle-robber” had his arm around, or kind of around, Lorrie. Old Frankie saw red, no double red, if not more, hell and back red.
I can hear the yawns already, especially from every guy who had a goofy, off-hand younger sister just starting to feel her oats (or for that matter every gal who had such a younger brother, or any other such combinations). See, though, and maybe it’s hard to explain if you didn’t live in those misbegotten times, Frankie was a guy who had more girls lined up that he could ever meet and be able to keep himself in one piece, although he had only one serious frail (read: girl again, okay) that kept his interest over time (Joanne that I told you about before when I did a thing on Roy "The Boy" Orbison). So Frankie was no stranger to the old male boy (and adult too, as we found out later) double standard of the age about boys being able to do whatever they wanted to but girls had to be true-blue or whatever color it was, but no messing around, especially in regard to his sister. But there you have it, and he was seeing that old red that meant no good, for somebody.
Now this sister, Lorrie, when I first meant her back in the days when I first met Frankie in middle school was nothing but a...sister, a Frankie, king of the hill, sister but still just a sister. Meaning I really never paid much attention to her. But this night I could see, dewy-eyed or not, that she has turned into not a bad looker, especially with that form-filling cashmere sweater all the girls were wearing those days and that I swear they were wearing so that guys would notice that form-filling part. And I could see that, while she took away from her "cool" in my eyes by the ubiquitous chewing of gum that made her seem about ten years old, that guys could go for her, eighteen or not, soda jerks or not. As to the soda jerk, Steve was his name as I found out later, who was not a bad looking guy and old Lorrie didn't need glasses to see that. He seemed like a lot of guys, a lot of Frankie and me guys, ready to chat up any skirt that would listen to him for two minutes, maybe less.
And see, as well, it is not like Frankie really had some old-fashioned medieval sense of honor, or some Catholic, which we and half the freaking town were then, or were trying to get away from then, hang-up about sex, teen-age or otherwise. So it was not that he was really protective of her as much as he was insulted (so he told me later) by some new “jerk” trying to make moves to become "king of the hill" by “courting” Frankie’s, Francis X. Riley’s sister. See that's the way that he operated, and for all I know maybe had to operate, to stay king. Maybe he read about it someplace, like in Machiavelli’s The Prince (Frankie and I were crazy for that kind of book in those days, Christ we even read Marx’s Communist Manifesto just to be “cool”), and figured he had to do things that way.
And Frankie, old wiry, slender, quick-fisted, and not bad–looking but no Steve McQueen, wrapping the girls up with his pseudo-beat patter Frankie was tough. Tougher than he looked (with his black chinos, flannel shirt, work boot and midnight sunglass regulation faux beat look). So naturally new boy “jerk” takes umbrage (nice word, right?) when Frankie starts to move “sis” away from him. Well the long and short of it was that Frankie and “jerk” started to beef a little but it is all over quickly and here is why. Frankie took an ice cream cone, a triple scoop, triple-flavored ice cream cone no less, that was sitting on the counter in a cup in front of a girl customer (a cute girl who I wound up checking out seriously later) and bops, no be-bops, no be-bop bops one soda jerk, new or not, with it.
Now if you have ever seen an eighteen year old guy, in uniform, I don’t care if it is only a soda jerk’s uniform, wearing about three kinds of ice cream (no, not what you think, some harlequin strawberry, vanilla, chocolate combo but frozen pudding, cherry vanilla, and mocha almond, hey, I really will have to check that girl out) on that uniform you know, you have to know that this guy’s persona non grata with the girls and “cool” guys in town forevermore.
Or so you would think. Frankie went out of town for a few days to do something on family business (not related) after this incident and one night near the edge of town as I was walking with that young girl customer whose ice cream Frankie scooped (I bought her another one that incident night, that same triple combo mentioned above, thank god I had a little cash on me, and that is why I was walking with her right then, thank you) when I saw one Lorrie, one very foxy cashmere sweater-wearing Lorrie, sitting, sitting like the Queen of Sheba, in Mr. Soda Jerk’s boss cherry red with full-chrome accessories 1959 Chevy listening to Cry Baby Cry by The Angels as “mood” music on the background car radio that I could faintly hear. Just don’t tell Frankie, okay.
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Out In The Be-Bop Night- In the Beginning Of Rock- Bop- Once Again, From the Vaults Of Sun Records
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Carl Perkins performing Boppin' The Blues.
CD Review
The Sun Gods, 3-CD set, Dressed To Kill Records, 1999
One of the purposes of this space is to review various cultural trends that drove American popular culture in the 20th century. More specifically drove those trends in the post-World War II, the lifetimes of many of today’s baby boomers. A seminal point, musically at least, was the breakout of the mid-1950s fueled by a strange and sometimes contradictory mix of black-based rhythm and blues, Arkie, Okie, Appalachian “hillbilly” rock-a-billy and plain old jazz and vanilla show tune Tin Pan Alley. The mix of course we now know as rock ‘n’ roll, sadly for this aging reviewer now called the age of classic rock 'n' roll. No sadly that it does not exist except in CDs such as the one under review, The Sun Gods, but that frenetic fury to change the musical direction of popular culture seems to have lost steam along the aging process. But take heart. While we have all probably slowed down a step or seven we will always have Sun Records CD memories to carry us.
And there is no question, no question at all that, pound for pound, the music that came out of Sam Phillips’ Memphis-based Sun Records for about a decade in the 1950s was central to the mix that created rock 'n' roll. Think Elvis, Jerry Lee and Chuck Berry to name just three of the more famous singers to come out of that label. And as this CD demonstrates beyond doubt, highlighted by the work of Sonny Burgess and Warren Smith here, also a whole tribe of lesser lights, one- hit Johnnies and Janies, and those who never made it that formed the background milieu that drove the others forward and created this musical chemistry that can boggle the mind. If you want to find, in one spot, a CD set that rediscovers the roots of rock ‘n’ roll, especially the contributions from the rock-a-billy side well here you are.
I have highlighted some of the tracks on each disc.
Disc One: Carl Perkins performing Roll Over Beethoven, a song made famous by Chuck Berry (and that I went crazy over when I first heard it as a kid) which I think that he may actually do better than Chuck, if you can believe that. There are several Elvis interviews recorded here as part of the promotion of his records and/or concerts in the early days. I would say, thank god, that he had that great musical talent, that look and those hips swaying in the sex-fantasy driven night because off these innocuous, bland interviews he would have starved otherwise. Still these are good to hear from a time before the king became “the King.”
Disc Two: Red Hot by Billy Lee Riley, a rock-a-billy hard-driving classic that expresses just what the break-out was all about; We Wanna Boogie by Sonny Burgess (a definitely underrated force), Red Cadillac and a Black Mustache by Warren Smith (Bob Dylan covered this one in a tribute album); and, Crazy Women by Gene Simmons. This is one of those CDs that you have to listen to all the way through to get a real feel for this music, and you should.
Disc Three: Rock Boppin’ Baby by Edwin Brice; Let’s Bop by Jack Earls; Thinkin’ Of Me by Mickey Gilley; Rockhouse by Harold Jenkins; and, You Don’t Care by, Narvel Felts. Yes, I know, you probably have never heard of any of them. But if you listen to this CD you will see where Elvis, Jerry Lee and Chuck got their stuff from. And you know, successful or as failures, as I have mentioned before in reviewing Sun Record material, all these guys (and a few gals) all sound like they are happy to be rocking and rolling rather than whatever else they were slated to do in life.
CD Review
The Sun Gods, 3-CD set, Dressed To Kill Records, 1999
One of the purposes of this space is to review various cultural trends that drove American popular culture in the 20th century. More specifically drove those trends in the post-World War II, the lifetimes of many of today’s baby boomers. A seminal point, musically at least, was the breakout of the mid-1950s fueled by a strange and sometimes contradictory mix of black-based rhythm and blues, Arkie, Okie, Appalachian “hillbilly” rock-a-billy and plain old jazz and vanilla show tune Tin Pan Alley. The mix of course we now know as rock ‘n’ roll, sadly for this aging reviewer now called the age of classic rock 'n' roll. No sadly that it does not exist except in CDs such as the one under review, The Sun Gods, but that frenetic fury to change the musical direction of popular culture seems to have lost steam along the aging process. But take heart. While we have all probably slowed down a step or seven we will always have Sun Records CD memories to carry us.
And there is no question, no question at all that, pound for pound, the music that came out of Sam Phillips’ Memphis-based Sun Records for about a decade in the 1950s was central to the mix that created rock 'n' roll. Think Elvis, Jerry Lee and Chuck Berry to name just three of the more famous singers to come out of that label. And as this CD demonstrates beyond doubt, highlighted by the work of Sonny Burgess and Warren Smith here, also a whole tribe of lesser lights, one- hit Johnnies and Janies, and those who never made it that formed the background milieu that drove the others forward and created this musical chemistry that can boggle the mind. If you want to find, in one spot, a CD set that rediscovers the roots of rock ‘n’ roll, especially the contributions from the rock-a-billy side well here you are.
I have highlighted some of the tracks on each disc.
Disc One: Carl Perkins performing Roll Over Beethoven, a song made famous by Chuck Berry (and that I went crazy over when I first heard it as a kid) which I think that he may actually do better than Chuck, if you can believe that. There are several Elvis interviews recorded here as part of the promotion of his records and/or concerts in the early days. I would say, thank god, that he had that great musical talent, that look and those hips swaying in the sex-fantasy driven night because off these innocuous, bland interviews he would have starved otherwise. Still these are good to hear from a time before the king became “the King.”
Disc Two: Red Hot by Billy Lee Riley, a rock-a-billy hard-driving classic that expresses just what the break-out was all about; We Wanna Boogie by Sonny Burgess (a definitely underrated force), Red Cadillac and a Black Mustache by Warren Smith (Bob Dylan covered this one in a tribute album); and, Crazy Women by Gene Simmons. This is one of those CDs that you have to listen to all the way through to get a real feel for this music, and you should.
Disc Three: Rock Boppin’ Baby by Edwin Brice; Let’s Bop by Jack Earls; Thinkin’ Of Me by Mickey Gilley; Rockhouse by Harold Jenkins; and, You Don’t Care by, Narvel Felts. Yes, I know, you probably have never heard of any of them. But if you listen to this CD you will see where Elvis, Jerry Lee and Chuck got their stuff from. And you know, successful or as failures, as I have mentioned before in reviewing Sun Record material, all these guys (and a few gals) all sound like they are happy to be rocking and rolling rather than whatever else they were slated to do in life.
From The Golden Age Of Boogie Woogie Be-Bop Night Piano- Jerry Lee Lewis At 70 Something -Last Man Standing
Click on the headline to link to a YouTUbe film clip of Jerry Lee Lewis performing in his golden age.
Elvis, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Bo Didderly. Yes those are the men who created rock and roll as we know it. However in that list do not forget one Jerry Lee Lewis. Fate dealt him an uneven hand due to the foibles of his personal life but his form of rockabilly/boogie woogie piano driven music and madman presentation must be placed in the mix of influences that drove the best of early rock. If for no other reason that that he is one of the few ‘still standing’ from that generation it is nice to see what the Killer can do in his 71st year in concert in New York City in 2006 with a host of guests some old, some young. Clearly off these performances he has lost a couple of steps. Hell that kind of energy that Jerry Lee produced in the 1950s definitely had a short shelf-life. There are some nice clips from that period intertwined with the concert by the way. Nevertheless here he can still give out on some tunes like in the old days. Take his set with Ivan Neville, for example, especially on Who Will the Next Fool Be. Tom Jones on Green, Green Grass of Home. Norah Jones on Your Cheating Heart. And on and on. In fact the covers of his old material and some Hank Williams material highlight this concert. If you have a couple of hours better take advantage of it. Then you will know what it was like when men (or women) played rock and roll for keeps.
Elvis, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Bo Didderly. Yes those are the men who created rock and roll as we know it. However in that list do not forget one Jerry Lee Lewis. Fate dealt him an uneven hand due to the foibles of his personal life but his form of rockabilly/boogie woogie piano driven music and madman presentation must be placed in the mix of influences that drove the best of early rock. If for no other reason that that he is one of the few ‘still standing’ from that generation it is nice to see what the Killer can do in his 71st year in concert in New York City in 2006 with a host of guests some old, some young. Clearly off these performances he has lost a couple of steps. Hell that kind of energy that Jerry Lee produced in the 1950s definitely had a short shelf-life. There are some nice clips from that period intertwined with the concert by the way. Nevertheless here he can still give out on some tunes like in the old days. Take his set with Ivan Neville, for example, especially on Who Will the Next Fool Be. Tom Jones on Green, Green Grass of Home. Norah Jones on Your Cheating Heart. And on and on. In fact the covers of his old material and some Hank Williams material highlight this concert. If you have a couple of hours better take advantage of it. Then you will know what it was like when men (or women) played rock and roll for keeps.
From The Pen Of The English Revolution Historian Professor Christopher Hill- A Short Note On -"Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century" (1958)
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Professor Christopher Hill.
Book Review
Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (1958)
In this expansively footnoted book Professor Hill, as he has done in his other work, connects the dramatic break up of traditional agrarian English society; the resulting vast increase of 'master-less' men not bound to traditional authority and potentially receptive to new ideas; the widespread availability of the protestant Bible brought about by the revolution in printing and thus permitting widespread distribution to the masses; the effects of the Protestant Reformation on individual responsibility; the discrediting of the theology of the divine right of kings; the role of the priesthood of all believers that foreshadow a very modern concept of the validity of individual religious expression; radical interpretations of equality and primitive communism, particularly the work of Gerrard Winstanley ; the Puritan ethic and many more subjects of interests to bring to life what the common people who hitherto had barely entered the stage of history were reading, watching, thinking and doing.
His central premise here is that it is hard to understand the political, social and economic developments that led to revolution and later the creation of a major capitalist state in England without reference to the literature of the times. To buttress his argument Hill writes a series of interesting essays ranging from the critical important of the enforcement or non enforcement of state censorship for literary freedom; the symbolic importance of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; the various literary battles between pro-parliamentary and pro-royalist writers especially his muse John Milton; an nice appreciative of Samuel Pepys’ Diary and a long overdue debunking of that of John Evelyn as sources for an appreciation of the fads and fashions of the times ; and a look at a couple of ultra-royalist restoration writers, Samuel Butler and the Earl of Rochester. In all a very good exposition of his ideas on the relationship between literature and political action. Of course, for the interpretation of the English Revolution, it never hurts to have John Milton as your muse. As I have pointed out before in other reviews one should read Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down first then you are really ready for the exoteric here. Fair enough?
Book Review
Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (1958)
In this expansively footnoted book Professor Hill, as he has done in his other work, connects the dramatic break up of traditional agrarian English society; the resulting vast increase of 'master-less' men not bound to traditional authority and potentially receptive to new ideas; the widespread availability of the protestant Bible brought about by the revolution in printing and thus permitting widespread distribution to the masses; the effects of the Protestant Reformation on individual responsibility; the discrediting of the theology of the divine right of kings; the role of the priesthood of all believers that foreshadow a very modern concept of the validity of individual religious expression; radical interpretations of equality and primitive communism, particularly the work of Gerrard Winstanley ; the Puritan ethic and many more subjects of interests to bring to life what the common people who hitherto had barely entered the stage of history were reading, watching, thinking and doing.
His central premise here is that it is hard to understand the political, social and economic developments that led to revolution and later the creation of a major capitalist state in England without reference to the literature of the times. To buttress his argument Hill writes a series of interesting essays ranging from the critical important of the enforcement or non enforcement of state censorship for literary freedom; the symbolic importance of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; the various literary battles between pro-parliamentary and pro-royalist writers especially his muse John Milton; an nice appreciative of Samuel Pepys’ Diary and a long overdue debunking of that of John Evelyn as sources for an appreciation of the fads and fashions of the times ; and a look at a couple of ultra-royalist restoration writers, Samuel Butler and the Earl of Rochester. In all a very good exposition of his ideas on the relationship between literature and political action. Of course, for the interpretation of the English Revolution, it never hurts to have John Milton as your muse. As I have pointed out before in other reviews one should read Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down first then you are really ready for the exoteric here. Fair enough?
From The Pen Of The English Revolution Historian Professor Christopher Hill- A Short Note On “Liberty Against The Law”
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Professor Christopher Hill
BOOK REVIEW
LIBERTY AGAINST THE LAW, CHRISTOPHER HILL, PENQUIN, NEW YORK, 1998
The late pre-eminent historian of the underclasses (and of their more well-known “organizations,” the quakers, sheathed and un-sheathed, shakers, fakers, rakers, and partakers) of the English Revolution, Professor Christopher Hill, has taken the myriad literary and cultural ideas, serious and zany, in some case very zany although not without some parallels today, or rather perhaps better said, the 1960s New Left times, that surfaced during the period between 1620-1720, the heart of the conversion of England from an agricultural to an embryonic capitalist economy. Professor Hill have given us his take on some previously understudied and misunderstood notions, many that have not made the conventional history books. I note that he used as his endpoint John Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera,” a work later adapted for the stage by Bertolt Brecht, and that I have reviewed elsewhere in this space (see September 2007 archives). One of the points discussed in that review is whether the figure of one MacHealth, the central figure of the work, former imperial soldier and leader of a profitable criminal gang is an incipient capitalist or the relic of an earlier age. Professor Hill’s book would seem to provide ammunition for the proposition that Mac Health, like the legendary Robin Hood, was a representative figure of the ‘freedom’ from the imperatives of capitalist contract, routine and law and harked back to the values of the old pastoral society. Read the book and see what you conclude.
BOOK REVIEW
LIBERTY AGAINST THE LAW, CHRISTOPHER HILL, PENQUIN, NEW YORK, 1998
The late pre-eminent historian of the underclasses (and of their more well-known “organizations,” the quakers, sheathed and un-sheathed, shakers, fakers, rakers, and partakers) of the English Revolution, Professor Christopher Hill, has taken the myriad literary and cultural ideas, serious and zany, in some case very zany although not without some parallels today, or rather perhaps better said, the 1960s New Left times, that surfaced during the period between 1620-1720, the heart of the conversion of England from an agricultural to an embryonic capitalist economy. Professor Hill have given us his take on some previously understudied and misunderstood notions, many that have not made the conventional history books. I note that he used as his endpoint John Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera,” a work later adapted for the stage by Bertolt Brecht, and that I have reviewed elsewhere in this space (see September 2007 archives). One of the points discussed in that review is whether the figure of one MacHealth, the central figure of the work, former imperial soldier and leader of a profitable criminal gang is an incipient capitalist or the relic of an earlier age. Professor Hill’s book would seem to provide ammunition for the proposition that Mac Health, like the legendary Robin Hood, was a representative figure of the ‘freedom’ from the imperatives of capitalist contract, routine and law and harked back to the values of the old pastoral society. Read the book and see what you conclude.
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