Workers Vanguard No. 1010	12 October 2012

The U.S. Capitalist Class, Past and Present

Who Owns America

Fight for Workers Rule!

We print below a presentation, edited for publication, by Spartacist League spokesman Jacob Zorn at a September 22 forum in Chicago.

While I was working on this forum, I spent quite a bit of time procrastinating. The most successful way I discovered of doing this was to watch the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Of course, each party lies about capitalism against the backdrop of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, now in its fifth year. The Republican Convention was an orgy of reaction. I think it says something that the governor of New Jersey was the human face of the Republican Party. Their slogan, “We built this,” was rich given their open hostility to unions and to working people. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, talked a lot about the bad things that Romney would undoubtedly do. But as the flyer to this forum states, we oppose any support to the Democrats. We advocate a revolutionary workers party.

It’s notable that the Democrats, in their posturing, claim to fight for the “Middle Class First,” as the placards read when Bill Clinton spoke. This is one way this party of capitalism obfuscates the true nature of the social system. However, the idea that the main conflict in capitalist America is between the “rich” and the “middle class” is echoed by the trade-union bureaucracy as well as much of what passes for a left.

The American capitalist class is the most powerful, arrogant and bloodthirsty in the world. At the same time, the United States is unique among advanced capitalist countries in that most of its people do not think in terms of class. There is no party that even claims to be a party of the working class. Many people argue that there aren’t really any classes in the U.S. By contrast, for example in Latin America, everybody knows about big, powerful families like the Garza Sadas and Slims in Mexico or the Cisneros in Venezuela. In the U.S., to be sure, nobody denies that there are rich people and poor people. However, it is common to argue that one’s economic position is fluid, that people can rise as well as fall and that there is no permanent class system. Instead, people talk about the so-called middle class and the “American dream”: the chance to advance into the middle class with the help of education, hard work and maybe some luck.

A good example of how this attitude is reflected among the left was seen in the Occupy protests a year ago, when thousands of protesters in New York, Oakland and elsewhere braved police violence. This movement, like all populist movements, dissolved the working class into what one of Occupy’s early declarations termed “all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world.” Fake socialist groups lapped up the liberal politics of Occupy. For example, Workers World Party called these protests a “fledgling revolution” and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) stated that Occupy had “fundamentally shifted the political landscape in the U.S.”

The term that Occupy popularized is the 99 percent—that is to say, everybody suffering from the capitalist crisis. I think it’s useful to quote what our paper, Workers Vanguard [No. 989, 28 October 2011], said at the time:

“It is false that ‘99 percent’ of the population share common interests. There is a fundamental class divide in society between the capitalists—the tiny group of families that own industry and the banks—and the working class, whose labor is the source of the capitalists’ profits. The working class is not just one more victim of capitalist austerity within the ‘99 percent.’ It is the only force with the potential power and historic interest to sweep away the capitalist system and rebuild society based on a centralized, planned economy.”

Class Divisions

Occupy was a rehash of the ideas popularized more than a decade ago in a book by two “post-Marxist” academics: Empire by Italian philosopher Antonio Negri and American academic Michael Hardt. Hardt and Negri claimed that the working class had been subsumed in what they called the multitude, an amorphous term encompassing almost everybody on the planet—industrial workers, peasants, smallholders, engineers, janitors, homeless beggars, corporate managers, prisoners and prison guards. Hardt and Negri themselves were rehashing the idea—popularized by the New Left in the 1960s—that changes in the economy had rendered Marxist, that is to say class-based, politics obsolete or “outmoded.”

One of the intellectual fathers of the New Left was an interesting sociologist, C. Wright Mills. He chose the term “power elite” over the term “ruling class” because for him “‘class’ is an economic term; ‘rule’ a political one.” For Mills, economic power did not necessarily translate into political power. Another professor of that period, G. William Domhoff—who still is on the faculty at UC Santa Cruz and wrote a very useful book called Who Rules America—more recently criticized Marxism as “too narrow a base for understanding the complexity and variety of power structures against time and places,” especially, he continued, for its supposed “tendency to downplay the importance of representative democracy.”

I want to begin with some basic Marxist definitions of society. We as Marxists define class as a group of people who share a common relationship to the means of production—that is, to the productive wealth of society. Under modern capitalism, there are two important classes: the working class, also known as the proletariat, and the capitalists, the bourgeoisie. Neither can be understood without understanding the constant struggle between the two.

Let me give an example. Many of you are familiar with the struggle by longshoremen in Longview, Washington. Members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union braved state repression and stood firm, surviving attempts by the EGT grain conglomerate to bust their union. The EGT capitalists own the means of production. Workers create value that is sold in the form of commodities, which longshoremen play a vital role in circulating. And the capitalists try to get workers to produce as much as possible for as little as possible, hence, EGT’s desire to bust the longshoremen’s union. As the Longview battle underscores, under capitalism there is a constant struggle between these two classes over the terms and extent of exploitation.

Keep in mind that the capitalists are a tiny minority. They are the ruling class because they not only own and profit from the means of production but also control the state in order to maintain their power and profits, as the police attacks and harassment of the Longview workers starkly demonstrated. The state comprises armed bodies of men—the army, police, prisons and courts—who keep the ruling class in power. What happened in Longview was no aberration. There is no shortage of similar events in American history. For example, almost a hundred years ago in April 1914, armed troops acting at the behest of the Rockefeller family killed more than a dozen men, women and children when they fired on a camp of striking miners in Ludlow, Colorado.

The Myth of the 99 Percent vs. the 1 Percent

Our goal is for the working class to take power, to become the ruling class, through socialist revolution that smashes the capitalist state, as the Bolshevik Revolution did in Russia in October 1917. Only in this way will the resources of society be able to be used for the benefit of the population and not the profit of a small, parasitical class.

During the Occupy movement, it was not uncommon for so-called Marxists to prettify it by claiming that even if Occupy lacked an explicit class-based perspective it had an implicit one. Paul LeBlanc, a longtime reformist, most recently of the ISO variety, wrote in Socialist Worker (26 April): “The fundamental perspective of the Occupy movement has been to replace the power of the wealthy and oppressive 1 percent with the power of the 99 percent, the great majority of whom are working class whether blue collar, white collar or unemployed.” He continued, “This power shift from the wealthy few to the great majority of people is a revolutionary goal.” In fact, the Occupy rhetoric of the 99 percent is counterposed to a class perspective.

The ruling class is much smaller than 1 percent and the proletariat, while vastly greater than the capitalists, is smaller than 99 percent. Further, it’s necessary to point out that the very concept of 99 percent is not very useful. Usually the way this figure is used is to refer to people’s income.

Capitalists, in fact, do not live off paychecks but returns from their investments—that is, their capital. In 2010, Mitt Romney and his wife had an income of more than $21.6 million, but exactly none of this came in the form of wages or salaries. As an aside, there is quite a bit of confusion over what wealth actually is. Many people, including workers, own a house or a little stock in the form of a pension or a 401(k) plan. As the last several years show, the value of these things can be erased almost overnight.

In any case, when we talk about wealth, it is about the productive wealth of society. This type of wealth is passed down from generation to generation. By contrast, income is quite precarious. Income ends when an individual dies, gets laid off or otherwise can’t work. In the 1930s, Ferdinand Lundberg, a radical journalist, wrote a book called America’s 60 Families that traced how this wealth is controlled and passed down among the bourgeoisie.

There are more than 200 million adults in the U.S., so by definition the top 1 percent comprises more than two million people. It’s everybody who made more than $352,000 in 2010. Most of these are well-paid professionals or businessmen who live much better than most Americans. But the actual ruling class is much smaller, a fraction of this 1 percent.

As I mentioned, not all of the remaining 99 percent of the population consists of workers. This multitude contains all sorts of people who don’t share common interests. The most impoverished and oppressed sections of the population, who have no connection to production, are the people who Karl Marx called the lumpenproletariat, such as homeless people or criminals. There are the ever-growing unemployed, who Marx called the reserve army of labor. The 99 percent also includes direct agents of the state—cops, security guards, judges, prison guards—as well as office workers, technicians, managers, computer programmers, teachers, college professors and other members of the intelligentsia. There are also a few small farmers, especially in New Jersey, where I live. And finally there are actual workers.

Talk of the 99 percent obscures the political importance of the working class. Notwithstanding changes in industrial technique, the proletariat remains central to a revolutionary perspective today. It continues to occupy a unique role in the heart of the process of production, and it is through the exploitation of the working class that the capitalists derive profit. Concentrating workers in large factories and great urban centers, the capitalists have created the instrument of their own destruction as an exploiting class. For the working class to emancipate itself, it must abolish all exploitation, leading to a society without class distinction. This requires a revolution that establishes a workers government to expropriate the capitalists, because capitalism cannot be fundamentally reformed.

Chattel Slavery and Early American Capitalism

Although for many people capitalism seems natural, it is a historically recent development. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the bourgeoisie in different European countries—beginning with the Dutch and the English and then culminating most spectacularly with the French—overthrew the feudal order and made itself the ruling class. This coincided with what Marx called primitive capital accumulation. In other words, the capitalists plundered and stole wealth that they used to kick-start capitalism. As Marx explained in Capital (Volume I):

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”

Throughout most of the 19th century, capitalism remade Europe. Starting with Britain, capitalism went beyond its mercantile roots and became industrial. Capitalism was progressive in relation to feudalism because it enormously raised the productive forces of society. So much so that for the first time there was a material basis for envisioning an end to scarcity and class divisions. As Friedrich Engels put it in his book Anti-Dühring: “Only the immense increase of the productive forces attained by modern industry has made it possible to distribute labour among all members of society without exception, and thereby to limit the labour-time of each individual member to such an extent that all have enough free time left to take part in the general—both theoretical and practical—affairs of society.” At the same time, private ownership of the means of production, which is central to capitalism, became a barrier to the continued development of societies’ productive forces. Capitalism also created the working class: the force with the power and interest to overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism.

Unlike Europe, the United States does not have a feudal history. The British colonies in North America were from the get-go integrated into British mercantile capitalism. Unlike Cromwell in England or Robespierre in France, the American revolutionaries did not need to create a new social system. Rather, they did not like the constraints that the British placed on their ability to develop.

The American bourgeoisie developed much more rapidly than in Europe. Primitive capital accumulation in the U.S., including taking the land from Native Americans and profiting from black slaves, ended much more recently. Indeed, much of the wealth of colonial America came from slave-grown tobacco. In the North, merchants sold food and other products to the slave-based “sugar colonies” in the British Caribbean and imported slave-made sugar. A major cause of the American Revolution was the attempt by the British to restrict the colonists’ ability to import and export slave-made commodities.

After independence, the merchant capitalists shared power in the new republic with the owners of slave plantations. These merchants profited from exporting slave-made agricultural products, first tobacco, later cotton. They also imported products from Europe and sold them to the slave South. Chattel slavery formed the bedrock of American capitalism.

By the mid 19th century, industrial capitalism was challenging mercantile capitalism in America. Big mercantile families looked down on these rising industrialists, in part because many industrialists had originally been artisans or were more involved in the actual production of goods. But it also reflected the fact that these two sections of the bourgeoisie fundamentally disagreed over slavery.

Many merchants were pro-slavery. Industrialists tended to oppose slavery or at least wanted to check its growth, favoring the new Republican Party while the merchants supported the Democratic Party. The dispute was over what social system was going to dominate the U.S.: a modern capitalist system, based on exploiting free labor, or an agricultural slave system.

The Civil War resolved the issue. This was America’s great bourgeois revolution, not the 1776 Revolution. The Civil War smashed the Southern slave system, destroyed the slave-owning class there and opened the road to the development of industrial capitalism. It smashed slavery, but the promise of full liberation for black people—a promise made explicit by some of the more radical bourgeois leaders during the postwar Reconstruction period—was not fulfilled. Even though black people became integrated into American capitalism, they remained forcibly segregated at the bottom. This is why we call today to finish the Civil War through a third, socialist, American revolution.

The Consolidation of the Bourgeoisie

The modern American bourgeoisie really has its origins after the Civil War. Some statistics: In 1869, there were almost twice as many factories in the United States as in 1859. In 1873, there was four times as much capital invested in manufacturing as in 1865. In 1866, London and New York City were connected by telegraph cable. The year before, there were 35,000 miles of railroad track in the U.S.; by 1873, there were more than 70,000 miles of track. This reflected the rise of American industrial capitalism and the American bourgeoisie.

Who was this bourgeoisie? Well, as the statistics indicate, one representative section was the railroad companies. Without railroads, a modern capitalist country was impossible, especially in a country so big. And so a group of swashbuckling pirates filled the breach to develop the railroads. The attitude of the railroad capitalists of the late 19th century was very similar to the Internet start-up capitalists a century later. Actually providing railroad service was far down on the list of their priorities. They raised capital by ripping off their investors—one favored method was issuing too much stock (called “watering” the stock from the practice of giving cattle lots of water before selling them so they would weigh more). The railroad magnates ripped off consumers, and they ripped off the government, and they ripped off each other. In at least one case, different capitalists fought pitched battles over control of the railroads. Some of these capitalists are still famous to this day—for example, Jay Gould.

It’s not for nothing that the capitalists of this period were called “robber barons.” They undertook all kinds of dodgy schemes to get rich. One famous, if comparatively mild, example was the so-called “Hall Carbine Affair.” During the Civil War, J.P. Morgan—then known as the son of banker Junius Spencer Morgan—was involved in a scheme to buy several thousand defective rifles from the U.S. government. In order to raise the money to buy these rifles, Morgan and his partners arranged to sell them to the U.S. government as new rifles at several times the original price. In other words, the government bought its own rifles, giving a large profit to Morgan and his partners. This would have been farce if it were not tragedy, especially for the Union soldiers who had to use the guns.

The 1870s to the 1890s—the Gilded Age—was very important for the American ruling class. The bourgeoisie lost interest in its plans to modernize the South and abandoned the black population to race-terror and discrimination. Some capitalists were also looking to turn a good profit in the South. The evolution of the Republican Party reflects this change. It went from being an anti-slavery party before the Civil War and advocates of Reconstruction after the war to being the party of the most powerful section of the big bourgeoisie.

The shift was also reflected on the legal level. During Reconstruction, Congress approved the Fourteenth Amendment, which declared everybody born in the U.S. a citizen, regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude. The Amendment also states that all citizens have the right to “due process” and “equal protection of the laws.” In 1886, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations had the same Fourteenth Amendment rights as people did. A decade later, in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the Court essentially ruled that the Amendment did not apply to black people at all, consolidating legal Jim Crow segregation.

The capitalists became self-aware of their role in society and determined to maintain that role. The bourgeoisie consolidated as a national class, emerging out of local elites. This reflected the creation of a national market; industrialists, merchants and bankers in one part of the country dealt with their counterparts elsewhere. They often owned factories, banks or railroads throughout the U.S. In this period, more and more capitalists moved to Manhattan, even if they had made their fortunes elsewhere, because it was the meeting ground of the bourgeoisie. Among them were the Armours from Chicago, Andrew Carnegie from Pittsburgh, John D. Rockefeller from Pennsylvania, Maximillian Fleischmann from Cincinnati and Meyer Guggenheim from Colorado.

Part of the self-awareness of the bourgeoisie was the creation of important social networks. In New York City alone, there were dozens of exclusive clubs. These included the Union Club, the Union League, the Manhattan Club, the Knickerbocker Club, the Calumet, the Metropolitan, the Tuxedo, the New York Yacht Club and the Racquet Club. The average wealthy New Yorker belonged to five of these clubs. J.P. Morgan belonged to 19.

Then there were cultural institutions, such as the Metropolitan Opera, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Philharmonic. These were run by donations from the bourgeoisie. Even today, one of the major benefactors of the Metropolitan Opera is the billionaire and Tea Party backer David Koch, who donated $2.5 million in 2010 alone. There were also private boarding schools and elite universities—particularly Harvard and Yale—that rose to prominence, not to mention the endless balls, dinner parties and other forms of socializing.

If this appears frivolous and wasteful, it was very important to cohering the American capitalist class by linking together capitalists from across the country and from different industries. Not every capitalist knew every other capitalist, but none was far removed from any other, which facilitated trust and a good working relationship. It also created a veneer of culture and refinement—which is often referred to as “class”—something the American bourgeoisie didn’t really have before this point. It emphasized the “right” and calling of the bourgeoisie to run society by helping distinguish it from the rest of the population, who did not have the culture that their “betters” had. On a more practical level, such networks allowed the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie to get to know one another. As Lundberg documents, just as with medieval dynasties, the American bourgeoisie formed alliances through marrying one another. This served to more closely concentrate the wealth of this class.

Class Battles and Labor Statesmen

The bourgeoisie was also compelled into action by awareness of threats to its own rule. In Europe, the “spectre of communism” threatened capitalism, as was most spectacularly demonstrated by the 1871 Paris Commune, when French workers briefly seized power. In the U.S. at the time, industrial workers began to organize and fight for their interests. The first national strike took place in 1877—the Great Railroad Strike. In the same year, the bourgeoisie abandoned its prior commitment to “reconstructing” the South, shifting its focus to maintaining its rule over the country.

In a series of labor battles over subsequent decades, the bourgeoisie resorted to the power of the state against the workers. Between 1880 and 1930, the courts issued some 4,300 injunctions against unions. Between 1869 and 1892, employers used Pinkerton thugs in 77 different strikes; over roughly the same time, state militias were deployed against striking workers 150 times. As a result, strikers were more likely to be killed or injured in the U.S. than in almost any other advanced capitalist country. As the Commercial and Financial Chronicle put it in 1887, after the explosive growth of the first national labor movement:

“As the Knights of Labor grew in membership, and the number of boycotts increased, merchants and manufacturers began to feel that they had a common interest in preventing the growth of any such irresponsible power; they had a common interest in maintaining industrial order and independence which was more important than any temporary advantage to be obtained over a commercial rival.”

Given the amount of strikes and workers’ militancy in the late 19th century, one could be forgiven for predicting that the U.S. labor movement would become the strongest in the world. Why did this not happen? It was in part because the bourgeoisie was always willing to use brutal repression. But the bourgeoisie also exploited ethnic, linguistic, religious and, later, racial divisions in the working class. As Jay Gould bragged: “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”

Much of the blame for the low class consciousness of American workers falls on the trade-union bureaucracy. Most early unions represented a narrow group of skilled white workers, mainly native-born but also some Protestant immigrants. Under the tutelage of Samuel Gompers, head of the cigar makers union and later the founder-leader of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), union leaders ignored immigrant and unskilled workers, the majority of the class. They refused to organize black and immigrant—especially Chinese—workers. Gompers also pioneered the so-called non-partisan approach: instead of a party that reflected the class interests of workers—even if in a deformed way—the AFL supported whatever bourgeois candidate promised more. Needless to say, Gompers and his ilk were contemptuous of political struggle and sworn enemies of socialism. They wanted to work within the capitalist system.

The Dominance of Finance Capital

After the Civil War, the tremendous expansion of industry required capital. And for this, banks were crucial. One of the original purposes of investment banks was to provide American companies access to foreign—particularly British—capital.

The 1870s and 1880s set the stage for the ascendency of finance capital and the emergence of modern imperialism. The nation-state system, which had served as a crucible for the rise of the capitalist class, came ever more sharply into conflict with the needs of an international economic order that capitalism itself had brought about. The rapid development of American capitalism meant that the bourgeoisie went from being progressive to being reactionary in the span of a generation.

The growth of finance capital led to American investments abroad, which entailed exploiting and oppressing the peoples of the colonial and semicolonial world, particularly in Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia. In 1898, the U.S. obtained colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Over the next period, the United States invaded many Central American and Caribbean countries, some of them repeatedly. U.S. troops were sent to Nicaragua three times between 1909 and 1933. In the first half of the 20th century, the capitalist Great Powers, having divided the world through bloody imperialist conquest, embarked on a series of wars to redivide it, seeking to expand their colonial holdings and spheres of influence at each other’s expense. Entering the interimperialist World War I in its third year, the U.S. emerged from the carnage stronger than its rivals in Europe.

When the U.S. was first becoming an imperialist power, the capitalist class was stressing the need for stability and common action. The swashbuckling pirates of the robber baron stage of capitalism were not so fit for the imperialist epoch. Through manipulation, reasoning and force, big capitalists organized what they called “trusts”—companies whose owners were interlocked. Again the banks were crucial, since they were able to gain control of various important companies. The banks didn’t necessarily own all of the companies, but because they controlled incoming capital, they were able to sway their owners.

In the 1930s, Lewis Corey (a radical who, a decade earlier, had been a founder of the Communist Party under the name Louis Fraina) called this process “Morganization.” J.P. Morgan gained control of huge portions of the railroad industry and shipping. He bought out other important capitalists—such as Andrew Carnegie—and formed the largest steel company in American history, U.S. Steel. Morgan or those he controlled held 341 directorships in 112 corporations, with an aggregate capitalization of over $22 billion.

Another example is the Rockefellers. Originating with a petroleum company, Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller expanded his holdings. In 1890, besides his petroleum interests, he had some $14 million in railroad investments, $2.8 million in mining, $2 million in other industries and more than $1 million in banking. He owned mines, paper mills, nail factories, timber mills, banks, insurance companies, orange groves, soda factories, steamship lines, real estate companies.

In other words, he owned lots of means of production. So much so that he could not manage it on a day-to-day basis. The concentration of wealth created the need for a whole array of assistants: technicians, engineers, attorneys, accountants, managers and supervisors. This stratum is part of the petty bourgeoisie and comprises a section of what is considered the “middle class.” The petty bourgeoisie, while large, has no independent social role to play in capitalist production. Its upper layers tend to support the capitalists, and its lower layers are often sympathetic to the workers.

Despite Horatio Alger’s novels and the occasional “self-made” man, the capitalists were a class that passed its wealth down from generation to generation. In 1892, two-thirds of the millionaires in New York City had inherited their fortunes. Sixty-one percent of wealthy New Yorkers in 1828 were still represented, either personally or through their heirs, among the city’s millionaires in the 1890s.

It was obvious that American capitalists formed a ruling class. They didn’t just own the wealth of society, but they controlled the state, and, usually, the politicians and the government. Anything that threatened their profits was smashed. One example was the Populist movement. Populists had demanded reforms (the nationalization of the railroads and banks as well as monetary and tax reforms) that they saw as in the interests of “the people” versus the moneyed interests. This notion is kind of the root, at least intellectually, of both the 1960s New Left and the Occupy movement. The Populists lumped together all “producers”—workers along with small businessmen and farmers. Even though populism did not fundamentally threaten the existence of capitalism, the bourgeoisie reacted with fury. When he was NYC police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt advocated that the Populists be treated “as the Commune in Paris was suppressed, by taking ten or a dozen of their leaders out, standing them…against a wall and shooting them dead.”

The 1896 campaign of the populist Democratic Party candidate William Jennings Bryan was a thorn in the side of the large capitalists, who flooded the coffers of the Republicans with millions of dollars. A key figure was Mark Hanna, a Republican operative who spearheaded the use of money to, in effect, buy candidates and elections. The underlying concept of Super PACs is not something new. It’s not a perversion of American democracy, but a continuation.

Candidates of both parties have long depended on large corporate donations. Lundberg describes how both Morgan and Rockefeller essentially controlled politicians at all levels, up to the president, in order to assure favorable policies. And the government repaid these contributions, with interest.

Growing Inequality and the “American Century”

By the late 1920s, the top one-twentieth of 1 percent, which was less than 40,000 people, owned 30 percent of U.S. savings. Then came the Great Depression. Since a large portion of the bourgeoisie’s wealth was maintained in stock, the crash of 1929 hurt the balance sheets of the wealthy. Four-fifths of the Rockefeller fortune disappeared. Corporate profits were $10 billion in 1929, but in 1932 there was a loss of $2.3 billion.

Don’t sing any sad songs for the bourgeoisie. The Rockefellers were still unimaginably wealthy. And as always, the bourgeoisie tried to make the working class pay for the capitalist crisis. Unemployment soared. More than eleven million Americans—25 percent of the workforce—were unemployed in 1932. Take U.S. Steel, which in 1929 had 225,000 full-time workers. By the end of 1932, it was operating at 12 percent capacity and did not have a single full-time worker. Following a slight uptick in the economy, the working class began to fight back. In 1934, there were more than 2,000 strikes. Among the most important were three citywide strikes in San Francisco, Toledo and Minneapolis. Led by “reds,” these strikes shook America and paved the way for the class battles that built the CIO industrial unions.

However, the new CIO leadership, often with the help of the Stalinist Communist Party, played essentially the same role, albeit with some more radical rhetoric, that the Gompers bureaucracy had played earlier in keeping class struggle within the bounds of capitalism. The union tops directly tied workers to the class enemy through support to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, a series of reforms that created a basic welfare state in the U.S. Reactionary capitalist ideologues denounced the New Deal. But more farsighted bourgeois representatives realized that such reforms were necessary to save capitalism in the face of crisis and class struggle.

World War II—another interimperialist war—further strengthened the position of U.S. capitalism against its European rivals. Emerging victorious from the war, the bourgeoisie heralded the “American century” because of its growing power. There were two broad trends at the time. First, there was the Cold War. The victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany and the Red Army’s liberation of much of Central and East Europe not only strengthened the USSR, but also gave Communism more prestige among the world’s exploited and oppressed, despite the horrors of Stalin’s bureaucratic rule. The bourgeoisie responded with its drive against the Soviet degenerated workers state.

Second, unions were probably the strongest they have ever been in the U.S. in this period. In 1946, there was a massive strike wave. Between 1933 and 1953, private-sector unionization grew from 15.5 percent to 35.7 percent, and the average manufacturing wage nearly tripled. After WWII, the bourgeoisie could afford higher wages because it was flush. But it could not accept any political challenge to its rule. The unions were purged of the reds who had helped build them.

Starting in the 1960s, U.S. capitalism entered a period of decline. U.S. imperialism’s defeat in Vietnam in the 1970s was both costly and embarrassing for the American rulers. For the workers of the world, it was a victory, especially as the heroic Vietnamese carried out a social revolution.

Over the next decades, millions of jobs were lost as the American bourgeoisie gutted the unionized industrial zones of the North and the Midwest, “outsourcing” plants first to the non-union South and Southwest and later to the semicolonial world. At the same time, the capitalists went on a rampage against the unions, driving down wages, ripping up benefits and attacking the standard of living for the working class. The signal event of this union-busting was Ronald Reagan’s firing of the striking PATCO air traffic controllers in 1981. Last year, there were 16 percent fewer workers in unions than in 1983. Only 11.2 percent of private-sector manufacturing workers are today members of unions, which is worse than it was in the 1920s.

Not surprisingly, this has led to a growth in inequality. Although critical of viewing society in terms of the “top 1 percent,” I want to cite some available statistics, which widely make use of such categories. Between 1979 and 1989, the portion of the country’s wealth held by the richest 1 percent almost doubled, from 22 percent to 39 percent. In contrast, in 1999 the average real after-tax income of the middle 60 percent of the population was actually lower than in 1977. Last year, the Census Bureau reported that the median family income had dropped another 7 percent alone since 2000. Marx referred to such trends as the immiseration of the working class.

The Continuity of the Ruling Class

When I was preparing this talk, several people asked me if the makeup of the bourgeoisie today is the same as it was in the Gilded Age. Of course, as the economy changes, there are new additions to the ranks of the capitalists. In the 1880s and 1890s, the railroads were the key industry, along with heavy industry and mining. Then came the automobile, so that by the 1920s the ranks of American capitalists were full of auto- or oil-related industrialists, such as Henry Ford and J. Paul Getty. Later, there was the airline industry, which contributed capitalists like Eugene Luther Vidal, who helped found TWA and Eastern Airlines (and also was the father of Gore Vidal). Now the bourgeoisie includes many from computer-related industries, such as Bill Gates, Ross Perot and the late Steve Jobs. The labor-hating credentials of the bourgeoisie today are still just as strong as for the “robber barons” of old.

One thing that is the case about the ruling class is that it has been white, reflecting the prevalence of black oppression under American capitalism. In the age of Obama has this changed at all? White families are roughly 20 times wealthier than black families. Due to the gains of the civil rights movement, today there is a small number of well-paid black professionals. But the number of actual black capitalists is infinitesimal. White capitalists tend to inherit their wealth, while the handful of black capitalists largely got their seed money as high-paid performers, celebrities or sports stars. According to Forbes, the richest black American in 2012 was Oprah, followed by Sean “Diddy” Combs. Only a handful of the top 20 richest black Americans were not entertainers or sports stars of one type or another, and two of these were the founders of BET. So there still is no significant black section of the bourgeoisie.

Key elements of the capitalist class display great continuity. In 1974, more than 100 years after John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil, Vice President Gerald Ford became president after Richard Nixon resigned. To fill the vice presidency, Ford chose Nelson Rockefeller, John D.’s grandson. This allowed Congress to look at his wealth. In a report for Congress, William Domhoff and Charles Schwartz detailed: “The Rockefeller fortune, although nominally distributed among many individual members of the Family, is actually coordinated under a central management” that was located on a particular floor in Rockefeller Plaza in NYC. They wrote that “fifteen employees of the Family, working out of this office, have been identified on the boards of directors of nearly 100 corporations over a number of years” and that “their combined assets add[ed] up to 70 billion dollars.” In 1992, the New York Times described how the Rockefeller foundation was safeguarding this wealth, which was estimated between $5 and $10 billion, for the fourth generation of the family.

What about today? In May, Rockefeller Financial Services sold a minority stake to RIT Capital Partners. (The “R” in RIT stands for Rothschild, a famous European capitalist family.) According to the London Telegraph, Rockefeller Financial Services had £22 billion, or about $35 billion, in assets. Venrock, whose name is an amalgam of ventures and Rockefeller, is a venture capitalist firm. It was an early backer of one of the emblems of the “new economy,” Apple Computer.

One study estimated that in 2000 the combined wealth of the Rockefellers, the Du Ponts, the Mellons, the Schwabs, the Hearsts, the Phipps (Henry Phipps was the second-largest shareholder in Carnegie Steel) was around $54 billion. The individual members of these families might not be as famous as their ancestors or the newer capitalists, and they probably prefer not to be in the news, especially after what happened to Paris Hilton. But they still own and run much of America.

Workers Revolution Will Rebuild America

Capitalism is increasingly unable to provide a decent life for most of the population. This is even more apparent over the last two decades after the counterrevolutions in the Soviet Union and East Europe that restored capitalism there. Not having to contend with the Soviet Union, much of the bourgeoisie is convinced that it faces no threat to its rule. Increasingly, the bourgeoisie discards things—like education, infrastructure, public transportation, science—which it once considered crucial to its system, making the reactionary nature of capitalism ever more clear. To end this looting and neglect, much less to expand the productive wealth of society for the benefit of humanity, requires overthrowing the bourgeoisie and putting the working class in power through a proletarian revolution.

In its epoch of decay, American capitalism has become more and more parasitical. The bourgeoisie has always been based on exploitation and oppression. But at least Rockefeller, Gould and Morgan’s fortunes were derived from production. To a large extent, today the American bourgeoisie focuses on financial gimmicks. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), V.I. Lenin described how capitalism created “the extraordinary growth of a class, or rather, of a stratum of rentiers, i.e., people who live by ‘clipping coupons,’ who take no part in any enterprise whatever, whose profession is idleness.”

The deindustrialization of America is reflected in not only the standard of living of the working class but also the very lives of many workers. Detroit, once a citadel of industry, is now largely a wasteland. The famous sign on the bridge spanning the Delaware River—“Trenton Makes, the World Takes”—now seems like a bad joke as huge swaths of the former industrial Northeast and Midwest rust and rot.

This is the state of American capitalism today. The capitalist class in its twilight has shown that it is incapable of maintaining society and is increasingly an obstacle to the survival of the human race. The working class still has the power and interest to wrench society from the bourgeoisie’s death grip and establish a workers government. To this end, we Marxists of the Spartacist League are dedicated to building a revolutionary workers party, the necessary instrument to lead the proletariat in its struggle for power. 

Workers Vanguard No. 1010 12 October 2012 TROTSKY LENIN Human Culture: A Marxist View (Quote of the Week) Speaking in Moscow in 1926, Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the October Revolution of 1917, stressed that the working class in power would need to acquire and build from the cultural achievements of previous class societies. Culture is everything that has been created, built, learnt, conquered by man in the course of his entire history, in distinction from what nature has given, including the natural history of man himself as a species of animal....   In the process of adapting itself to nature, in conflict with the hostile forces of nature, human society has taken shape as a complex organization of classes. The class structure of society has determined to a decisive degree the content and form of human history, that is, its material relations and their ideological reflections. This means that historical culture has possessed a class character. Slave-owning society, feudal serf-owning society, bourgeois society, each engendered a corresponding culture, different at different stages and with a multitude of transitional forms. Historical society has been an organization for the exploitation of man by man. Culture has served the class organization of society. Exploiters’ society has given rise to an exploiters’ culture. But does this mean that we are against all the culture of the past?   There exists, in fact, a profound contradiction here. Everything that has been conquered, created, built by man’s efforts and which serves to enhance man’s power is culture. But since it is not a matter of individual man but of social man, since culture is a social-historical phenomenon in its very essence, and since historical society has been and continues to be class society, culture is found to be the basic instrument of class oppression. Marx said: “The ruling ideas of an epoch are essentially the ideas of the ruling class of that epoch.” This also applies to culture as a whole. And yet we say to the working class: master all the culture of the past, otherwise you will not build socialism. —Leon Trotsky, “Culture and Socialism” (1926), printed in Labour Review (Autumn 1962)

Workers Vanguard No. 1010	12 October 2012

Court Throws Out Mumia’s Challenge to Life Without Parole

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

On August 23, class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal filed a pro se motion challenging a secretive court order that sentenced him to life without parole. The sentence, pronounced ten days earlier and mandated by Pennsylvania statute, was expected following Mumia’s removal from death row in December 2011, after the Philadelphia district attorney’s office ended its campaign to legally lynch him (see “Drive to Execute Mumia Halted,” WV No. 993, 6 January). Mumia’s legal papers sought to vacate the illegally imposed sentence, citing violations of Pennsylvania’s own rules of criminal procedure. More significantly, Mumia’s motion raised a challenge to his sentence of life without parole as cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, citing his “almost thirty years in solitary confinement on death row under an illegal and unconstitutionally-imposed death sentence.” On October 1, Philadelphia judge Pamela P. Dembe threw out Mumia’s motion.

Yet again the racist rulers have dispensed with even the pretense of due process in Mumia’s case. The courts had imposed the life sentence without notice to defense attorneys or a formal hearing, trampling on Mumia’s fundamental rights to be present and to be heard. Although the 30-year drive to execute Mumia ran aground, he is now condemned to a living death, entombed in the dungeons of Pennsylvania. Class-conscious workers and fighters for black equality must continue to demand freedom for this innocent man.

Mumia’s motion also raised a general challenge to the constitutionality of life without parole, as well as the practice of isolating those on death row in solitary confinement. As we wrote in “Abolish the Racist Death Penalty” (WV No. 1009, 28 September):

“In our opposition to the death penalty, we are equally committed to the abolition of life without parole, the prisons and all the barbaric institutions of the capitalist state. Our purpose is to arm the working class with the understanding that the cops, courts, prisons and military make up the apparatus for the violent repression of the working class and oppressed in defense of the power and profits of the capitalist rulers.”

Beginning with Mumia’s frame-up and conviction three decades ago on false charges of killing a Philadelphia policeman, the cops and courts have relentlessly tried to silence this “voice of the voiceless,” a leading member of the Black Panther Party in his youth and later an eloquent journalist and supporter of the Philadelphia MOVE group. It should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed Mumia’s torturous journey through the bourgeois courts that it is Judge Dembe who signed the resentencing order and denied his challenge. The same judge rejected the evidence that Mumia’s original trial judge, Albert Sabo, was biased and racist, despite a sworn affidavit that Sabo was overheard saying, “I’m going to help them fry the n----r.” Dembe also rejected the confession of Arnold Beverly that it was he, not Mumia, who shot and killed Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.

As the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee have insisted all along: There is no justice in the capitalist courts. Free Mumia now! 

Workers Vanguard No. 1010	12 October 2012

Defend Jazz Hayden!

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

The following statement was issued by the Partisan Defense Committee on September 10.

The Partisan Defense Committee condemns the arrest of Joseph “Jazz” Hayden, an outspoken opponent of the NYPD’s racist stop-and-frisk campaign and advocate of rights for ex-prisoners. On 2 December 2011 the police stopped Hayden and unlawfully searched his car. He was arrested on two counts of possession of a weapon for having a penknife and a miniature commemorative baseball bat replica in his car. The 71-year-old Hayden is facing a possible 14 years in prison.

Hayden’s arrest was a blatant act of retaliation for his documentation of police harassment of Harlem youth and posting his flip-camera videos on his allthingsharlem.com/copwatch Web site. He had filmed these same two cops in a stop-and-frisk incident earlier in the summer. The arresting officers told him they knew exactly who he was. Hayden’s arrest was intended to silence and intimidate those who oppose the rampant repression of New York City youth at the hands of the police.

We join the many others in demanding that charges be dropped against Jazz Hayden.

Workers Vanguard No. 1010	12 October 2012

Gore Vidal: An Appreciation

The author Gore Vidal died on July 31 of complications from pneumonia; he was 86 years old. He left a rich body of work: novels, plays, essays, movie scripts, countless interviews and public talks as well as two memoirs. He was a man who understood that this country has a history, and he put his considerable talents to use in exposing and demolishing the mythologies, hypocrisies and outright lies designed to present America as the culmination of the quest for heaven on earth.

In an interview with the Progressive (August 2006), Vidal described himself thus: “I’m a lover of the old republic and I deeply resent the empire our Presidents put in its place.” He was a radical egalitarian in the age of imperialism, an enemy of bigotry and religiosity and impeccable on matters of sex and morality and women’s equality. Gore Vidal was a superb writer and quite simply the greatest American essayist since Edmund Wilson. As Marxists, we keenly appreciate his body of work. While our parallel attitudes on many social and historical issues came from very different vantage points, they often put us on common ground—from an appreciation of the centrality of the Civil War in U.S. history, to sex and religion.

Born at West Point in 1925 and raised among the rich and famous, Gore Vidal was very much aware that there is a ruling class in the U.S. “But,” he noted, “it’s the best-kept secret in the United States” (Vanity Fair, June 1987). His maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor (T.P.) Gore, was a longtime Senator from Oklahoma. His father, Eugene, founded three airlines and served under Franklin D. Roosevelt as director of the Bureau of Air Commerce. His mother, Nina, divorced Eugene in 1935 and married Hugh D. Auchincloss, the stepfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Vidal went to the right schools: St. Albans School in Washington and then Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He joined the Army in World War II at the age of 17, serving as first mate on a freight supply ship in the Aleutian Islands. He did not go on to university. As he noted in his second memoir, Point to Point Navigation (2006): “After nearly three years in the army, the thought of four years at Harvard was unbearable.... I would ‘live by writing,’ I said. And so I did.”

He was radicalized initially by the outpouring of homophobic censure that greeted his early novel, The City and the Pillar (1948). Vidal claimed that his next five books were blacked out by the New York Times as well as by Time and Newsweek. In its obituary, the Times (1 August) grudgingly conceded its role in scandalizing the novel and more: “Mr. Vidal later claimed that the literary and critical establishment, The New York Times especially, had blacklisted him because of the book, and he may have been right.” We believe Vidal would get a chuckle out of the fact that the Times blew it when publishing the obituary, making no less than three whopping factual mistakes, including one on his sex life, which required an embarrassing correction (3 August).

As Vidal explained, “I exist to say, ‘No, that isn’t the way it is,’ or ‘What you believe to be true is not true for the following reasons.’ I am a master of the obvious. I mean, if there’s a hole in the road, I will, viciously, outrageously, say there’s a hole in the road and if you don’t fill it in you’ll break the axle of your car” (“The Scholar Squirrels and the National Security State: An Interview with Gore Vidal” by Jon Wiener, Radical History Review No. 44, 1989).

Vidal was also radicalized by the post-World War II McCarthyite witchhunt and the blacklisting of leftists, particularly in the entertainment business in which he worked during that time. In the interview with Wiener, he recounted: “I decided that I would do an anti-McCarthy play on Philco-Goodyear Playhouse: something called ‘A Sense of Justice’.” Vidal also turned his go-for-the-jugular wit and serious study of history to religion. Referring to his novel about the “apostate” Roman Emperor, Julian (1964), he remarked: “I’ve always been anti-Christian, but I wanted to know why. So I investigated the cult, a radicalizing thing to do since I come from that tradition.”

In 1968, when Vidal says he was caught in the Chicago police riot at the Democratic Party Convention, he “came out, as it were, into radical politics.” But he was not a Marxist. From his youth, he had been determined to be a politician. He ran unsuccessfully for office in the early 1960s (and later in 1982) as a Democrat. He became co-chairman, with Benjamin Spock, of what would become the People’s Party (affiliated with the Peace and Freedom Party). He was involved in that effort from 1968 to 1972, the year that Democratic Senator George McGovern, a Vietnam War “dove,” mounted a presidential campaign only to get trounced by Richard Nixon. Vidal told Wiener, “I quit when McGovern, in the primaries, was saying everything we were, and rather better.”

Despite his own campaigns and acquaintance with much of the Democratic Party glitterati, Vidal did not gloss over the nature of the beast. As he told the Progressive: “I have been saying for the last thousand years that the United States has only one party—the property party. It’s the party of big corporations, the party of money. It has two right wings: one is Democrat and the other is Republican.”

As a truth-teller, Vidal made his share of enemies. After his death, one David Greenberg wrote a vile piece headlined: “Stop Eulogizing Gore Vidal: He Was a Racist and an Elitist” (Slate Magazine, 2 August), which rides to the defense of the Zionist neocon Commentary crowd, circa 1986-87. At that time, Vidal had had the temerity to tangle with part of the Zionist lobby devoted to pressuring Congress on Israel’s behalf. The Commentary Cold Warriors—editor Norman Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter—responded with an attack baiting Vidal as an anti-Semite. Podhoretz had established his reputation as a racist back in the 1960s with his essay “My Negro Problem—And Ours” and was outspoken in his bigotry against homosexuals.

Vidal skewered the Podhoretz/Decter team in the Nation (22 March 1986): “Joyously they revel in the politics of hate, with plangent attacks on blacks and/or fags and/or liberals, trying, always, to outdo those moral majoritarians who will, as Armageddon draws near, either convert all the Jews, just as the Good Book says, or kill them.” Commenting on Podhoretz’s proclamation that for him the “Civil War is as remote and as irrelevant as the War of the Roses,” Vidal noted, “I realized then that he was not planning to become an ‘assimilated American,’ to use the old-fashioned terminology; but, rather, his first loyalty would always be to Israel.” Podhoretz whined that Vidal’s essay was “the most blatantly anti-Semitic outburst to have appeared in a respectable American periodical since World War II” (Commentary, November 1986).

It was at this time that we took up the cudgels in defense of Vidal against the witchhunters and established a modest correspondence with him. Our main article in defense of Vidal, titled “Gore Vidal: Bad Boy of the Bourgeoisie,” was published in Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 40, Summer 1987. We quoted Vidal’s statement:

“We stole other people’s land. We murdered many of the inhabitants. We imposed our religion—and rule—on the survivors. General Grant was ashamed of what we did to Mexico, and so am I. Mark Twain was ashamed of what we did in the Philippines, and so am I. Midge is not because in the Middle East another predatory people is busy stealing other people’s land in the name of an alien theocracy. She is a propagandist for these predators (paid for?) and that is what all this nonsense is about.”

In August 1987 he wrote to us to applaud our article as “the clearest and most detailed so far—not to mention informatory: I learned a good deal.”

Vidal had come to know the social reality of this country. That’s why, from the centrality of the Civil War in American social and political life to the racist horrors perpetrated at the time of Hurricane Katrina, he was so eloquent. Recalling watching “the catastrophe that has left most of New Orleans under water” from his home in Italy, he observed in Point to Point Navigation:

“The Italians are astonished at the casualness with which the American government goes about saving those clinging to life atop the roofs of buildings. Tact keeps the local press from noting what every American knows: those who have been abandoned by lifesavers belong to our permanent underclass: the African Americans.”

We hated a lot of the same people for about the same reasons. Our special debt to Vidal is for the seven novels—from Burr (1973) to Lincoln (1984) and Empire (1987) through to The Golden Age (2000)—that constitute the “Narratives of Empire” collection. Vidal told the truth, and that is both rare and subversive. And, he embraced life, not what he referred to as the “death cult” of Christianity and other religions, nor the stultifying, hypocritical conformity of the holy family. There is more truth in Vidal’s fiction than in many celebrated works of “history.” The Prometheus Research Library, archive of the Spartacist League Central Committee, long ago made Gore Vidal a subject category and collected his writings to educate comrades with provocatively good reads.

Gore Vidal is buried side by side with his partner of 50 years, Howard Austen, near the grave of his first love, Jimmie Tribble, who was slain in World War II. We will miss his creative spark, but his legacy will continue to enrich us. 

Workers Vanguard No. 1010	12 October 2012

Bogus Rape Claims and Imperialist Vendetta

Hands Off Julian Assange!

The following article is reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 220 (Autumn 2012), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League.

Following two years under house arrest in Britain, in mid-June Julian Assange, the founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, sought refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Assange is facing extradition to Sweden on trumped-up allegations of “sexual molestation” and “rape”—which boil down to charges of unprotected sex in what were by all accounts consensual relations—but he rightly fears that this is simply a pretext to facilitate his extradition to the U.S. By granting him political asylum, Ecuador threw a monkey wrench into the process of handing Assange over to the U.S. imperialists, who are intent on exacting retribution against Assange and WikiLeaks for having lifted the lid, however slightly, on the hideous crimes of U.S. and British imperialism.

In April 2010, WikiLeaks posted a video online which showed a U.S. Apache helicopter gunning down and killing at least 12 civilians in Baghdad in 2007, including two Reuters journalists, while the pilots gloated over the carnage. The release of the video was followed by the publication of hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables as well as classified documents recording the murder, torture and rape carried out by the imperialists in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the leaks contained little in the way of revelations, the British and U.S. capitalist rulers were enraged at any light being shed on their machinations. Contrary to Sweden’s “human rights” facade, WikiLeaks drew attention to its militaristic role, not least in Afghanistan where it has maintained a military presence for over ten years.

If sent to the U.S., Assange could face charges including “espionage,” which carries a potential death penalty. U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning has been in military prison for more than two years in torturous conditions, accused of “aiding the enemy”—a capital offence—for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks. If Manning was indeed the source of the information, then he has provided a useful and courageous service on behalf of imperialism’s victims. We say: Free Bradley Manning now! Hands off Julian Assange—let him go to Ecuador!

The British government, caught off guard by Ecuador’s granting asylum to Assange, reacted with fury. Attempting to intimidate tiny Ecuador into handing over their quarry, swarms of cops surrounded the embassy while the Foreign Office threatened to revoke Ecuador’s diplomatic immunity and to storm the building in order to arrest Assange. This arrogant imperialist threat to breach internationally recognised diplomatic protocol comes from the same government which screamed bloody murder against Iran when protesters, furious at British imperialism imposing financial sanctions on that country over its nuclear enrichment programme, briefly took over the British embassy in Teheran last November. Back then, foreign secretary William Hague waxed eloquent on the sanctity of embassies, castigating the Iranian government for a “grave breach of the Vienna convention which requires the protection of diplomats and diplomatic premises under all circumstances” (Guardian, 29 November 2011).

The Iranians certainly have cause for anger—among the WikiLeaks exposures were cables showing that Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other Arab states have been pressing the U.S. to stage a military attack against Iran’s nuclear programme, showing yet again that Iran needs nukes to deter attack by the U.S. or its Israeli proxy. And while Hague told Ecuador: “The UK does not accept the principle of diplomatic asylum,” the British imperialists have no problem with such asylum when it serves anti-Communist China-bashing. When Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng sought refuge in the U.S. embassy in Beijing in April this year, Hague rushed to lecture the Chinese government on its “abuse of power,” while the European Union urged China to use the “utmost restraint” in dealing with Chen.

“Socialists” Aid Witchhunt

The rape allegations made against Assange by two women in Sweden are simply not credible. Both women approached Assange at separate times and, by their own accounts, had consensual sex with him. Neither claimed at the time that she had been the victim of a rape or sexual assault. One of the so-called “victims” organised a barbecue for Assange the day after the supposed “assault.” The other went to the police after exchanging emails with the first woman, and then apparently to see if Assange could be forced to take a sexual health test after a condom allegedly broke during sex. Prosecutors in Sweden initially opened, then dropped, then reopened an investigation into the accusations. Assange—who has not been charged with any offence—has repeatedly offered to be interviewed by Swedish authorities either in London or by video link, but the Swedes have steadfastly refused.

The capitalists and their hired scribblers in the media—the so-called “liberal” press—have cynically seized on the rape accusations to smear Assange and to discredit WikiLeaks. “Considering he made his name with the biggest leak of secret government documents in history, you might imagine there would be at least some residual concern for Julian Assange among those trading in the freedom of information business. But the virulence of British media hostility towards the WikiLeaks founder is now unrelenting,” wrote Seumas Milne (Guardian, 21 August). To the British press, Milne noted, Assange “is nothing but a ‘monstrous narcissist,’ a bail-jumping ‘sex pest’ and an exhibitionist maniac.” This venom is spewed at someone “who has yet to be charged, let alone convicted, of anything.”

The reformist left have joined in the witchhunt of Assange, treating the rape allegations as good coin, as was seen when the bourgeois press unleashed a vicious backlash against MP [Member of Parliament] George Galloway. He made the unexceptionable statement in an online video broadcast that “even taken at its worst, if the allegations made by these two women were true, 100 percent true, and even if a camera in the room captured them, they don’t constitute rape. At least not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it.” Salma Yaqoob, a leader of Galloway’s Respect party, condemned his remarks as “deeply disappointing and wrong” and later resigned from Respect.

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) also took aim at Galloway, who was their coalition partner in Respect before a split in 2007. In an article in Socialist Worker (1 September) leading SWPer Judith Orr chastised Galloway for his assertion that Assange was guilty of nothing more than “bad sexual etiquette.” Orr objects to Galloway’s statement, saying: “Part of the fight for women’s liberation has been for us to no longer to [sic] be seen as sex objects.” The SWP’s concern for women’s liberation rings hollow, to put it mildly, given its long record of pandering to Islamic reactionaries such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. For sure George Galloway, who also panders to Islamic reaction and opposes abortion, is hardly a champion of women’s rights. But this was not a problem for the SWP when, in order to form the Respect coalition with Galloway in 2004, these opportunists buried the question of women’s oppression (and gay rights) in order to avoid alienating the mosques. Now the SWP cynically invokes women’s rights while in reality providing a cover to the witchhunt against Julian Assange, whom the imperialist rulers have declared a public enemy.

The Socialist Party joined the vendetta against Assange, including in an editorial comment from its Swedish sister group, Rättvisepartiet Socialisterna, which opposes Assange’s extradition to the U.S., but tacitly supports his extradition to Sweden. The article says: “Internationally, the case centres around US imperialism’s need to punish WikiLeaks and no doubt the Swedish state and government would happily assist the US in getting Assange extradited. However, the case is also about serious allegations of rape, which must be investigated” (Socialist, 30 August). The International Socialist Group in Scotland (a split from the SWP) brands Assange a rapist before he has even been charged, let alone convicted. An online piece by Sarah Watson declares: “Assange committed rape and should face trial in Sweden” (internationalsocialist.org.uk, 22 August).

We are opposed to government interference in people’s private, sexual lives, as well as to any categorical criminalisation of a sex act, such as the reactionary “age of consent” laws. As a guiding principle, we advocate the concept of effective consent—that is, mutual understanding and agreement. To conflate consensual sex with rape is to trivialise the brutal crime of rape. The reformist left share a touching faith in the capitalist state, which they entrust to regulate the sexual activity of youth, as well as to “protect” women and children.

The state in Sweden, as in Britain, is certainly not known for its sympathetic treatment of women who have been raped. An article titled “We Are Women Against Rape But We Do Not Want Julian Assange Extradited,” written by members of Women Against Rape (Guardian, 23 August), expressed a healthy scepticism over the sudden concern for “rape” victims in the Assange case. The article noted:

“When Julian Assange was first arrested, we were struck by the unusual zeal with which he was being pursued for rape allegations.

“It seems even clearer now, that the allegations against him are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction.”

Julian Assange is a bourgeois liberal who vainly seeks to rid the imperialist system of its worst excesses through exposure of its crimes. In trying to take down Assange, WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning, the U.S. and British imperialists are sending a message that any exposure or even accurate reporting of the imperialists’ crimes and atrocities will be punished by life in prison, or the death penalty. It is in the interests of the working class and all the oppressed to fight the witchhunt of Assange, which is an attempt to criminalise dissent and to silence opponents of imperialism’s wars and occupations as well as domestic repression carried out in the name of fighting “terrorism.” We Marxists seek to impart the understanding that imperialist war, with all its savagery, is inherent to capitalist class rule. Only when capitalism is destroyed root and branch through workers revolution will humanity finally be rid of such horrors. 

From The Pen OfJoshua Lawrence Breslin-The Be-Bop Beach Night, Circa 1960

 

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of James Ray performing If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody.

CD Review

The Rock and Roll Era: The‘60s: Keep On Rockin’, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1989

“Josh called, Josh called, Josh called about seven times while you were out Betty,” Mrs. Becker yelled up to Betty rushing to her room in order to get ready for her big date with new romance Teddy. Teddy today freshly met at the beach, the beautiful, beautiful Olde Saco Beach, formerly just a beach, a too stony to the Betty feet touch beach, fetid at low tide (it stunk, honestly) and on more than one occasion held to be a beach fit solely for lowlife by one Betty Becker. But now beautiful, beautiful since Teddy, Teddy Andrews, had noticed her and graced his bare feet on that stony brine as she was stationed along with her bevy of summering Olde Saco High School girls in their traditional spot between the Seal Rock Yacht Club and the South Saco River Club. But enough of beaches, enough of stones, enough of boat clubs.

Teddy had spied her, he said, from the deck of the Seal Rock Club and was compelled, compelled he said, to check out the foxy blonde-haired chick in the red bikini. Betty smiled, smiled the of the knowing, knowing that she had turned more than one head this summer, older guys too, with that very revealing bathing suit. Unlike the others though that she would have rebuffed if they had approached her Teddy had noticed, walked over to the bevy of blankets and told her just that. And she practically swooned.

Dreamy Teddy, rich Teddy, of the father-bought new Pontiac Star Chief with plenty of zip and style that every girl in school was crazy to get in the front seat of. Teddy of the forget Josh, walking Josh of the no car fraternity. Blah. And before Betty could hear the faint ring of another Josh call she was out the door and planned to be off-limits, Teddy off-limits, to every Josh in school, until somebody came by with a father-bought Cadillac and then maybe she would find herself in the front seat of that automobile. Maybe.

Meanwhile Josh, Josh of the infinite nickels, had stepped away from the telephone at Doc’s Drugstore over on Main Street after making that eighth call to one Betty Becker. See, Josh had two reasons for using the public telephone at Doc’s, first, he didn’t want snooping older brothers to harass him over his Betty craze and so he would not use a home phone to call her. And secondly, currently, the Breslin residence, due to an out of work father, had no phone with which to call Miss Betty in any case. So he was pushing shoe leather between the telephone booth and his stool at Doc’s where a forlorn Coke (cherry Coke) was waiting on the completion of his errand. He said to himself one more time was all and then he would head home. Doc’s motions made him realize that was his fate in any case as he was ready to close up shop for the evening. Ninth call, no soap, and he left saying a pitiful good night to Doc.

Out on Main Street he walked head down, lost in thought, when a big new Pontiac, two-toned (a couple of shades of green then stylish, uh, cool) passed him by, honking like crazy. He didn’t realize who it was until the car came back to him honking like crazy again. The he saw Betty and her dreamy Teddy laughing, laughing like crazy at the “pedestrian.” The car stopped, Betty got out and gave Josh his class ring back saying that she was not walking any place anymore, thank you. And then, to add insult to injury, Teddy floored the petal leaving dust all over Josh. He could faintly sense them laughing, laughing like crazy once again as they drove away.

When he got home he went up into his tiny room (the fate of the youngest brother), closed the door behind him, locked it, and turned on his transistor radio and wouldn’t you know that old WMEX, the local rock and roll station that had saved his nights more than one time was playing If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody by James Ray just then. Last week Betty and he had laughed at that one promising eternally that such would never be their fates.

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin-From The "Ancient Dreams, Dreamed" Sketches-Reflections On A Fierce Head Wind Dream Night

Desperately clutching his newly adorned white flags, his 9/11 white flags, exchanged years ago for bloodied red ones, white flags proudly worn for a while now, he wipes his brow of the sweat accumulated from the fear he has been living with for the past few months. Now ancient arms folded, hard-folded against the rainless night, raining, he carefully turns right, left, and careful of every move as the crowd comes forward. Not a crowd, no, a horde, a beastly horde, and this was no time to stick out with white flags (or red, for that matter). He jumps out of the way, the horde passes brushing him lightly, not aware, not apparently aware of the white flags. Good. What did that other guy say that old 19^th century guy, oh yes, struggle.

White truce flags neatly placed in right pocket. Folded aging arms showing the first signs of wear-down, unfolded. One more time, just one more war-weary dastardly fight against big car-fueled Persian Gulf oil-driven time. Against a bigger opponent this time, hell, take the beating, the manly beating and then the joys of retreat and taking out those white flags again and normalcy. The first round begins. He holds his own, a little wobbly. Second round he runs into a series of upper-cuts that drive him to the floor. Out. Awake later, seven minutes, hours, eons later he takes out the white flags now red with his own blood. He clutches them in his weary hands. The other guy, some long time ago guy, he said struggle, struggle. Yah, easy for you to say brother.

Lashed against the high-end double seawall, bearded, slightly graying against the forlorn time, a vision in white not enough to keep the wolves of time away, the wolves of feckless petty larceny times reappear, reappear with a vengeance against the super-rational night sky and big globs of ancient hurts fester against some unknown enemy, unnamed, or hiding out in a canyon under an assumed name. Then night, the promise of night, a night run up some seawall laden streets, some Grenada night or maybe Lebanon sky boom night, and thoughts of finite, sweet flinty finite haunt his dreams, haunt his sleep. Wrong number, brother. Yah, wrong number, as usual.

A smoky sunless bar, urban style right in the middle of high Harvard Square civilization, some singer belting out some misty time Hank Williams tune, maybe Cold, Cold Heart from father home times. Order another deadened drink, slightly benny-addled, then in walks a vision. A million time in walks a vision, but in white this time. Signifying? Signifying adventure, dream one-night stands, lost walks in loaded woods, endless stretch beaches, moonless nights, serious caresses, and maybe, just maybe, some cosmic connection to wear away the days, the long days ahead. Yah that seems right, right against the oil-beggared times, right.

Greyhound bus station men’s wash room stinking to high heaven of seven hundred pees, six hundred laved washings, five hundred wayward unnamed, unnamable smells, mainly rank. Out the door, walk the streets, walk the streets until, until noon, until five, until lights out. Plan, plan, plan, plain paper bag, Mexican tourista style, in hand holding, well, holding life, plan for the next minute, no, the next ten seconds until the deadly impulses subside. Then look, look hard, for safe harbors, lonely desolate un-peopled bridges, some gerald ford-bored newspaper-strewn bench against the clotted hobo night snores. Desolation row, no way home.

He said struggle. He said push back. He said stay with your people. He said it would not be easy. He said you have lost the strand that bound you to your people. He said you must find that strand. He said that strand will lead you away from you acting in god’s place ways. He said look for a sign. He said the sign would be this-when your enemies part ways and let you through then you will enter the golden age. He said it would not be easy. He said it again and again. He said struggle as if to emphasize his point. He said it in 1848, he said it in 1917, he said it in 1973. What an old guy, huh.

Chill chili nights south of the border, endless Kennebunkports, Bar Harbors, Campobellos, Moncktons, Peggy’s Coves, Charlottetowns, Montreals, Ann Arbors, Neolas, Denvers by moonlight, Boulders echos, Dinosaurs dies, salted lakes, Winnemuccas flats, pueblos, Joshua Trees, embarcaderos, golden-gated bridges, malibus, and flies. Enough to last a life-time, thank you. Enough of Bunsen burners, Coleman stoves, wrapped blankets, second-hand sweated army sleeping bags, and minute pegged pup tents too. And enough too of granolas, oatmeals, desiccated stews, oregano weed, mushroomed delights, peyote seeds, and the shamanic ghosts dancing off against apache (no, not helicopters, real injuns) ancient cavern wall. And enough of short-wave radio beam tricky dick slaughters south of the border in deep fall nights. Enough, okay.

Bloodless bloodied streets, may day tear down the government days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. But stop. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove and no flame-flecked phoenix but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva comes a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ will take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart acting in god’s place can even dream of.

The great Mandela cries, cries to the high heavens, for revenge against the son’s hurt, now that the son has found his way, a strange way but a way. And a certain swagger comes to his feet in the high heaven black Madonna of a night. No cigarette hanging off the lip now, not Winston filter-tipped seductions, no need, and no rest except the rest of waiting, waiting on the days to pass until the next coming, and the next coming after that. Ah, sweet Mandela, turn for me, turn for me and mine just a little. Free at last but with a very, very sneaking feeling that this is a road less traveled for reason, and not ancient robert frost to guide you…Just look at blooded Kent State, or better, blooded Jackson State. Christ.

Shaved-head, close anyway, too close to distinguish that head and ten-thousand, no on hundred-thousand other heads, all shave-headed. He falls down to the earth, spitting mud-flecked red clay, spitting, dust, spitting, spitting out the stars over Alabama that portent no good, no earthy good. Except this-if this is not murder, if this is not to slay, then what is? And the die is cast, not truthfully cast, not pure warrior in the night cast, but cast. Wild dreams, senseless wild dreams follow, follow in succession. The days of rage, rage against the light, and then the glimmer of the light.

Drunk, whisky drunk, whisky rotgut whisky drunk, in some bayside, atlantic bayside, not childhood atlantic bayside though, no way, no shawlie way, bar. Name, nameless, no legion. Some staggered midnight vista street, legs weak from lack of work, brain weak, push on, push on, find some fellaheen relieve for that unsatisfied bulge, that gnawing at the brain or really at the root of the thing. A topsy-turvy time, murder, death, the death of death, the death of fame, murder, killing murder, and then resolve, wrong resolve and henceforth the only out, war, war to the finish although who could have known that then. Who could have known that tet, lyndon, bobby, hubert, tricky dick war-circus thing then.

Multi-colored jacket worn, red and black, black and red, some combination reflecting old time glories, or promises of glory, cigarette, Winston small-filtered, natch, hanging from off the lip at some jagged angle, a cup of coffee, if coffee was the drink, in hand, a glad hand either way, look right, look left, a gentle nod, a hard stare, a gentle snarl if such a thing is possible beyond the page. Move out the act onto Boston fresh streets. Finally, that one minute, no not fifteen, not fifteen at all, and not necessary of the big fame game, local fame, always local fame but fame, and then the abyss of non-fame, non- recognition and no more snarls, gentle or otherwise. A tough life lesson learned, very tough. And not yet twenty years old.

Main street walked, main street public telephone booth cheap talk walked searching for some Diana greek goddess wholesale on the atlantic streets. Diana, blonde Diana, cashmere-sweatered, white tennis –shoed Diana, million later Dianas although not with tennis shoes, really gym shoes fit for old ladies to do their rant, their lonely rant against the wind. Seeking, or rather courage-seeking, nickel and dime courage as it turns out; nickel and dime courage when home provided no sanctuary for snuggle-eared delights. Maybe a date, maybe just a swirl at midnight drift, maybe a view of local lore submarine races, ah, to dream, no more than to dream, walking down friendly aisles, arm and arm along with myriad other arm and arm walkers on senior errands (high school senior and not ARRP stuff, Christ). No way, no way and then red-faced, alas, a red-faced “no” known even red-faced forty years later. Wow.

Sweated dust bowl run nights, not the sweated exotic atlantic cheerleader glance nights but something else, something not endless walked about, something done, or with the promise of done, for something inside, for some sense of worth in the this moldy white tee shirt, mildewy white shorts, who knows what diseased sneakers, Chuck Taylor sneakers pushing the red-faced Irish winds, harder, harder around the oval, watch tick in hand, looking, looking he guessed for immortality, immortality even then. Later, in bobby darin times or percy faith times (early 1960s for the unknowing), who knows, sitting, sitting high against the lion-guarded pyramid statute front door dream, common dreams, common tokyo dreams, all gone asunder, all gone asunder, on this curious fact, no wind, Irish or otherwise to drive him. Who would have figured that one?

Lindo, lindos, beautiful, beautifuls, not some spanish exotic though, maybe later, just some junior league dream fuss though, some future cheerleader football dame though, some sweated night pastry crust and he, too slip-shot, too, well, just too lonely, too lonesome, too long-toothed before my time to do more than endless walks along endless atlantic streets to summon up the courage to glance, glance right at windows, non-exotic atlantic cheerleader windows. Such is the new decade a-borning, a-borning but not for me, no president jack swagger, or bobby lawyer goof as they run the table on old tricky dick or some tired imitation of him. He, he would gladly take exotics, or lindos, if they ever crossed his path, his lonely only path

A bridge too far, an un-arched, un-steeled, un-spanned, unnerved bridge too far. One speed bicycle boy, dungarees rolled up against dog bites and meshed gears , churning through endless heated, sweated, no handkerchief streets, names, all the parts of ships, names, all the seven seas, names, all the fishes of the seas, names, all the fauna of the sea, names. Twelve-year old pedaled hard churned miles to go before sleep, searching for the wombic home, for the old friends, the old drifter, grifter, midnight shifter petty larceny friends, that’s all it was, petty and maybe larceny, hard against the named ships, hard against the named seas, hard against the named fishes, hard against the named fauna, hard against the unnamed angst, hard against those changes that kind of hit one sideways all at once like some mack the knife smack devilish thing

City square no trespass standing, low-slung granite buildings everywhere, granite steps leading to granite doors leading to granite gee-gad counters, hated, no name hated, low-head hated, waiting slyly, standing back on heels, going in furtively, coming out ditto, presto coming out with a gold nugget jewel, no carat, no russkie Sputnik panel glitter for his efforts such is the way of young lumped crime, no value, no look, just grab, grab hard, grab fast, grab get yours before the getting is over, or before the dark, dark night comes, the dark pitched-night when the world no longer is young, and dreamed dreams make no more sense that this bodily theft.

Walks, endless waiting bus stop non-stop walks, up crooked cheap, low-rent, fifty-year rutted pavement streets, deeply gouged, one-lane snow-drift hassles, pass trees are green, coded, endless trees are green secret-coded waiting, waiting against boyish infinite time, infinite first blush of innocent manhood, boyhood times, gone now, for one look, one look, that would elude him, elude him forever such is life in lowly spots, lowly, lowly spots. And no dance either, no high school confidential (hell this is elementary school, man), handy man, breathless, Jerry Lee freak-out, at least no potato sack stick (read: girls with no shape teen lingo)dance with coded name brunette. That will come, that will come.

Endless walks, endless sea street seawall walks, rocks, shells, ocean water-logged debris strewn every which way, fetid marsh smells to the right, mephitic swamps oozing mud splat to the left making hard the way, the path, okay, to uptown drug stores, Rexall’s drug store, grabbing heist-stolen valentine, ribbon and bow valentine night bushels, signed, hot blood-signed, weary-feet signed, if only she, about five candidates she, later called two blondes, two brunettes, and a red-head, sticks all, no womanly shape to tear a boy-man up, would give a look his way, his look, his newly acquired state of the minute Elvis-imitation look, on endless sea streets, the white-flecked splash inside his head would be quiet.

Nighttime fears, red-flagged Stalin-named fears, red bomb unnamed shelter blast fears, named, vaguely named, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg hated stalinite jews killed fears, jews killed our catholic lord fears and what did they do anyway fears against the cubed glass glistening flagless flag-pole rattling dark asphalt school yard night, alone, and, and, alone fears avoidance, clean, clear, stand-alone avoidance of old times sailors, tars, sailors’ homes AND deaths in barely readable fine- marked granite-grey lonely seaside graveyards looking out on ocean homelands and lost booty. Dead.

A cloudless day, a cloudless Korean War day, talk of peace, merciless truce peace and uncles coming home in the air, hot, hot end of June day laying, face up on freshly mown grass near fellowship carved-out fields, fields for slides and swings, diamonded baseball, no, friendlier softball fields the houses are too close, of gimps, glues, cooper-plated portraits, of sweet shaded elms, starting, now that he too, that nose-flattened brother, has been to foreign places in the time of his time, to find his own place in the sun but wondering, constantly wondering, what means this, what means that, and why all the changes, slow changes, fast changes, blip changes, but changes.

Nose flattened cold against the frozen, snow falling front window apartment project hang your hat dwelling, small, warm, no hint of madness, or crazes only of sadness, brother kinship sadness, sadness and not understanding of time marching as he, that older brother, goes off to foreign places, foreign elementary school reading,‘riting, ‘rithmetic places and, he, the nose flattened against the window brother, is left to ponder his own place in those kind of places, those foreign-sounding places, when his time comes. If he has a time, has the time for the time of his time, in this red scare (but what knows he of red scare only brother scares), cold war, cold nose, dust particles in the clogging air night.

His mind went back, back to womb times maybe and he thought, thought hard. Yah, sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out the goofy stuff and just call her a woman and be done with it, will tie a guy’s insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tie up a guy so bad he will go to the chair kind of smiling, okay maybe just half-smiling. Frank (read: future Peter Paul Markin, and a million, more or less, other guys) had it bad as a man could have from the minute Ms. Cora walked through the door in her white summer blouse, shorts, and the then de rigueur bandana holding back her hair, also white. She may have been just another blonde, very blonde, frail serving them off the arm in some seaside hash joint but from second one she was nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. Peter Paul swears, swears on seven sealed bibles that he yelled at the screen for Frank to get the hell out of there at that moment. But do you think he would listen, no not our boy. He had to play with fire, and play with it to the end. Ah, life.

One more battle, one more, please, one more, one fight against the greed cowboy and Indians night, one more questing for the blue-pink great American night dream, and one more struggle against no dreams. He, maybe a little punch-drunk, maybe suffering egg-scrabbled brains after one too many fights, chained himself, well not really chained, but more like tied himself to the black wrought-iron fence in front of the big white house with his white handkerchief. Gone are retreat flags, sullen retreat and pondering armchair potato flags. Another guy, shaking the clotting snow off his old army jacket still useful against driving winds and off-hand city snows, did the same except he used some plastic hand-cuff-like stuff. A couple of women, bundled knowingly against all weathers just stood there, hard against that ebony-etched fence, if can you believe it, they just stood there. Others, milling around, disorderly in a way, started chanting after someone starts om-ing, om-ing out of Allen Ginsberg Howl nights, or at least Jack Kerouac Big Sur splashes. The scene was now complete, or almost complete. Now, for once he knew, knew for sure, that it wasn’t Ms. Cora whom he needed to worry about, and that his black and white television child dream was a different thing altogether. A ruse. And he had no longer to worry about flags, white or red. Just keep pushing against immortality. But who, just a child, could have known that back then.

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- From The "Ancient Dreams, Dreamed" Sketches-Time Is Not On Our Side

 

Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:

He, Peter Paul Markin to give him a name although many of the generation of ‘68 had been on the same quest, for a whole number of reasons both personal and political, had been on the trail of his roots, including trips to the old working- class neighborhoods where he came of political age. Through various methods, including extensive use of the glorious Internet, he was able to track down a couple of guys from the old neighborhood whose family story had gripped him in olden times.

As an unintended result of that research he have also come in contact with some helpful old high school classmates, North Adamsville High School (that’s in Massachusetts) Class of 1964 . One such helpful person, a class officer back in the day, had asked him to answer some questions that her committee was putting together for his high school class with an eye to the upcoming 50^th anniversary reunion. You know the “what the hell have you done with your ill-begotten life for the past half century,” how many kids, grandkids, egad, great-grandkids do you have; don’t lie about anything in any answer because we have ways of finding out the truth of your silly life. How do you think we found you after all these years anyway? (Although, as simple matter, a glance a local telephone book would have provided the answer.)

Got it. Peter Paul got it alright. He had answered some of the more pertinent questions, the dream questions, like how did things actually work out as against one’s totally inflated and obscenely optimistic teenage dream goals, as truthfully as possible, or as any of the old gang needed to know and gave forth with the expected fair percentage of lies, half-lies, and bizarre falsehoods that they should have expected for him, despite the fore-warnings. And they, in turn provided their inflated estimates. No foul, no harm. He dutifully posted those on the class website, although not without noting that this “memoir” excursion was getting to be a seemingly endless task as the more questions he answered the more they (really she, she unnamed she, just in case legal action becomes necessary) kept sending him. Such is life. But, through some of the interchange correspondence he uncovered more information about his roots coming from an earlier period, the dark “projects” coming of age period. Such is life, indeed.

He told me, one melancholy barroom veranda afternoon, some of the details of his “discovery.” How his family had started life in a housing project in Adamsville with all that implied, then and now. By the beauties of the Internet social networking he had come in contact with someone who remembered him (or rather his brother, his older brother, Prescott- she was sweet on him in elementary school), a woman named Sherry. She had lived in that housing project during his family’s stay there and for many, many year after his family had left (to move to the other side of town in a broken down single, well, shack was the only work he could think of to describe it) , and saw its transformation from a temporary way station for returning World War II veterans as had been its original intention to a classic drug-strewn crime-ridden ‘den of iniquity’ as portrayed in subsequent media accounts, She agreed to be his ‘hood historian. Moreover she had brothers, sisters, children and grandchildren who had memories from that place and she agreed to pump them for their remembrances.

And that is where I came in. Peter Paul, my old yellow brick road magical mystery tour brother from the 1960s summer of love (summers of love?) generational break-out since we met on the West Coast one sunny year called on me to work out some of the kinks in the stories, something he felt was too close to believe that he could do them some small measure of justice. He presented the concept as something that could very well be a slice of life series on the trials and tribulations of members of the marginally working poor, a section of the working class with which I am also very familiar coming from old time mill town Olde Saco up in Maine. See too from my vantage point the thing could have produced a study, with all its inherent limitations, of the decline and disintegration of working class political consciousness in America since World War II. I had (have) written other stories from the Olde Saco days that played out one way with a section of the working class that was slightly above the one that Peter Paul came from, but just above, the steadily employed working people who dotted the coastal Maine landscape back then. That saga did not paint a pretty political picture. Nor would this one, I feared. But, damn, we both agreed, why shouldn’t these people have their stories told, warts and all.

Again, like that Olde Saco series (with a ponderous series title of History and Consciousness, H&C, I have gotten better with my titles since then, thank you), this series would really narrate a very prosaic working class set of stories. I planned, however, to organize these stories differently because now I know what I am looking for and each story will be able to stand on its own. In H&C the stories as they unfolded piecemeal, frankly, got out of control and I do not believe that when I put all the parts together at the end that it had the power that I wanted it to have, and that it did have for me as they unfolded.

That said, if this time last year somebody asked me, including Peter Paul, if I would be doing another series like H&C I would have said they were crazy. I then wanted to discuss the finer theoretical points of organizing to push for the American withdrawal from Afghanistan Iraq or building a workers’ party in this country. But this series seemed like finding the philosopher’s stone. This was the “real deal” down at the base of society; from a time when with a little tweaking things could have gone in another direction.

I prepared the first story (since published) that dealt with how this poor woman Sherry, Peter’s ‘hood historian, was humiliated by other students (girls mainly) at his elementary school for the mere fact of being from “the projects.” This writer was painfully aware of that type of humiliation as he faced the same thing up in Olde Saco. I expected to use that introductory story to draw some political conclusions, if possible. Again, as I had in H&C, I asked the question- will there be political lessons to be learned? I did not believe so, directly. However, real stories about the fate of the working class down at the base can help explain the very real retardants to working class political consciousness that we face as we try to organize here in America to take back the republic. I have spent a lifetime quoting radical socialist principles, chapter and verse, elsewhere. These stories desperately need to be told. Sadly, after that first story though Sherry passed away and we, Peter Paul and I, have been left a little rudderless. Time is not always on our side. Sherry from the ‘hood, RIP.

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin-The Golden Age Of The Automobile, Circa 1954

There was a madness in this country in the 1950s. No, not the Cold War atomic-bomb-is-going-to-get-us-we-are-all-going-to-be-dead-next-week or “better dead than red” kind of madness although there was plenty of that, but a madness for the automobile, the sleeker, the more airplane-like, the more aerodynamic, and more powerfully-engined the better. It wasn’t just, deafeningly mad as they were, driven by those guys in the now almost sepia-faded photographic images of tight white T-shirt wearing, rolled sleeve cigarette-packed, greased Pompadour-haired, long side-burned, dangling-combed , engineer-booted, chain-wielding, side of the mouth butt-puffing , didn’t care if school kept or not bent over the hood of some souped-up ’57 Chevy working, sweating pools of sweat, sweating to get even more power out of that ferocious V-8 engine for the Saturday night “ chicken" run.

And it wasn’t even driven by those mad faux James Dean-sneered, "rebel without a cause"-posed, cooled-out, maybe hop-headed guys, smelling of aromatic ganga, mary jane, herb, grass deeply drawn , name your name for nirvana twists, either. The guys with the faux leather jackets, black as night and black as their desiccated hearts, short tempers and short knives ready to avenge at the drop of a hat, or just because they were feeling that way that day, any slight. And it was always guys, who you swore you would beat down if they ever even looked at your sister, if you had a sister, and if you liked her enough to beat a guy down to defend her honor, or whatever drove your sense of right. And, of course she, your sister no less, is looking for all she is worth at this “James Dean” soda jerk (hey, what else could he be), this zen master “chicken run’ hood, or that black-hearted chain-wielder, because this guy is “cute.” Go figure.

No, and forget all those stereotypes that they, the historians, the literary critics, the social commentators, the media-aratti, like to roll out when they want to bring a little “color” to the desperately color-craving 1950s. This car madness was driven, and driven hard, by your very own stay-at-home-and watch the television, water the lawn, if you have a lawn and it needed watering and sometimes when it didn’t just to get out of the house, have couple of beers and take a nap on Saturday afternoon father (or grandfather, I have to remember who might be in my audience now) who always said “ask your mother” to blow you off. You know him. I know you know him he just had a different name than mine did. And maybe even your very own mother (or grandmother) got caught up in the car thing too, your mother the one who always would say “ask your father. You know her too, don’t say no. I hope by now you knew they were working a team scam on you even if you didn’t have the kind of proof that you could take to court and get a little justice on.

Hell, on this car thing they were just doing a little strutting of their stuff in showcase, show-off, “see what I got and you don’t” time. Come on now, don’t pretend that you don’t know what I am talking about, at least if you too grew up in the 1950s, or heard about it, or even think you heard about it. Hey, it was about dreams of car ownership for the Great Depression, World War II survivors looking to finally cash in, as a symbol that one, and one’s family, had arrived in the great American dream, and all on easy monthly payments, no money down, and the bigger, the sleeker the better and I’ll take the heavy- chromed, aerodynamically-designed, two-toned one, thank you. That was how you knew who counted, and who didn’t. You know what I mean.

Heck, that ‘50s big old fluffy pure white cloud of a dream even seeped all the way down into “the projects”, the Acre projects (a.k.a. the Olde Saco Housing Authority apartments up in Maine although nobody ever called it that except to snicker , just the Acre). And I will bet the same was true over at the Adamsville, Massachusetts “projects” near Boston where my amigo Peter Paul Markin grew up he did too, although I don’t know for sure on that, and maybe in the thousand and one other displaced person hole-in-the-walls“projects” they built as an afterthought back then for those families like mine caught on the slow track in “go-go” America. Except down there, down there on the edge of respectability, and maybe even mixed in with a little disrespectability, you didn’t want to have too good a car, even if you could get that easy credit, because what we you doing with that nice sleek, fin-tailed thing with four doors and plenty of room for the kids in the back in a place like “the projects” and maybe there was something the “authorities”should know about, yes. Better to move on with that old cranky 1940s-style un-hip, un-mourned, un-cool jalopy than face the wrath and clucking of that crowd, the venom-filled, green-eyed neighbors.

Yes, that little intro is all well and good and a truth you can take my word for but this tale is about, if I ever get around to it, those who had the car madness deep in their psyche, but not the wherewithal- this is a cry, if you can believe it today, from the no car families. Jesus, how could you not get the car madness then though, young as I was, facing it every night stark-naked in front of you on the television set, small as the black and white picture was, of Buicks, and Chevys and Pontiacs and whatever other kind of car they had to sell to you. But what about us street car dependents? The ones who rode the bus, back or front it didn’t matter, at least up there in Olde Saco it didn’t matter. Down South they got kind of funny about it.

As you might have figured out by now, and if you didn’t I will tell you, that was our family’s fate, more often than not. It was not that we never had a car back then, but there were plenty of times when we didn’t and I have the crooked heels, peek-a-boo-soles, and worn out shoe leather from walking rather than waiting on that never-coming bus to prove it. And not only that but I got so I had no fear of walking, and walking great distances if I had to, all the way to “up-town” Olde Saco Center even. That was easy stuff thinking back on it. I‘ll tell you about walking those later long, lonesome roads out West in places like just before the mountains in Winnemucca, Nevada and 129 degree desert- hot Needles, California switching into 130 degree desert-hot Blythe, Arizona some other time, because it just doesn’t seem right to talk about mere walking, long or short, when the great American automobile is present and rolling by.

It’s kind of funny now but the thing was, when there was enough money to get one, that the cars my poor old, kind of city ways naïve, but fighting Marine-proud father would get, from wherever in this god forsaken earth he got them from would be, to be polite, clunkers and nothing but old time jalopies that even those “hot rod” James Dean guys mentioned above would sneer at, and sneer at big time, at. It would always be a 1947 something, like a Hudson or Nash Rambler, or who knows the misty, musty names of these long forgotten brands.

The long and short it was, and this is what’s really important when you think about it, that they would inevitably break down, and breakdown in just the wrong place, at least the wrong place if you had a wife who couldn’t drive or help in that department and three screaming, bawling tow-headed boys who wanted to get wherever it was we were going, and get there-now. And always dreaming, or maybe pointing out in daytime to anybody in this whole candid world who would listen, of great 1954 this or that “boss” (local, hell maybe nation, among the young then, term of art for primo, numero uno things) Buicks, Pontiacs, and especially that two-toned Chevy just off the assembly line.

But it was those break-downs, those oil slicks under the car, those sick engine sounds that meant no good, that funny rattling sound coming from the rear which meant hard-earned money (and maybe no car for a while if it was a battle between that and kids’groceries) would have to be spend on repair that ruled the young Breslin family world. Sometimes the only difference between having a car available and not was dependent on the good graces of one Joey Parker, the max daddy of the self-taught local mechanics who, very conveniently, lived in a trailer at the outer edge of the Acre and who, from some unknown beginning , was friendly with my father, the late Prescott Breslin. (Our“relationship,” my relationship with Joey, if that is the right term, had started when my father had to push, assisted by three young sons, a transmission- busted 1947 Studebaker over to his place for major work and I was totally fascinated by the automobiles strewn in all conditions around his “garage.”)So in the end the golden age of the American automobile turns out to be about the valor of Joey Parker and his mad passion for fixing lame and halting automobiles.

Joey Parker was several years older than me, maybe ten, but that didn’t stop him from letting me hang around his “garage”and watch him turn some stumble-bum wreck of an automobile that had been scrapped off some back road after some midnight “chicken run” into a vehicle worthy of a king. Worthy that is if what you wanted was speed and chicken runs and were not worried like a lot of older guys (and like my corner boys from the stoop in front of Mama’s Pizza parlor over Main Street and me later when our time came about ninth grade when we are already plotting Seal Rock dream dates in some sultry, sexy heap) were about the thing being “girl ready,” especially girl back seat ready. Then you went, just like we did, over to Bill’s Esso and got the thing all dolled up, amped up, and perfumed up, I guess.

Then though all I, ten years of surly snarl and Meme back-bite, cared about, aside from the revival of various Breslin clunkers already mentioned, was Joey turning his wrecks into speed. And, truth, that was all that Joey cared about, at least that s all he talked about. About that ability to pull the throttle down from zero to sixty in about thirty second s flat (wild estimate for I wouldn’t know the exact time it took unless I was told). Here is the funny part though, unlike a lot of guys who had those “boss”engines under the hood to impress the girls (women too, married women from what I heard, although I didn’t put too much credence in that talk at the time. Every guy from about fourteen to four hundred believed that those young married women were just pining away for some sex instead of doing the housework while hubby was at work. Those ideas died hard.) as they zoomed down Olde Saco Boulevard, Joey didn’t talk or seem to take much interest in girls.

Although they, when he had some speed demon roadster all polished and pretty, flocked to his trailer looking for, well, you know what they were looking for (although I didn’t at the time). One girl, about sixteen, had her brother, my school friend Benny, hang around Joey’s for the express purpose of gathering intelligence about who Joey was, or was not, seeing and dropping hints via that poor brother that she was ready to give her all to sit in the front seat of a Joey-mobile.

[A few years later long after I had stopped hanging around the garage and moved on to the corner I found out the exact reason why Joey was not interested in discussing girls, or his sex life. We (or maybe, I) thought he might be a fag (a term of, well you know, derision in the Acre and elsewhere in 1950s America). Gay. No way. See Joey had fathered at least two children by two different girls up around Portland way and was laying low, very low on the girl front-JLB]

Now in case you don’t know, and maybe thought I was some juvenile delinquent-in- waiting, ready, at age ten, to plot out robberies and other mayhems in order to be ready to get my own fixed up wreck when my time came the reason I was hanging Joey’s garage was just because it was located down the end of our family’s street over in the Acre and when thing s got tough at home with Ma mainly (we called her in the French-Canadian fashion, Meme, she nee LeBlanc from the LeBlancs up around Quebec City way) then I headed to Joey’s to cool out. There was always a battle over sometime, mainly dough or no dough stuff, and desires kid know-nothing economic desires, but that is my story (and Meme’s) not Joey’s so I will move on.

Sometimes we, Joey and I, would run around town but mainly I just hung out there with a couple of other guys my age that also had the Ma problem. We did that for a few years until we had to start worrying about girls and cars rather some wrecked cars getting revived but the best years were the first couple when Joey would let us watch, maybe let us hand him some tool and also let us listen to the forbidden (Ma forbidden, Meme strictly forbidden no devil’s music in her pure Roman Catholic home, period, end of story) local radio station, WMEX, that he had on constantly. The local rock and roll radio station (although at first we did not know that term but we sure as hell knew the bounce of the music).Around the house Ma and Dad were strictly tuned into WJDA and the old fogey World War II stuff like Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Peggy Lee and Frank (yes, that Frank) that drove me up a wall even before I hit on Joey’s WMEX.

I remember the first, maybe the second, time Joey let me hang around (it was done mainly, as it was with the other guys, by him not saying “get lost”). For some reason he did not have the radio on that morning before he started working on some 1954 Pontiac that had gotten mashed going 110 MPH, or something like that, over on Gorham Road in Scarborough. So he talked, talked a blue streak for a taciturn, gruff, few words kind of guy, about how he had finally found a wreck, this Pontiac Star Chief, that he could turn into a chariot (his term) that would blow Johnny Blaze, Johnny, king of the “chicken run” Olde Saco Beach Saturday night, away. Beat Johnny so bad that he would thereafter happily have his work done over at Bill’s Esso like all the other squares (1950s term of art for, for, hell, you know, squares, the regular nine to five people, stuff like that).

Even I had heard of Johnny and his exploits. About his almost jet-like cars. About how he totally blew Stewball Stu (named as such for his constant companion whisky breathe but don’t ever call him that to his face or you might have your face mangled at the wrong end of chain whipping) the previous king away leaving him badly injured in some swamp ditch down in South Berwick one rainy early Sunday morning, driving away laughing and with Stu’s girl (they had bet her as part of the bargain). Rough boy. The most famous though was the night he outran the Kennebunk cops out on Route 109, blew them away, and the next morning sat down at the Jeffery’s Diner and smiled, just smiled at the same cops who chased him, while they were having their coffee and. And they, red-faced, couldn’t let on they had been beaten by a civilian. Beautiful. Yes, Johnny was the king in that jacked up Chevy of his and would be hard to displace, very hard I thought.

Then Joey went on and on that morning about the displacement this and that, the wheel base this and that, the fuel pump this and that, the dual carburetors this and that, all stuff then (and now) which I was clueless about. All I knew was that I wished Joey well, that I hoped that he would beat old Johnny (not for any other reason than I knew Joey and didn’t know Johnny), and that I wished he would let me hang around while he was putting his masterpiece together. And he did. Did let me hang around and did finish his masterpiece. It took him maybe two months, in between working on various conditions of my father’s and other’s cars in order to carry the freight for expenses for his souped-up Star Chief.

Word got around; got around small town Olde Saco (and the even smaller part that cared about chicken runs Olde Saco) that Joey was ready, ready for Johnny Blaze anytime, anywhere. As such things go about two days later I heard from Benny, one of the other kids that also hung around Joey’s (and the brother of that girl who was ready to give her all for Joey at the slightest glance, sorry sister Joey was booked, booked solid) that the deal was down for Saturday night June 6^that the far end (the traditional chicken run end) of Olde Saco Beach near Seal Rock and did I want to sneak out of the house and go with him. The sneaking part was necessary since these chicken runs were held at about two in the morning when few people, and cops, were in that area. I said I would try, try in order to give support for our man Joey and because I had never seen a chicken run up close (just some off-hand dueling by strictly week-end warriors, probably drunk, on Route 1, kid’s stuff really).

That trying to get out of the house Saturday night part never happened though. Jesus, it never happened. Here is what did. The Friday before the big run Joey decided he wanted to take the Pontiac on a test run, a run over that same Gorham Road he said that had brought him his“good luck” wheels in the first place. Here is where it got kind of crazy though in the good luck department. Joey had also decided that since I had hung around his place so much while he was building his baby (his term) he wanted me to ride with him on that run. See, I was his good luck. I was thrilled, Jesus was I. So that Friday about eight o’clock, like I was some date, he picked me up at my house so my parents wouldn’t worry and we rode over to the Gorham Road.

I do not know about now but in those days the Gorham Road was nothing but a country road, a road for farmers to get to Scarborough, or maybe try to connect with Route 1to Portland or to head south. In other words on a Friday night not a bad place to test out a car for speed. And we did, jesus, we did. Joey got her up to about 120 MPH fast, faster that I would have believed possible, and got me white as sheet. I almost threw up I was so scared. At that point he slowed down (and so did my pulse rate). But that was not the end of it. Some Scarborough cops were now on his tail, lights flashing. Joey, in what must have been a Johnny Blaze moment, decided he was going to outrun them (he, fortunately, did not tell me that).

And guess what, he did, as we lost them somewhere on that road I don’t remember how far up, maybe about ten miles. Needless to say I wanted no more part of being a co-pilot with Joey Parker, although I later continued to hang around his garage since I still had enough Meme beefs to fill the planet. Oh yah, Joey, Joey beat Johnny Blaze that Saturday night, beat him bad, left him knee deep in the waters off Seal Rock, his car filled with engine-destroying salt water (the chicken runs around Olde Saco were raced on the flats at low tide on the beach but one a car went out of control the damn thing usually wound up in some water). I don’t think Johnny ever turned over a new leaf though and went thereafter to Bill’s Esso. The last I had heard he was serving ten to fifteen for an armed robbery up in Shawshank.

As for Joey, here is the beauty of it, that Sunday morning he went into Jimmy Jake’s Diner III over in Scarborough (Diner I and II were in Olde Saco, I for jukebox teens and II for blue-haired ladies and summer touristas) and smiled, just smiled at the two cops who had chased him on Friday night while they were having their coffee and. So when you think of the be-bop golden age of the American automobile think about those red-faced cops, and think about Joey Parker too.