From The American Left History Blog Archives (2006) - On American Political Discourse

 

Markin comment:

 In the period 2006-2008 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on.

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DO WE GET IT NOW! - THE DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS DO NOT WANT TO END THE WAR IN IRAQ

AMERICA, WHERE ARE YOU NOW? DON’T YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS? DON’T YOU KNOW WE NEED YOU NOW? WE CAN’T FIGHT ALONE AGAINST THE MONSTER.  Lyrics from ‘Monster’, a 1960’s rock song by Steppenwolf.     

FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!

Well the votes are in from various proposals for withdrawing from Iraq put forth by some Democrats. The results speak for themselves. On the parliamentary level anti-war militants are alone. Forget the ‘softball’ non-binding Levin-Reed proposal. Jesus, they all vote for those things as a cheap way to bolster their tarnished images. They can vote for that kind of proposition all day. No, I am talking about the Kerry proposal. That went down 86-13.

In this series the writer has been trying to hammer home the one real question that counts on the parliamentary level. Yes or No on the war budget. We had our answer on that one last week- 98-1 for the war budget.  Enough said.

If we had a workers party representative, which we obviously desperately need now, he or she would use Congress as a tribune to denounce all of this nonsense.

Here is a proper workers party proposal. We would introduce a bill to fully fund the purchase of 138,000 pairs of the best all purpose, all weather, all terrain sneakers money could buy to cut and run today. We may only get one vote now-tomorrow, who knows?  

 

From The American Left History Blog Archives (2006)- On American Political Discourse

Markin comment:

In the period 2006-2008 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on.

************
CONFESSIONS OF AN OLD MILITANT-A CAUTIONARY TALE

THIS CONFESSION IS NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED-BE FOREWARNED.

FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY

I VOTED FOR VICE PRESIDENT HUBERT HORATIO HUMPHREY OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IN 1968. MOREOVER, I ACTIVELY CAMPAIGNED FOR THE DEMOCRATIC TICKET IN THE FALL OF THAT YEAR. AND AS AN ASPIRING YOUNG POLITICAN I WAS PERFECTLY WILLING TO ACCEPT AN ENTRY-LEVEL POSITION IN A VICTORIOUS HUMPHREY ADMINISTRATION. The thought of that rash youthful action as I am writing this piece still brings a blush to my cheeks. Of all the political mistakes I have made in my life this is the one that is still capable of doing that. In today’s confessional age, however, it is good to get it off my conscience. Please, let me tell you the story. If at any point it sounds awfully familiar concerning today’s political choices please feel free to stop.

First, I must plead my youth as a mitigating circumstance. And as this is also an age when victims give voice to their travails you must realize that I was a victim of circumstances throughout all of this experience. Those circumstances most certainly had a name. That name, one Richard Milhous Nixon, at one time President of the United States, common war criminal, and political sociopath now residing in one of Dante’s circles of hell. You knew didn’t you that at least one of the villains had to be a Republican- some things never change. It may be hard for today’s militants to understand how much THAT man dominated our political hatreds in those days. To put it in perspective just remember that Mr. Nixon was the‘godfather’ of the current president, Mr. Bush, common war criminal, political sociopath and a prime candidate for one of Dante’s circles of hell. Enough said.

In the early and mid- 1960’s this writer defined himself as a left-liberal of the Americans for Democratic Action school. He had worked for civil rights for blacks and against war, particularly the Vietnam War then beginning to take center stage in national politics. When it became apparent that Mr. Nixon was going to be a serious candidate for president he made a very calculated political decision. Despite his war follies the writer was fully committed to supporting one Lyndon Baines Johnson, one time President of the United States, common war criminal, political sociopath and now also residing in one of Dante’s circles. Those readers who supported the pro- Iraqi War Democratic presidential candidate, one John Forbes Kerry, in 2004 know the surreal mental gymnastics entailed to justify that position. Why Johnson? Because he was the only candidate that could defeat the main villain of the piece, Mr. Nixon.

At no time did I consider the candidacy of the anti-war candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota viable by the above-mentioned standard. It must be something about Irish poets and wits. In any case, after Mr. Johnson announced that he was not going to run again I easily switched my allegiance to Senator Robert Kennedy of New York. Even today I have a little soft spot for the memory of that man. If ever a bourgeois politician could move me it was him. Remember this, it was Robert Kennedy was nailed on the head what Mr. Nixon represented politically- the dark side of the American spirit. However, in the final analysis, what drove me to the Kennedy campaign was the belief that he was the only candidate who could defeat Mr. Nixon.

After the Kennedy assassination in June 1968 and after a little confusion I moved on to support Mr. Humphrey, one time Vice President of the United States, common war criminal and political sociopath now at the Dante residence. Why? Because he was… (you can fill in the rest on your own by now). You were warned that this story was not for the faint-hearted. However it has a happy ending. Over the years I have voted for various socialist and labor party candidates and propositions and have not regretted one of those votes. Still, old habits die hard. I am still looking for that entry-level government job- in a victorious workers government.

From The American Left History Blog Archives(2006) - On American Political Discourse

 

Markin comment:

In the period 2006-2008 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on.

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EVERYONE WANTS TO DO SOMETHING WITH THE TROOPS IN IRAQ- EXCEPT IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL.

COMMENTARY

BUSH, AL QAEDA AND THE KLAN HAVE THEIR DREAMS- AND THEY ARE NOT PRETTY

In a recent blog, dated September 3, 2006, this writer jokingly mentioned that the only people in the world who still supported the war in Iraq were in the immediate Bush entourage. Apparently I was as not as far from the truth as I thought. The Bush Administration has clearly drawn a line in the sand on Iraq and has adamantly proclaimed that troops will stay in Iraq as long as that administration draws breathe. And Bush means every word of it.  So we know exactly what he wants to do with the troops in Iraq. Leave them as hostages to the sectarian civil war there. Much more interesting are a couple of news reports concerning an American Al Qaeda operative and a Klu Klux Klan demonstration at the Gettysburg National Cemetery. Even hard core American right-wingers and Islamic fundamentalists are getting into the anti-Bush act. 

On the American Al Qaeda operative. Apparently this Californian trained at an Al Qaeda base prior to 9/11 and then skipped to the Middle East shortly after those events with the FBI hot on his trail. Recently he came forward as an English-speaking spokesman (oops, spokesperson) for Al Qaeda’s No.2 man. And here is what his take on the American troops in Iraq is. He has called for the troops to switch sides and support the Al Qaeda cause in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jesus, and all I want to do is withdraw the troops from Iraq. After that, while I do not expect them to turn their swords into plowshares, I sure as hell do not expect them to become cannon fodder for Islamic fundamentalists. Know this- militant leftists have, as a part of their business of changing the world, a fight against religious fundamentalism and that most definitely includes this crowd. It is not always true, and in this case it is definitely not true, that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. We just have to order our priorities- American imperialism is today the main enemy of the peoples of the world. We will deal with the other enemies in due course.

On the Klu Klux Klan demonstration.  I do not, as of this moment, know if there was any opposition by militant leftists to the fact that this organization was allowed to demonstrate anywhere, let alone Gettysburg National Cemetery. Gettysburg is hallowed ground for all those who struggled against slavery and the preservation of the union in the American Civil War- the Second American Revolution. That the Klan be permitted anywhere near there is a provocation in itself.  In any case, I will deal with the issue of free speech for fascists and Klansmen (oops! Klanspersons) in another blog. What I want to mention here is one of their demands. Their spokesperson called for the troops in Iraq to come home and patrol the borders (presumably with Mexico) against the so-called immigration menace. What I mentioned above concerning Al Qaeda pertains to this group as well.

The Bush Plan. The Al Qaeda Plan. The Klan Plan. All their dreams are our nightmares. What about the Markin Plan? That’s a simple idea given today’s political conjecture. The only way out is for the troops in Iraq to figure a way out. Use history, particularly the Russian Revolution, as an example. Given the opposing plans presented here I do believe that Markin’s Plan takes the only rationale course. At least this writer’s proposal ultimately gets the troops out of harm’s way. Which is just a shorthand way to say that this writer will, shortly, be sending another open letter to the troops in Iraq (see blog, dated August 24, 2006 for first open letter)- this time with some suggestions for really organizing a troop withdrawal. Enough said.

From The American Left History Blog Archives(2008) - On American Political Discourse

 

 

 

Markin comment:

In the period 2006-2008 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on.

************

LABOR DAY SCORECARD -2006

 

COMMENTARY

 

TOUGH TIMES FOR THE AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT- AND THAT AINT NO LIE

 

FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!

 

This writer started his blog site in February 2006 (see below for blog site) so this is the first Labor Day scorecard giving his take on the condition of American labor. And it ain’t pretty. That says it all. There was little strike action this year. There was little in the way of unionization to organize labor’s potential strength. American workers continue to have a real decline in their paychecks. The difference between survival and not for most working families is the two job (or more) household. In short, the average family is working more hours to make ends meet. Real inflation in energy and food costs has put many up against the wall. Forget the Federal Reserve Bank’s definition of inflation- one fill up at the pump confounds that noise. One does not have to be a Marxist economist to know that something is desperately wrong when at the beginning of the 21^st century with all the technological advances and productivity increases of the past period working people need to work more just to try to stay even. Even the more far-sighted bourgeois thinkers have trouble with that one. In any case, here are some comments on the labor year.

 

The key, although not the only action necessary, to a turn-around for American labor is the unionization of Wal-Mart and the South. The necessary class struggle politics that would make such drives successful would act as a huge impetus for other areas of the labor movement. This writer further argues that such struggles against such vicious enemies as Wal-Mart can be the catalyst for the organization of a workers party.  Okay, okay let the writer dream a little, won’t you? What has happened this year on this issue is that more organizations have taken up the call for a boycott of Wal-Mart. That is all to the good and must be supported by militant leftists but it is only a very small beginning shot in the campaign (See blog, dated June 10, 2006)    

 

The issue of immigration has surfaced strongly this year. Every militant leftist was supportive of the May Day actions of the vast immigrant communities to not be pushed around. Immigration is a labor issue and key to the struggle against the race to the bottom. While May Day and other events were big moments unless there are links to the greater labor movement this very promising movement could fizzle. A central problem is the role of the Democratic Party and the Catholic Church in the organizing efforts.  I will deal with this question at a latter time but for now know this- these organizations are an obstruction to real progress on the immigration issue. (See blog, dated May 1, 2006)    

 

By far the most important labor action of the year was the transport workers strike of Local 100 in New York City just before Christmas 2005. Although this turned out to be three day work stoppage that eventually has to rank as a defeat for the labor movement there are some lessons militant leftists can learn from the experience.

 

·        It appears that every time the left, and not only the left, gives up on the possibility of the international labor movement being capable of coming close to what Marx and other projected as its historic role in creating a new society something happens to pull that theory up short. In my generation it was the events which led to a workers general strike and semi-insurrection in France in 1968. Now is it the example of the New York transit workers. Although both efforts were defeated, mainly through the treachery and class collaboration of the trade union leadership, no one then or now can deny the potential political power of the working class. We militant leftists are not just blowing smoke when we say that labor must rule. The key is to channel those possibilities into a struggle for power for a new, more just society. 

 

·        Although the transit workers proved to have more than enough militancy to succeed the leadership, frankly, got scared when the capitalists rulers started to play rough.  The issues in dispute were hardly radical issues- pensions, wages, working conditions. Actually they represented a rather defensive effort on the part of the transit workers to stop falling further behind in the capitalist race to the bottom. This fight nevertheless could have been won. Perhaps it is because the labor movement has lost continuity with its historic roots in the huge and successful struggles of the 1930’s. But know this -every serious effort at class struggle by the working class will be met by the same kind of reaction and worst that was meted out by the ruling class in New York. Not only do militant leftists have to know this fact but also that every labor action has to be planned carefully to ensure victory. In short, that means a new labor leadership based on a program of struggle is needed. More on this another time. Start reading about the labor struggles in the 1930’s- in auto, the Teamsters, steel, electrical workers, etc. Those were the days. 

 

·        The transit workers strike brought out the underlying class tensions of society. Sure the yuppies, ruling class, etc. were inconvenienced as were working people, however, working people in general supported the transit workers’ struggle as their struggle. Know your enemies- yes. But, also know your friends. As for enemies note the ugly role played by the International Transit Workers Union bureaucracy in leaving the New York workers in the lurch. Also note well the treacherous role of the rest of the New York labor bureaucracy in not calling out their members to support the strike. That support was the key to success. A general strike was in the cards there. Needless to say I do not even have to mention the role of the politicians, both Democratic and Republican, in outbidding each other in denouncing the strike.

 

·        The transit workers as governmental workers prove you can strike against the government. But you need to defend against the capitalist onslaught by insisting on amnesty for your membership and for the leadership before going back to work. Also know this, if you did not already, that the courts, the cops and the politicians are not your friends. If nothing else the defeat in New York should burn these lessons in the memories of every serious militant. Next time we can win. Plan for it.

 

 

 

If one needed one more example of why the American labor movement is in the condition it is in then an article this summer by John Sweeney, punitive President of the AFL-CIO, and therefore one of the titular heads of the organized labor movement brings that point home in gory detail. The gist of the article is that the governmental agencies, like the National Labor Relations Board, have over the years (and here he means in reality the Bush years) bent over backwards to help the employers in their fight against unionization. Well, John, surprise, surprise. No militant leftist, no forget that, no militant has believed in the impartiality of governmental boards, agencies, courts, etc. since about 1936. Yes, that is right, since Roosevelt. Wake up. Again this brings up the question of the leadership of the labor movement. And I do not mean to turn it over to Andy Stein and his Change to Win Coalition.  We may be, as some theorists imagine, a post-industrial society, but the conditions of labor seem more like the classic age of rapacious capitalist accumulation of the last century and the early part of this century.  We need a labor leadership based on a program of labor independence and struggle for worker rights- and we need it damn soon.

 

 

From The American Left History Blog Archives(2008) - On American Political Discourse - MARRIAGE IS APPARENTLY NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED

Markin comment:

In the period 2006-2008 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on.

************
MARRIAGE IS APPARENTLY NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED

COMMENTARY

NOTES ON THE RECENT NEW YORK AND WASHINGTON STATE SAME-SEX MARRIAGE DECISIONS

FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!

UPDATED: NOVEMBER 24, 2006

As noted in the commentary below the thrust of the fight on the issue of same-sex marriage has returned to the states with a vengeance. Since the original blog the midterm 2006 elections have produces seven more states that have passed resolutions or state constitutional amendments defining marriage in the old fashion way-one man, one woman. Arizona is the only state that bucked the trend. Also since the summer the New Jersey Supreme Court has held that same-sex marriage does not violate the state constitution. However, unlike Massachusetts the justices left it up to the state legislative to run with the issue.  The struggle continues but remember- Government out of the bedrooms

Originally posted: August 2006 

Earlier this year, when the United States Senate was discussing and voting on a proposal to make the prohibition against same-sex marriage a constitutional amendment this writer pointed out that with the defeat of that measure in the United States Senate the battle ground would again shift to the states and particularly to the judiciary. (see blog, dated June 7, 2006). The states have been the battleground for quite some time. Numerous states have overwhelmingly approved various state constitutional amendments, statutes, etc. banning same-sex marriage. This summer the highest courts of New York and Washington states have rendered decisions along that same line. What is striking is the legal reasoning used to justify the majority decisions in these cases. One would think these cases were about prohibitions against indentured servitude rather than marriage. Here’s why.

One would have thought in this day in age that the act of marriage, at its core, represents nothing more than the act of registering the fact two people decided to legally fortify their relationship. Apparently this writer is way off base in that assumption. According to the legal reasoning put forward by the majorities in the aforementioned states procreation is a fundamental state interest. Fair enough. However, to those majorities the point of marriage, the fundamental point, is to ensure that procreation is protected within that act. Odd, odd indeed.  While it would be easy to punch a hole (or rather about 10,000 holes) in that reasoning I will let it go. Let me say this- by the courts’ reasoning whole categories, way beyond the targeted same-sex couples, would be affected if their reasoning is followed through to the end. A rule of thumb in judicial- decision making is to tailor the decision as narrowly as possible while addressing the facts of the case. It takes an active act of judicial malice to take a swipe at most of society in order to get to your sacrificial lambs. Nice going Washington and New York Supremes.        

HONOR THE MEMORY OF JOHN REED-Harvard Class Of 1910

COMMENTARY

HONOR A FOUNDING MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST MOVEMENT –AND A CLASS TRAITOR, TO BOOT

John Reed, Harvard Class of 1910, epitomized the best of the pre-World War I radicals. Unlike the vast majority of his Class and class he cast his fate with the working people and oppressed of America at a time when the dominant left bourgeois movement- the Progressive movement- was busy applying band aids to the increasingly inequitable capitalist system. The radical movement is always in need, sometimes desperately in need, of intellectuals to tell its side of the story. Despite some exceptions, like Reed, the intellectuals then, as now, either stood on the sidelines or at most acted as ‘fellow travelers’ to the movement. Reed on the contrary put all his energies into the movement. As a journalist he sought out all the radical hotspots of his time starting with his coverage of the Mexican Revolution through the various strikes of the 1910’s in America culminating in his coverage of the heroic period of the Russian Revolution. His journalistic account of the Bolshevik seizure of power, Ten Days That Shook the World, stands even today as one of the best eyewitness accounts of that turbulent time in Russia.

John Reed’s political development also offers today’s militant leftists an insight into how the swirl of events drives the best militants leftward. Reed started out in the typically Bohemian milieu of New York City's Greenwich Village and imbibed its avante guarde cultural pretensions. However, as the United States lurched into participation into World War I he grew stronger as an anti-war advocate and placed himself on the line to oppose that war. This was the great dividing point in the radical movement of the time. This separated the dilettantes from serious revolutionaries. Not an unusual political development, but an important one.

Under the influence of the Russian Revolution Reed led the left wing of the American Socialist Party on a program of opposition to the war and defense of the Bolshevik Revolution. When the left wing was forced out of the Socialist Party he formed a communist organization based on the centrally of the native American working class as the vanguard of the American Revolution. Opposed to that were left-wingers, mainly foreign born elements based on the various language federations of the old Socialist Party, who essentially wanted to act as cheerleaders for the Russian Revolution-and no much else. The result was the creation of two communist organizations that caused no end of problems both here and in the Communist International. But the fights to lead the Socialist party leftward and later between the communist organizations are stories for another time, and worth separate space.

Reed’s political trajectory parallels that of some of the more serious elements of the radical generation of ’68, the class traitors of that generation, in this country who were won to radicalism by the civil rights movement and early opposition to the Vietnam War. As always some remained dilettantes, lost energy or capitulated to the power of parliamentary politics. However, the better elements came to understand, sometimes fitfully and haphazardly, the need for a Leninist-type organization if one was to fight the monster of American imperialism to the end. Reed would have applauded such efforts. Reed’s untimely death in 1920 before the Communist movement got off the ground has left some room for speculation about what his ultimate position would have been toward the Soviet Union. And that is where it remains, speculation. What we know for sure is that when the deal went down he was on the side of the angels. Damn, we could use a few more class traitors like him these days. Are there any out there?

Out In The Thriller Night- Johnny Depp’s The Tourist (And That Woman With The Big Lips Too)

DVD Review

The Tourist, starring Johnny Depp, Angela Joie

For starters I am almost always willing to take a chance on anything, any film that the madcap actor (and my muse the late Hunter Thompson’s friend) Johnny Depp puts his name to. With rare exceptions (the big one being his role as that self-same Hunter Thompson in the film adaptation of his book Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas) I have not been disappointed. And while I was not disappointed here the story line, and the antic –laden thriller did not do justice to his, or co-star Angela Joie’s (she of the big lips in the title), talents.

After all how hot and bothered is one to get over the whereabouts of a crackerjack thief, dough thief, big dough, billions and that is big dough even today, from a British gangster, and from the British tax boys looking for their graft, named Alexander Pearce anyway. And also constantly following a beautiful woman with big luscious red lips and a quaky English accent and who is filled to the brim, filled I tell you, with ennui looking to meet her man. And of course that gangster, that nasty gangster full of hubris and quirky habits. The problem though, and this may have to do with the nature of star power and Hollywood’s take on it, is how far into the movie will it take to figure out who that Mister Pearce really is. Guess?

Out In The 1960s Civil Right Struggle Night- Taylor Branch’s Pillar Of Fire-America In The King Years, 1963-65- 50 Years Later Still Mississippi Goddam –And Alabama Too

Book Review

Pillar Of Fire-America In The King Years, 1963-65, Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1998

No question the early 1960s, the political coming of age time of my generation, the generation of ’68, were exciting times, times as the English poet Wordsworth said in the context of the early part of the French Revolution, “to be young was very heaven.” Although a reading of Taylor Branch’s second part homage to the King’s years, Pillar Of Fire also brings back memories some of the ugliness of the period that got my generation off the couches, out of the classrooms, out of lethargy, and into the streets to stake our claim to a say in a world we had not created, and had not been asked about. And the number one issue, in my high school circles, and I am sure in others as well was the canker sore of Mister James Crow segregation down South(and a little later de facto James in our own northern precincts) before the hellfire of the damn war in Vietnam took up all our air.

Of course the central character then, if less so now, now that Malcolm X has captured the minds of the street smart, and the central character in this the second book of the Taylor Branch’s trilogy, is Doctor Martin Luther King and the struggle to end Jim Crow in all its pervasive forms from segregated schools, public accommodations, and culture to the right to vote which he led. 1963, while not the start of the more vocal aspects of the civil rights movement (after all Montgomery, freedom rides, and sit-ins had already occurred), certainly was the point when the situation in the south concerning second (hell, third, or no) class citizenship was the norm, no more so than in the Deep South states of Florida, Georgia, Alabama and hellhole Mississippi which Branch concentrates on. Doctor King, whatever his political shortcomings, was personally brave and courageous in leading those struggles. But Branch also starts in this second book, and rightly so, given the trajectory of the black liberation struggle later in the decade over the thorny question of black nationalism exemplified by the actions of the Black Panthers begins to give some space to Malcolm X and his brand (or brands) of black nationalism as a counter-balance to King’s liberal integrationism, as, really, a counter-posed strategy for liberation.

For those now two generations removed from the events of the 1960s and for those like me who lived through the period and was involved in different aspects of that struggle Taylor Branch has captured the key names and events that have gone, or will go down in history. Obviously names Doctor King and Malcolm, but also names like SNCC, Robert Moses, Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, SCLC, Mohammed Ali, and the feisty Fanny Lou Hamer of blessed memory. Also some villains like the bizarre J. Edgar Hoover, Sheriff Jim Clark and Bull Connor (I still rage and want to throw something over that scene where he unleashed the dogs and water cannon on young black children in Birmingham). And god forsaken places like Selma, Greenwood, Birmingham, Philadelphia (Miss), Hattiesburg, Saint Augustine, and Lowndes County. And events like the myriad Klan cross-burnings, the shootings of local black activists trying to exercise their rights, the Birmingham Sunday murders, the murders of the three civil rights workers in Philadelphia , Selma, the heroic Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the March on Washington and a book packed full of information about the period. This three part project should be the first stop for those seriously interested in this period. And fifty years later after reading this material I still agree with the late torch singer Nina Simone- Mississippi goddam and Alabama too.

In Honor Of The 94^th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Five- A Worker’s Dread

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

They, the murky union leadership, the dockers’ leadership, if that was what you could call it, wanted to call the whole thing off, call all hands back to work just when they, the rank and file, had shut everything on the waterfront down, and shut it down tight. Just because Lloyd George, that bloody Liberal Party Welshman, called their bluff, called their number and they came up short. They didn’t have the guts to take things into their own hands and so they were parlaying what do next. Hell, not a damn ship was moving, not a damn ship was being unloaded, nothing. Tom Jackson could see as he looked out on the Thames that in the year of our lord 1919 that there were more ships, ships from every port of call, than he had ever seen filling up each and every estuary. And with a certain pride he looked out just then because he had been the delegate in his area that had responsible for closing most of the port down, and having those beautiful ships, ships from each port of call as he liked to say to the boys over a pint at the Black Swan after a hard day of unloading those damn cargoes, sitting idle, sitting idle upon a workingman’s decision that they stay idle. And now the damn leadership wanted to give up the game.

Tom Jackson had been a union man, a dockers’ union man, for all of his twenty –seven years, or at least since he knew what a union was, and his father before him (that was how he got the job as a casual that started his career) and the Jackson clan had been working men since, since he reckoned Chartist times when old Ben Jackson led his clan out of Scotland to raise hell about the working man’s right to vote, something like that, Tom wasn’t always clear on the particulars of that history although he knew for certain that it involved the Chartists of blessed memory.

Most of the time he had been content to be a union man, pay his dues, and support any actions that the leadership proposed. And have a pint or two with the boys at his beloved Black Swan and then go home to Anne and the two little ones. But the damn war of unblessed memory had changed things. He had been lucky enough to be exempt since the government desperately needed men to unload the massive loads of materials to be eaten up by the war. They had worked twelve, fourteen, sixteen hour shifts to whittle down the backlog. At the same pay. And no one, no one least of all Tom Jackson, complained while the war was on. They, he, saw the work as their patriotic duty. But now, now that war was over the dock owners, the shipping companies, and their agents wanted to keep all the dough for themselves and keep the steady dockers working at that same damn rate. And hence the strike.

Tom Jackson was also a Labor Party man, although unlike in the union he held not office nor was he active in his local branch. He just voted Labor, like his father before him (and before that Liberal when Gladstone of blessed memory was alive). The party was also ready to call it quits, call all hands back. Tom Jackson was in a quandary. His assistant steward (and pint or two companion in sunnier times), Bill Armstrong, was a headstrong younger man who had been a member of the Social-Democratic Federation before the war and since had been tinkering with the small groups of communists that were running around London of late. Bill had told him that the Labor Party would sell them out, the union leaders would sell them out but that a new group, a group headed by the Bolsheviks over in Russia, the same ones they, the dockers, had previously helped by not loading military equipment the government wanted to send the White Guards that were fighting a civil war against those same Bolsheviks, a grouping called the Communist International would not sell the out.

Tom listened to what Bill had to say but dismissed it out of hand. He was not going to get involved, get Anne and the two kids involved in international intrigue. No, something would happen and things would work out. Something did happen a couple of days later. The strike was officially called off with nothing won. Tom was angry for a time but then, with a shrug of his shoulders, he said he could not abandon his union, his Labor Party or his Black Swan for some new adventure…

Workers Vanguard No. 1018	22 February 2013

Britain 1919: Class Struggle, Racism and Labour Reformism

The following article, reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 221 (Winter 2012-2013), is based on remarks made by an ICL comrade in the discussion following Jacob Zumoff’s presentation at the Historical Materialism conference in London in November 2012. The presentation was previously published as “The Black Freedom Struggle and the Comintern” in WV No. 1006 (3 August 2012).

The intervention of the Comintern into the newly founded Communist Party in the United States that provided a corrective on the black question was part of a broader effort to impart the lessons of the Bolshevik revolution to the fledgling Communist parties internationally. The American party had the considerable advantage over its British counterpart of having been forged from among the most vibrant elements of the left at that time, including many immigrants, syndicalists and others who formed the left wing of the socialist movement. The Comintern sought to regroup into its ranks those sections of the working-class movement that were breaking from the Second International during and after World War I. In Britain, the task was to win those elements who rejected the treacherous Labour leaders to the concept of a Leninist party.

The year 1919 saw a proletarian upheaval in Britain that shook capitalist rule to its foundations. Soldiers returning from the trenches of the interimperialist slaughter faced economic slump, poor housing and a scramble for a dwindling number of jobs. The demobilised soldiers included a number of young black men from Britain’s former colonies, who often bore the brunt of vile racism. Asians, blacks and other minorities were scapegoated, including by Labour leaders, for the rising unemployment level that was caused by the capitalist system.

In 1919 Claude McKay, a young black man who grew up in Jamaica, moved from the U.S. to London where he lived until 1921. By the time he arrived in London McKay was a committed socialist and radical poet. He was appalled by the level of racism he encountered, not least among Labour Party and trade-union leaders whom he had previously admired. George Bernard Shaw, the person McKay most wanted to meet in London, saw fit to ask why he chose to become a poet rather than a boxer.

McKay was in London during a grotesque racist propaganda campaign led by E.D. Morel, a supporter of the Independent Labour Party who campaigned against the enslavement of blacks in the Congo under Belgian King Leopold. Morel was incensed by the presence of black troops in the French army of occupation in the German Ruhr following World War II. The Daily Herald published Morel’s racist tirade under the grotesque headline: “BLACK SCOURGE IN EUROPE” and railed about “Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine.” An expanded version of this filth was distributed as a pamphlet to delegates attending the annual Trades Union Congress in 1920.

McKay wrote a letter to the Daily Herald protesting Morel’s campaign. But the letter was returned to him by the editor of that time, George Lansbury, a prominent Labour “left” figure who assured McKay that he was not personally prejudiced against black people, but refused to publish his letter. Lansbury led the Labour council that was elected in 1920 in Poplar, east London. To this day “Poplarism” remains a model for the reformist left, who foster the illusion that the interests of the working class can be served by administering the capitalist state at local council level. (See “When Militant Ran Liverpool: Down With Executive Offices of the Capitalist State!” Workers Hammer No. 210, Spring 2010 [reprinted in WV No. 957, 23 April 2010].)

In the letter that Lansbury refused to publish McKay said:

“I do not protest because I happen to be a negro...I write because I feel that the ultimate result of your propaganda will be further strife and blood-spilling between the whites and the many members of my race, boycotted economically and socially, who have been dumped down on the English docks since the ending of the European War.”

— Quoted in Staying Power, Peter Fryer (1984)

McKay is referring to a shameful campaign in the ports by leaders of the seafarers unions to exclude immigrant seamen from jobs on British ships. Many seamen drawn from overseas—Indian “lascars” as well as Chinese, Arab and other sailors—had been employed on British merchant ships during the war, when British crews were enlisted in the Royal Navy. With the demobilisation of the armed forces, the competition for jobs intensified. Prominent among the leaders of the anti-immigrant campaign in Glasgow was Manny Shinwell, who went on to become a Labour MP [Member of Parliament]. Effectively, the seafarers unions—including the National Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union, the British Seafarers’ Union (of which Shinwell was Glasgow branch leader) and the National Union of Ships’ Stewards, Cooks, Butchers and Bakers—excluded non-British sailors and in some cases campaigned for their deportation by the state. The chauvinist campaign by Labour leaders led to violent racist attacks on immigrant areas by enraged mobs in Glasgow, Cardiff, London, Liverpool, Tyneside and other port cities.

Shinwell’s anti-immigrant tradition was revived in 2009 when strikes and protests on construction sites erupted under the slogan “British jobs for British workers” (later “local jobs for local workers”). These were fully supported by the Socialist Party, and given backhanded support by the Socialist Workers Party. The Spartacist League/Britain denounced these strikes as poison to the interests of the multiethnic working class, pointing to the necessity for “a fight for jobs for all, through a shorter workweek with no loss in pay, and to undertake a union organising drive,” including low-paid immigrant workers (“Down With Chauvinist Campaign Against Foreign Workers!” Workers Hammer No 208, Autumn 2009 [reprinted from WV No. 939, 3 July 2009]).

The newspaper that did publish McKay’s protest against Lansbury’s Daily Herald was Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Dreadnought. McKay later said that he could not have survived a year in London if not for the fact that he was an active communist. In a letter to Leon Trotsky in 1922, McKay recalled: “I was working at that time in London in a communist group. Our group provided the club of Negro soldiers with revolutionary newspapers and literature, which had nothing in common with the daily papers that are steeped in race prejudice.” McKay was a supporter of the Workers Socialist Federation, led by Pankhurst, which was anti-racist and tried to attract to its ranks black soldiers who ended up in London after the war. Pankhurst was battle-hardened in the fight against chauvinism, having led the left wing of the women’s suffrage movement before WWI. McKay himself wrote that Pankhurst “was always jabbing her hat pin into the hides of smug, slack labor leaders” (McKay, A Long Way From Home, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970).

The strike wave of 1919 that swept the cities of Glasgow, London and Belfast was part of a post WWI wave of proletarian struggles throughout Europe. Workers of Glasgow’s “Red Clydeside” mobilised behind the engineers, who struck for a 40-hour week. With workers battling police in the city streets, the government sent troops to Glasgow to restore order, but it was an open question whether the soldiers would have attacked the strikers, or sympathised with them. In the event the troops were not tested: the strike leaders were arrested and the engineering strikes were settled. However the threat remained of a major class confrontation between the government and the Triple Alliance—the unions representing miners, transport and rail workers. The treachery of the union misleaders was shown when Prime Minister Lloyd George called their bluff by pointing out that a joint strike by these three powerful unions would, in effect, pose the question of taking power. “Are you ready to take the power?” the prime minister cleverly asked these fakers. As miners leader Robert Smillie remarked, from that moment “we were beaten and we knew we were.”

The Communist International urged the formation of a unified Communist party from among the best elements of the British far left. These included revolutionary syndicalists like John Maclean and Willie Gallacher who led heroic proletarian struggles during WWI. These struggles were waged not only in opposition to wartime restrictions and state repression but also in defiance of the right-wing Labour and trade-union leaders who opposed strikes as damaging to the “war effort.” Yet the Communist Party of Great Britain that was founded in 1920 did not include the most militant, internationalist elements of the socialist movement. Thus it lacked a leadership core that was experienced in fighting the politics of the Labour Party and trade-union bureaucracy. The Labour Party cynically positioned itself to contain the revolutionary upsurge, not least by adopting a formal commitment to “socialism” which was enshrined in its constitution in 1918. Lenin wrote his 1920 pamphlet, “Left-Wing” Communism—An Infantile Disorder to help win over the left-wing leaders like Sylvia Pankhurst to an understanding of the need for tactics to win the mass of the working class away from Labour reformism.

As we observed in a seminal article on the origins of British Communism, the best revolutionary elements did not make the transition from syndicalism to Leninism, and the party that was founded in 1920 was ineffective in its strategic task of breaking workers from Labour reformism. The article noted:

“This study of the British SLP [Socialist Labour Party] illuminates in one important, concrete case the historic problem of forging Communist parties in the West out of the subjectively revolutionary elements in the pre-1917 socialist and anarcho-syndicalist movements. It also adds appreciably to our understanding of why the Communist Party in Britain was stillborn. The sterility of the CPGB and absence of a real Leninist tradition in Britain have been key negative conditions for the complete hegemony of Labourite reformism over the workers movement right down to the present.”

— “British Communism Aborted,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86 

“A Talk to Teachers” By James Baldwin (Delivered October 16, 1963, as “The Negro Child – His Self-Image”; originally published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, Saint Martins 1985.) Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within. To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible – and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people – must be prepared to “go for broke.” Or to put it another way, you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won’t happen. Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself, and in some ways am fairly easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave that and go back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I’m the child’s parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society. A society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change. Now, if what I have tried to sketch has any validity, it becomes thoroughly clear, at least to me, that any Negro who is born in this country and undergoes the American educational system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic. On the one hand he is born in the shadow of the stars and stripes and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war. He pledges allegiance to that flag which guarantees “liberty and justice for all.” He is part of a country in which anyone can become president, and so forth. But on the other hand he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization – that his past is nothing more than a record of humiliations gladly endured. He is assumed by the republic that he, his father, his mother, and his ancestors were happy, shiftless, watermelon-eating darkies who loved Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann, that the value he has as a black man is proven by one thing only – his devotion to white people. If you think I am exaggerating, examine the myths which proliferate in this country about Negroes. All this enters the child’s consciousness much sooner than we as adults would like to think it does. As adults, we are easily fooled because we are so anxious to be fooled. But children are very different. Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look too deeply at anything, look at everything, look at each other, and draw their own conclusions. They don’t have the vocabulary to express what they see, and we, their elders, know how to intimidate them very easily and very soon. But a black child, looking at the world around him, though he cannot know quite what to make of it, is aware that there is a reason why his mother works so hard, why his father is always on edge. He is aware that there is some reason why, if he sits down in the front of the bus, his father or mother slaps him and drags him to the back of the bus. He is aware that there is some terrible weight on his parents’ shoulders which menaces him. And it isn’t long – in fact it begins when he is in school – before he discovers the shape of his oppression. Let us say that the child is seven years old and I am his father, and I decide to take him to the zoo, or to Madison Square Garden, or to the U.N. Building, or to any of the tremendous monuments we find all over New York. We get into a bus and we go from where I live on 131st Street and Seventh Avenue downtown through the park and we get in New York City, which is not Harlem. Now, where the boy lives – even if it is a housing project – is in an undesirable neighborhood. If he lives in one of those housing projects of which everyone in New York is so proud, he has at the front door, if not closer, the pimps, the whores, the junkies – in a word, the danger of life in the ghetto. And the child knows this, though he doesn’t know why. I still remember my first sight of New York. It was really another city when I was born – where I was born. We looked down over the Park Avenue streetcar tracks. It was Park Avenue, but I didn’t know what Park Avenue meant downtown. The Park Avenue I grew up on, which is still standing, is dark and dirty. No one would dream of opening a Tiffany’s on that Park Avenue, and when you go downtown you discover that you are literally in the white world. It is rich – or at least it looks rich. It is clean – because they collect garbage downtown. There are doormen. People walk about as though they owned where they are – and indeed they do. And it’s a great shock. It’s very hard to relate yourself to this. You don’t know what it means. You know – you know instinctively – that none of this is for you. You know this before you are told. And who is it for and who is paying for it? And why isn’t it for you? Later on when you become a grocery boy or messenger and you try to enter one of those buildings a man says, “Go to the back door.” Still later, if you happen by some odd chance to have a friend in one of those buildings, the man says, “Where’s your package?” Now this by no means is the core of the matter. What I’m trying to get at is that by the time the Negro child has had, effectively, almost all the doors of opportunity slammed in his face, and there are very few things he can do about it. He can more or less accept it with an absolutely inarticulate and dangerous rage inside – all the more dangerous because it is never expressed. It is precisely those silent people whom white people see every day of their lives – I mean your porter and your maid, who never say anything more than “Yes Sir” and “No, Ma’am.” They will tell you it’s raining if that is what you want to hear, and they will tell you the sun is shining if that is what you want to hear. They really hate you – really hate you because in their eyes (and they’re right) you stand between them and life. I want to come back to that in a moment. It is the most sinister of the facts, I think, which we now face. There is something else the Negro child can do, to. Every street boy – and I was a street boy, so I know – looking at the society which has produced him, looking at the standards of that society which are not honored by anybody, looking at your churches and the government and the politicians, understand that this structure is operated for someone else’s benefit – not for his. And there’s no reason in it for him. If he is really cunning, really ruthless, really strong – and many of us are – he becomes a kind of criminal. He becomes a kind of criminal because that’s the only way he can live. Harlem and every ghetto in this city – every ghetto in this country – is full of people who live outside the law. They wouldn’t dream of calling a policeman. They wouldn’t, for a moment, listen to any of those professions of which we are so proud on the Fourth of July. They have turned away from this country forever and totally. They live by their wits and really long to see the day when the entire structure comes down. The point of all this is that black men were brought here as a source of cheap labor. They were indispensable to the economy. In order to justify the fact that men were treated as though they were animals, the white republic had to brainwash itself into believing that they were, indeed, animals and deserved to be treated like animals. Therefor it is almost impossible for any Negro child to discover anything about his actual history. The reason is that this “animal,” once he suspects his own worth, once he starts believing that he is a man, has begun to attack the entire power structure. This is why America has spent such a long time keeping the Negro in his place. What I am trying to suggest to you is that it was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn’t understand. It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in or4der to make money from black flesh. And now, in 1963, because we have never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble. The Reconstruction, as I read the evidence, was a bargain between the North and South to this effect: “We’ve liberated them from the land – and delivered them to the bosses.” When we left Mississippi to come North we did not come to freedom. We came to the bottom of the labor market, and we are still there. Even the Depression of the 1930’s failed to make a dent in Negroes’ relationship to white workers in the labor unions. Even today, so brainwashed is this republic that people seriously ask in what they suppose to be good faith, “What does the Negro want?” I’ve heard a great many asinine questions in my life, but that is perhaps the most asinine and perhaps the most insulting. But the point here is that people who ask that question, thinking that they ask it in good faith, are really the victims of this conspiracy to make Negroes believe they are less than human. In order for me to live, I decided very early that some mistake had been made somewhere. I was not a “nigger” even though you called me one. But if I was a “nigger” in your eyes, there was something about you – there was something you needed. I had to realize when I was very young that I was none of those things I was told I was. I was not, for example, happy. I never touched a watermelon for all kinds of reasons that had been invented by white people, and I knew enough about life by this time to understand that whatever you invent, whatever you project, is you! So where we are no is that a whole country of people believe I’m a “nigger,” and I don’t , and the battle’s on! Because if I am not what I’ve been told I am, then it means that you’re not what you thought you were either! And that is the crisis. It is not really a “Negro revolution” that is upsetting the country. What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity. If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you’d be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history. And the reason is that if you are compelled to lie about one aspect of anybody’s history, you must lie about it all. If you have to lie about my real role here, if you have to pretend that I hoed all that cotton just because I loved you, then you have done something to yourself. You are mad. Now let’s go back a minute. I talked earlier about those silent people - the porter and the maid – who, as I said, don’t look up at the sky if you ask them if it is raining, but look into your face. My ancestors and I were very well trained. We understood very early that this was not a Christian nation. It didn’t matter what you said or how often you went to church. My father and my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother knew that Christians didn’t act this way. It was a simple as that. And if that was so there was no point in dealing with white people in terms of their own moral professions, for they were not going to honor them. What one did was to turn away, smiling all the time, and tell white people what they wanted to hear. But people always accuse you of reckless talk when you say this. All this means that there are in this country tremendous reservoirs of bitterness which have never been able to find an outlet, but may find an outlet soon. It means that well-meaning white liberals place themselves in great danger when they try to deal with Negroes as though they were missionaries. It means, in brief, that a great price is demanded to liberate all those silent people so that they can breathe for the first time and tell you what they think of you. And a price is demanded to liberate all those white children – some of them near forty - who have never grown up, and who never will grow up, because they have no sense of their identity. What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. That’s all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That’s how the country was settled. Not by Gary Cooper. Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper. Now this is dangerously infantile, and it shows in every level of national life. When I was living in Europe, for example, one of the worst revelations to me was the way Americans walked around Europe buying this and buying that and insulting everybody – not even out of malice, just because they didn’t know any better. Well, that is the way they have always treated me. They weren’t cruel; they just didn’t know you were alive. They didn’t know you had any feelings. What I am trying to suggest here is that in the doing of all this for 100 years or more, it is the American white man who has long since lost his grip on reality. In some peculiar way, having created this myth about Negroes, and the myth about his own history, he created myths about the world so that, for example, he was astounded that some people could prefer Castro, astounded that there are people in the world who don’t go into hiding when they hear the word “Communism,” astounded that Communism is one of the realities of the twentieth century which we will not overcome by pretending that it does not exist. The political level in this country now, on the part of people who should know better, is abysmal. The Bible says somewhere that where there is no vision the people perish. I don’t think anyone can doubt that in this country today we are menaced – intolerably menaced – by a lack of vision. It is inconceivable that a sovereign people should continue, as we do so abjectly, to say, “I can’t do anything about it. It’s the government.” The government is the creation of the people. It is responsible to the people. And the people are responsible for it. No American has the right to allow the present government to say, when Negro children are being bombed and hosed and shot and beaten all over the Deep South, that there is nothing we can do about it. There must have been a day in this country’s life when the bombing of the children in Sunday School would have created a public uproar and endangered the life of a Governor Wallace. It happened here and there was no public uproar. I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. And on the basis of the evidence – the moral and political evidence – one is compelled to say that this is a backward society. Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try to teach them - I would try to make them know – that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I would teach him that if he intends to get to be a man, he must at once decide that his is stronger than this conspiracy and they he must never make his peace with it. And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth. I would teach him that there are currently very few standards in this country which are worth a man’s respect. That it is up to him to change these standards for the sake of the life and the health of the country. I would suggest to him that the popular culture – as represented, for example, on television and in comic books and in movies – is based on fantasies created by very ill people, and he must be aware that these are fantasies that have nothing to do with reality. I would teach him that the press he reads is not as free as it says it is – and that he can do something about that, too. I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger – and that it belongs to him. I would teach him that he doesn’t have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything. I would try to show him that one has not learned anything about Castro when one says, “He is a Communist.” This is a way of his learning something about Castro, something about Cuba, something, in time, about the world. I would suggest to him that his is living, at the moment, in an enormous province. America is not the world and if America is going to become a nation, she must find a way – and this child must help her to find a way to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy.