This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
The Class Struggle- With Preston
Sturges’ Christmas In July In Mind
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Christmas In July, starring Dick
Powell, directed by Preston Sturges
Scene: A boy from the tenements, the New York City tenements from the high
rise backdrop feel of it, the respectable working poor tenements not the rough-edged
Hell’s Kitchen variety filled with pug uglies and the dregs of society if you
please, is daydreaming, no, night dreaming with his girl about what they would
do if they had some real dough. Real dough in the times we are talking about,
maybe the late1930s early 1940s, being about twenty-five thousand dollar. Nothing
but walking around money today but serious dough back then, especially for boys
and girls who came up the hard way living on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
and Spam, or some such variations. And what they dream of coming out of the
Great Depression is not some mansion or Rolls Royce but a little cottage for two
(maybe for more later, after they tie the knot), with a white picket fence out
in, well, out in not New York City tenement land. Maybe a nice Nash Rambler, a few
bucks in the bank after taking care of the extended family and easy street all wrapped
in a bow. Just like today except like I say, today you had better add some
zeros to that easy street number discussed above.
Of course sitting on some
star-crossed tenement rooftop dreaming such dreams does not get you to square
one in the quest for easy street. You have to have an idea, a good idea, and
work your butt off to prove that you are worthy of such easy street luxuries.
And so boy, Dick, and girl, Ellen, just dream the dream and go to their nine to
five prison office jobs and place those aforementioned dreams on hold just like
millions of other in depression times or not. But not so fast. See Dick has an
idea, an idea of himself as a budding Madison Avenue mad man ad man and with just
a break or two, just a little whisper in some hot- shot’s ear might be just the
thing to push him alone. Wouldn’t you know just as Dick is about give up hope he
decides to screw up his courage and walk right in the general manager’s office
with his bag full of ad ideas, good ones too, the ones not so good he left on the
cutting room floor. Ads that will make confirmed tea drinkers cry out in the
night for coffee, that will make housewives who swear by virtues of pure butter
scratch each other’s eyes out getting to the dairy counter for oleomargarine,
and make formerly satisfied Camel smokers turn with nicotine rage until they can
get their hands on a fresh deck ofLucky
Strikes. More than one man, more than one company too, would be willing to pay
a pretty penny for such results if only they were aware that such a budding ad
man existed on the planet.
Dick finally did screw up that courage,
finally did go into the general manager’s office and present his case. And
while the general manager was skeptical about some of Dick’s ad ideas he passed
the material on up the chain of command to the boss man, the owner, who liked many
of his ideas, and thought they had some merit. And as a reward for such good
ideas and the willingness to go to the mat for them Dick moved over from his
thirty- dollar a week desk job along with forty others all arranged in rows of
ten checking invoices to the ad department creating ads at fifty- dollars a
week along with thirty others all arranged in rows of ten. Of course if
somebody had an idea to make a movie of Dick’s’ life (and don’t forget faithful
Ellen) he would have as a result of his pluck been on happy ending easy street
cavorting with the Mayfair swells, working hard on the nightclub circuit and dreaming
with Ellen out in some cozy little suburban cottage. But this is a saga of the
class struggle, not about tinsel town movies and so it goes.
There is no more potent symbol of the genocide, wholesale land
theft and dispossession meted out to the Native American peoples than Wounded
Knee. It was the site of the last battle of the so-called Indian Wars—the 1890
massacre of some 300 men, women and children by the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry.
This was the same Seventh Cavalry once headed by one George Armstrong Custer,
which was routed in the battle of Little Big Horn by the Lakota and their allies
four years earlier. That may well have accounted for just how bloodthirsty the
Army’s slaughter at Wounded Knee was. It was due to that legacy that this was
also the site of the 1973 American Indian Movement (AIM) occupation and
subsequent stand-off with federal agents armed to the teeth.
For the next three years, the Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation
was subjected to a reign of terror by hundreds of FBI and Bureau of Indian
Affairs (BIA) agents, supplemented by trained and armed thugs. Some 69 tribal
members were victims of unsolved murders. Mass arrests were carried out and
militants like Leonard Peltier were framed up and imprisoned (see accompanying
article).
Adding insult to grave injury, the Wounded Knee site is now up for
sale by a private owner for $3.9 million. The Oglala reportedly have a May 1
deadline to come up with the money or the site may be sold to one of the
investment groups that have made offers. To say that the Oglala Sioux are
cash-strapped is a cruel understatement. Having had their land stolen through
broken treaties as well as by legislation sanctioning massive land grabs and
sales to non-Native settlers as part of allotment schemes, those who survive at
Pine Ridge live in conditions of absolute hopeless poverty. From 1980 to 2000,
the counties that make up Pine Ridge comprised the poorest in the country. The
2000 census found them the third poorest, only because things got worse on two
other South Dakota reservations. As of 2007, the unemployment rate was a
staggering 80-90 percent, per capita income was $4,000, and teens committed
suicide at four times the national rate. Infant mortality is three times the
national rate, and life expectancy is the lowest in the United States and
second-lowest in the Western Hemisphere, after Haiti.
The U.S. government stole the lands around Wounded Knee. They
should be given back to the Oglala to do with as they see fit! There is
no way to undo the destruction of the aboriginal tribes by the racist rulers who
founded their republic on the backs of black chattel slaves and whose westward
march was guided by the spirit of General Sheridan’s infamous remark: “There are
no good Indians but dead Indians.” Only the destruction of capitalism through
proletarian revolution and the inauguration of the era of socialist development
can ensure the all-sided, voluntary integration of American Indians into society
on the basis of the fullest equality and meet the special needs created by a
history of injustice and oppression.
Last year, the Departments of Justice and the Interior (which
oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs) announced a $1 billion settlement over
nearly 56 million acres of Indian land held “in trust” by Washington but in fact
exploited by timber, farming, mining and other commercial interests with little
benefit to the tribes. Attorney General Eric Holder proclaimed that the
settlement “fairly and honorably resolves historical grievances over the
accounting and management of tribal trust funds, trust lands and other
non-monetary trust resources that, for far too long, have been a source of
conflict between Indian tribes and the United States” (London Guardian, 4
May 2012). Ha!
The reality is that the successive defeats of the Native Americans
in their struggles to preserve some independence from the capitalist state are
reflected in the changes in the legal status of the tribes. In 1830, the Supreme
Court ruled that the tribes “had always been considered as distinct,
independent, political communities, retaining their original natural rights,”
only to be informed by President Andrew Jackson that the Court could try to
enforce this decision, but he controlled the army and was going to relocate the
Cherokee. He did so under his bluntly named Indian Removal Act of 1830. Some
20,000 Cherokees were marched at gunpoint from Georgia to Oklahoma, with a
quarter of those perishing on this Trail of Tears.
The Dawes Act of 1887 broke up, with few exceptions, what remained
of the native communal holdings through a land-allotment system that gave small
parcels to individual Native Americans and threw the rest onto the open market.
Although citizenship was finally granted to Native Americans in 1924, the
government has maintained an essentially custodial relationship to the
reservations, holding the land “in trust.”
Until the New Deal’s Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934, the
reservations were ruled autocratically by BIA agents. Designed as a reform
measure to introduce limited self-rule, the IRA resulted in the creation of a
layer of Indian bureaucrats on the reservations who rubber-stamp government
policies and sell tribal land and mineral holdings. Later the government
attempted to terminate tribal status and thereby end federal assistance programs
and tax exemptions, the economic margin upon which many survive. Through this,
the capitalist rulers washed their hands of the remnants of the Native American
population.
Denied the old world of the tribe, shattered forever, and the new
world of capitalist society, whose doors were closed, Native Americans have
borne the full brunt of a capitalist system that long ago entered its period of
decay. V.I. Lenin insisted that the revolutionary Marxist party must act as a
tribune of the people, and it is as such that we call for the return of the
Wounded Knee Massacre site to the Oglala Sioux, whose blood was spilled in a
vindictive U.S. war crime. Proletarian revolutionaries seek to sear into the
collective memory of the working class and the oppressed the genocidal
near-destruction of the Native peoples. Under workers rule, new generations will
be instructed in the history of capitalist barbarism, smashed once and for all
through victorious proletarian socialist revolution. As the youth group of the
Spartacist League wrote in the concluding part of the Young Spartacus
three-part series on “Marxism and the American Indian Question” (Nos. 27, 28 and
31; December 1974, January and April 1975):
“Oppressed national and racial minorities throughout the world
will look to the future workers state in this country to measure the commitment
of the American proletariat to provide for the social emancipation and voluntary
assimilation of Indians into society....
“Indians represent a significant part of the historical
development of mankind, and revolutionary socialists understand their cultural
uniqueness and share a mutual interest in preserving aspects of the Indians’
cultural heritage. This knowledge will help correct centuries of cultural
erosion and social stagnation, to overcome the backwardness of reservation life
and at the same time allow Indians, if they choose, to maintain their social
identity.”
Budget Slashers Attack City College of San Francisco
(Young Spartacus pages)
City College of San Francisco (CCSF), one of the few remaining
avenues to higher education for its 85,000 predominantly working-class, poor and
minority students, is threatened with being shut down. Last July, the
Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) told the
college that it would lose accreditation—i.e., face closure—if it did not
sufficiently address the commission’s demands for fiscal and structural changes.
The ACCJC particularly cited the costs of CCSF’s wages and benefits for the
unionized faculty and campus workers. Seizing on the threatened sanction, the
campus administration unilaterally imposed an 8.8 percent wage cut and began
axing faculty and clerical workers’ jobs, paving the way to slashing more
classes and even entire programs. Already, the administration has announced that
it plans to close two of CCSF’s nine campus sites.
The ACCJC’s own report makes clear that the accreditation sanction
has nothing to do with the quality of education at CCSF. In fact, the report
commends “several exemplary models of demonstrated educational quality.” What
they object to is that such programs and the unionized faculty who staff the
departments haven’t been sufficiently slashed. Their purpose is to streamline
programs that educate technicians and other skilled workers as are needed by
business and get rid of the rest. Such cuts could potentially target bilingual
education, food service and hospitality classes that allow working-class youth
to get jobs in SF’s unionized hotel industry, as well as job-training programs
for those just released from America’s prison hellholes.
California’s community college system is the largest in the
country. For years it had provided working-class and poor youth with their best
shot at getting into the elite University of California (UC) system, while
offering other such students their only access to any education beyond the
increasingly underfunded and decrepit high schools. But having wiped out whole
swaths of industry and manufacturing, the American bourgeoisie has for decades
been choking off funding for public education, seeing little value in educating
youth for whom there are no jobs.
The attacks against CCSF are part of a broad nationwide assault on
public schools and teachers unions. And California has led the nation on this
score, particularly since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. A tax revolt by
white property owners, Prop. 13 cut spending on social programs benefiting black
people, minorities and the poor, with schools taking some of the biggest hits.
The 2007-08 capitalist economic meltdown sent the budget-slashing, union-busting
drive into high gear. Funding for the community college system has been slashed
by over $1 billion, a quarter of classes have been cut entirely, and despite the
fiction of “free tuition” the fees for classes have risen by an astronomical
255 percent in nine years.
Over the last several months, CCSF students, as well as faculty
organized in the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have participated in
rallies against the attacks on the college. Protests organized by the Save CCSF
Coalition, in which the reformist Socialist Organizer (S.O.) plays a leading
role, have pleaded with CCSF Chancellor Thelma Scott-Skillman and the Board of
Trustees to “reverse all cuts” and “promote equity.” A banner at a February 21
protest demanded “Trustees: Put Us First! We Are S.F. City College!” Fat chance
of that! The whole purpose of the Board of Trustees is to enforce the dictates
of the capitalist rulers whose interests they represent, and that means bringing
down the budget ax. S.O. couples its entreaties to the good offices of the
Chancellor with appeals to the bourgeoisie to fork out more tax money to fund
education.
The government’s tax code flows from the class and social relations
that define racist American capitalism, a system of production for profit based
on the exploitation of labor and the brutal subjugation of black people. Look at
Proposition A—a property parcel tax intended specifically to provide funds to
stop budget cuts and layoffs at CCSF. Recognizing the importance of the school,
an overwhelming majority of SF voters supported Prop. A in last November’s
elections. But the rulers hold the purse strings. As Chancellor Scott-Skillman
and the Board of Trustees made clear, they have no intention of using these
funds to “save CCSF.” Rather, they have pledged that money raised under Prop. A
will go to building up the college’s financial reserves, while the axing of jobs
and classes continues.
There is no lack of money in this rich country that could be used
to provide free, quality education for all. But for working people to get their
hands on that wealth will require nothing less than socialist revolution to
break the power of the bourgeoisie. It is this revolutionary perspective that
guides the Spartacus Youth Club, which has intervened into student and labor
rallies protesting the closure of CCSF. As a Spartacist speaker declared at a
February 21 protest:
“CCSF isn’t going to be saved by appealing to the chancellor or
the campus administration, which really exists to serve the capitalist rulers on
the campus.... And it isn’t going to be saved by appealing for ‘bridge loans’ to
the Democratic Party city administration, which has been cutting wages, benefits
and jobs for workers all over the city. Alongside the students, there has to be
mobilized the power of the workers, the people who make this city run.... The
people who go to school here are the children of working-class people, and
working people in this city and the whole Bay Area have an innate interest in
fighting to save CCSF. And that fight must be mobilized around the call for
free, quality, integrated education for everybody.”
The SYC demands: No tuition, open admissions and a full living
stipend for all students! Abolish the Board of Trustees and the administration!
Those who work, study and teach at the colleges and universities should run
them—for worker/student/teacher control!
Race and Class Privilege in Education
Contrary to the myth that college and university campuses are ivory
towers that exist apart from the broader society, the attack on CCSF shows in
the realm of higher education the race and class privilege at the core of
American capitalism. The whole history of the community college system provides
a concrete demonstration that the bourgeoisie seeks to spend on educating poor
and working-class youth only what they can realize back in profit through the
exploitation of their labor. From the beginning, the conception of such colleges
was to provide skilled workers and technicians for industry. They massively grew
in the aftermath of World War II, particularly to provide workers for the
growing defense industries that had moved to California. Indeed, when these
industries faced a labor shortage during the war, California shipyard owners
recruited untrained and often semiliterate Southern youth, many of them black,
who learned how to read and write and often became skilled apprentices in little
more than three months.
Following the war, the GI Bill provided free tuition for those who
had served as cannon fodder for U.S. imperialism. Working-class and poor
families thought that their sons and daughters would finally have access to
higher education and a better future. But with enrollment skyrocketing,
including many knocking on the door for entry into the prestigious University of
California system, a committee headed by UC Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr came
up with the Master Plan for Education in 1960. Qualifications for getting into
UC were ramped up to limit enrollment to the top 12 percent of high school
graduates. Meanwhile, the California state colleges, which previously had
largely been teacher-training institutions, became officially recognized as
liberal arts colleges. Qualifications for entry were tightened to apply to only
33 percent of high school graduates as opposed to the previous 50 to 70 percent.
Community and junior colleges were to take and train the rest.
Affirmative action—a limited gain of the civil rights
movement—allowed some access to the UC system for blacks and other minority
youth. But these programs have been destroyed. California was in the vanguard of
the campaign to roll back affirmative action. Moreover, poor, black and
working-class youth were increasingly priced out of the UC market as tuition
skyrocketed. The bourgeoisie increasingly considers the masses of black people
in the inner cities as a “surplus population,” no longer needed as a reserve
army of labor and thus not “worth” providing with even the basic means of
survival, much less education.
As we wrote in early 2010, at a time of massive student and campus
worker protests against tuition hikes, education cuts and job-slashing
attacks:
“We think everyone should have access to the same quality
education available to the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie. We call to
nationalize the private universities and for a state-paid living stipend so
working people and the poor can attend. We demand the expansion of remedial
programs for students relegated to inner-city public schools, an end to the
racist ‘tracking’ system in the high schools and their genuine integration,
including through the aggressive implementation of busing. Whether this is
possible or not is in reality determined by the outcome of class and social
struggle. Under capitalism, gains wrested from the ruling class through social
struggle are limited and reversible. As communists, our goal is not what is
possible within the framework of capitalist society, but the revolutionary
overthrow of capitalist class rule and the establishment of a workers state as a
transition to the construction of a classless, egalitarian society where
scarcity has been eliminated and education is the right of all.”
—“ Protests Against Education Cuts and Fee Hikes Sweep California,”
WV No. 950, 15 January 2010
The Dead End of Pressure Politics
Reformist “socialists” perennially peddle the lie that capitalism
can be reformed to serve the interests of the working class and oppressed. To
this end, Socialist Organizer even offers budgetary advice to the bourgeoisie.
In a leaflet titled “Don’t Let the 1% Dismantle CCSF,” which was distributed at
a March 14 protest at SF City Hall, S.O. opines:
“They tell us that there is no money, so we have to cut back or
they will close our school. They are lying. There are many obvious solutions to
CCSF’s and California’s financial woes: taxing the rich, taxing oil extraction,
cutting prison and war funding, and/or amending Prop 13. Cuts are not
inevitable. The school and the state is [sic] facing a priorities
crisis—not a budget crisis” (emphasis in original).
The only “priority” for the bourgeoisie is the maintenance of their
class rule and the protection and expansion of their global imperialist
interests. That will not change short of socialist revolution. S.O. stops short
of even the utopian call that reformists often raise for the capitalist rulers
to end imperialist war. They simply and explicitly accept the capitalist
machinery of repression, only urging that less money be spent on maintaining the
prisons and subjugating peoples around the world.
At the same time, S.O. can talk out of the left side of its mouth,
making a nod in its leaflet to mobilizing the power of organized labor and even
writing that this “requires breaking labor’s subordination to the Democratic
Party.” They acknowledge that “winning free, quality public education for
all…requires eliminating capitalism and replacing it with a socialist society.”
But this is window-dressing for their work on the ground as leaders of the Save
CCSF Coalition.
From the podium at the March 14 rally, the speech by S.O.’s Eric
Blanc had not a scintilla of “socialism.” He complained, “Unfortunately, the
politicians have remained silent up until this moment,” adding that “when our
school is under attack, the responsibility of the people who are elected from
this city is to save our school, not dismantle it.” Indeed, a core demand of the
Coalition is that “San Francisco’s elected representatives must step in” as
allies providing funds and political support to the fight to save CCSF. S.O.
& Co. appeal to Mayor Ed Lee and the Democratic-controlled city
administration—the same capitalist politicians cutting the wages, benefits and
pensions of city workers, including members of SEIU Local 1021, which also
represents CCSF clerical employees.
Thus, like the trade-union bureaucracy, which has long subordinated
labor to the Democratic Party, S.O. serves to channel the protests into the
bourgeois electoral shell game. The idea that the Democrats—the other party of
American capitalist rule—are the allies of the working class and poor has long
served as a key prop for maintaining the system of racist U.S. imperialism.
As the youth auxiliary to the Marxist Spartacist League, the
purpose of the Spartacus Youth Clubs is to win a new generation of students and
youth to the fight to build a revolutionary workers party. Only under the
leadership of such a party can the working class realize its social power and
historic interests as the gravediggers of this system of wage slavery, racial
oppression, poverty and war. The working class must seize state power and
reorganize society on an egalitarian socialist basis, providing for the needs of
the many rather than the profits of a tiny class of exploiters. The essential
precondition for human emancipation from starvation, exploitation, ignorance and
inequality is a planned, socialized economy on a global scale. Only in this way
can the accumulated knowledge and culture of civilization be truly appropriated
by those who are today deprived of the right to quality education.
Proletarian Revolution: Answer to Capitalist Decay
(Quote of the Week)
The austerity and massive unemployment racking the southern tier
of the European Union are hallmarks of the ongoing world economic crisis. In
contrast to Eduard Bernstein, who projected that socialism would peacefully
evolve from the bourgeois order, and other revisionists who predicted a final
capitalist collapse, revolutionary Marxists understand that not even the most
severe crisis is sufficient in itself to sweep this system away. Rather, as Leon
Trotsky wrote, only proletarian revolution can lift humanity from capitalist
decay.
The Bernsteinians outlined two perspectives: one, unreal, allegedly
orthodox “Marxist,” according to which in the long run, under the influence of
the internal contradictions of capitalism, its mechanical collapse was supposed
to take place; and the second, “realistic,” according to which a gradual
evolution from capitalism to socialism was to be accomplished. Antithetical as
these two schemas may be at first glance, they are nevertheless united by a
common trait: the absence of the revolutionary factor. While they disavowed the
caricature of the automatic collapse of capitalism attributed to them, the
Marxists demonstrated that, under the influence of the sharpening class
struggle, the proletariat would carry through the revolution long before the
objective contradictions of capitalism could lead to its automatic
collapse....
The most important component of the theory of collapse was the
theory of pauperization. The Marxists contended, with some prudence, that the
sharpening of social contradictions need not signify unconditionally an absolute
drop in the standard of living of the masses. But in reality, it is precisely
this latter process which is unfolding. Wherein could the collapse of capitalism
express itself more acutely than in chronic unemployment and the destruction of
social insurance, that is, the refusal of the social order to feed its own
slaves?
The opportunistic brakes in the working class have proved to be
powerful enough to grant the elemental forces of outlived capitalism additional
decades of life. As a result, it is not the idyll of the peaceful transformation
of capitalism into socialism which has taken place, but a state of affairs
infinitely closer to social decay....
Reformism will be unable to shift the historical responsibility
from itself. By paralyzing and curbing the revolutionary energy of the
proletariat, the international Social Democracy invests the process of the
capitalist collapse with the blindest, most unbridled, catastrophic, and bloody
forms.
Of course, one cannot speak of a realization of the revisionist
caricature of Marxism except conditionally, in applying it to some given
historical period. The way out of decaying capitalism, however, will be found,
even if after a great delay, not upon the road of the automatic collapse but
upon the revolutionary road.
—Leon Trotsky, “The Only Road” (14 September 1932), reprinted in
The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (1971)
Margaret Thatcher Finally Dead-Iron Lady, Rust in Hell!
The following presentation was given by comrade Olly Laing of
the Spartacist League/Britain at a public class in London on April 17. It has
been adapted for publication.
As everyone here will be only too well aware, it was Margaret
Thatcher’s funeral today: a publicly funded, pomp-filled ceremonious insult to
working people in this country and beyond. Anyone close to central London was
subjected to a salute to Thatcher by artillery used in the Falklands in 1982, in
her dirty little war against Argentina’s Galtieri dictatorship over windswept
rocks in the South Atlantic. In that conflict, Thatcher earned the title
“Butcher of the Belgrano” for a war crime: She ordered the sinking of the
Argentine battleship General Belgranooutside Britain’s own
declared war zone, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of young Argentine
conscripts.
The death of nobody but Thatcher could be celebrated by such a huge
swath of the population in this country. Just look at the “death parties,” as
the bourgeois press termed them with horror, in Glasgow, Bristol, Brixton and
Trafalgar Square. Think of the toasts raised in the pubs of former mining and
industrial areas across northern England, Wales and Scotland and in the Catholic
areas of Northern Ireland. Surely the outburst of jokes makes some new record,
from “Thatcher’s only been in hell half an hour and she’s already closed down
three furnaces” to the Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle’s “I was all for a
lavishly funded public cremation for Thatcher. Right up until she died.”
Government officials sniffed that the celebrations are “puerile” and grumbled
that some of the participants are too young to remember Thatcher. So what? They
know she’s a big part of the reason there’s no education, no jobs, no future for
them. Capturing Thatcher’s disdain for everything outside of that citadel of
finance capital, the City of London, her biographer, Charles Moore, told Radio 5
that Thatcher was “reviled in parts of the country that are less important.”
Reformists point to British society today as proof that Thatcherism
didn’t work: the devastation of the manufacturing base, insufficient and
unaffordable housing, generations of unemployed and financial deregulation for
the City. Well, Thatcherism did work for the capitalist class. This is why
Thatcher is so celebrated, not only by the bourgeoisie’s Conservative (Tory)
Party but also by Labour Party leaders: Opposition leader Ed Miliband professed
to “greatly respect her political achievements” while Tony Blair offered this
“towering political figure” his sincerest form of flattery, noting that his own
government retained “some of the changes she made in Britain.”
Distancing himself from New Labour’s fawning, maverick Member of
Parliament George Galloway objected to “spending £10 million on the canonisation
of this wicked woman,” complaining: “The comparison of Margaret Thatcher with
Mr. Churchill is utterly absurd. We’d be conducting this conversation in German
if it was not for Mr. Churchill.” Galloway’s admiration for Churchill, a
colonialist pig who engineered the starvation of millions of Bengalis during
World War II, is based on the myth that WWII was a war for “democracy” against
fascism. In fact, Churchill was defending the interests of British imperialism
against its rivals, particularly Germany. Fundamentally it was the Soviet Red
Army that smashed Hitler’s military.
The capitalist media talk about how, before Thatcher came into
office, Britain was “the sick man of Europe,” crippled by strike waves and
outdated industry. In fact, British industry had been in decline relative to its
imperialist competitors such as the U.S. and Germany since the late 19th
century. This was exacerbated by the loss of Britain’s empire and
near-bankruptcy following World War II. The bourgeoisie needed to increase their
competitiveness on the world market, that is, to ratchet up the rate of
exploitation of the working class. In the 1960s and ’70s, the Labour governments
of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan tried to do this by cutting deals with the
union tops over beer and sandwiches, through wage controls, strike ballots and a
ban on secondary picketing, and when that failed by mobilising the police and
army against striking workers.
During this period, miners, railwaymen, dockers and others waged
strikes that shook the country, led by a powerful and militant shop stewards
movement. However, while trade-union militancy was able to frustrate the
capitalist system, it could not resolve the underlying conflict. There were two
alternatives in the long term: either the bourgeoisie would be dealt with by
workers revolution or the workers would be dealt with by the bourgeoisie. As it
happened, the class struggle was derailed into electing a Labour government.
When Callaghan’s Labour government proved unable to deliver for them, the
bourgeoisie turned to Thatcher.
Anti-Union, Anti-Soviet Crusader for the Bourgeoisie
By 1990, after eleven bitter years of confrontation, Thatcher would
be ousted by her own party as protests against the poll tax swept the country.
In Scotland, where the tax was first tested out, Thatcher was so unpopular that
the Tories’ fortunes have never recovered. So it’s no surprise that in the 1979
election, the Economist noted that Callaghan stood on a “platform of
middle-ground conservatism” but Thatcher was dangerously radical and
confrontationist. The Economist came out for Thatcher anyway, for
offering the best hope to revive the economy. The bourgeoisie gambled that the
unions did not have a leadership to match Thatcher in hard class war, and that
gamble paid off.
The coal miners strike of 1984-85 was the defining event of
Thatcher’s rule. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) represented the most
powerful and militant section of the working class. They had brought down Edward
Heath’s Conservative government in 1974, and Thatcher was out for revenge. She
decided to destroy the NUM in order to bring the trade-union movement to heel,
and she destroyed the mining industry to smash the NUM.
Thatcher’s victory over the miners was not inevitable. The miners
fought heroically against fierce state repression for 12 months. Their strike
was supported by broad sections of the working class—there were plenty of
examples of dockers and railway workers refusing to touch scab coal. But Labour
Party leader Neil Kinnock obscenely echoed Thatcher, denouncing miners for
“violence” on the picket lines against the strikebreaking cops. The leaders of
some unions openly scabherded, while the “left” union leaders mouthed fine words
but curbed the workers’ militancy. In the final analysis, it was not the
capitalist state that defeated the miners but the fifth column in the workers
movement, including the left-talking leaders of the dockers union, who sent
their striking members back to work twice during the miners strike.
We called on all unions to refuse to handle scab coal and for a
fighting triple alliance of miners, dockers and railway workers to strike
together. This would have amounted to a general strike, posing the question: who
was going to start things up again? Which class would rule? It was this
perspective the reformist Labour politicians and trade-union bureaucrats hated
and feared above all. As our paper Workers Hammer (No. 67, March 1985)
put it after the defeat of the strike:
“The NUM leadership under Arthur Scargill took this strike about
as far as it could go within a perspective of militant trade union reformism,
and still it lost. Why? Because militancy alone is not enough. From day one it
was clear that the NUM was up against the full power of the capitalist state.
What was needed was a party of revolutionary activists rooted in the trade
unions which fought tooth and nail to mobilise other unions in strike action
alongside the NUM. But all Arthur Scargill had was the Labour Party, and it
would rather see the NUM dead than organise to take on the bosses’ state in
struggle.”
In 1983, on the eve of the miners strike, Scargill was witchhunted
by the misleaders of the Trades Union Congress, aided by Gerry Healy’s Workers
Revolutionary Party, for telling the truth that imperialist-funded “free trade
union” Solidarność in Poland was anti-socialist. The failure of any delegate to
defend him signalled to Thatcher that Scargill was isolated and she could launch
her attack. For Thatcher, the miners and other militant workers represented “the
enemy within” while the Soviet Union and East European deformed workers states
were the ultimate “enemy without.” Polish Solidarność had a programme for
capitalist counterrevolution. This is why, apart from the Union of Democratic
Mineworkers who scabbed on the miners strike, it was the only “trade union”
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan ever liked.
Those trade-union bureaucrats who were the most anti-Soviet were
also the most hostile to the miners strike. And the anti-Communist “socialists”
like the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), whose devotion to capitalist “democracy”
led them to support Solidarność, were far to the right of the majority of
striking miners. The SWP had members in the steel plants who crossed miners’
picket lines. When we exposed this at a public meeting, their founder-leader
Tony Cliff bragged about how many and where! Workers Power and (retrospectively)
the Socialist Party supported the scab ballot Thatcher and Kinnock were trying
to force on the NUM, with workers already on strike supposed to hold a strike
vote. The miners had voted with their feet; their weapon was not the
bourgeoisie’s strike laws but the picket line!
As for Lech Walesa, the leader of Solidarność, during the strike he
took a stand on behalf of his imperialist patrons, praising Thatcher as a “wise
and brave woman” in the Sunday Mirror under the headline “Why Scargill Is
Wrong—by Lech.” Walesa came to Thatcher’s funeral to pay homage with other Cold
Warriors like Henry Kissinger. (Scargill, on the other hand, lay low, reportedly
responding laconically to a friend’s text of the news “Thatcher dead”: “Scargill
alive.”)
Baroness Bigot
During the miners strike, you saw how various minorities got behind
the miners. They saw a powerful working-class struggle taking on their common
oppressor: the Thatcher government and her brutal cops. Blacks, Asians, gays,
Irish Republicans and Catholics championed the miners and gave them material
assistance. In turn, the miners came to the defence of oppressed minorities,
championing their cause even after the strike: participating in gay rights
marches, for example. The miners were predominantly white and from rural areas,
but the strike radicalised them. Many miners would say that before the strike
they never knew what it was like to be black or Asian, or to be Catholic in
Northern Ireland. After they had been on the receiving end of the cops’
violence, they could relate to that oppression.
The miners strike also impacted broader layers of the working
class. In 1984, when the IRA set off a bomb at the Tory conference, a common
joke was that the culprits should be shot because they missed Thatcher. A worker
at a car plant in Birmingham quipped that the police had better get started
rounding up suspects because there were 50 million of them. Ten years earlier,
Irish workers had been physically driven out of this same plant after the
criminal bombing of two city centre pubs was attributed to the IRA. During the
strike, in the Catholic areas of Northern Ireland banners went up: “Victory to
the Miners!” Large collections of food and money were taken up in Dublin. Irish
trade unionists said they were repaying the miners for the support British
workers gave them during the Dublin Lockout of 1913.
Thatcher personified the bourgeois onslaught against the working
class and the oppressed overall. In 1981, Thatcher saw Bobby Sands and nine
other Irish Republican hunger strikers die grisly deaths rather than discuss
their demand to be treated as political prisoners. As support grew around the
world for the men’s heroic struggle, Thatcher intoned: “Crime is crime is crime.
It is not political.” Under Thatcher, British armed forces colluded with
Loyalist death squads in the murder of Northern Irish Catholics, including Pat
Finucane, a solicitor who defended Republican prisoners. As Labour’s Peter
Mandelson recalls, when he became Northern Ireland Secretary in 1999 she advised
him: “You can’t trust the Irish, they are all liars.”
Under Thatcher, the black and Asian youth whose parents had come to
Britain in times of labour shortages were treated as a surplus population, left
to rot in areas deprived of resources. They were at the mercy of racist cops
that she spurred on. The Brixton police riots of 1981 and 1985 are hallmarks of
the Thatcher years, when blacks who tried to protest police brutality were
attacked by police and denounced by Thatcher as “criminal, criminal.”
Among the more nauseating claims about Thatcher is that by
triumphing in the male-dominated world of bourgeois politics she struck a blow
for women’s equality. Thatcher was a dedicated enemy of women’s
liberation. She attacked single mothers and unashamedly campaigned to restore
Victorian values. She openly maligned gays and managed to enact Section 28, the
first anti-gay legislation in over 100 years, which prevented the “promotion” of
homosexuality by school and local authorities. Moreover, the triumph of
movements she supported internationally—such as the reactionary mujahedin
in Afghanistan and capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East
Europe—came at the cost of women in particular.
Thatcher spearheaded the British capitalists’ reactionary
campaigns. But some credit for the dismal situation of the trade unions in
Britain today must be given to the “old Labour” misleaders who isolated
struggles, disarmed militant workers and supported the drive for capitalist
counterrevolution in the East. When asked what her greatest achievement was,
Thatcher reportedly answered “Tony Blair and New Labour.” And under Tony Blair
the Labour Party earned its claim to the Iron Lady’s legacy, trampling on the
working class and gutting social services. Working people need a party that will
fight for our own class interests, a workers party committed to sweeping away
the bankrupt capitalist system. But we’ll take what comfort this deeply unjust
world has to offer. Eighty-seven years old, her last days spent in a suite at
the Ritz: it’s not exactly Mussolini’s end. Nevertheless, we are glad to see the
last of this exceptionally vile representative of the capitalist class, and
finally be able to “tramp the dirt down.”
Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- The Drifter Of No Known Trade
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
As the drifter of no known trade (that is the moniker that he gave himself although if you look for a birth certificate, driver’s license or, more importantly, through the police files you will no such name. You will however find William James Bradley, Willie Brads, William Lee, Billie Wills and at least one half dozen other aliases depending on where you look and the town but “drifter” and keep in mind the add on “of no known trade” will do here.) sat down on the windy day Boston Common park bench he eyed a beat cop eyeing him. A copper ready, willing, and able to add him to his resume, to his weekly quota. The drifter had that look about him, the look, hell too these days maybe the smell of con. Funny the park was filled with people, mothers or nursemaids with little children, a couple of young lovebirds, a wino singing to himself , a couple of girls, with the look of strictly trade about them, whom he sensed were walking the streets looking for tricks and who were just then gathering themselves for the next push.
All that going on and that copper only had eyes for him. He didn’t know the cop from Adam and since he was new in town the cop didn’t know him either. But it was always the same story, the same story since childhood, but more recently since he had been on the nod it seemed every cop in every city had his number. Maybe they were right to take that stare what with him in a “seen better days” trench coat, soiled and spattered pants a size or two too big these days, worn-out shoes (worn from many miles of hobo wandering and hitchhike standing on desolate two in the morning no traffic side roads, needing a shave and a haircut and topped off with a soft fedora hat, fairly new and of a Kelly green color ,that did not in any way, shape or form, go with the rest of the outfit. But such are the ways of the nod, and maybe such are the cop antenna that they sense the nod, or at least in a park sense that some connection is about to be made and they should keep on their toes. And as the cop started heading his way slowly, feeling his way, the drifter started working his way back in his mind about how it all had gone awry. When he thought such thoughts and they had not been often that indicated that he was in need of some fix, some connection, although he was only sitting on this bench just then to rest, to rest the rest of the weary. And think.
He swore as a kid back in those North Adamsville projects (the town located a short way from Boston and the Common he was sitting in just then) to his corner boy gang that he would never do a lick of work in his life, nine to five work, back-breaking work like many fathers, including his, did and had the damn tumbledown project life to show for their efforts. No that scene was not for him.He figured, figured almost right back then, back in the mid-1950s that he could take his good looks (all the girls were crazy for him then and he would give his “leavings,” his rejects, to his corner boys after he was done with them), his good singing voice, and his, well, style and make it as a rock and roll star with plenty of dough, girls and everything. And he almost made it except a funny thing happened his voice changed, changed to a gruff if manly voice that might have later made it as some sissy boy folk singer but not as a rock star. So he had to hustle, hustle like crazy to keep up with expenses and the like.
That is where he started presenting himself under the moniker of the “drifter with no known trade.” One day a guy came up to him, a guy who was interested (not a cop) to find out how a guy with no known trade had such a “boss” car, some nice duds, a couple of foxy chicks and plenty of dough. He replied that he was doing a little of this and a little of that. End of story. Well not quite the end. See he was robbing everything that was not tied down, first around North Adamsville then in Boston and latter in Philly. And he was good at it, made some dough and planned big heists, some that came off, a couple you might have read about that were never solved, until she came along.
No, not a woman she, sister, cocaine, snow, girl, although a woman was part of it. A young girl from Philly, a society girl that he was trying to ply her for her society connections as well as trying to ply her, Ellen, took him up as partner in snorting every line put in front of her. She said she was bored with tea (grass, herb, marijuana whatever you call it in your neighborhood) and wanted to branch out. He liked it after trying it, liked that she liked it, liked that they got all sexy (for a while before the hunt to keep connected, always connected, took the edge off) and made endless bed time. Then the other shoe dropped. Her habit, and then his, got him to take more risks, get “rum” brave and plan a big heist, heist that went awry and which cost him to two to five (she, society girl she, got off with five years’ probation, but he wasn’t squawking).
When he got out, the world had changed a little, the dough wasn’t around, he had not been around, the cops started looking his way more closely everywhere he went. So he moved again. This time to New Orleans, New Orleans and graduation day. Cocaine, coke, was not doing it for him anymore, he needed more of a kick and then some whore he ran into on the street turned him on to boy, H, heroin. And the nod. A couple more years in stir, give or take, for this and that, mostly drug dealing now and then to keep even with his habit. And now a park bench, a cop heading his way and maybe thirty days “vag.” Hell, maybe this time he would go cold turkey and get well, real well, maybe even get a job, get a trade. Nah, he wasn’t built for that stuff …
Sunday, May 12, 2013
***A Word -Pinky Foley And The Early Boston Corner Boys
From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin
Paul Kiley walked the refresher streets of North Adamsville, his 1960s working- class neighborhood growing up streets, on a whim, well, maybe not a whim so much as a chance to reflect on the vagaries of corner boy existence after reading a story in his local newspaper, The Daily News, about the unheralded and un-mourned death of the famous Boston corner boy leader, Pinky Foley, in prison. Pinky Foley had been for Markin’s corner boy generation in dinky North Adamsville something of a hero, a model to be emulated, from the tough coming out of the Great Depression corner boy world existence the generation before his against the cops, the church, and society at large and anybody else who wanted to cramp his style. Pinky’s organization, based on hanging around some Dorchester Avenue store fronts, a variety store here, a pizza parlor there, had run every kind of racket from book, drugs, extortion, and women, to strong arm, and, in the end, hired guns all the while giving the finger to the world, the non-Pinky Foley world. They had finally caught with him in some flea-bitten entrapment operation involving moving a whole ship load of cocaine from down Mexico way to Boston and he and his boys had been in a shoot-out where a cop or two got killed. They threw the book at Pinky (and a couple of other of his corner boy survivors) and while he would later be occasionally mentioned in some newspaper article which wanted to scare children away from a life of corner boy crime that was about all Paul had heard about Pinky for years until he read of his death
When Paul heard that news he reflected that a quarter turn the other way might very well have led him to his own Pinky Foley fate, it certainly was a close thing, and hence the need for a reflective walk down the old neighborhood streets. First stop as always was the corner of Sagamore and Young Streets where he was to first become enthralled to the corner boy life by the denizens in front of Harry’s Variety Store, now long gone, enthralled by leader Red Riley’s corner boy lifestyle. Of course then, as Paul chuckled to himself as he walked across the street to the ball field bleachers that had been there sincehe was a kid to have a good think, he had been only something of a mascot, being only about twelve- years old, to the older, harder boys like his two older brothers, Prescott and Kenny, who were Red’s major accomplices, his lieutenants, in his midnight creeps around the neighborhood houses, his stolen car ring, his extortion ring, and later the graduation to the armed robberies that eventually did all three in.
Funny at the time, that early time, Red was nothing but a hero to Paul, bigger than life, even when, or especially when, one night he witnessed Red chain whip a corner boy from another corner just because he was from another corner and left him in a bloody pile for the ambulance and just walked away. Yes, Red was tough, but Paul remembered him more kindly as the guy who would give him his left-over free games on the Madame LaRue pinball machine that Harry had in the back of his store. Yes too, Red’s fate was none too noteworthy since he was shot down one night in a police shoot-out after he had robbed a White Hen convenience store down south trying to get dough to keep himself and some wayward honey from the cold.
That Harry’s recollection too got him to thinking about his two older brothers and how they tried to “wise him up” about the world and thought like their leader Red, take what you could when you could, and don’t look back. They had been four and five years older than Paul and so, for a while, they held sway over him, a big sway, as he mulled over his options in the world. See the way Prescott and Kenny looked at it they had come up dirt poor, had somehow gotten the short end of the stick in the getting of life’s goods and unlike their father who did not bust out against his fate they were not going to wind up like him, a broken man with nothing to show for his life except nothing. Yes, the world owed the Kiley boys a living, an easy street living and they lived for that expectation. And the older boys were broken by it.
Paul remembered the day Kenny went down. This was after Prescott and Kenny had broken off with Red, or maybe Red had decided to head south and try his luck elsewhere or something and they decided not to go. Such details were always a little murky in the telling. In any case they started free-lancing on their own. A midnight heist here, a dope deal there, maybe the old stand-by extortion someplace, the small beer of the world. Then one day they ran into some guy who needed some heavy muscle for a big heist over in Brookline, a heist of an estate with paintings, jewelry, silverware, the works. And the plan seemed sound when Paul heard the details later, on paper it seemed solid anyway. In the execution less so since either Kenny or another guy had forgotten some detail and set off the alarm system. A couple of minutes later the place was swarming with cops as they tried to make their getaway. The inevitable shoot-out occurred and Kenny was laid low in the cross fire. Before he died he told Prescott to tell Paul “not to forget that the world was a tough place and that he had better take what he could when he could.”
And Kenny probably got the better of the deal, an early death and some martyr’s halo in some secret corner boy world. That busted heist though started Prescott on his almost endless incarcerations, first a dime (two off for good behavior) for the Brookline caper, and then a series of other shorter sentences for low-rent armed robberies, and assorted other acts of mayhem. Until Prescott turned into an old man, into at the end an old con, an old con who was afraid of the shadows of the real world when he got out the last time, the time that he finally figured out that he couldn’t do any more time having been a virtual ward of the state since he was about twenty-two. It was then that he took a lonely room over in some run-down rooming house in the South End of Boston for drifters, grifters and ne’er-do-wells trying to figure the next dollar and reduced his world even further be sticking there as a recluse of sorts, until the end. The end came one morning when they found him on his bed with a needle in his arm and more junk in him that any normal human could take. Yes, in the end the fix was in, but a very different fix from what Prescott figured out was due him those many years before when the world was fresh and everything was possible. Somehow to get through the jail time, and apparently later that lonely freedom time out on the mean streets he had picked up that smack habit, a habit that would have required some serious dough to keep maintained and he finally played the percentages his way. When Paul eventually found out about Prescott’s fate he had already been buried in some lonesome potter’s field over in Long Island. He decided to leave his brother buried there as a fitting and proper resting place for a friendless and broken man after all his lifetime of woes.
It was here that he first met Frankie Riley, Frankie the king hell king of the early 1960s corner boy night. Frankie was the guy who first showed Paul the “clip (how to heist from stores everything from records under your shirt to rings, tons of rings for quick and easy resale),” first showed him how to jimmy a door (and left no telltale marks), first showed him how to get do some dope (harmless grass, weed, you know, marijuana, but in those days a very wicked and evil thing, devil-like), and to sell it. Sell it to kids eager to try something to break out from the jail of early 1960s cold war red scare working- class life, to get some kicks in life before the world blew up in their faces. Yes, Paul was on his way, on his way to the easy street life. That was the time when he became familiar with the exploits of the late Pinky Foley (although he had heard the name before at Harry’s kind of whispered in hushed reverence by the corner boys there he didn’t connect with his exploits then). He figured he was just smart enough to pull it off, working with Frankie and a couple of other guys. Break out of that small time stuff and work North Adamsville like Pinky worked Boston.
Of course sixteen year old boys, or maybe any year old teenage boys, wise beyond their years or not, were not going to make a splash in the corner boy world at that age, just hanging around some two- bit drugstore listening to Elvis or Buddy Holly on some jammed up jukebox. So as Paul got older he moved onto the orbit of Billy Bradley (Frankie did too, once he also saw the writing on the wall that selling joints and small time clipped hot stuff was not going to be the road to easy street) and his corner boy hang-out at Balducci’s Pizza Parlor at the corner of Main and First Street. That was where the action was, that is where Paul (and Frankie) spent their high school apprenticeship years under the tutelage of Billy Bradley, a fellow classmate and well known throughout the town with those who counted, high school boys and girls, as the king hell king of the corner boy night now that Red had moved on.
It wasn’t so much, like with Red, that Billy was tough although he was tough enough, but Billy had great plans, great ideas of how to make that one big score that would put him, and his confederates, on easy street. Of course dope, coke, bennies, marijuana was part of it but that was mostly to raise seed money. And that old stand-by for every corner boy, extortion, was always in play. A little jack-rolling too. But the big thing was to move cars, cars that guys were crazy to buy (or have their fathers buy ) to be‘cool” cool for the honeys Saturday night, And for a couple of years, maybe Paul’s senior year in high school and the year after that,they were rolling in dough, had more orders than they could fill. All boss cars too.
And then it stopped. No, not the various illegal operations but Paul's desire to find the easy street ways, the corner boy way.Did Red Riley’s untimely demise which occurred around that time have anything to do with it? Perhaps. Did he fear for his brothers fast and un-thought out ways have anything to do with it (this before that busted heist that got Kenny killed and Prescott hard time). Sure, although they had already drawn their lines in the sand. But that was just stuff he thought about afterwards, stuff that might have contributed to his decision. Mainly thought it was because he had in those heady times seen what was happening to Billy (and Frankie too who he was personally closer to) as they got wilder and wilder in their easy street plotting. Paul still thought, and would for a long time think, that the world owed him a living, his brothers after all did hold a heavy sway, but he sensed somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind that this was not his way. Eventually Frankie too slipped away from the life. Unfortunately Billy, Billy of the big score dreams, never made the turn, and wound up a few years later face down in some Sonora, Mexico, dusty back street with two bullets in his head after some drug deal with awry on him.
As Paul walked away from the last corner boy memory station of the cross he thought about the picture of Pinky Foley that accompanied his obituary, taken in the old days in front of a drugstore on Dorchester Avenue showing him and a couple of his corner boys smiling some devilish hell-raising smile. More importantly, if one looked closely at that picture it could have been a picture of Paul, his corner boy pal Billy Bradley and his other corner boy pal Frankie Riley growing up.
Fortunately for him and Frankie (although it was a close thing in both cases) they followed the line from the Bruce Springsteen Jersey Girl lyrics- "ain't got no time for the corner boys down in the streets making all that noise." Billy (and his two brothers), unfortunately, didn't listen so well.
Boston Private Bradley Manning Stand-Out As Part Of An International Day Of Solidarity -Saturday June 1stPark Street Station – 1 PM
Let’s Redouble Our Efforts To Free Private Bradley Manning-President Obama Pardon Bradley Manning -Make Every Town Square In America (And The World) A Bradley Manning Square From Boston To Berkeley to Berlin-Join Us At Park Street Station In Boston On June 1st At 1 PM For A Stand-Out In Solidarity Before Bradley’s June 3rd Trial
Plan to go to Fort Meade outside of Washington, D.C. on June 1st for an international day of solidarity with Bradley before his scheduled June 3rd trial. Check with the Bradley Manning Support Network http://www.bradleymanning.org/for information about going to Fort Meade from your area.
If you can’t make it to Fort Meade come to Park Street Station on June 1st in support of this brave whistle-blower.
*** Gypsy Love In The Summer of Love, Circa 1966
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
This was the way it started with Gypsy Love and me. “Hey Mister, do you want to buy some flowers for your girlfriend?” And just then, girlfriend-less and walking alone, I started to say no but something, something from deep inside me, or maybe in my reaction to her, made me say this, “Sure, but since I don’t have a girlfriend I will just buy them and why don’t you just keep them and wear them in your hair.” Something about that sentiment struck a chord in her as well, as she flashed that beguiling smile of hers that I can still see in the mind’s eye all this time later. So we continued to talk, talk a lot for the next several minutes even though many people, many potential customer people, lots of young men and women in every type of garment, from square madras Bermuda shorts to buckskin jackets and bell-bottom trousers to wispy billowy long dresses, and nobody thought anything of one particular costume over another, as befit the times, out on dates or just goofing, were walking by on this moonless night, this moonless Boylston Street 1966 Friday summer night that I am thinking about.
We talked the usual “who are you?, where are you from?, why is a delicate flower like you selling flowers on the streets on nice summer night?” talk (as she put my flower gift in her hair making her even more beguiling). We talked some more, maybe about the weather, or about the latest Rolling Stones album or about the huge influx of young people coming from hither and yon to encamp in Boston and try do a version of their own jailbreak from suburban square life. She mentioned that in her own case she was trying to break out on her own to from her Nashua, New Hampshire home and pursue some kind of art career. She was taking classes part-time at the Museum School and was working the flower- strewn streets to make rent money and maybe a little food. I mentioned that I was finishing school but was in no hurry since “uncle”was ready to call my draft number to go fight his nasty little war in Southeast Asia anytime I decided that school was a drag. We talked, as I got slightly panicky that she would drift away to sell her flowers, to make her rent money. We talked until we ran out of strangers in the night generic talk, and, as we laughed about it later, stuttered some stuff out at times to have reason not to part ways just then. After a while I told her that I would sit on the steps of the Public Library until she finished selling her flowers and then maybe we could go up to the Unicorn coffeehouse and talk some more. She didn’t say yes, she didn’t say no so I apparently had to take my chances. So I sat on those steps hoping, hoping for about a half hour and then she came up behind me and placed the last couple of unsold flowers in my getting longish hair. And that is the way it started, I swear.
Of course Gypsy Love was just the pet name that I gave her a little later, and it is better for all concerned that we just leave it like that, although not for any particular privacy, things better left unsaid, or let sleeping dogs lie reason. It wasn’t like that with us in our time, the time of our time together, other than Gypsy Love says more about her, about me, and about what happened to us in those days that I want to tell you about than her real name. Naturally, naturally unless you might want to think otherwise, she was no more of a gypsy than I am. Long, flowing blonde hair, fair almost alabaster white skin, flashing blue eyes, bedroom eyes we called them around my old neighborhood, my old Hullstown neighborhood in my old high school days corner boy-sizing up the girls days a few years previously, kind of thin, kind of hadn’t had a good meal in a while thin, and wearing no make-up, as was the fashion in those days was not my picture, and I am sure not yours either, of a dark-skinned, dark-haired, dancing-eyed gypsy girl with a rose in her teeth doing the tarantella, or something like that.
No, the gypsy part came in because of the flowers. Right that 1966 minute you could not go down any city street, any decent-sized city street on a Friday night, a boy and girl-filled Friday night, and not have some enterprising real-live gypsy girl, maybe twelve or twenty, who knows, trying to sell you some woe-begotten, faded, wilted, or worst, plastic, Christ, plastic rose, a single rose, by the way, for your girlfriend. All the while she cheapskate embarrassed you when you sheepishly blustered out "no thanks." Or she would direct you, no steer you, to some Madame LaRue ancient gypsy-mother in the window fortune-telling lady. An ancient gypsy mother woman who would, for small, very small, change, and knowing whom to pitch her spiel to, start running life’s wheel of fortune, to tell you of just ahead glad tidings. And then having exhausted her magic, would add “But wouldn’t the lady also like to know love’s fortune?’ for an extra thin coin at you. And then, always, always looking into her crystal ball, or the cards, T.S. Eliot’s dread tarot cards, and, whee, thankfully predict love’s delights. And that is the long and short of it for the gypsy part. The love part is self-explanatory, is stuff that has been going on so long it need not detain us, or should not, and if it is not you will catch the drift as I go along.
Let’s say in 1962 or 1963, on some other moonless Boylston Street night, some high school moonless night looking for one of the latest, cheap date, coffeehouses that dotted the street and were the rage those few years back that real gypsy girl would have been left by me to ply her trade, her rose-pedaling trade (maybe an older sister might have been working some other, more adult, scheme, but in that boy and girl-filled night I was not noticing that scene since I was girl-ed up and working, or trying to work, my charm on said girl) and would have had no fair-haired gypsy love girl competition.
See in 1966 all hell had broken loose in the land. There had been a jail-break among the young, among some of the more adventurous or alienated young, who had decided, and rightly so, that suburban, white picket-fence, college, then graduate school, then a respectable profession, and then, yes, then, then, then a straight line replication of dear mother and father was not in the cards. And one did not need a fortune-telling lady, ancient gypsy-mother or not, tarot cards reading or not, to know that death-strewn street. So some, and Gypsy Love included herself among the some as I did, decided that the jail-break was worth the risk, worth the risk for a little while anyway. Then let’s see what happened. The stars were aligned or at least I, we, were going to grab the ticket, and ride the crest of that max daddy wave.
But jail-break or not, picket-fence security or not, squaresville or edge city, you still needed dough, dough to keep off the “hairy (term of art meaning scary),” not woman friendly streets, dough to keep body and soul together, hell, dough for the yarn to start up that shawl-making business she told me about later that was the direct reason that Gypsy Love was selling flowers to get some seed money to sell them in furtherance of her art career. She was not selling suburban boy and girl in town for a weekend to look at, maybe seek, the hippies night roses, and certainly no gypsy plastic throw-aways, just cut flowers suitable for hair from the wholesale Flower Exchange (Gypsy Love had some business sense too), and medieval garlands to prance around the Boston Common. Although like I said before when describing my first look at her, she was obviously not getting enough business to keep her from being not enough to eat thin. After all that was a summer of love, not the 1967 “officially” proclaimed one, proclaimed from this Atlantic shore to San Francisco but still a summer of love and every unattached (and maybe some attached, who knows), fair-haired, alabaster white-skinned fairy princess was also selling flowers, or something, to keep the wolves from the door.
So, naturally, once I knew the score, from that talking several minutes (and later) that I held Gypsy Love up (although, as it turned out, she was more than happy to be talking rather than selling flowers) made me feel guilty and I offered to spring for a little dinner for her rather than some cheap jack cup of coffeehouse coffee. Either out of hunger, or some spark between us that she also felt, she said yes, an empathic yes, or at least that is how I am going to tell it. So, "old pro" Boylston Street denizen that I had become we went into the Olive, a cheap old time caboose diner that served light meals, light meals in the dark, ambience they called it. So we ate some supper, not too badly served that night. A not drunk chef must have been on duty that night or something, and then left after Gypsy Love had had enough to eat (and asked to take the leavings home, something I never would have thought of and was not commonly done then). And then we headed, kind of ambling, stumbling and both a little shy about it, for her garret over on Commonwealth Avenue.
Yes, it was certainly a garret no question. I had been in enough such places before that, no problem, I was, if anything, no snob when it came to other people’s living quarters. I had my own roommate- shared small apartment over on Westland Avenue next Symphony Hall so I knew the drill. What I didn’t expect, didn’t expect when she invited me over was that she shared the place with about six others, boys and girls alike, some paired, some not. And that was also okay, or rather it turned out to be okay, because among the denizens of that place was a guy, no, a gallant, who knowing that he could not compete with the Gypsy Love flower-sellers of the Boston night sold dope instead. And good stuff too, primo Acapulco Gold and Columbia Red that he got from some Spanish girl, no that is not right, some Mexican girl, some sunflower sunshine Juanita girl connection that he had met over in Cambridge Common where he hung out during the day. And he was not averse to sharing some of his own stash with his roomies, and their friends. Yah, it was that kind of time, unlike later when guys would try to sell you oregano or something like you were some nowhere clown.
So we “split” (left the premises, or went out, for the squares, okay) the scene at the walk-up garret with its menagerie of humanity, also all laced- high as far as I could tell as we closed the door behind us, around two o’clock in the morning to “goof” on (not make fun of, not serious, hurtful make fun of anyway, but more like let’s let the dope take its course, observe the late hour night life, again for the squares who don’t know, and again okay, okay) the Boylston Street scene. Strangely, most of my late, late night, improper Boston late night scene really wasn’t spent in Boston, but rather in Cambridge, in Harvard Square, specifically since about 1962 at the all-night Hayes –Bickford right up from the subway station, kind of a budding literary hang-out place but in any case a long way refuge from bad high school home scenes, and later to soak in the night life, and catch a few ideas, if only by osmosis. All for the price of a refillable watery dregs cup of coffee and maybe a soggy Danish or stale three o’clock in the morning yesterday muffin.
But this Boylston Street scene was something else, 1966 something else. Something at once more alive, more viscerally alive than the, when you really thought about it, staid and now well-worn late night Bickford literary scene with its ritual low important conversation hum, its frantic writerliness, and its slow drum tattoo beat to define “cool.” And, at the same time more destructive, not Vietnam War nightly television waste destructive that the mad daddies in D.C. had already cornered the market on, and were not letting go of despite many anguished cries, but more the sense that this was the last chance for happiness, or sanity, or some such thing and we had better grab it now before it blows away with the winds, or we get tired of riding it and go back to the cocoons. A madness scene, and let’s leave it at that, leave it at that until the dope wears off.
Sure, there were the jugglers, juggling all improbable combinations of materials from bowling pins to ninja sticks, and clowns, Charley Chaplin tramp clowns, Clarabelle clowns, Disneyland clowns, squirting, spraying, belching, bellowing, bestriding bicycles, bouncing balls and baby cars, and whatever seven other things clowns do, were out in force. No hip town, no college night town from east to west, from Cambridge to Berkeley, Ann Arbor in between, no cultural oasis town from the Village to Venice Beach, Austin in between, America or Europe, continental Europe Paris the hub, London in between was “hip,” (not squares for the squares, got it) without a plethora of those brethren.
Or the one-trick pony Monte guys sitting at little tables or on benches “organizing” a game, cards, walnut shells, peas-in-a pod a specialty, acrobats, maybe some circus castoffs or Olympic failure cases, bouncing off each other, sparkling uniforms making an arc to off-set the trickiness of the action, and maybe in a couple of years Vegas in the big tent, into the dead air night. And anyone else with any talent, any mimic money, spare-change, put the dough in the hat right in front of you, please, talent to keep the wolves away from the door.
And sure too a zillion guitar players, and some nights in Harvard Square a few years previously that might have been a low-ball estimate, now electric, electrified in the post-Dylan night, and diehard acoustics, trads, trying to maintain but losing the battle in the sound night and have the empty hats to prove it. Plugged in or on the edge though, singing, crooning, bleeping, basheeing, bahai-ing, rama-ing, hari-ing, and just plain old-fashioned vanilla screaming, along with tambourines, kazoos, wash tubs, triangles, oboes, hautboys, water glasses of various sizes, anything that could, or would, or should, make music, enough music to keep those ravenous wolves away from that damn door.
Guys and gals, angel love guys and gals, hop-headed or harmless, bejeweled or buckskinned, selling every kind of dope from every arm, reaching into every pocket for a pill here, some tea leaves there, more rare, an eight ball of this, and rarer still then although after a while I heard about it more, maybe a girl-boy (coke, H) combination for a permanent float. And every kind of kid (mainly), some college preppie out on the Boylston Street night, maybe tired, too tired from that fraternity beer-keg and some lame three hundred freshman in a telephone booth, or a Volkswagen joke, some suburban high school break-out kid looking to forget the corner boy action, or the last dance, last high school dance failure, and didn’t want to go home, some car-full of girls (always a car-full, never less) from a different suburb, looking, well, looking for those “hippie” guys that look kind of cute now, now that mother and father don’t approve of hippie guys, and streams of boys and girls in all colors and shades and all uniforms just getting in from the long bus ride from Bangor, or Montpelier and intent, seriously intent , on breaking out of that hayseed world, buying those fifty-seven flavors and smoking, dropping, or swallowing it right there on the premises, the street premises and wilding out (going crazy with joy, ecstasy, fear, freak-out) before hard dawn hits the streets.
But also every 1950s hipster, dipster, grifter, drifter and midnight sifter who had enough sense to catch sleep during the day and come out at night and do his or her rube-taking madness. Some bad ass madness, some not from the suburbs, not now anyway, madness, police-worthy-of-notice madness. The clash between the dope-infested madness and the lumpen-greed head madness, the known world’s madness in new form, would define that summer, for good or evil. But right then for the good, for the good Mexican night dope that was just beginning to wear off and let sleep take its course. Then dawn came, or just that few minutes before dawn, when heavy, lumpish human outline figures started to take distinctive shape, and Gypsy Love and I could look over on Boston Common hill and see the outline forms of hundreds of sleeping bags, tent city resident pup-tent, oddly Army surplus, homemade lean-too dwellers, park bench newspaper-pillowed sleepers, whatever, sheltering the summer of love refugees against that moonless night. And just at that pre-dawn moment I knew that Gypsy Love and I were solid for that moment, and for some other moments, and for a while beyond that too but I began to wonder when the cold winds came, when the skies turned granite grey in revenge, when the yellowish, brownish, orange-ish leaves started falling would we have been done with our moment.
