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
Monday, November 04, 2013
Palestinians in Cambridge: Stories From the Diaspora--An exhibit of
photographic portraits and excerpts from interviews with twenty Palestinians
about life and identity in the Diaspora, and experiences living and working in
Cambridge
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Cambridge
There is this expression in Arabic that “every people live in their
country” but for Palestinians “our country lives in us”. Most Palestinians live
in exile and many have never been to Palestine - in some sense it's this
mythical place. I'm lucky in that I've been able to spend a large portion of my
life in Palestine on the ground."
Multicultural Arts Center at 41 Second St. East Cambridge
Opening Reception: December 5th, 6-8pm Exhibit runs through January
24th, 2014
Interviewees include Salma Abu Ayyash
and Giacomo Milia, Sari Abuljubein, Jamal and Mushoor Abu-Rubieh, Sa’ed Atshan,
Nidal Al-Azraq, Amahl Bishara, Leila Farsakh, Randa Ghattas, Sami Herbawi, Layla
Hijab-Cable, Asma Jaber, Walid Masoud, Rania Matar, Dana Sajdi, Maysoun Shomali
and Jamal Saeh.
Both Ty Moore in Minneapolis and Kshama Sawant in
Seattle have a good chance at winning elections as open socialists independent
of the two parties of big business. Come to this discussion on Socialist
Alternative's analysis of these elections and possible next steps for the
left.
BACKGROUND:
Ty Moore and Kshama
Sawant, both Socialist Alternative members, are poised to make a historic impact
Tuesday. Both candidates are backed by a coalition of unions, socialists and
Greens. Both are building vibrant social movements like Occupy Homes in
Minneapolis and the "Fight for 15" in the Seattle area. Please come to this
important discussion about how this was achieved and what the next steps forward
can be for the left.
Please see below for a special opportunity to attend a Veterans Day Forum
at the JFK Library, sponored by Bank of America and The Home Base Program.
Challenges
and Hope; What's Facing Returning Veterans and
Military Families
Please
join us this Veterans Day for the Annual Home Base Leadership
Forum.
Date: Veterans Day,
Monday, November 11, 2013 Time: 2:00 PM –
5:00PM* Location: John F. Kennedy Library and
Museum, Smith Hall Columbia Point
Boston, MA 02125
This is a free event, click here to
Presented with
support from *Guests
are welcome to arrive at the JFK Library at 1PM to enjoy a complimentary tour of
the museum prior to the start of the Leadership Forum at 2PM. Please proceed to
the ticket counter and inform staff that you are taking part in the Home Base
Leadership Forum.
Key
Note Speakers:
Joseph Robert “Bob” Kerrey,
Recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroic actions as a U.S.
Navy Seal in Vietnam, former U.S. Senator and Governor of Nebraska, former
President of the New School University, national leader in education,
author.
Michael Schoenbaum, PhD, Senior Advisor for
Mental Health Services, Epidemiology and Economics in the Office of the Director
NIMH. Dr. Schoenbaum is one of the leaders of the Army Study to Assess Risk and
Resilience in Servicemembers (Army STARRS) a response to the increase in
military suicides.
Panel discussion: War
stories; keeping the American public engaged after the troops come
home.
Kevin Cullen, Moderator. A military family
member, Boston Globe columnist, Cullen was a member of the 2013
investigative team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Catholic
Church's sexual abuse scandal. He is co-author of the New York Times
best-seller "Whitey Bulger: America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That
Brought Him to Justice."
Thomas “T.J.” Brennan, U.S.
Marine Corps Veteran; served in Iraq and Afghanistan and has written poignantly
and honestly about his own experience with the invisible wounds of war in his
blog posts for The New York Times “At War” series. Brennan is Military
Affairs reporter for The Daily News in Jacksonville,
NC.
Phillip Carter, Director of Military, Veterans and
Society Program, Center for a New American Security. A U.S. Army and Iraq War
veteran, Carter’s research focuses on veterans issues, military manpower issues,
and civil-military relations.
Mistress
Carrie, Afternoon Drive DJ and Music Director of WAAF 97.7/107.3, who
was embedded with units from the MA Army National Guard in Iraq (2006) and
Afghanistan (2011), and was awarded the Commander’s Award for Public Service,
one of the U.S. Army’s highest civilian honors twice. Mistress Carrie is also a
military spouse.
Wes Moore, U.S. Army Veteran,
Afghanistan, Rhodes Scholar, White House Fellow, youth advocate, business
leader, New York Times best selling author of The Other Wes
Moore.
About the Leadership Forum:
For the
past two years, Home Base has gathered thought leaders in the health care,
military, business, policy, and philanthropy community for a Veterans Day
discussion designed to illustrate and address the challenges facing our
returning veterans and their families as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan come
to an end.
This is an opportunity to pause, honor and learn more about
the men and women – and their families -- who have served and sacrificed for our
nation in the military since 9/11.
The Red Sox Foundation and
Massachusetts General Hospital Home Base Program helps Iraq and Afghanistan
veterans and military families heal from the “invisible wounds of war” – post
traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury – through clinical care, community
education and research. www.homebaseprogram.org
***The
Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World
War II- From Deep In The Songbook-The Inkspots –To Each His Own…
…it
was as simple as this. He had asked her, asked her quite politely although she
could tell that he had liquor on his breathe, for a dance, a slow one, at the
weekly USO dance. A dance held by those who were keeping the home fires burning
in order to keep up the morale of the boys getting ready to go overseas, to go
east to preparation places in order to take back Europe from the night-takers,
to go west and island by island to take back the Pacific from the night-takers
on that side of the world. But that night like every USO dance night such talk,
such thoughts were set aside for those few hours before the ships and planes
took off to their appointed destinations.
She,
well, she was as patriotic as any other red-blooded American girl, young woman,
and had volunteered to be one of the hostesses.And he, nothing but a country boy he from down in Appalachia up north
for the first time, had spied her from his bashful corner, spied her all flowing
black hair, sweets smiles, simply dressed for the occasion, no flash but an
allure, something struck in his down to earth country way and spoke of soul
mate (although he would have dismissed such term out of hand as too city). So after
fortifying himself with some store-bought liquor, he had asked for a dance and
she had accepted. Something about him, about the way he held her, about their
talk afterward got her going, although she sensed that what was ahead for him,
for them, would not be the pretty dreams of her younger girlish days, not the
pretty dreams at all.
But
that was later, the not pretty dreams part, that night, and for the rest of the
nights before he took a plane west to take a ship to join in on that desperate
island by island fight in the Pacific they flowered, there is no other way to
express it, their burgeoning love heated up the night, they would, if he came
back (and she was sure he would, he was more fatalistic) share whatever dreams
came their way, together. Would share their small inexpensive dreams together …
**********
Peter
Paul Markin comment on this series:
Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it
meant to our parents or not, knew what sacred place it held in their youthful
hearts, Benny Goodman with and without Miss (Ms.) Peggy Lee, Harry James with
or without the orchestra, Duke Ellington with or without Mr. Johnny Hodges,
Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey with or without fanfare, Glenn Miller with or
without glasses, Miss (Ms.) Billie Holiday with or without the blues, personal
blues, Miss Lena Horne with or without stormy weather, Miss (Ms.) Margaret
Whiting, Mr. Vaughn Monroe with or without goalposts, Mr. Billy Eckstine, Mr.
Frank Sinatra with or without bobbysoxers, The Inkspots with, always with, that
spoken refrain, the Andrews Sisters with or without rum in their Coca-Cola, The
Dewdrops with or without whatever they were with or without, Mr. Cole Porter
with or without the boys, Mr. Irving Berlin with or without the flag, and Mr. George
Gershwin with or without his brother, is the music that went wafting through
the house of many of those of us who constitute the generation of ‘68.
Yes, the generation of ’68, baby-boomers, decidedly not what
Tom Brokaw dubbed rightly or wrongly “ the greatest generation,”decidedly not your parents’or grandparents’ (please, please do not say
great-grandparents’ even if it is true) generation. Those of us who came of
age, biological, political and social age kicking, screaming and full of the
post-war new age teenage angst and alienation in the age of Jack Kennedy’s
Camelot. Who were, some of us any way and I like to think the best of us,
driven by some makeshift dream, who, in the words of brother Bobby quotingfrom Alfred Lord Tennyson, were “seeking a
new world.”Those who took up the call
to action and slogged through that decade whether it was in civil rights/black
liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find
one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came down.
And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that
we searched for, desperately searched, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone. But
enough about us this series is about our immediate forbears (but please, please
not great grandparents) their uphill struggles to make their vision of the
newer world, to satisfy their hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and
the music that in their youth dreamed by
on cold winter nights or hot summer days.
This is emphatically the music of the generation that
survived the dust bowl all farms blown away, all land worthless, the bankers
taking whatever was left and the dusted crowd heading west with whatever was
movable, survived empty bowls wondering where the next meal would come from,
survived no sugar bowl street urchin hard times of the 1930s Great Depression,
the time of the madness, the time of the night-takers, the time of the long
knives. Building up those wants, name them, named those hungers on cold nights
against riverside fires, down in dusty arroyos, under forsaken bridges. Survived
god knows how by taking the nearest freight, some smoke and dreams freight,
Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, B&O, Illinois Central, Penn Central,
Empire State, Boston and Maine, or one of a million trunk lines to go out and
search for, well, search for…
Searching for something that was not triple- decker bodies,
three to a room sharing some scraggly blanket, an old worn out pillow for rest,
the faint smell of oatmeal, twenty days in a row oatmeal, oatmeal with.., being
cooked in the next room meaning no Pa work, meaning one jump, maybe not even
that ahead of the rent collector (the landlords do not dare come in person so
they hire the task out), meaning the sheriff and the streets are closing in.
Bodies, brothers and sisters, enough to lose count, piled high cold-water flat
high, that damn cold water splash signifying how low things have gotten, with a
common commode for the whole floor and brown-stained sink. Later moving down
the scale a rooming house room for the same number of bodies, window looking
out onto the air shaft, dark, dark with despair, the very, very faint odor of
oatmeal, who knows how many days in a row, from Ma’s make-shift hot plate on
its last legs.Hell, call it what it was
flop house stinking of perspiration and low-shelf whiskeys and wines. Others
had it worse, tumbled down shack, window pane-less, tarpaper siding, roof tiles
falling, a lean-to ready to fall to the first wind, the first red wind coming
out of the mountains and swooping down the hills and hollows, ready to fall to
the first downpour rain, washed away. Yes, get out on the open road and search
for the great promised American night that had been tattered by world events,
and greed.
Survived the Hoovervilles, the great cardboard, tin can
roof, slap-dash jerry-built camp explosions along rivers, down in ravines and
under railroad trestles. Tossed, hither and yon, about six million different
ways but it all came down to when the banks, yeah, the banks, the usual
suspects, robbed people of their shacks, their cottages, their farm houses. Robbed
them as an old-time balladeer, a free-wheeling, song-writing red, a commie, in
the days when in some quarters sailing under that banner was a badge of honor, said
at the time not with a gun but with a fountain pen, but still robbed them.
Survived the soup kitchens hungers, the gnawing can’t wait
in the endless waiting line for scrapes, dreaming of some by-gone steak or dish
of ice cream, and always that hunger, not the stomach hunger although that was
ever present, but the hunger that hurts a man, hurts his pride when he has to
stick his hand out, stick it out and not know why. Planning the fruitless day,
fruitless since he was born to work, took pride in work, planning around Sally
breakfasts don’t be late, six to nine, but with sermon and song attached,
mission stuff in heat-soaked rooms, men smelling of unwashed men, and drink.
Planning around city hall lunches, peanut butter sandwiches, slapped slap-dash
together with an apple, maybe. Worse, worse by far the Saint Vincent DePaul
suppers, soup, bread, some canned vegetable, something they called meat but was
in dispute, lukewarm coffee, had only, only if you could prove you were truly
destitute with a letter from some churchman and, in addition, under some
terrible penalty, that you had searched for work that day. A hard dollar, hard
dollar indeed.
Jesus, out of work for another day, and with three hungry
growing kids to feed, and a wife sickly, sick unto death of the not having he
thought, little work waiting for anybody that day, that day when all hell broke
loose and the economy tanked, at least that is what it said in the Globe (ditto New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times,
San Francisco Examiner if anybody was asking), said that there was too much
around, too much and he with nothing for those kids, nothing and he was too
proud to ask for some damn letter to give to those Vincent DePaul
hard-hearts.And that day not him, not
him yet, others, others who read more that the Globe (and the dittos)were
dreaming of that full head of steam day to come in places like big auto Flint, waterfront
Frisco town, rubber Akron, hog butcher to the world prairie Chicago, hell, even
in boondock trucker Minneapolis, a day when the score would get evened, evened
a little, and a man could hold his head up a little, could at least bring bread
to those three hungry growing kids who didn’t understand the finer point of
world economics just hunger. Until then though he is left shifting the
scroungings of the trash piles of the urban glut, the discard of the haves, the
have nots throw nothing away, and on other horizons the brethren curse the
rural fallow fields, curse the banks, and curse the weather, but curse most of
all having to pack up and head, head anyway, anywhere but the here, and search,
search like that brother on that urban glut pile for a way to curb that gnawing hungry that cried out in the night-want, want
that is all.
Survived too the look, the look of those, the what did FDR
(Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the young, or forgetful) call them, oh yeah, the
economic royalists, today’s 1%, the rack-renters, the coupon-clippers, the
guys, as one of their number said, who hired one half of the working class to
fight the other, who in their fortified towers, their Xanadus, their Dearborns,
their Beacon Hills, their Upper East Sides, their Nob Hills, and a few other
spots, tittered that not everybody was built to survive to be the fittest. That
crowd, and let’s name names, a few anyway, Ford, General Motors, Firestone,
U.S. Steel, fought tooth and nail against the little guy trying to break bread.
Fought that brother too out pounding the mean streets to proud to ask for a
letter, Jesus, a letter for some leftover food, before he got “religion” about
what was what in the land of “milk and honey. ”Wreaked havoc on that farmer out in the dust bowl not travelling some
road, some road west knowing that the East was barred up, egging him on to some
hot dusty bracero labor filed picking, maybe “hire” him on as a scab against
those uppity city boys. Yes, fought every guy trying to get out from under that
cardboard, tar paper, windowless soup kitchen world along with a hell of a lot
of comrades, yes, comrades, not Russkie comrades although reds were thick in
those battles, took their lumps in Frisco, Flint, Akron and Minneapolis, hell,
any place where a righteous people were rising, kindred in the struggle to put that
survival of the fittest on the back-burner of human history. To stand up and take collective action to put things right,
hell, made the bosses cry bloody murder when they shut down their factories,
shut them down cold until some puny penny justice was eked out. And maybe just
maybe make that poor unknowingly mean-street walking city brother and that
sweated farm boy thing twice about helping those Mayfair swells.
Survived but took time out too, time out if young perhaps,
to stretch those legs, to sway those hips to a new sound coming out of the
mist, coming out of New York, always New York then, Chicago, Detroit, and
Kansas City, the Missouri K.C. okay. The sound of swing replacing the dour Brother, Can You Spare a Dime, no
banishing it, casting it out with soup lines, second-hand clothes (passed down
from out the door brothers and sisters), and from hunger looks, because after
all it did not mean a thing, could not possibly place you anywhere else but
squareville (my term, not their), if you did not have that swing. To be as one
with jitter-buggery if there was (is) such a word. And swing a fade echo of the
cool age be-bop that was a-borning, making everybody reach for that high white
note floating out of Minton’s, Big Bill’s Jimmie’s, hell, even Olde Saco’s
Starlight Ballroom before it breezed out in the ocean air night, crashed into
the tepid sea. Yeah.
Survived, as if there was no time to breathe in new fresh
airs, to slog through the time of the gun in World War II, a time when the
night-takers, those who craved the revenge night of the long knives took giant
steps in Europe and Asia trying to make that same little guy, Brit, Frenchie,
Chinaman, Filipino, God’s American, and half the races and nationalities on
this good green earth cry uncle and buckle under, take it, take their stuff
without a squawk. And so after Pearl, after that other shoe dropped on a candid
world Johnnie, Jimmie, Paulie, Benny too, all the guys from the old
neighborhood, the guys who hung around Doc’s hands in their pockets, guys from
the wheat fields fresh from some Saturday night dance, all shy and with
calloused and, guys from the coal slags, down in hill country, full of home
liquor, blackened fingernails and Saturday night front porch fiddlings wound up
carrying an M-I on the shoulder in Europe or the Pacific. Susie, Laura, Betty,
and dark-haired Rebecca too waiting at home hoping to high heaven that some
wayward gun had not carried off sweetheart Johnnie, Jimmy, Paulie, or young
Benny.Jesus not young Benny.
Survived the endless lines of boys heading off East and
West, some who could hardly wait to get to the recruiting office others, well,
other hanging back, hanging back just a little to think things over, and still
others head over heels they were exempt, 4-F, bad feet, you see. All, all
except that last crew who got to sit a home with Susie, Laura, Betty and even
odd-ball Rebecca waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the ships to sail or
planes to fly, hanging in some corner drugstore, Doc’s, Rexall, name your
drugstore name, sitting two by two at the soda fountain playing that newly
installed jukebox until the nickels ran out. Listened to funny banana songs,
rum and coca cola songs, siting under the apple tree songs to get a minute’s
reprieve from thoughts of the journey ahead.
Listened too to dreamy, sentimental songs, songs about
faraway places, about keeping lamp- lights burning, about making a better world
out of the fire and brimstone sacrifice before them, about Johnnie, Jimmie and
the gang actually returning, returning whole, and putting a big dent in their
dreams, hell, about maybe the damn wars would be over sooner rather than later.
Listened and as old Doc, or some woe-begotten soda jerk, some high school kid,
told them to leave he was closing up, they made for the beach, if near a beach,
the pond, the back forty, the hills, or whatever passed for a lovers’ lane in
their locale and with the echo of those songs as background, well, what do you
think they did, why do you think they call us baby-boomers.
The music, this survival music, wafted through the air
coming from a large console radio, the prized possession amid the squalor of
second-hand sofas and woe-begotten stuffed pillows smelling of mothballs,
centered in the small square living room of my growing up house. My broken
down, needs a new roof, random shingles on the ground as proof, cracked windows
stuffed with paper and held with masking tape, no proof needed, overgrown lawn
of a shack of a house too small, much too small, for four growing boys and two
parents house.
That shack of a house surrounded by other houses, shack
houses, too small to fit Irish Catholic- sized families with stony-eyed dreams
but which represented in some frankly weird form (but what knew I of such weirdness
then I just cried out in some fit of angst) the great good desire of those
warriors and their war brides to latch onto a piece of golden age America. And
take their struggle survival music with them as if to validate their sweet
memory dreams. That radio, as if a lifesaver, literally, tuned to local station
WDJA in North Adamsville, the memory station for those World War II warriors
and their war brides, those who made it back. Some wizard station manager
knowing his, probably his in those days, demographics, spinned those 1940s
platters exclusively, as well as aimed the ubiquitous advertisement at that
crowd. Cars, sofas, beds, shaving gear, soap, department store sales, all the
basics of the growing families spawned (nice, huh) by those warriors and
brides.
My harried mother, harried by the prospects of the day with
four growing boys, maybe bewildered is a better expression, turning the radio
on to start her day, hoping that Paper
Dolls, I’ll Get By, or dreamy Tangerine,
their songs, their spring youth meeting at some USO dance songs and so
embedded, or so it seemed as she hummed away the day, used the music as
background on her appointed household rounds. The stuff, that piano/drum-driven
stuff with some torch-singer bleeding all over the floor with her loves, her
hurts, and her wanderings, her waitings, they should have called it the waiting
generation, drove me crazy then, mush stuff at a time when I was craving the
big break-out rock and roll sounds I kept hearing every time I went and played
the jukebox at Doc’s Drugstore over on Walker Street down near the beach. As
far as I know Doc, knowing his demographics as well, did not, I repeat, did
not, stock that stuff that, uh, mush for his rock-crazed after school soda
fountain crowd, probably stocked nothing, mercifully before about 1955. Funny
thing though while I am still a child of rock and roll (blues too) this
so-called mushy stuff sounds pretty good to these ears now long after my
parents and those who performed this music have passed on. Go figure.
********
Songwriters: MCCOY, VAN
A
rose must remain with the sun and the rain
Or it's lovely promise won't come true.
To each his own, to each his own,
And my own is you
What good is a song if the words just don't belong?
And a dream must be a dream for two.
No good alone, to each his own,
For me there's you.
If a flame is to grow there must be a glow,
To open each door there's a key.
And I need you, I know, I can't let you go,
Your touch means too much to me.
Two lips must insist on two more to be kissed
Or they'll never know what love can do.
To each his own, I've found my own,
One and only you.
If a flame is to grow there must be a glow,
To open each door there's a key.
I need you, I know, I can't let you go,
Your touch means too much to me.
Two lips must insist on two more to be kissed
Or they'll never know what love can do.
To each his own, I've found my own,
One and only you.
From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 96th Anniversary Of The Russian October Revolution- Bourgeois Hypocrisy on Women’s Equality Leon Trotsky On The Lessons Of The Russian Revolution Workers Vanguard No. 968 5 November 2010
In Honor of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
For New October Revolutions!
(From the Archives of Marxism)
November 7 (October 25 by the calendar used in Russia at the time) marks the 93rd anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Led by the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the workers’ seizure of power in Russia gave flesh and blood reality to the Marxist understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Despite the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet workers state, culminating in its counterrevolutionary destruction in 1991-92, the October Revolution was and is the international proletariat’s greatest victory; its final undoing, a world-historic defeat. The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) fought to the bitter end in defense of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe, while calling for workers political revolutions to oust the parasitic nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies that ruled these states. This is the same program we uphold today for the remaining workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.
Having been expelled from the USSR in 1929 by Stalin, Trotsky spent the remainder of his life in exile. In November 1932, he gave a speech to a Danish social-democratic student group in Copenhagen. He outlined the political conditions and the social forces that drove the Russian Revolution, stressing the decisive role of the Bolshevik Party. Illuminating the worldwide impact of the Russian Revolution and its place in history, Trotsky underlined the necessity of sweeping away the decaying capitalist order and replacing it with a scientifically planned international socialist economy that will lay the material basis for human freedom.
The ICL fights to forge workers parties modeled on Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks to lead the struggle for new October Revolutions around the globe.
* * *
Revolution means a change of the social order. It transfers the power from the hands of a class which has exhausted itself into those of another class, which is on the rise....
Without the armed insurrection of November 7, 1917, the Soviet state would not be in existence. But the insurrection itself did not drop from Heaven. A series of historical prerequisites was necessary for the October revolution.
1. The rotting away of the old ruling classes—the nobility, the monarchy, the bureaucracy.
2. The political weakness of the bourgeoisie, which had no roots in the masses of the people.
3. The revolutionary character of the peasant question.
4. The revolutionary character of the problem of the oppressed nations.
5. The significant social weight of the proletariat.
To these organic pre-conditions we must add certain conjunctural conditions of the highest importance:
6. The Revolution of 1905 was the great school, or in Lenin’s words, the “dress rehearsal” of the Revolution of 1917. The Soviets, as the irreplaceable organizational form of the proletarian united front in the revolution, were created for the first time in the year 1905.
7. The imperialist war sharpened all the contradictions, tore the backward masses out of their immobility and thereby prepared the grandiose scale of the catastrophe.
But all these conditions, which fully sufficed for the outbreak of the Revolution, were insufficient to assure the victory of the proletariat in the Revolution. For this victory one condition more was needed:
8. The Bolshevik Party....
In the year 1883 there arose among the emigres the first Marxist group. In the year 1898, at a secret meeting, the foundation of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was proclaimed (we all called ourselves Social-Democrats in those days). In the year 1903 occurred the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In the year 1912 the Bolshevist fraction finally became an independent Party.
It learned to recognize the class mechanics of society in struggle, in the grandiose events of twelve years (1905-1917). It educated cadres equally capable of initiative and of subordination. The discipline of its revolutionary action was based on the unity of its doctrine, on the tradition of common struggles and on confidence in its tested leadership.
Thus stood the Party in the year 1917. Despised by the official “public opinion” and the paper thunder of the intelligentsia press, it adapted itself to the movement of the masses. Firmly it kept in hand the control of factories and regiments. More and more the peasant masses turned toward it. If we understand by “nation,” not the privileged heads, but the majority of the people, that is, the workers and peasants, then Bolshevism became in the course of the year 1917 a truly national Russian Party.
In September 1917, Lenin, who was compelled to keep in hiding, gave the signal, “The crisis is ripe, the hour of the insurrection has approached.” He was right. The ruling classes had landed in a blind alley before the problems of the war, the land and national liberation. The bourgeoisie finally lost its head. The democratic parties, the Mensheviks and social-revolutionaries, wasted the remains of the confidence of the masses in them by their support of the imperialist war, by their policy of ineffectual compromise and concession to the bourgeois and feudal property-owners. The awakened army no longer wanted to fight for the alien aims of imperialism. Disregarding democratic advice, the peasantry smoked the landowners out of their estates. The oppressed nationalities at the periphery rose up against the bureaucracy of Petrograd. In the most important workers’ and soldiers’ Soviets the Bolsheviki were dominant. The workers and soldiers demanded action. The ulcer was ripe. It needed a cut of the lancet.
Only under these social and political conditions was the insurrection possible. And thus it also became inevitable. But there is no playing around with the insurrection. Woe to the surgeon who is careless in the use of the lancet! Insurrection is an art. It has its laws and its rules.
The Party carried through the October insurrection with cold calculation and with flaming determination. Thanks to this, it conquered almost without victims. Through the victorious Soviets the Bolsheviki placed themselves at the head of a country which occupies one sixth of the surface of the globe....
Let us now in closing attempt to ascertain the place of the October Revolution, not only in the history of Russia but in the history of the world. During the year 1917, in a period of eight months, two historical curves intersect. The February upheaval—that belated echo of the great struggles which had been carried out in past centuries on the territories of Holland, England, France, almost all of Continental Europe—takes its place in the series of bourgeois revolutions. The October Revolution proclaims and opens the domination of the proletariat. It was world capitalism that suffered its first great defeat on the territory of Russia. The chain broke at its weakest link. But it was the chain that broke, and not only the link.
Capitalism has outlived itself as a world system. It has ceased to fulfill its essential mission, the increase of human power and human wealth. Humanity cannot stand still at the level which it has reached. Only a powerful increase in productive force and a sound, planned, that is, Socialist organization of production and distribution can assure humanity—all humanity—of a decent standard of life and at the same time give it the precious feeling of freedom with respect to its own economy. Freedom in two senses—first of all, man will no longer be compelled to devote the greater part of his life to physical labor. Second, he will no longer be dependent on the laws of the market, that is, on the blind and dark forces which have grown up behind his back. He will build up his economy freely, that is, according to a plan, with compass in hand. This time it is a question of subjecting the anatomy of society to the X-ray through and through, of disclosing all its secrets and subjecting all its functions to the reason and the will of collective humanity. In this sense, Socialism must become a new step in the historical advance of mankind. Before our ancestor, who first armed himself with a stone axe, the whole of nature represented a conspiracy of secret and hostile forces. Since then, the natural sciences, hand in hand with practical technology, have illuminated nature down to its most secret depths. By means of electrical energy, the physicist passes judgment on the nucleus of the atom. The hour is not far when science will easily solve the task of the alchemists, and turn manure into gold and gold into manure. Where the demons and furies of nature once raged, now rules ever more courageously the industrial will of man.
But while he wrestled victoriously with nature, man built up his relations to other men blindly, almost like the bee or the ant. Belatedly and most undecidedly he approached the problems of human society. He began with religion, and passed on to politics. The Reformation represented the first victory of bourgeois individualism and rationalism in a domain which had been ruled by dead tradition. From the church, critical thought went on to the state. Born in the struggle with absolutism and the medieval estates, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people and of the rights of man and the citizen grew stronger. Thus arose the system of parliamentarism. Critical thought penetrated into the domain of government administration. The political rationalism of democracy was the highest achievement of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.
But between nature and the state stands economic life. Technology liberated man from the tyranny of the old elements—earth, water, fire and air—only to subject him to its own tyranny. Man ceased to be a slave to nature, to become a slave to the machine, and, still worse, a slave to supply and demand. The present world crisis testifies in especially tragic fashion how man, who dives to the bottom of the ocean, who rises up to the stratosphere, who converses on invisible waves with the Antipodes, how this proud and daring ruler of nature remains a slave to the blind forces of his own economy. The historical task of our epoch consists in replacing the uncontrolled play of the market by reasonable planning, in disciplining the forces of production, compelling them to work together in harmony and obediently serve the needs of mankind. Only on this new social basis will man be able to stretch his weary limbs and—every man and every woman, not only a selected few—become a full citizen in the realm of thought.
—“Leon Trotsky Defends the October Revolution” (Militant, 21 January 1933)
*************
Workers Vanguard No. 998
16 March 2012
TROTSKY
LENIN
Bourgeois Hypocrisy on Women’s Equality
(Quote of the Week)
When the U.S. launched its occupation of Afghanistan in 2001,
feminists joined government spokesmen in covering this imperialist depredation
with cynical platitudes concerning Afghan women who are horribly oppressed by
Islamic fundamentalist forces. Those forces were themselves recipients of U.S.
money and arms in the 1980s. Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin punctured such
bourgeois hypocrisy in an article marking the advances made toward women’s
emancipation in the two years following the October Revolution of 1917.
In words bourgeois democracy promises equality and freedom, but in
practice not a single bourgeois republic, even the more advanced,
has granted women (half the human race) and men complete equality in the eyes of
the law, or delivered women from dependence on and the oppression of the
male.
Bourgeois democracy is the democracy of pompous phrases, solemn
words, lavish promises and high-sounding slogans about freedom and
equality, but in practice all this cloaks the lack of freedom and the
inequality of women, the lack of freedom and the inequality for the working and
exploited people.
Soviet or socialist democracy sweeps away these pompous but false
words and declares ruthless war on the hypocrisy of “democrats,” landowners,
capitalists and farmers with bursting bins who are piling up wealth by selling
surplus grain to the starving workers at profiteering prices.
Down with this foul lie! There is no “equality,” nor can there be,
of oppressed and oppressor, exploited and exploiter. There is no real “freedom,”
nor can there be, so long as women are handicapped by men’s legal privileges, so
long as there is no freedom for the worker from the yoke of capital, no freedom
for the labouring peasant from the yoke of the capitalist, landowner and
merchant.
—V.I. Lenin, “Soviet Power and the Status of Women,” November 1919
***The
Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World
War II- From Deep In The Songbook-The Inkspots –Always…
…
it did not always start with sighs and meanings, start with golden age
thoughts, with forever, not by a longshot. It might have started like it did in
Doc’s Drugstore in old time North Adamsville (or name your drugstore, Rexall’s
, Smitty’s, People’s the setting is not what counts here, okay), started with
her playing a dreamy record on the jukebox at the soda fountain. (Why else
would otherwise healthy teenagers be at a damn drugstore, of all places.) And
him, him a nothing but love them and leave them Jimmy kind of swaying to the
tune, waiting to play his latest be-bop crazed song, you know, something one
could dance to, hell, not some waltz fox-trot thing butsomething one could jitter-bug to. And as his
song came up he asked her to dance. At first she refused, refused flat out
knowing he was a “fast” guy, a what did I call him, oh yeah, a love them and
leave them guy. Then he whispered something in her ear for a couple of minutes,
something that she would not divulge even fifty years later. And they danced,
and danced in sync, danced with meaning.
So
it started, started with that jitter-buggery, started with whatever he
whispered in her ear at Doc’s.And
everybody noticed, especially his corner boys, the boys who put their feet up
against the night wall at Harry’s Market, that he was thereafter always seen
with her, and with nobody else, no other girl. But those were not times to
reform one’s personal habits, those were not times to spent much time on such
things, not with a world being haunted by the night of the long knives and he,
he and those corner boys, he and those North Adamsville youth, and those of a
million North Adamsvilles when their number was called, had to put such things
on hold. But get this, get this if you can, as she saw him off at the North
Adamsville train station on his way to some foul, dank, sweaty troop ship, half
the guys getting seasick and not just Kansas no ocean guys either, to go lay
down his head in some watery grave if necessary, he swore, he swore that if he
made it back, he would finish what he started, would finish what he whispered
in her ear right Doc’s Drugstore that fateful afternoon…
**********
Peter
Paul Markin comment on this series:
Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it
meant to our parents or not, knew what sacred place it held in their youthful
hearts, Benny Goodman with and without Miss (Ms.) Peggy Lee, Harry James with
or without the orchestra, Duke Ellington with or without Mr. Johnny Hodges,
Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey with or without fanfare, Glenn Miller with or
without glasses, Miss (Ms.) Billie Holiday with or without the blues, personal
blues, Miss Lena Horne with or without stormy weather, Miss (Ms.) Margaret Whiting,
Mr. Vaughn Monroe with or without goalposts, Mr. Billy Eckstine, Mr. Frank
Sinatra with or without bobbysoxers, The Inkspots with, always with, that
spoken refrain, the Andrews Sisters with or without rum in their Coca-Cola, The
Dewdrops with or without whatever they were with or without, Mr. Cole Porter
with or without the boys, Mr. Irving Berlin with or without the flag, and Mr.
George Gershwin with or without his brother, is the music that went wafting
through the house of many of those of us who constitute the generation of ‘68.
Yes, the generation of ’68, baby-boomers, decidedly not what
Tom Brokaw dubbed rightly or wrongly “ the greatest generation,”decidedly not your parents’or grandparents’ (please, please do not say
great-grandparents’ even if it is true) generation. Those of us who came of
age, biological, political and social age kicking, screaming and full of the
post-war new age teenage angst and alienation in the age of Jack Kennedy’s
Camelot. Who were, some of us any way and I like to think the best of us,
driven by some makeshift dream, who, in the words of brother Bobby quotingfrom Alfred Lord Tennyson, were “seeking a
new world.”Those who took up the call
to action and slogged through that decade whether it was in civil rights/black
liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find
one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came down.
And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that
we searched for, desperately searched, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone. But
enough about us this series is about our immediate forbears (but please, please
not great grandparents) their uphill struggles to make their vision of the
newer world, to satisfy their hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and
the music that in their youth dreamed by
on cold winter nights or hot summer days.
This is emphatically the music of the generation that
survived the dust bowl all farms blown away, all land worthless, the bankers
taking whatever was left and the dusted crowd heading west with whatever was
movable, survived empty bowls wondering where the next meal would come from,
survived no sugar bowl street urchin hard times of the 1930s Great Depression,
the time of the madness, the time of the night-takers, the time of the long
knives. Building up those wants, name them, named those hungers on cold nights
against riverside fires, down in dusty arroyos, under forsaken bridges. Survived
god knows how by taking the nearest freight, some smoke and dreams freight,
Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, B&O, Illinois Central, Penn Central,
Empire State, Boston and Maine, or one of a million trunk lines to go out and
search for, well, search for…
Searching for something that was not triple- decker bodies,
three to a room sharing some scraggly blanket, an old worn out pillow for rest,
the faint smell of oatmeal, twenty days in a row oatmeal, oatmeal with.., being
cooked in the next room meaning no Pa work, meaning one jump, maybe not even
that ahead of the rent collector (the landlords do not dare come in person so
they hire the task out), meaning the sheriff and the streets are closing in.
Bodies, brothers and sisters, enough to lose count, piled high cold-water flat
high, that damn cold water splash signifying how low things have gotten, with a
common commode for the whole floor and brown-stained sink. Later moving down
the scale a rooming house room for the same number of bodies, window looking
out onto the air shaft, dark, dark with despair, the very, very faint odor of
oatmeal, who knows how many days in a row, from Ma’s make-shift hot plate on
its last legs.Hell, call it what it was
flop house stinking of perspiration and low-shelf whiskeys and wines. Others
had it worse, tumbled down shack, window pane-less, tarpaper siding, roof tiles
falling, a lean-to ready to fall to the first wind, the first red wind coming
out of the mountains and swooping down the hills and hollows, ready to fall to
the first downpour rain, washed away. Yes, get out on the open road and search
for the great promised American night that had been tattered by world events,
and greed.
Survived the Hoovervilles, the great cardboard, tin can
roof, slap-dash jerry-built camp explosions along rivers, down in ravines and
under railroad trestles. Tossed, hither and yon, about six million different
ways but it all came down to when the banks, yeah, the banks, the usual
suspects, robbed people of their shacks, their cottages, their farm houses. Robbed
them as an old-time balladeer, a free-wheeling, song-writing red, a commie, in
the days when in some quarters sailing under that banner was a badge of honor, said
at the time not with a gun but with a fountain pen, but still robbed them.
Survived the soup kitchens hungers, the gnawing can’t wait
in the endless waiting line for scrapes, dreaming of some by-gone steak or dish
of ice cream, and always that hunger, not the stomach hunger although that was
ever present, but the hunger that hurts a man, hurts his pride when he has to
stick his hand out, stick it out and not know why. Planning the fruitless day,
fruitless since he was born to work, took pride in work, planning around Sally
breakfasts don’t be late, six to nine, but with sermon and song attached,
mission stuff in heat-soaked rooms, men smelling of unwashed men, and drink.
Planning around city hall lunches, peanut butter sandwiches, slapped slap-dash
together with an apple, maybe. Worse, worse by far the Saint Vincent DePaul
suppers, soup, bread, some canned vegetable, something they called meat but was
in dispute, lukewarm coffee, had only, only if you could prove you were truly
destitute with a letter from some churchman and, in addition, under some
terrible penalty, that you had searched for work that day. A hard dollar, hard
dollar indeed.
Jesus, out of work for another day, and with three hungry
growing kids to feed, and a wife sickly, sick unto death of the not having he
thought, little work waiting for anybody that day, that day when all hell broke
loose and the economy tanked, at least that is what it said in the Globe (ditto New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times,
San Francisco Examiner if anybody was asking), said that there was too much
around, too much and he with nothing for those kids, nothing and he was too
proud to ask for some damn letter to give to those Vincent DePaul
hard-hearts.And that day not him, not
him yet, others, others who read more that the Globe (and the dittos)were
dreaming of that full head of steam day to come in places like big auto Flint, waterfront
Frisco town, rubber Akron, hog butcher to the world prairie Chicago, hell, even
in boondock trucker Minneapolis, a day when the score would get evened, evened
a little, and a man could hold his head up a little, could at least bring bread
to those three hungry growing kids who didn’t understand the finer point of
world economics just hunger. Until then though he is left shifting the
scroungings of the trash piles of the urban glut, the discard of the haves, the
have nots throw nothing away, and on other horizons the brethren curse the
rural fallow fields, curse the banks, and curse the weather, but curse most of
all having to pack up and head, head anyway, anywhere but the here, and search,
search like that brother on that urban glut pile for a way to curb that gnawing hungry that cried out in the night-want, want
that is all.
Survived too the look, the look of those, the what did FDR
(Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the young, or forgetful) call them, oh yeah, the
economic royalists, today’s 1%, the rack-renters, the coupon-clippers, the
guys, as one of their number said, who hired one half of the working class to
fight the other, who in their fortified towers, their Xanadus, their Dearborns,
their Beacon Hills, their Upper East Sides, their Nob Hills, and a few other
spots, tittered that not everybody was built to survive to be the fittest. That
crowd, and let’s name names, a few anyway, Ford, General Motors, Firestone,
U.S. Steel, fought tooth and nail against the little guy trying to break bread.
Fought that brother too out pounding the mean streets to proud to ask for a
letter, Jesus, a letter for some leftover food, before he got “religion” about
what was what in the land of “milk and honey.”Wreaked havoc on that farmer out in the dust bowl not travelling some
road, some road west knowing that the East was barred up, egging him on to some
hot dusty bracero labor filed picking, maybe “hire” him on as a scab against
those uppity city boys. Yes, fought every guy trying to get out from under that
cardboard, tar paper, windowless soup kitchen world along with a hell of a lot
of comrades, yes, comrades, not Russkie comrades although reds were thick in
those battles, took their lumps in Frisco, Flint, Akron and Minneapolis, hell,
any place where a righteous people were rising, kindred in the struggle to put that
survival of the fittest on the back-burner of human history. To stand up and take collective action to put things right,
hell, made the bosses cry bloody murder when they shut down their factories,
shut them down cold until some puny penny justice was eked out. And maybe just maybe
make that poor unknowingly mean-street walking city brother and that sweated
farm boy thing twice about helping those Mayfair swells.
Survived but took time out too, time out if young perhaps,
as if such things were embedded in some secret teen coda, to stretch those
legs, to flash those legs, to sway those hips, to flash the new moves not, I
repeat, not the ones learned at sixth grade Miss Prissy’s Saturday dance
classes but the ones that every mother, every girl mother, warned her Susie
against, to a new sound coming out of the mist, coming to take the sting out of
the want years nights, and the brewing night of the long knives. Coming out of
New York, always New York then, Minton’s, Jimmy’s, some other uptown
clubs,Chicago, Chicago of the big
horns and that stream, that black stream, heading north, following the northern
star, again, for jobs and to get the hell away from one Mister James Crow, from
Detroit, with blessed Detroit Slim and automobile sounds, and Kansas City, the
Missouri K.C. okay, the Bird land hatchery, the Prez’s big sexy sax blow home.
Jesus no wonder that madman Hitler banned it, along with dreams.
The sound of swing replacing the dour Brother, Can You Spare a Dime, no banishing it, casting it out with
soup lines, second-hand clothes (passed down from out the door brothers and
sisters), and from hunger looks, because after all it did not mean a thing,
could not possibly place you anywhere else but squareville (my term, not their’s),
if you did not have that swing. To be as one with jitter-buggery if there was
(is) such a word. And swing a fade echo of the cool age be-bop that was
a-borning, making everybody reach for that high white note floating out of
Minton’s, Big Bill’s Jimmie’s, hell, even Olde Saco’s Starlight Ballroom before
it breezed out in the ocean air night, crashed into the tepid sea. Yeah.
Survived, as if there was no time to breathe in new fresh
airs, to slog through the time of the gun in World War II, a time when the
night-takers, those who craved the revenge night of the long knives took giant
steps in Europe and Asia trying to make that same little guy, Brit, Frenchie,
Chinaman, Filipino, God’s American, and half the races and nationalities on
this good green earth cry uncle and buckle under, take it, take their stuff
without a squawk. And so after Pearl, after that other shoe dropped on a candid
world Johnnie, Jimmie, Paulie, Benny too, all the guys from the old
neighborhood, the guys who hung around Doc’s hands in their pockets, guys from
the wheat fields fresh from some Saturday night dance, all shy and with
calloused and, guys from the coal slags, down in hill country, full of home
liquor, blackened fingernails and Saturday night front porch fiddlings wound up
carrying an M-I on the shoulder in Europe or the Pacific. Susie, Laura, Betty,
and dark-haired Rebecca too waiting at home hoping to high heaven that some
wayward gun had not carried off sweetheart Johnnie, Jimmy, Paulie, or young
Benny.Jesus not young Benny.
Survived the endless lines of boys heading off East and
West, some who could hardly wait to get to the recruiting office others, well,
other hanging back, hanging back just a little to think things over, and still
others head over heels they were exempt, 4-F, bad feet, you see. All, all
except that last crew who got to sit a home with Susie, Laura, Betty and even
odd-ball Rebecca waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the ships to sail or
planes to fly, hanging in some corner drugstore, Doc’s, Rexall, name your
drugstore name, sitting two by two at the soda fountain playing that newly
installed jukebox until the nickels ran out. Listened to funny banana songs,
rum and coca cola songs, siting under the apple tree songs to get a minute’s
reprieve from thoughts of the journey ahead.
Listened too to dreamy, sentimental songs, songs about
faraway places, about keeping lamp- lights burning, about making a better world
out of the fire and brimstone sacrifice before them, about Johnnie, Jimmie and
the gang actually returning, returning whole, and putting a big dent in their
dreams, hell, about maybe the damn wars would be over sooner rather than later.
Listened and as old Doc, or some woe-begotten soda jerk, some high school kid,
told them to leave he was closing up, they made for the beach, if near a beach,
the pond, the back forty, the hills, or whatever passed for a lovers’ lane in
their locale and with the echo of those songs as background, well, what do you
think they did, why do you think they call us baby-boomers.
The music, this survival music, wafted through the air
coming from a large console radio, the prized possession amid the squalor of
second-hand sofas and woe-begotten stuffed pillows smelling of mothballs,
centered in the small square living room of my growing up house. My broken
down, needs a new roof, random shingles on the ground as proof, cracked windows
stuffed with paper and held with masking tape, no proof needed, overgrown lawn
of a shack of a house too small, much too small, for four growing boys and two
parents house.
That shack of a house surrounded by other houses, shack
houses, too small to fit Irish Catholic- sized families with stony-eyed dreams
but which represented in some frankly weird form (but what knew I of such weirdness
then I just cried out in some fit of angst) the great good desire of those
warriors and their war brides to latch onto a piece of golden age America. And
take their struggle survival music with them as if to validate their sweet
memory dreams. That radio, as if a lifesaver, literally, tuned to local station
WDJA in North Adamsville, the memory station for those World War II warriors
and their war brides, those who made it back. Some wizard station manager
knowing his, probably his in those days, demographics, spinned those 1940s
platters exclusively, as well as aimed the ubiquitous advertisement at that
crowd. Cars, sofas, beds, shaving gear, soap, department store sales, all the
basics of the growing families spawned (nice, huh) by those warriors and
brides.
My harried mother, harried by the prospects of the day with
four growing boys, maybe bewildered is a better expression, turning the radio
on to start her day, hoping that Paper
Dolls, I’ll Get By, or dreamy Tangerine,
their songs, their spring youth meeting at some USO dance songs and so
embedded, or so it seemed as she hummed away the day, used the music as
background on her appointed household rounds. The stuff, that piano/drum-driven
stuff with some torch-singer bleeding all over the floor with her loves, her
hurts, and her wanderings, her waitings, they should have called it the waiting
generation, drove me crazy then, mush stuff at a time when I was craving the
big break-out rock and roll sounds I kept hearing every time I went and played
the jukebox at Doc’s Drugstore over on Walker Street down near the beach. As
far as I know Doc, knowing his demographics as well, did not, I repeat, did
not, stock that stuff that, uh, mush for his rock-crazed after school soda
fountain crowd, probably stocked nothing, mercifully before about 1955. Funny
thing though while I am still a child of rock and roll (blues too) this
so-called mushy stuff sounds pretty good to these ears now long after my
parents and those who performed this music have passed on. Go figure.
********
Always
Songwriters: WADDELL,
LAWRENCE EL GRECCO/ALLEN, JEFFREY STEPHEN
{this intro is not used in the ella version;
it's included here for completeness}
Intro:
Everything went wrong,
And the whole day long
I'd feel so blue.
For the longest while
I'd forget to smile,
Then I met you.
Now that my blue days have passed,
Now that I've found you at last -
{end intro}
I'll be loving you always
With a love that's true always.
When the things you've planned
Need a helping hand,
I will understand always.
Always.
Days may not be fair always,
That's when I'll be there always.
Not for just an hour,
Not for just a day,
Not for just a year,
But always.
I'll be loving you, oh always
With a love that's true always.
When the things you've planned
Need a helping hand,
I will understand always.
Always.
Days may not be fair always,
That's when I'll be there always.
Not for just an hour,
Not for just a day,
Not for just a year,
But always.
Not for just an hour,
Not for just a day,
Not for just a year,
But always.
