From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 96^th Anniversary Of The Russian October Revolution-The Leninist Press and Revolutionary Continuity


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. 1000	13 April 2012

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Leninist Press and Revolutionary Continuity

(Quote of the Week)

For the 1,000th issue of Workers Vanguard, we print below excerpts from a 1958 speech by James P. Cannon, historic leader of American Trotskyism, on the role of the Leninist press in propagating revolutionary Marxism and cohering the cadres of the proletarian vanguard. Delivered on the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Militant, newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Cannon’s talk also marked the anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. In the early 1960s, the Revolutionary Tendency, forerunner of the Spartacist League/U.S., was formed inside the SWP to fight against the party majority’s increasing abandonment of the Trotskyist program. The SL, founded in 1966, began publishing WV five years later. We salute the dedication of comrades who have helped produce and distribute our press over the decades and go forward in the fight for new October Revolutions.

We did not pretend, when we started The Militant, that we were producing a great mass paper, simplifying everything to the lowest common denominator. On the contrary, our paper was devoted to the education and reeducation of the vanguard militants of the Communist movement. It was primarily a cadre paper, the educator and guide of the cadres. The people who hold the party together and keep it going in all kinds of weather. The people who never quit, who never float down the stream like dead fish, but swim against the current no matter how rough it may be. That is the meaning of “militant,” and that was the meaning of the paper we started to represent such people.

We had learned a good deal by then, although we have learned a great deal more since, and were applying something from Lenin’s program for Iskra. Many of you have read in his great pamphlet, What Is To Be Done?, what he considered to be the role of a national paper. As Lenin conceived it, the role of a revolutionary paper is to function not merely as an agitator dealing with protest issues, not merely as a propagandist concerned with educating people and dealing with questions of theory and politics, but as the best organizer of the party....

Old Frederick Engels, in the hard and bitter time of the movement of his day, wrote to an old comrade, an old guard of the Communist League, referring to the difficulties and troubles they were in and to the good comrades who had fallen by the wayside. And the old comrade asked, “What shall we do?” And Engels answered, “What can we do? We stand in the breach. That’s what we are here for.”

—James P. Cannon, “Revolutionary Journalism,” November 1958, reprinted in Speeches for Socialism (Pathfinder, 1971)

 

From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 96^th Anniversary Of The Russian October Revolution- Those Who Labor Must Rule!

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. 999 30 March 2012 TROTSKY LENIN Those Who Labor Must Rule! (Quote of the Week) In the midst of a hard-fought 1936-37 West Coast maritime strike, Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon emphasized that labor can advance its cause only by relying on its own class strength and solidarity against the capitalist class enemy. Ben Hanford, who is referred to in the selection below, was a leader of the U.S. Socialist Party in the early 20th century. A good deal is said about strike “strategy”—and that has its uses within certain clearly defined limits—but when you get down to cases this strike, like every other strike, is simply a bullheaded struggle between two forces whose interests are in constant and irreconcilable conflict. The partnership of capital and labor is a lie. The immediate issue in every case is decided by the relative strength of the opposing forces at the moment. The only strike strategy worth a tinker’s dam is the strategy that begins with this conception. The problem of the strikers consists in estimating what their strength is, and then mobilizing it in full force and pressing against the enemy until something cracks and a settlement is achieved in consonance with the relation of forces between the unions and the organizations of the bosses. That’s all there is to strike strategy. You cannot maneuver over the head of the class struggle. We pass over entirely the question of who is “right” in the maritime strike, for we believe with Ben Hanford that the working class is always right. From our point of view the workers have a perfect right to the full control of industry and all the fruits thereof. The employers on the other hand—not merely the shipowners; all bosses are alike—would like a situation where the workers are deprived of all organization and all say about their work and are paid only enough to keep body and soul together and raise a new generation of slaves to take their places when they drop in their tracks. Any settlement in between these two extremes is only a temporary truce and the nature of such a settlement is decided by power; “justice” has nothing to do with it. The workers will not have justice until they take over the world. The demands of the workers in a strike are to be judged solely by their timeliness and the way they fit realistically into the actual relation of forces at the time. —James P. Cannon, “The Maritime Strike” (November 1936), reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator (1958)

 

***A Note On The Profile Of The Manager Of The Blog-Tales From Old North Quincy

 

Click below to link to the Tales From Old North Quincy blog

http://talesfromoldnorthquincy.blogspot.com/

Peter Paul Markin, Class Of 1964, North Adamsville High School comment (ex-classmates can figure out that despite the light dust-up change of names and places mentioned this is about the old town):

Here are the background facts of my life that are important to understanding the “why” of the creation of this blog and the reason that I can speak with some authority about the old pre- 1964 North Adamsville, at least to tell some tales about it (the town proper named Adamsville, after one, or maybe both, of the two United States Presidents who hailed from there, and set some kind of austere tone never quite vanquished). My maternal grandparents, Anna (nee O’Brien) and Daniel Riley lived on Young Street over across from the Welcome Young Field of blessed childhood memories of steamy summers under shaded elm trees and big time Fourth of July celebrations, almost all of their married lives, and various members of this branch of the Riley family have lived in North Quincy up until very recently. My grandfather was actually born in that house on Young Street and my grandmother elsewhere in Quincy so the roots, the roots after those first arrivals from the old country in Southie, are deep. As far as I have been able to trace back one or the other families goes back the Irish “famine ship” times in the late 1840s, although that information in pre-"green card" times is sketchy at best.

Needless to say my late mother, Delores, NAHS Class of 1943, and her siblings were born in Adamsville (and mainly stayed) as well. My mother, during World War II, fell in love with and married a Marine, the late Prescott Markin, who had been based at the Hingham Depot (now a shopping mall strip on the road to Nantasket Beach, also of blessed childhood memories, and who hailed from coal country down in Hazard, Kentucky. They had four boys, Prescott, Junior, the late Kevin, the late Frederick, and me, all born close together right after the war, classic post-war baby-boomers, all coming of age in the 1960s, all formed by that experience, not always for the better.

We four boys all went through the Adamsville school system, although I will just give my own public school resume here. I went to the Adamsville South Elementary School down in the Adamsville housing project, a place that we wound up at after some time on Young Street. I started from the first grade there and then is where I came of age, graduating in 1958. After a brief period at the Adamsville South Junior High (now Middle School) we moved back to North Adamsville over to Maple Street near the old Duggan Brothers Garage. I went to, and graduated from, the North Adamsville Junior High (ditto now Middle School) in 1960. I spent all four years of high school at North, graduating in 1964.

That last date is important to the sense of purposes of this blog as well. Events, places, and people described since that time mentioned in my various writings are a result of current reflections, hearsay, a few trips back, or some other form of indirect recollection because after that year I, effectively, no longer could be described as a North Adams-ite (a misbegotten son of Adam?). Oh, except, of course, that tiny little nagging problem of some forty plus years later finding that I am fiercely driven by some “inner demons” deep in my soul to feverishly write some tales of old North Adamsville, my old hometown, now too of blessed memory.

***Out In The Film Noir Night-With Robert Mitchum’s“Angel Face” In Mind -Take Two

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

...hey, don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers about that Jeffers murder/ suicide, the one that happened a while back, the one where the wife, the one with the dough, big dough, backed up their Jaguar in the driveway of their country estate at about eighty miles an hour and had them tumble down the hilly embankment and done. They, the newspapers, or their reporters, or somebody got a lot of it all balled up, all balled up big time. I know, I sure in hell know, the real scoop, except for the end which they, the newspapers got right. Dead right. See Frank Jeffers had been in my place, my little diner, Sammy’s, located just on the outskirts of Santa Barbara that morning when it happened.

Frank wanted to see what his old Bakersfield corner boy neighborhood and army buddy, me, Sam James, had to say about his predicament, about whether he should pull up stakes and leave her, leave Diane, leave Diane Tremont Jeffers and the dough and cars, or just go back and face some kind of life with her. Even as a kid, even back in front of Johnny’s Variety where we held up the wall on steamy summer nights (and cooler winter nights too), committed a few larcenies and other misdemeanors, strictly small time stuff he would seek my advice on his personal problems. Hell, who am I kidding, girl problems, everything else was easy to work out. Frank Jeffers was skirt-addled even then. Same thing in the Army, he would be cool, very cool under fire, under gun fire, but was like some raggedly schoolboy once we were on liberty, once he had to face girl fire.

I said to Frank from what I knew, from what I read, and from being at the trial every day until they were freed, that she was poison, poison worse than his old flame from the neighborhood, Mary, who almost got him killed when some bozo she was freshly interested in, interested in after Frank did, or didn’t, do something, decided that he wanted her for his exclusive company and was ready to put Frank six feet under to enforce it. And Mary, well, Mary just laughed that blonde bimbo laugh of hers all thrilled and maybe turned on too that he-men were fighting over her. Christ, although that was child’s play compared to his later troubles. Naturally Frank being Frank, didn’t want to listen to my advice, as he could never stop chasing some skirt until he tumbled over, sorry Frank, but that was the deal. Let me tell you what he told me and then maybe you can see how he had to go back, go back and face the music, face the fate his whole benighted life had prepared for him.

He had been running, well half- running a garage, Jimmy’s Esso (his partner and a guy he, we, also knew from the service although not a Bakersfield corner boy), just a few miles from Santa Barbara on the other side of town from here, near Route 101, when the call came in that one of the Tremont cars had blown a gasket or something and needed to be either fixed on the spot, or towed to Jimmy’s and worked on. So Frank, since he was the ace mechanic and the tow-truck driver as well (Jimmy, was strictly a gas jockey, but a gas jockey who had the start-up dough and was the brains of the operation, always figuring ways to expand the business, bring in new customers, while Frank worried, worried about some dame what else), trudged up the hills to the Tremont Estate. A great big place, kind of secluded up a winding road, and like I said up in the hills, those fatal hills. He got there, maybe spent an hour fixing this big old Bentley, a beauty, the English sure knew how to make high-end cars when wanted to, and was ready to leave when she, Diane she, came out of the house and started asking questions about cars, and stuff like that. Then she showed him her Jaguar and asked him if he could check something. Now this was no ordinary Jag, but a specially built job, build just for her. He was hooked, hooked not just on the car but her, something about her manner, her angel face manner, was intriguing , something a little different.

Maybe like with all women it was her scent, that jasmine stuff she wore, and maybe she was kind of young and fresh and naïve, see she was only twenty and that won him over. Maybe after corner boy girls, and whore house floozies he was ready to take a step up. The car too, for sure, since he mainly handled nothing more exotic than some souped-up hot rod. But mainly her, mainly that angel face. So he took the ticket and took the ride. See too He had had a tough stretch of luck with women since he got back from the service, a bunch of round heels and two, maybe three-timers, especially the last one, a blonde as usual, who took him for a ride, and then blew town with his dough, his car, and some guy named Marty. So maybe it was that Diane was a brunette and he was looking to change his luck. Maybe he should have stuck to blondes, harmless blondes who just took your dough and at least left you breathing.

This Tremont set-up by the way was all the step-mother’s dough, Dora, Dora Moore’s, not hers, not hers directly. See her own mother had died young, and her father, a novelist, a big time British novelist, David Tremont, you might have read on of his books, Captain Smiley’s Revenge, or something like that, had married into the Moore fortune, stocks and bonds stuff. Diane was close, too close to the father if you know what I mean (she told Frank one night some intimate stuff about her and the father but he thought it was just so much trying to make him jealous, or some weird fantasy like a lot of women have, or something, kid’s stuff) and hated the step-mother with a passion, a deadly passion as it turned out.

She kept needling Frank endlessly about how bad the step-mother was, and went on and on about it. About some wicked witch of the west idea until Frank started wising up that his sweet Diane, left to her own devices, was not above murdering old Dora. Frank, maybe a fool in love choices was no fool when it came to where he might fit in the set-up and so he decided a twenty- year old brunette was nice but not nice enough to take the big step-off for. And so he bowed out, or tried to, but before he could do so Diane carried out her little scheme, her little scheme of fooling around with Dora’s old Bentley steering wheel. What Diane didn’t know, couldn’t have figured on, was that the day Dora was to drive that beast, drive it accelerator pedal to the floor down that fateful embankment that her father would be in the car too.

Diane, Frank did say, was full of remorse after that happened, after the father took the big tumble and she even tried to take the rap alone for the murders. But see Frank, ace auto mechanic Frank, no dough Frank, plenty of dough Diane (left by that step-mother in her will since she didn’t trust old David to not run out and spend it foolishly), was custom-built to fit the frame for doing the deed, or helping. So Diane’s very expensive lawyer built the case to the cops, and later to the jury, that Frank was up to his neck in the thing. And the outward facts seemed to fit. The only way out of those murders, the big fall-off, as you know from the big newspaper splash at the time was that they got married, married enough, to make the whole set-up just some crime of passion, if anything. So, yah, they got off, runaway jury got off the big step-off, murder one.

Frank though had had enough; he didn’t want to be looking for angel faces behind his back for the rest of his life. He wanted to get to Mexico, get somewhere far from her. He went back to the Tremont place one night to pack his bags and give his leaving speech. Then she sprang the car, dough, and maybe sponsoring a racing team which he would lead on him (Frank was a very promising auto racer before we headed to those Pacific island s and atolls to wipe up the Japs). He said then, maybe jasmine scent said too always a factor when she was within ten feet of him, that he would think it over. That next morning is when he told me the skinny, and you already know my opinion. What you didn’t know, and it never came out, was that Frank bought my argument, or maybe he just added mine to his already made up mind, and was going back to tell Diane nix and that he was heading south, heading south alone. According to Johnny, one of the house servants who overheard it all, and who told me the real story later when I went to check out what the hell happened, they had a row over him going. A big row, no holds barred. Then she offered him a ride to the bus station. The rest you do know. RIP Frank, RIP old buddy.

***"Man and Superman"-The Immoralist, Andre Gide

 

BOOK REVIEW

The Immoralist, Andre Gide, Penguin Classics, New York, 2001

Andre Gide was always justly famous for writing tight little novels that presented unusual moral dilemmas that did not, as in real life, necessarily get resolved or resolved in a way that one would think. Reflecting at bottom a certain historically pessimistic understanding of the world, and the capacity of its denizens to finally act as a conscious collective mass. That stance also reflected a very real reaction, not all of it mere show, mere café chatter about the solitary nature of modern humankind’s ability to cope with a system that it build and for which some of its member felt an urge to flee. To seek one’s own good in the world and not be troubled by larger perspectives if they entered into the equation at all.

That is the case here with one of his early and perhaps most famous offerings, The Immoralist, a very good title to describe the dilemma to be related. The story line centers on the bedraggled life of a consummate French bourgeois scholar who went through a personal crisis after the death of his father and his unsought `shot gun' marriage in the early part of the 20th century. Already, at that early date, that the explosions to come , wars and revolutions, would not find everybody up to the task of bringing out of the small confines of their singular existence.  The newlyweds travelled to various exotic outposts of French imperialism, including the hot and dry Northern African coast.

Along the way while staying that exotic North African locale our protagonist became sick with a life-threatening illness but by an act of will, and the extraordinary care of his new wife, overcame that crisis. That event and his reaction to the closeness of death, or maybe just another in a line of hubristic acts drives the rest of the action. As a result of her loving efforts his wife in turn got sick (moreover during her pregnancy). He is decidedly inattentive to her illness, to the extent of it, to the lie-threatening nature of it. The scholar, in the final analysis, permits her to die by his self-centered actions.  

After his own illness, and as a result of overcoming that close experience the scholar began, little by little, to believe, to sense  that he is `superman' a la Nietzsche, that he is a chosen one,  and therefore consciously or unconsciously becomes the agent of his wife's descend into greater illness and eventually death. Quite a dilemma, to be sure, but he shed no tears over it. The real question here is whether, in a hard and unforgiving world where each person is his or her own agent, that it was his duty to thoughtfully care for his wife or whether his need to take actions to `understand' himself was paramount.

Some other moral questions concerning his role as landlord in his inherited rural estate pop up along the way, as well. Also, just a hint of homosexual tension in his dealings with the young Arab boys in the neighborhood hovers in the background. This is a subject that then was almost always covered in discreet language so it is hard to tell the full extent of the attraction, the physical consummation part. And whether he did anything about it. This is a question that concerned Gide personally, as well so he may have been working through some of his own concerns in novel form.

 

This theme of one’s responsibility in the world (and the sub-theme of homosexuality) and the book itself at the start of the 20th century may have been somewhat scandalous but reading it after some of the harrowing events done by humankind in the last century has cut deeply into the impact that it was intended to have. Still it is a great book and a quick read. Any lessons to be drawn about the dark side of human nature, as it has evolved thus far, take a lot longer to fathom.

***Songs To While The Time By- The Roots Is The Toots- Van Morrison’s Into The Mystic…

… and for the tenth time he (or she, provide your own pronoun) worried himself sick, worried that she would not be there when he got back, not out of spite, not out of hubris (what did she know of hubris, and of gods, or Greeks for that matter) but just that she was like the wind, had come in like the wind. Had come in all flowing reddish hair (reddish brown she called it), peasant dress, cowboy boots (or whatever you called the ones with the pointed toes) and took a fancy (quaint, her term) to him. And he, delighted, delighted in that misty foghorn Frisco night back when all things were possible, when everybody, everyone, swore they were going to create that newer world they had been jabbering about for so long, had delighted in her breeze, her coming in like the wind. But now, now the bloom had wilted some, and he had the frets, and should he call her before the ship came into port or just go to her place. Yeah, he fretted…

A YouTube clip to give some flavor to this subject.

Over the past several years I have been running an occasional series in this space of songs, mainly political protest songs, you know The Internationale, Union Maid, Which Side Are You On, Viva La Quince Brigada, Universal Soldier, and such entitled Songs To While The Class Struggle By. This series which could include some protest songs as well is centered on roots music as it has come down the ages and formed the core of the American songbook. You will find the odd, the eccentric, the forebears of later musical trends, and the just plain amusing here. Listen up-Peter Paul Markin

"Into The Mystic"

We were born before the wind
Also younger than the sun
Ere the bonnie boat was won as we sailed into the mystic
Hark, now hear the sailors cry
Smell the sea and feel the sky
Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic

And when that fog horn blows I will be coming home
And when the fog horn blows I want to hear it
I don't have to fear it

And I want to rock your gypsy soul
Just like way back in the days of old
And magnificently we will flow into the mystic

When that fog horn blows you know I will be coming home
And when that fog horn whistle blows I got to hear it
I don't have to fear it

And I want to rock your gypsy soul
Just like way back in the days of old
And together we will flow into the mystic
Come on girl...

Too late to stop now...

 

From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin-Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night- The Songs of Tom Waits-Take Four

A YouTube film clip of Tom Waits performing Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night

If you, as I do, every once in a while, every once in a while when the norms of the bourgeois-driven push (okay, okay maybe going back further to Calvinist Puritan avenging angels times with John Winthrop and the Mayflowerboys) to get ahead in this wicked old world leaving you wondering where you fell off the edge, that edge city where youthful dreams were dreamt and you took risks, landed on your ass more than a few time but just picked yourself up and dusted your knees off and done. Yeah so if you are wondering then what, have been pushed off your saintly wheels, yeah, pushed you off your sainted wheels, and got you into some angst-ridden despair about where you went off that angel-driven dream of your youth, not faded, tattered, and half- forgotten(but only half, only half, sisters and brothers), and need some solace, need to reach back to roots, reach back to the primeval forest maybe, put the headphones on some Tom Waits platter (oops, CD, YouTube selection, etc.- “platter” refers to a, ah, record, vinyl, put on a record player, hell, look it up in Wikipedia, okay).

If the norms of don’t rock the boat, the norms of keep your head down, keeping your head down being an art form now with appropriate ritual, and excuse, because, well, because you don’t want to wind up like them (and fill in the blank of the “them,” usually dark, speaking some unknown language maybe gibberish for all you know, moving furtively and stealthily against your good night) drive you crazy and you need, desperately need, to listen to those ancient drum beats, those primeval forest leave droppings maybe, that old time embedded DNA coda long lost to, oh yes, civilization, to some civilizing mission (think of that Mayflowergang), that spoke of the better angels of your nature when those angel dreams, half-forgotten but only half remember, ruled your days. Turn up the volume another notch or two on that Tom Waits selection, maybe Jersey Girl or Brother, Can You Spare A Dime (can you?), Hold On, or Gunn Street Girl.

If you need to hear things, just to sort things out, just to recapture that angel-edge, recapture the time when you did no fear, you and everybody else sisters and brothers, that thing you build and from which you now should run, recapture that child-like wonder that made you come alive, made you think about from whence you came and how a turn, a slight turn this way or that, could have landed you on the wrong side, sort things out about boozers (and about titantic booze-crazed struggles in barrooms, on beaches, in the back seats of cars, lost in the mist of time down some crazed midnight, hell, four in the morning, penniless, cab fare-less night), losers (those who have lost their way, gotten it taken away like some maiden virginity, those who never had anything but lost, not those who never had a way to be lost), dopesters inhaling, in solidarity hotel rooms among junkie brethren, gathering a needle and spoon in some subterranean dank cellar, down in dark alleys jack-rolling some poor stiff out of his room rent for kicks, out in nighttime canyons flame blaring off the walls, the seven seas of chemical dust, mainly blotter, maybe peyote if that earth angel connection comes through, creating vision of long lost tribes trying, trying like hell, to get“connected,” connected in the campfire shadow night), hipsters (all dressed in black, mary mack dressed in black, speeding, speaking be-bop this and be-bop that to stay in fashion, hustling, always hustle, maybe pimping some street urchin, maybe cracking some guy’s head to create a “new world order” of the malignant, always moving), fallen sisters (sisters of mercy, sisters who need mercy, sisters who were mercifully made fallen in some mad dash night, merciful sister feed me, feed me good), midnight sifters (lifting in no particular order hubcaps, tires, wrenches, jacks, an occasional gem, some cheap jewelry in wrong neighborhoods, some paintings or whatever is not saleable left in some sneak back alley, it is the sifting that counts), grifters (hey, buddy watch this, now you see it, now you don’t, now you don’t see your long gone John dough, and Mister three card monte long gone too ), drifters (here today gone tomorrow with or without dough, to Winnemucca, Ogden, Fresno, Frisco town, name your town, name your poison and the great big blue seas washing you clean out into the Japans ), the driftless (cramped into one room hovels, shelters, seedy rooming houses afraid to stay in-doors or to go outside, afraid of the “them”too, afraid to be washed clean, angel clean), and small-time grafters (the ten-percent guys, failed insurance men, repo artists, bounty hunters, press agents, personal trainers, need I go on). You know where to look, right.

If you need to be refreshed on the subject of hoboes, bums, tramps (and remind me sometime to draw the distinction, the very real and acknowledged distinction between those three afore –mentioned classes of brethren once told to me by a forlorn grand master hobo, a guy down on his luck moving downward to bum), out in the railroad jungles in some Los Angeles ravine, some Gallup trestle, some Hoboken broken down pier, the fallen (fallen outside the gates of Eden, or, hell, inside too), those who want to fall (and let god figure out who made who fall, okay), Spanish Johnnies (slicked back black hair, tee shirt, shiv, cigarette butt hanging from a parted lip, belt buckle ready for action, leering, leering at that girl over there, maybe your girl but watch out for that shiv, the bastard), stale cigarette butts (from Spanish Johnnie and all the johnnies, Camels, Luckies, no filters, no way), whiskey-soaked barroom floors (and whiskey-soaked drunks to mop the damn place up, for drinks and donuts, maybe just for the drinks), loners (jesus, books, big academic books with great pedigrees could be written on that subject so let’s just pass by), the lonely (ditto loners), sad sacks (kindred, one hundred times kindred to the loners and the lonely but not worthy of study, academic study anyway), the sad (encompassing all of the above) and others at the margins of society, the whole fellahin world, then Tom Waits is your stop.

Tom Waits is, frankly, an acquired taste, one listen will not do, one song will not do, but listen to a whole record (CD okay) and you won’t want to turn the thing off, high praise in anyone’s book, so a taste well worth acquiring as he storms heaven in words, in thought-out words, in cribbed, cramped, crumbled words, to express the pain, angst and anguish of modern living, yes, modern living, looking for busted black-hearted angels (who left him short one night in some unnamed, maybe nameless gin mill), for girls with Monroe hips (swaying wickedly in the dead air night, and flaming desire, hell lust, getting kicked out of proper small town hells (descendants of those aforementioned Mayflowerboys, get real, and left for dead with cigar wrapping rings, for the desperate out in forsaken woods who need to hold to something, and for all the misbegotten.

Tom Waits gives voice in song, a big task, to the kind of characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). The, frankly, white trash Dove Linkhorns of the world, genetically broken before they begin, broken before they hit these shores, having been chased out, cast out of Europe, or some such place. In short, the people who do not make revolutions, those revolutions we keep hearing and reading about, the wretched of the earth and their kin, far from it, but those who surely, and desperately could use one. If, additionally, you need a primordial grizzled gravelly voice to attune your ear and occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Finally, if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother, keep looking.

Veterans For Peace: Veterans Day Parade and Rally When: Monday, November 11, 2013, 12:30 pm Where: Charles St. and Beacon St. • Boston Attention Peace Activists Please Join Veterans For Peace and our “Outhouse House Band” The Leftist Marching Band for Armistice / Veterans Day for PeaceNovember 11, 2013 Parade & Faneuil Hall Rally Veterans for Peace will once again proudly walk behind the street sweepers in the Veterans Day Parade in Boston. Please join us as we show our opposition to the on-going war in Afghanistan and our undeclared Drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia More information to follow We will gather at 12:30 on the corner of Charles and Beacon Streets. 1st Parade steps off at 1:00 pm – our parade will follow Our Armistice / Veterans Day for Peace Parade will follow the first parade which steps off at 1:00 pm on the corner of Boylston and Tremont Street and continue along the Boston Common. Our parade then will weave it’s way to Faneuil Hall for the Armistice / Veterans Day for Peace event. United for Justice with Peace is a coalition of peace and justice organizations and community peace groups in the Greater Boston region. The UJP Coalition, formed after September 11th, seeks global peace through social and economic justice. Help us continue to do this critical work! Make a donation to UJP today.

An appeal to donate from Jill Stein and Matt Gonzales to support the candidacies of Kshama Sawant and Ty Moore Jill Stein was the 2012 Green Party nominee for President of the United States. Matt Gonzales knows how to challenge the Democratic Party's establishment. In 2003 he ran for mayor in San Francisco and in 2008 he became Ralph Nader's running mate for vice president of the U.S. A CALL TO ACTION IN SUPPORT OF TWO INDEPENDENT CANDIDATES As the American public is confronted with the latest example of two-party dysfunction, exemplified by the current government shutdown, two candidates running in local municipal races, in two different cities, pose an opportunity for the Left to govern and show the American people what we can accomplish when given a chance. Both candidates self-identify as socialists and both are running unabashed left/progressive campaigns. They are serious candidates and we ask that all Independents, Greens, Libertarians, and others interested in forging a wider discourse in American politics consider financially supporting them. We believe that their success will ultimately bode well for the emergence of a multi-party state this country desperately needs. The two candidates, Kshama Sawant in Seattle and Ty Moore in Minneapolis, are already supported by unique coalitions that include Green Party, Socialists, Independents and break-away unions that are frustrated with current political leadership. Ty is backed by the SEIU Minnesota State Council, representing over 30,000 workers. Kshama has been endorsed by six unions. Kshama is also strongly supported by Seattle's second largest newspaper, The Stranger. Both campaigns are building social movements. Kshama is at the forefront of the "Fight for 15 and a Union" in Seattle, building support for fast food strikes and raising the minimum wage. Ty helped found and lead Occupy Homes in Minneapolis, a group that fights the foreclosures carried out by the big banks. Click here and here to see inspiring videos of Ty helping to lead successful protests against evictions. These two campaigns can win, but only with your help. So far Kshama has raised $70,000 and Ty $35,000 in grassroots contributions. Neither campaign takes corporate money. But to answer the lies and distortions of their heavily funded opponents they urgently need money to send out mailers. The Kshama campaign believes they need to raise another $50,000 to send 150,000 mailers, while Ty's campaign estimates they need another $20,000 to send multiple mailers to every voter in his ward. The maximum donation to Kshama is $700 and the maximum donation to Ty is $300. Please consider giving all you can. Donate to Kshama here and for Ty here. Politics in this country is not going to change by complaining about it if that isn't also coupled with action. Supporting these candidates even with a small contribution increases the chance that they win and have an opportunity to articulate progressive ideas in opposition to what the other parties believe are intractable problems. The election of independent working class city council candidates in Seattle and Minneapolis would be an enormous step forward, providing an important platform to popularize the idea of more independent anti-corporate candidates running in a time of tremendous upheaval. Please donate to Kshama and Ty's campaigns today. Join us, Matt Gonzalez former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Jill Stein 2012 Green Party nominee for President of the United States P.S. You may also contribute by sending a check to "Vote Sawant" at P.O. Box 85862, Seattle, WA 98145, or to "Ty Moore for City Council" at 3401 Pillsbury Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55408. If you have given over $100 to a campaign, the law requires you include your occupation, employer (if self-employed list the name under which you do business), employer's city & state.