***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 

…she hadn’t thought about the upcoming date all that much, hadn’t thought about how Art was going to squire her to the first dance of the school year, the decisive Fall Frolic. Decisive in that one’s date, one’s successful date, at that event usually foretold who one would be going to the senior prom with. It wasn’t that she was crazy for Art, not in the way best friend, Jenny, was crazy over Sal, Sal with the wavy black hair and athletic build, crazy to let him do what he wanted with her, but she did see him a one part of her “item” for the senior year if only he showed a little spark her way. Damn, she almost had to force the issue and invite him to the dance herself after they had spent some time together in school talking and then he walking her home after school, talking. So they had spent their time together before the dance in that way. And here it was the big night and she was now preening herself, fluffing her hair, tightening that damn girdle to make her more slender than she already was, applying yet another touch-up on the make-up, as expected of any girl going to the Frolics with a guy that might form part of an “item” for senior year.

She wasn’t sure when she heard the rumble of the engine coming up the street, maybe just before the car stopped in front of her house, but she definitely heard it before Art knocked on the door downstairs as her mother welcomed him in while she was finishing her last preparations. As she came down she noticed that he looked especially handsome in his suit and with his hair parted just so. Things already looked up for the evening. She did not know the half of it though until he opened the front door for her as they were leaving and she spied that big old Cadillac sitting in front of her sidewalk. Seems that old Art, once he got the message from the time around the dance invitation, started his own version of the courting ritual and convinced his friend, Spider Mack, to let him borrow his souped-up Caddy. And off they went, she proud to be seem in the company of a man who knew how to bring a girl to the dance in style.

 

But that was only the half of it since once they got to the school gym when the Frolics were held annually Art seemed a man transformed as the cover band hired for the evening by the Fall Frolic senior committee (it was always a senior-sponsored affair, a kind of last gift to their fellow schoolmate), the Ready Riders, kissed off the old classics, you know Patti Page, Frank, Dean, those guys, that had guided previous dances and kicked out the jams. She noticed that Art had become almost a whirling dervish as he rocked to some older rhythm and blues stuff and then laid out the program when the band tore into a big riffing dose of Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 that everybody at Doc’s Drugstore over on Main was dropping endless nickels and dimes in the juke-box to hear over and over. As the dance ended she, they ran into Jenny and Sal, and she, she who had secretly scorned the stuff Jenny told her that she and Sal did down at Adamsville Beach, suggested that the foursome go down to that very beach to, well, she said “cool off” after the dance. But you know what she meant. So, yes, if anybody was interested she and Art were an “item” that year …               

*********

Rocket 88         

You woman have heard of jalopies
You heard the noise they make
Let me introduce you to my Rocket '88
Yes, it's great, just won't wait
Everybody likes my Rocket '88
Baby, we'll will ride in style movin' all along

V-8 motor and this modern design
Black convertible top and the girls don't mind
Sportin' with me, ridin' all around town for joy
Blow your horn, rocket, blow your horn

Step in my rocket and don't be late
We're pullin' out about a half past eight
Goin' on the corner and havin' some fun
Takin' my rocket on a long, hot run
Ooh, goin' out, oozin' and cruisin' and havin' fun

Now that you've ridden in my Rocket '88
I'll be around every night about eight
You know it's great, don't be late
Everybody likes my Rocket '88
Girls will ride in style movin' all along

Read more at http://www.songlyrics.com/jackie-brenston/rocket-88-lyrics/#jxXskKb8Yxv3Z2RP.99

 In The Time Before The Rock ‘n’ Roll Jailbreak –They Shoot CD Players Don’t They

 

 

 

Some people ask, although I am not one of them, if there was music before 1950s classic rock ‘n’ roll. Of course there was and I have taken some pains to establish the roots of rock back to Mississippi country blues, electric blues as they traveled north to the heartland industrial cities, jazz as it got be-bopped and took to swing, certainly rhythm and blues, north and south and rockabilly as it came out of the white small town South. What it owes little to, or at least I hope that it owes little to is that Tin Pan Alley/ Broadway show tune axis part of the American songbook. That seems to me a different trend and one that is reflected in this CD under review, The 1950s: 16 Most Requested Songs, which is really about the 16 most requested song before the rock jailbreak of the mid-1950s. Let’s be clear about that.

I have along the way, in championing classic rock as the key musical form that drove the tastes of my generation, the generation of ’68, contrasted that guitar-driven, drum/bass line driven sound to that of my parents’ generation, the ones who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and fought World War II, and listened to swing, jitter-buggery things and swooned over big bands, swings bands, Frank Sinatra, the Andrews Sisters and The Mills Brothers, among others. In other words the music that, we of the generation of ’68, heard as background music around the house as we were growing up. Buddha Swings, Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree, Rum and Coca-Cola, Paper Dolls, Tangerine, and the like. Stuff that today sounds pretty good, if still not quite something that “speaks” to me. That is not the music that is reflected in this compilation and which, I think rightly, I was ready to shoot my CD player over once I heard it as I announced in the headline.

No, this is music that reflects, okay, let’s join the cultural critics’ chorus here, the attempted vanilla-zation (if such a word can exist) of the Cold War Eisenhower (“I Like Ike”) period when people were just trying to figure out whether the Earth would survive from one day to the next. Not a time to be rocking the boat, for sure. Once things stabilized a bit though then the mad geniuses of rock could hold sway, and while parents and authorities crabbed to high heaven about it, let that rock breakout occur and not have everything wind up going to hell in a hand basket. But this music, these 16 most requested songs were what we were stuck with before then. Sure, I listened like everyone else, everyone connected to a radio, but this stuff, little as I knew then, did not “speak” to me. And unlike some of that 1940s stuff still does not “speak” to me.

Oh, you want proof. Here is one example. On this compilation Harbor Lights is done by Sammy Kaye and his Orchestra. This was cause one for wanting to get a pistol out and start aiming. Not for the song but for the presentation. Why? Well, early in his career Elvis, while he was doing his thing for Sam Phillips’ Memphis Sun Records operation, covered this song. There are a myriad of Elvis recordings during the Sun period, including compilations with outtakes and alternative recordings of this song. The worst, the absolute worst of these covers by Elvis has more life, more jump, dare I say it, more sex than the Kaye recording could ever have. And it only gets worse from there with incipient things like Frankie Lane’s I Believe, Johnny Mathis’ It’s Not For Me To Say, and Marty Robbins’ (who did some better stuff later) on A White Sports Coat (And A Pink Carnation). And you wonder why I ask whether they shoot CD players. Enough said.

*******

Harbor Lights Lyrics
(words & music by H. Williams - J. Kennedy)

I saw the harbor lights

They only told me we were parting

Those same old harbor lights

That once brought you to me.

I watched the harbor lights

How could I help it?

Tears were starting.

Good-bye to golden nights

Beside the silvery seas.

I long to hold you dear,

And kiss you just once more.

But you were on the ship,

And I was on the shore.

Now I know lonely nights

For all the while my heart keeps praying

That someday harbor lights

Will bring you back to me.

 

 

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The German Spartacists-Karl Liebknecht   

    

 

EVERY JANUARY WE HONOR LENIN OF RUSSIA, ROSA LUXEMBURG OF POLAND, AND KARL LIEBKNECHT OF GERMANY AS THREE LEADERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT.

Karl Liebknecht Thumbnail Biography

The son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of the SPD, Karl Liebknecht trained to be a lawyer and defended many Social Democrats in political trials. He was also a leading figure in the socialist youth movement and thus became a leading figure in the struggle against militarism.

As a deputy in the Reichstag he was one of the first SPD representatives to break party discipline and vote against war credits in December 1914. He became a figurehead for the struggle against the war. His opposition was so successful that his parliamentary immunity was removed and he was imprisoned.

Freed by the November revolution he immediately threw himself into the struggle and became with Rosa Luxemburg one of the founders of the new Communist Party (KPD). Along with Luxemburg he was murdered by military officers with the tacit approval of the leaders of the SPD after the suppression of the so-called “Spartacist Uprising” in January 1919.

**************
Markin comment:

Karl Liebknecht- A Model Anti-Warrior

This comment was written in 2006 but the main points hold true today:

I recently (2006) received a comment from someone whom I took earnestly to be perplexed by a section of a commentary that I had written where I stated that the minimum necessary for any anti-war politician was to vote against the Iraq war budget in a principled manner. Not the way former Democratic presidential candidate Massachusetts Senator John Kerry’s (and others) dipsy-doodled votes for and against various war budgetary requests in 2004. And certainly not the other variations on this theme performed recently by aspiring Democratic presidential candidates Senators Obama and Clinton in the lead-up to 2008. Nor, for that matter, the way of those who oppose the Iraq war budget but have no problems if those funds were diverted to wars in Afghanistan, Iran , North Korea, China or their favorite ‘evil state’ of the month. What really drew the commenter up short was that I stated this was only the beginning political wisdom and then proceeded to explain that even that would not be enough to render the politician political support if his or her other politics were weak.  The commenter then plaintively begged me to describe what politician would qualify for such support. Although I have noted elsewhere that some politicians, Democratic Congressman James McGovern of Massachusetts and presidential candidate Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich stand out from the pack, the real anti-war hero on principle we should look at is long dead-Karl Liebknecht, the German Social-Democratic leader from World War I. Wherever anyone fights against unjust wars Liebknecht’s spirit hovers over those efforts.  

…I do not believe we are lacking in physical courage. What has declined is political courage, and this seems in irreversible decline on the part of parliamentary politicians. That said, I want to finish up with a woefully inadequate political appreciation of Karl Liebknecht, member of the German Social Democratic faction in the Reichstag in the early 1900’s. Karl was also a son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, friend of Karl Marx and founder of the German Social Democratic Party in the 1860’s. On August 4, 1914, at the start of World War I the German Social Democratic Party voted YES on the war budget of the Kaiser against all its previous historic positions on German militarism. This vote was rightly seen as a betrayal of socialist principles. Due to a policy of parliamentary solidarity Karl Liebknecht also voted for this budget, or at least felt he had to go along with his faction. Shortly thereafter, he broke ranks and voted NO against the war appropriations. As pointed out below Karl Liebknecht did much more than that to oppose the German side in the First World War. THAT, MY FRIENDS, IS THE KIND OF POLITICAN I CAN SUPPORT. AS FOR THE REST- HOLD THEIR FEET TO THE FIRE.

One of the problems with being the son of a famous politician is that as founder of the early German Social Democratic Party Wilhelm Liebknecht's son much was expected of Karl, especially on the question of leading the German working class against German militarism. Wilhelm had done a prison term (with August Bebel) for opposition to the Franco-Prussian War. As for Karl I have always admired that famous picture of him walking across the Potsdam Plaza in uniform, subject to imprisonment after loss of his parliamentary immunity, with briefcase under arm ready to go in and do battle with the parliamentary cretins of the Social Democratic Party over support for the war budget. (THIS PICTURE CAN BE GOOGLED) That is the kind of leadership cadre we desperately need now. REMEMBER HIS FAMOUS SLOGANS- "HE MAIN ENEMY IS AT HOME’-‘NOT ONE PENNY, NOT ONE PERSON (updated by writer) FOR THE WAR." Wilhelm would have been proud.

 

 

 

***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Elmore James’ Look On Yonder Wall

 

…who knows when he first began to notice the difference, notice that the music, his parents’ music, the stuff, as they constantly told him, that got them through the “Depression and the war,” grated on his ears. Noticed that he had had enough of Nat King Cole, the Inkpots, Bing Crosby and the like. Had become tired unto death of the cutesy Andrews Sisters and their antics bugle boy, rum and coca-cola, under the apple tree music, tired of Frank, Frankie and Den, tired of Benny, Tony, and very tired of swing, the big band sound and even blessed be-bop, be-bop jazz. Maybe it was because he was showing serious signs of growing pains, of juts being a pain his parents called him, and just wanted to be by himself up in his room and let the world pass by until his growing pains passed by.

To placate him (or, heaven forbid, to keep him out of sign and therefore out of mind) they, his usually clueless parents, had gone to the local Radio Shack store and bought him a transistor radio to listen to music up in his room rather than lie around the living room all night changing the dials looking for some other stations on the old family Emerson radio which had formed the center piece of the room before the television had displaced it. This transistor radio was a new gizmo, small and battery-powered, which allowed the average teenager to put the thing up to his or her ear and listen to whatever he or she wanted to listen to away from prying eyes. Hail, hail.

And that little technological feat saved his life, or at least help save it. The saving part was his finding out of the blue on one late Saturday night Buster Brim’s Blues Bonanza out of WRKO in Chicago. Apparently, although he was ignorant of the scientific aspects of the procedure, the late night air combined with the closing down of certain dawn to dusk radio stations left the airwaves clear at times to let him receive that long distance infusion. He immediately sensed that the music emanating from that show had a totally different beat from his parents’ music, a beat he would later find came out of some old-time primordial place when we all were born, out of some Africa cradle of civilization. Then though all he knew was that the beat spoke to his angst, spoke to his alienation from about twelve different things, spoke to that growing pains thing. Made him, well happy, when he snapped his fingers to some such beat. What he was unsure of, and what he also did not found out about until later, was whether this would last or was just a passing fancy life those Andrews Sisters his parents were always yakking about. What he didn’t know really was that he was present at the birth of rock and roll. Geez, and all he was doing was snapping his fingers until they were sore to Elmore James’ Look On Yonder Wall…                 

Songwriters: ELMORE ELMO JAMES, MARSHALL SEHORN

 

Look on yonder wall and hand me down my walkin' cane
Look on yonder wall and hand me down my walkin' cane
I got me another woman, baby, yon' come your man

Look on yonder wall and hand me down my walkin' cane
Look on yonder wall and hand me down my walkin' cane
I got me another woman and, uhh, baby, yon' come your man

You hurried up and went to the wall,
and you know it was tough, uhh
I don't know how many men you's killed,
but, I know you done killed enough for two

Look on yonder wall and hand me down my walkin' cane
Look on yonder wall and hand me down my walkin' cane
I got me another woman, now baby, yon' come your man
Ooh yeah

I love you baby, but you just can't treat me right,
spend all my money and walk the streets all night
But, look on yonder wall and hand me down my walkin' cane
I got me another woman, and baby, yon' come your man

 Out In The Jukebox Saturday Night 

 Recently I, seemingly, have endlessly gone back to my early musical roots in reviewing various compilations of a Time-Life classic rock series that goes under the general title The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era. And while time and ear have eroded the sparkle of some of the lesser tunes it still seems obvious that those years, say 1955-58, really did form the musical jail break-out for my generation, the generation of ’68, who had just started to tune into music.

And we had our own little world, or as some hip sociologist trying to explain that Zeitgeist today might say, our own sub-group cultural expression. I have already talked about the pre 7/11 mom and pop corner variety store hangout with the tee-shirted, engineered-booted, cigarette (unfiltered) hanging from the lips, Coke, big sized glass Coke bottle at the side, pinball wizard guys thing. And about the pizza parlor jukebox coin devouring, playing some “hot” song for the nth time that night, hold the onions I might get lucky tonight, dreamy girl might come in the door thing. Of course, the soda fountain, and…ditto, dreamy girl coming through the door thing, merely to share a sundae, natch. And the same for the teen dance club, keep the kids off the streets even if we parents hate their damn rock music, the now eternal hope dreamy girl coming in the door, save the last dance for me thing.

Needless to say you know more about middle school and high school dance stuff, including hot tip “ inside” stuff about manly preparations for those civil wars out in the working- class neighborhood night, than you could ever possibly want to know, and, hell, you were there anyway (or at ones like them). Moreover, I clued you in, and keep this quiet, about sex, or rather I should say doin’ the do in case the kids are around, and about the local “custom” (for any anthropologists present) of ocean-waved Atlantic “watching the submarine races.”

Whee! That’s maybe enough memory lane stuff for a lifetime, especially for those with weak hearts. But, no, your intrepid messenger feels the need to go back indoors again and take a little different look at that be-bop jukebox Saturday night scene as it unfolded in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Hey, you could have found the old jukebox in lots of places in those days. Bowling alleys, drugstores (drugstores with soda fountains- why else would healthy, young, sex-charged high school students go to such an old-timer-got-to-get medicine-for-the-arthritis place. Why indeed, although there are secrets in such places that I will tell you about some other time when I’m not jazzed up to go be-bop juke-boxing around the town.), pizza parlors, drive-in restaurants, and so on. Basically any place where kids were hot for some special song and wanted to play it until the cows came home. And had the coins to satisfy their hunger.

A lot of it was to kill time waiting for this or that, although the basic reason was these were all places where you could show off your stuff, and maybe, strike up a conversation with someone who attracted your attention as they came in the door. The cover artwork on this compilation shows dreamy girls waiting for their platters (records, okay) to work their way up the mechanism that took them from the stack and laid them out on the player. There is your chance, boy, grab it. Just hanging around the machine with some cashmere-sweatered, beehive-haired (or bobbed, kind of), well-shaped brunette (or blond, but I favored brunettes in those days) chatting idly was worth at least a date (or, more often, a telephone number to call). Not after nine at night though or before eight because that was when she was talking to her boy friend. Lucky guy, maybe.

But here is where the real skill came in. Just hanging casually around the old box, especially on a no, or low, dough day waiting on a twist (slang for girl in our old working- class neighborhood) to come by and put her quarter in (giving three or five selections depending what kind of place the jukebox was located in) talking to her friends as she made those selections. Usually the first couple were easy, some old boy friend memory, or some wistful tryst remembrance, but then she got contemplative, or fidgety, over what to pick next. Then you made your move-“Have you heard Only You. NO! Well, you just have to hear that thing and it will cheer you right up. Or some such line. Of course, you wanted to hear the damn thing. But see, a song like that (as opposed to Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Rock and Roller, let’s say) showed you were a sensitive guy, and maybe worth talking to … for just a minute, I got to get back to my girlfriends, etc, etc. Oh, jukebox you baby. And guess what. On that self-same jukebox you were very, very likely to hear some of the songs on the compilation on this CD: Here are the stick outs (and a few that worked some of that “magic” mentioned above on tough nights):

Oh Julie, The Crescendos (a great one if you knew, or thought you knew, or wanted to believe that girl at the jukebox’s name was Julie); Lavender Blue, Sammy Turner (good talk song especially on the word play); Sweet Little Rock and Roller, Chuck Berry (discussed above, and worthy of consideration if your tastes ran to those heart-breaking little rock and rollers. I will tell you about the ONE time it came in handy sometime); You Were Mine, The Fireflies; Susie Darlin’, Robin Luke (ditto the Julie thing above); Only You, The Platters (keep this one a secret, okay, unless you really are a sensitive guy). 

 

 

 

***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin, Private Investigator – The Two Knives

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

As readers know Tyrone Fallon, the son of the late famous Southern California private operative, Michael Philip Marlin (Tyrone used his mother’s maiden name for obvious reasons), and private eye in his own right told my old friend Peter Paul Markin’s friend Joshua Lawrence Breslin some stories that his illustrious father told him. Here’s one such story although not about himself but about an operative for the largest detective agency on the West Coast, John “Stubs” Lane. (Stubs nick-named for a habit picked while sitting alone endlessly in cold cars drinking cold coffee and picking out cigarette stubs from the ashtray after his fresh deck ran out). Marlin let Stubs tell it in his own voice and I will do so here.      

*******

You know not all cops are on the level, in fact most of them aren’t, aren’t on the level, and maybe don’t know what being on the level entails. Every twelve year old, maybe younger knows that hard fact, or should. Most cops, aside from hating what they call private peepers, are either “on the take” to some local gangster on their beat to turn the other way when some dope deal is going down, some back alley gambling was going on as they passed by or to let some wayward hooker ply her trade in peace (no pun intended). Or they want to be on the take.

Oh yeah, there is a good cop every once in a while, a guy not on the take one way or another, a guy who is okay with working for coffee and crullers, a guy like Detective Danny Shea down in the Los Angeles Police Department, a guy that I have worked with on a few cases. But even Danny gets squirrely ever once in a while like the time he threatened to have me locked up as a material witness in the Morton case when I refused to tell him what I knew, knew confidentially, in that grisly murder case.

See I should know about cops and their easy “on the take” ways since I run up against them as an operative for the International Operations Organization and have to pay a courtesy call on them occasionally. But that coffee and cakes part is right, they work for peanuts and so maybe they don’t feel too bad about shaving the law in the interests of their pocketbooks. And just maybe they are around crime so much it rubs off, gets easy to blur the distinctions between law and the jungle. Here’s a case in point from one I worked on the sides, the official cops got all the credit for busting one their own but it was a close thing, and a murder to boot. 

Detective Johnny Ladd and Sergeant Billy Brooks had been partners for a few years, had cracked a couple of big cases, the famous Smoot kidnapping case and the Landry murder case, and so were moving up the line in the Ocean City Police Department. Both were on the take to Marty Sheen’s criminal operation but that doesn’t enter into this story, not the “on the take” part but allegiance to Marty’s part. This was strictly an independent operation on Billy Brooks’ part. He had met some dame, a looker, a real good-looker, Lana Wadsworth, a divorcee over at the Kit-Kat Club across from the 6^th Precinct Station and the favored hang-out for off-duty cops. And for women, some cops’ wives too, looking for a roll in the hay with a man in blue. That kind of thing has been going on ever since there were cops, before actually with soldiers, guys in uniforms turn some women on. But like I said that is old hat.      Well Billy went for her and she went for him, they met a few times after that first encounter, started dating, hit the satin sheets before too long and they had talked of marriage.

One night, one night after a heavy night of drinking first at the Kit-Kat then at her place where they usually wound up after such bouts Lana told him about her ex-husband, Jason Wadsworth, heir to the Peeps coffee fortune, a rich guy, real rich, and how she didn’t want a penny from him. He had offered a generous settlement, had included a house and car in the arrangement but she passed on that. She had said that things just didn’t work a while back, he was chasing another woman, had not satisfied her in bed, had different interests and she wanted it left that way. For herself she had stopped being in love with Wadsworth and like a lot of women that is the key, not the dough, and, yes, go figure. But like I said the guy was loaded, had no relatives, known relatives anyway except Lana, and that got Billy thinking, thinking about easy street, about getting away from the coffee and cakes life, the two-bit “on the take” life finally. 

Of course a cop, a police officer has access to all kinds of information: finger prints, criminal records, evidence room materials, and the like. So Billy grabbed some opium from the evidence room and had one of hi stoolies goes over to this Wadsworth guy’s house in El Segundo and plants the dope in the house, in Wadsworth’s study, after having given one of the servants, some Mex who was one of those “No Habla Ingles” guys, some cock and bull story about inspecting something in the house. Then a few days, maybe a week, later he planted an anonymous tip to his fellow officers that this Wadsworth character was selling high-grade dope to the Hollywood crowd. Then Billy went all out by saying, through one of his confidential sources, that this Wadsworth operation was protected by some high-powered weaponry in the house. Naturally

the cops, including Billy who asked personally to be in on the bust,  working under  some “eminent danger” theory went in like gang-busters. Wadsworth never knew what hit him as Billy fired point- blank at the man. Billy later said that Wadsworth threatened him with a gun, a gun that later proved to have been placed in his hand by Billy.  

After the dust had settled and after some civilians wanted to know what the hell happened when one of the leading citizens in El Segundo was shot down like a dog the Police Commissioner was forced to conduct an investigation. The long and short of it was that Detective Ladd was assigned to do the investigation. Billy figured he was in clear, was all set to grab the dough, especially when Wadsworth’s will had been left as it was when Lana and he were married. She was to get all the dough. Thing was though that Ladd saw early on that this thing stank to high heaven. Even then, even after he figured out that Billy had set the whole thing up, had done it for the big payoff he was willing to cover him if he would just leave town and stay out, go east someplace.

Billy then offered him a cut of the proceeds and he almost went for it, had in fact agreed to it when a higher up in the department learned of Billy’s role in the caper through that stoolie who set the whole thing up. More importantly Marty Sheen did not like the idea that one, or two, of his hirelings in blue were acting on their own. With the heat on in all directions Detective Ladd was forced to turn Billy in, did it with a certain relish roughing Billy up before he brought him in. Had been ready to kill him if Marty needed that kind of help.  Yeah, so the next time somebody, some rube tells you, the cops are on the level tell them the little story I just related to you, okay?   

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution: An Essay on the different editions of that Work

BOOK REVIEW

PROBLEMS OF THE CHINESE REVOLUTION, LEON TROTSKY, PATHFINDER PRESS, 1967

Recently I reviewed in this space Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate, a novelistic treatment of the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, that emphasized the problems at the base of Chinese society in its late phase after the popular front alliance with General Chiang Kai-Shek’s bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang broke down and Chiang began his extermination drive against the Chinese Communists. In Leon Trotsky’s book, under review here, we get a real time, real life analysis of the political questions that led to that catastrophe and what revolutionaries could learn from it.

I have noted elsewhere that the Communist International (hereafter Comintern) evolved in the mid-1920’s , under the impact of Stalinization, from a revolutionary organization that made political mistakes, sometimes grossly so, in pursuit of revolution to an organization that pursued anti-revolutionary aims as it turned primarily into an adjunct of Soviet foreign policy. Prima facie evidence for such a conclusion is the Soviet Communist Party /Commintern policy and its implementation toward the budding Chinese Revolution.

As much as policy toward the Chinese Revolution became a political football in the internal Russian Communist party fights between Stalin’s bloc and Trotsky’s bloc it is impossible to understand the strategy for the Chinese Revolution without an understanding of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. No Marxist, at least not openly and honestly, put forth any claim that in the West the national bourgeoisie could be a progressive force in any modern upheaval. Russia, in the early 20th century was, however, still a battleground over this question. This is where Trotsky formulated the advanced Marxist notion that in Russia the national bourgeoisie was too weak, too beholding to foreign capitalist interests and too dependent on the Czarist state and its hangers-on to fulfill the tasks associated with the classic bourgeois revolutions in the West. Thus, for Russia alone at that time Trotsky postulated that the working class had become the heirs of the revolutions in the West. The Revolution of 1905 gave a glimmer of understanding to that proposition and the Revolution of October 1917 cannot be understood except under that premise.

In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution the question of who would lead the revolutions of the countries even less developed that Russia, mainly colonial and semi-colonial regimes, formed one of the new political battlegrounds. And China was the first dramatic test that Trotsky’s originally Russia-only premise applied to underdeveloped ‘third world’ capitalist regimes, as well. However,unlike in Russia, this time Trotsky lost. The necessary independent organization of the working class and the political separation of the communist vanguard were not carried out and, to our regret, the Chinese Revolution was beheaded. As mentioned above this was a conscious Stalinist policy of kowtowing to Chiang by unequivocably ordering the Communist Party to make itself politically and militarily subservient to the Kuomintang as well as providing Comintern military advisers to Chiang.

Today, even a cursory look at countries of belated and uneven development emphasizes the fact that the various tasks associated with the Russian and Chinese Revolutions still need to be carried out. Thus, the political fights that wracked the international communist movement in the 1920’s which under ordinary circumstances would only be of historical interest today take on a more life and death meaning for many of the peoples of the world. That makes this book well worth the read.

I might add that there is a very interesting appendix at the end of this work detailing reports from the field filed by those Communist agents that carried out Comintern policy in China and who as a result of disillusionment with that policy had become oppositionists. These reports give added ammunition to Trotsky’s more theoretical arguments. They also give flesh and bones to the some of the points that Malraux was trying to bring out in Man’s Fate. Read on.

 

Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm

Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.

Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.

The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff. 
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The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution:An Essay on the different editions of that Work

From Revolutionary History, Vol.2 No.4, Spring 1990. Used by permission.

This short resume of the ideological odyssey of the various editions of Harold Isaacs’ classic work appeared in Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.15, September 1983, pp.71-6, and is here translated by Ted Crawford, with the results carefully collated against the original texts in English and their pagination accordingly aligned.

Harold Isaacs (1910-1986) went out to China as a journalist, and there he edited a magazine, China Forum, that was favourable to the Chinese Communist Party. But whilst he was in China he encountered Frank Glass (cf. Revolutionary History, Vol.1, no.2, Summer 1988, pp.3-4) who won him over to the Trotskyist position. The first – and best – edition of the book was published in 1938 by Seeker and Warburg, probably as a result of C.L.R. James’ influence with Frederick Warburg, who was his publisher. All subsequent editions were published in the USA after he had left the Trotskyist movement in disillusionment at Trotsky’s murder in 1940. He belonged for a while to Max Shachtman’s Workers Party before becoming a Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He returned to China after many years in 1980, a visit he described in Re-encounters in China: Notes on a Journey in a Time Capsule, 1985. His old comrade Liu Renjing, who had provided much of the documentation for The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution whilst hiding in Isaacs’ apartment in Peking, died a year later than he did, after serving in a university post under Mao’s regime from 1949 onwards. A very revealing obituary of Harold Isaacs appeared in Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.27, September 1986, pp.110-11.

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Had the Chinese Revolution of 1924-27 been left to itself it would perhaps not have come to victory immediately but it would not have resorted to the methods of hara-kiri, it would not have known shameful capitulations, and it would have trained revolutionary cadres. Between the dual power of Canton and that of Petrograd is only the tragic difference that in China there was no Bolshevism in evidence; under the name of Trotskyism it was declared a counter-revolutionary doctrine and was persecuted by every method of calumny and repression. Where Kerensky did not succeed during the July days, Stalin succeeded ten years later in China. – Leon Trotsky, Prinkipo, 9 February 1931. [1]

In 1938 when the first edition of The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution appeared, Harold Isaacs wished to refute ‘the gross falsehoods in which the Communist International tried to bury the facts of what actually happened in the critical years 1925-27.’ [2] [3]

This production was the answer to a work already in existence for some time, China’s Millions by Anna Louise Strong  [4] and a book by Pavel Mif, Heroic China. [5] It had two later editions, the first in 1951 and the second in 1961.  [6] In the course of these three ‘versions’ Isaacs’ views on the international Communist movement changed. It is this evolution, as much on account of cuts in the work rather than changes in the analysis, which it is interesting to study.
In 1930 at the age of 20 Harold Isaacs arrived in China, joined the Communist Opposition in 1934 and immediately started his work on the consequences of the failure of the Chinese revolution. Within a year, helped by his friend Liu Renjing [7], he collected the necessary materials for his book and then in 1935 left for Europe where he met Treint, Sneevliet (Maring) and eventually, in August of that year, the exiled Trotsky at Honefoss in Norway. The manuscript of The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution was ready in January 1936, and in February Trotsky promised the author a preface for which he traced out the broad outlines.  [8] Finally, the book came out in 1938 in London with a long introduction by Trotsky datelined Coyoacan, Isaacs then being a member of the Socialist Workers Party.  [9]
It is certainly true, as Isaacs wrote in 1951, that the 1938 text is a committed ‘Trotskyist’ one. Trotsky introduced it thus:

What are the classes which are struggling in China? What are the interrelationships of these classes? How, and in what direction, are these relations being transformed? What are the objective tasks of the Chinese Revolution, i.e. those tasks dictated by the course of development? On the shoulders of which classes rests the solution to these tasks? With what methods can they be solved? Isaacs’ book gives the answers to precisely these questions. [10]

What is the fate of the answers to these questions thirteen years later? First of all the author removes Trotsky’s introduction. He explains himself in his preface of 23 April 1951:

Although I reject the Bolshevism of which Trotsky became the most authentic spokesman, I still have great respect for some of Trotsky’s conceptions of what the Socialist revolution was meant to be ... But I could hardly feel free, because of this, to include in this edition the Introduction in which Trotsky warmly endorsed the original work...I cannot assume that he would agree with the views I now hold and which have been written in this book. Nor would I presume to reprint the Introduction with his endorsement deleted. [11]

This rejection of ‘Bolshevism’ led Isaacs to recast the greater part of his work. He changed the structure and the text as a result of what he called the ‘changes in his “point of view”’. Furthermore, as he explained:

‘Point of view’ is another phrase for interpretation, interpretation is another word for bias, and bias is another word for outlook. Every writer is conditioned by all the individual and social factors that shape his writing about man’s affairs ... All historical and political questions are the products of conflict, and are therefore controversial. They all concern unresolved human problems on which all thought is subject to contradiction and revision ... Thus the basic approach in this work is one that seeks to contribute to a radical transformation of all social relations and political institutions ... It involves, further, the effort to find a way out of the blind alley of national sovereignty into some broader and more internally co-operative organisation of the world in which all peoples can hope to thrive. [12]

Then, while he cut about 20 pages of the chapter on Problems of the Chinese Revolution to replace it by a part entitled The World Crisis: The Russian Impact he abandoned as well his Trotskyist analysis of the role of the Russian proletariat and Bolshevik Party in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Here is what Isaacs wrote in 1938:

This bureaucratic stratum which began to solidify on the outer crust of the newly-formed Soviet State took Russia’s national isolation as its starting point... Lenin fought this tendency in his last years, but it was stronger than he. Too soon this struggle ended and power fell to representatives of the new bureaucratic caste personified in Joseph Stalin. The Bolshevik opposition to the usurpers centred around Trotsky and the best elements of the proletarian core of the Bolshevik Party. They swam against the current but could not dam or divert it ... The defeats of the Revolution in Europe, above all the defeat in Germany in 1923, engendered moods of disillusionment and punctured the confidence in the capacity of the Western proletariat to win power. Out of these roots and these moods sprang the theory of ‘Socialism in One Country’ brought forward by Stalin for the first time in 1924 ...

This Nationalist degeneration, proceeding under the corrosive influence of Soviet isolation, led inevitably to a departure from the proletarian basis of Soviet policy at home and abroad. [13]

The 1951 version is quite otherwise:

We know the Soviet Union in 1951 as a supernationalist totalitarian state, which rules by brute force and police terror and cynically manipulates other peoples to further its own national-strategic ends. An oligarchic bureaucracy rules the people and the economy of Russia under conditions of total tyranny ... They believed they were launching this great effort by establishing in Russia the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. This is a term and an idea that was never very precisely defined by Marxists from the time Marx first used it in 1852 ... In later years the evolution of the Russian state under Stalin provided its own definition of the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. The historic reality usurped the claims of the theoretical concept, and despite the possible appeal to the real democratic content of many other aspects of Marxist thought, no restoration on this score seems possible.’ [14]

Thus there disappeared from Isaacs’ thought the notion of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, the nature of the bureaucracy considered as a caste and the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state.

Again, when he changed the titles of his chapters about the Wuhan government [15], he there modified his approach to the policies of the Communist International and the Chinese Communist Party within the class collaborationist government of the Communists and the Left Guomindang in 1927. In particular, while keeping in the quotations from Trotsky, he cut out his past references to the policy of the Comintern as regards workers’ councils. Let us join his vigorous advocacy in 1938:

Had not Stalin wired, as far back as October 1926, to check the peasants in order not to alienate the generals? Was not the Comintern, in these very days, opposing the creation of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ Soviets? ... In Wuhan, at the other end of wires from Moscow, were Borodin, Roy, Mif, Lozovsky, Browder, Doriot and a host of other ‘Bolshevik’ advisors. Not one of them raised his voice – in time. None of the contemptible evasions and falsehoods with which Moscow sought to thrust responsibility on the shoulders of Chen Tu-Hsiu and the Chinese Central Committee, can conceal the identity of the political path designated by the Communist International and followed by the Chinese Communist Party ...

‘Concede, concede!’ cried Borodin, Roy, and all the minions of the Communist International when as never before the Chinese revolution needed to unfurl upon its banners the immortal slogan of Danton, ‘de l’audace, de l’audace, encore de l’audace!’ But Moscow ordered the Chinese Communists to bow before the Left Guomindang. The Left Guomindang kow-towed before the militarists, the landlords and the bourgeoisie. This treachery would in the end strangle the Chinese revolution, but not all the vacillation and cowardice of these leaders could cloud the grandeur and the might of the masses in action. [l6]

The 1951 version dealing with the same events comes to grips with them in quite a different way:

The Comintern would soon be denouncing this course and charging the Chinese Communists with exclusive responsibility for the debacle which followed. But the record shows that the Chinese Communist Party was with literal fidelity carrying out directives it had received from Moscow ... Moscow had imposed a formula which cancelled itself out: victory was impossible without the cooperation of the Left Guomindang. But, as we have seen, under the leadership of the Left Guomindang, it was impossible to have the agrarian revolution. Hence on Moscow’s terms victory was impossible. [l7]

Furthermore, in 1951 Isaacs profoundly modified his last three 1938 chapters. His study on Fruits of Defeat which takes up a large part of the work in 1938 is replaced in 1951 by The Imprint of the Chinese Revolution and henceforth serves as a conclusion to the edition of 1961.

The chapter on the Jiangxi period, from 1928 to 1934, The Rise and Fall of ‘Soviet China’, missing in 1951, reappears in an appendix in 1961. By contrast the conclusion of the first edition, The New ‘National United Front’, is simply abandoned in 1951 for a synthesis, The Blind Alley of Totalitarianism, which is likewise suppressed in 1961.
The political analysis developed in The New ‘National United Front’ seems to have as its source the report of Liu Renjing, Five Years of the Left Opposition in China, sent to Trotsky in August 1935. [18] In the final chapter in 1938, the author grapples with the slogan ‘For a National Assembly’, as opposed to the slogan ‘A People’s Soviet Government’ or the ‘National United Front’:

Although the Trotskyists never gathered enough strength to exert any direct influence on events, they hammered insistently on the need for an elementary democratic programme as the indispensable starting point for the revival of the Labour movement...Generalised into the slogan for a National Assembly, elected by the universal suffrage of the people, this programme offered a common starting-point for all sections of the population oppressed and terrorised by the Guomindang military dictatorship.

Events forced the Stalinists to take half a step, despite themselves, in this direction. Their own programme of ‘Soviet power’ possessed no immediate significance that the workers could grasp. Their slogans, ‘Support the Red Army’, ‘Support the Soviets’ bore no relation to the immediate interests or demands of the workers. Frightened by the impotence to which this condemned it, the Communist Party suddenly introduced in the fall of 1931 the slogan of an ‘elected People’s Power’ which sounded dangerously like the Trotskyist position of an elected National Assembly.  [19]

He goes on:

The ‘national united front’ was recreated in 1937 on a new historical plane. In 1927 the Communist Party stood at the head of a mighty mass movement. In 1937 it stood at the head of a peasant army of 100 000 men, isolated from the great masses of the people. In 1927 the Communists believed the working class would win “hegemony” in the bloc with the bourgeoisie and would lead the national liberation movement to victory. In 1937 the Communists formed a bloc based upon the Guomindang’s absorption of the Red Army and the conduct of an anti-Japanese struggle which would serve the immediate interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. [20]

Instead of this analysis of 1938, Isaacs substitutes a chapter in 1951 where all reference to the struggle of the Left Opposition has disappeared, where any polemic about the ‘National United Front’ is absent and where class struggle does not exist. The Blind Alley of Totalitarianism is marked by the Cold War, and makes what looks like an appeal to the ‘Free World’:

It is perhaps the ultimate paradox of this history that the hopes for future world growth on a humanly tolerable basis still lie with the Western world, which did so much to bring Asia to its present pass, and, above all with the United States, which has inherited the world Europe so largely made ... The latest and most formidable of these is the barrier of Russian totalitarian imperialism ... In any case, we will either transform our paretic world and create a global society in which Asia and Africa can thrive with us, or else they will, out of intolerable frustration, create a new set of tyrannies, of which Russia’s will have been but the first and China’s the second. [21]

In coming to this conclusion Isaacs decisively rejects en bloc the lessons which he drew in 1938. It is even in contradiction to the central point of his analysis, which while amending the 1938 edition, continues to be the core of his developing work. His leaving the Socialist Workers Party in 1940, his abandonment of all political struggle, then the incredible American political climate because of McCarthyism in the ’fifties explain this surprising conclusion, which the author has had the wisdom not to put in the edition revised for the second time in 1961.

Even after its evolution through three editions and their signposts 45 years after it first appeared, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution is, nonetheless, one of the indispensable works for an understanding of the Chinese Communist movement and the Communist International in the years 1925-27. In spite of the author’s wish, he has not been able to rip out the stamp of Trotsky which gives this book all its great value.

Paul Collin

Notes

1. L.D. Trotsky, The Strangled Revolution, a review of Andre Malraux. Les conquerants, 9 February 1931, in Leon Trotsky on China, New York, 1976, p.509.

2. Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, Seeker and Warburg, London, 1938. An abridged Chinese edition appeared in 1947.

3. Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, Stanford University Press, 1951, preface by Harold Isaacs, p.viii.

4. Anna Louise Strong, China’s Millions, New York, 1928. A new edition in 1936 had the sub-title The Revolutionary Struggles from 1927 to 1935.

5. Pavel Mif, Heroic China, New York, 1927, Moscow Russian edition in 1932. New English edition in 1937 with the sub-title Fifteen Years of the Communist Party in China.

6. Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, Stanford University Press, 1961, second revised edition.

7. Liu Renjing (1899-1987), a personal friend of Isaacs who lived clandestinely with him, was one of the principal leaders of the Communist opposition in China. The author cites him in the 1951 preface under the initials JCL.

[His obituary in the Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.38, June 1989 is as follows: ‘In 1934 he hid with Harold Isaacs in Peking, where he documented his book on China. He was arrested in 1935 and broken by torture. In 1937 he joined the Guomindang and repudiated Communism, and bowed before Mao in 1949 and obtained a minor post in a University Institute.’ – Editors’ note]

8. Letter of Trotsky to Isaacs, 11 February 1936. Oeuvres Leon Trotsky, Tome 8, EDI, Paris 1980, p204. [This letter does not appear to be in any English edition. – Editors’ note]

9. Born in 1910, on his arrival in China in 1930, Harold Isaacs became involved in politics, where he published China Forum, which was close to the Chinese Communist Party. When he came back to Europe in 1935 he wrote in New International and was associated with Fenner Brockway, then leader of the left wing of the ILP. After his interview with Trotsky in Norway in the autumn of 1935 he joined the Workers Party of the United States, or WPUS. With his wife Viola Robinson he was active in the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky. Very close to Trotsky until the latter was assassinated, and he left the SWP soon afterwards. [For a time he was associated with Shachtman. – Editors’ note]

10. L.D. Trotsky, Revolution and War in China, Preface to the first edition of Harold Isaacs’ book, 5 January 1938, in Leon Trotsky on China, New York, 1976, pp.581-2.

11. Op. cit. (1951 edition), pp.xii-xiii. [It seems a pity that Collin omitted the following interesting passage from Isaacs’ 1951 Introduction: ‘First published in England in 1938, this book has led an eventful life of its own. The plates and surviving copies of the original edition were destroyed in the Nazi bombing of London in 1940. A pirated edition published in Shanghai had a much wider circulation, copies of it turning up in different parts of the world in later years. In India in 1944 I came across a condensed version circulating in mimeographed form. – Editors’ note]

12. Op. cit., 1951 edition, pp.viii-ix.

13. Op. cit., 1938 edition, p.50. Passage cut in 1951.

14. Op. cit., 1951 edition, pp.37-39.

15. Wuhan – the Revolutionary Centre became in 1951 Moscow the Revolutionary Centre and the Revolutionary Centre at Work became in 1951 Wuhan – the Revolutionary Centre.

16. Op. cit., 1938 edition, pp.257-9. Passage cut out in 1951.

17. Op. cit., 1951 edition, p.220.

18. L.D. Trotsky, Discussions with Harold Isaacs, in August 1935, in Leon Trotsky on China, New York 1976, pp.541-66.

19. Op. cit., 1938 edition, p.434.

20. Op. cit., 1938 edition, p.451.

21. Op. cit., 1951 edition, p.339. [In this translation all Isaacs’ texts have been taken from the English originals and their page references checked. References to Trotsky’s works are also from the English editions, where this is possible. All the notes are from the original article except where otherwise stated. – Editors’ note]

Note on the Transliteration of Chinese names

Except in the case of the titles of old books, or in quotations or citations of authors’ names from such books, names have been given in the new Pinyin system wherever possible. In most cases the names are easily recognised by those well acquainted with the old Wade-Giles system, but a number differ widely in their Pinyin English transcriptions, so we list them here for the convenience of our readers.

Pinyin		Wade-Giles
Anhui	—	Anwei
Beijing	—	Peking
Chen Duxiu	—	Chen Tu-Hsiu
Feng Yuxiang	—	Feng Yu-hsiang
Fujian	—	Fukien
Gansu	—	Kansu
Guangdong	—	Kwantung
Guizhou	—	Kweichou
Guomindang	—	Kuomintang
Henan	—	Honan
Hubei	—	Hupeh
Jiangsu	—	Kiangshu
Jiangxi	—	Kiangsi
Jinggangshan	—	Chinghanshan
Li Dazhao	—	Li Ta-Chao
Li Lisan	—	Li Li-San
Liu Renjing	—	Liu Jen-Ching
Mao Zedong	—	Mao Tse-Tung
Peng Shuzi	—	Peng Shu-Tse
Qu Qiubai	—	Ch’u Ch’iu-Pai
Shandong	—	Shantung
Shanxi	—	Shensi
Sichuan	—	Szechuan
Sinjiang	—	Sinkiang
Tan Pinshan	—	Tang Ping-Shan
Wang Fanxi	—	Wang Fan-Hsi
Wang Jingwei	—	Wang Ching-Wei
Zhejiang	—	Chekiang
Zheng Chaolin	—	Ch’eng Ch’ao-Lin

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Revolutionary History,Vol.2 No.4, Spring 1990

Editor: Al Richardson
Deputy Editors: Ted Crawford and Bob Archer
Reviews Editor: Keith Hassell
Business Manager: Barry Buitekant
Production and Design Manager: Paul Flewers
Editorial Board: John Archer, David Bruce, William Cazenave, George Leslie, Sam Levy, Jon Lewis, Charles Pottins, Jim Ring, Bruce Robinson, Ernest Rogers and Ken Tarbuck

ISSN 0953-2382

Copyright © 1990 Socialist Platform, BCM 7646, London WC1N 3XX
Typeset and printed by Upstream Ltd (TU), 1 Warwick Court, Choumert Road, London SE15 4SE Tel: 01-358 1344

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