"Today is my last day at Rolling Stone. As of this week, I’m leaving to work for First Look Media, the new organization that’s already home to reporters like Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras."]

"This blitzkrieg reorganization of our economy has left millions of Americans facing a smorgasbord of frightfully unexpected new problems"

The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks' Most Devious Scam Yet

Banks are no longer just financing heavy industry. They are actually buying it up and inventing bigger, bolder and scarier scams than ever

[page 1 of 5, from Rolling Stone:]

By Matt Taibbi

February 12, 2014 11:00 AM ET

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

Call it the loophole that destroyed the world. It's 1999, the tail end of the Clinton years. While the rest of America obsesses over Monica Lewinsky, Columbine and Mark McGwire's biceps, Congress is feverishly crafting what could yet prove to be one of the most transformative laws in the history of our economy – a law that would make possible a broader concentration of financial and industrial power than we've seen in more than a century.
Matt Taibbi on the Great American Bubble Machine
But the crazy thing is, nobody at the time quite knew it. Most observers on the Hill thought the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 – also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act – was just the latest and boldest in a long line of deregulatory handouts to Wall Street that had begun in the Reagan years.
Wall Street had spent much of that era arguing that America's banks needed to become bigger and badder, in order to compete globally with the German and Japanese-style financial giants, which were supposedly about to swallow up all the world's banking business. So through legislative lackeys like red-faced Republican deregulatory enthusiast Phil Gramm, bank lobbyists were pushing a new law designed to wipe out 60-plus years of bedrock financial regulation. The key was repealing – or "modifying," as bill proponents put it – the famed Glass-Steagall Act separating bankers and brokers, which had been passed in 1933 to prevent conflicts of interest within the finance sector that had led to the Great Depression. Now, commercial banks would be allowed to merge with investment banks and insurance companies, creating financial megafirms potentially far more powerful than had ever existed in America.
All of this was big enough news in itself. But it would take half a generation – till now, basically – to understand the most explosive part of the bill, which additionally legalized new forms of monopoly, allowing banks to merge with heavy industry. A tiny provision in the bill also permitted commercial banks to delve into any activity that is "complementary to a financial activity and does not pose a substantial risk to the safety or soundness of depository institutions or the financial system generally."
Complementary to a financial activity. What the hell did that mean?
The Feds vs. Goldman
"From the perspective of the banks," says Saule Omarova, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, "pretty much everything is considered complementary to a financial activity."
Fifteen years later, in fact, it now looks like Wall Street and its lawyers took the term to be a synonym for ruthless campaigns of world domination. "Nobody knew the reach it would have into the real economy," says Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. Now a leading voice on the Hill against the hidden provisions, Brown actually voted for Gramm-Leach-Bliley as a congressman, along with all but 72 other House members. "I bet even some of the people who were the bill's advocates had no idea."
Today, banks like Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs own oil tankers, run airports and control huge quantities of coal, natural gas, heating oil, electric power and precious metals. They likewise can now be found exerting direct control over the supply of a whole galaxy of raw materials crucial to world industry and to society in general, including everything from food products to metals like zinc, copper, tin, nickel and, most infamously thanks to a recent high-profile scandal, aluminum. And they're doing it not just here but abroad as well: In Denmark, thousands took to the streets in protest in recent weeks, vampire-squid banners in hand, when news came out that Goldman Sachs was about to buy a 19 percent stake in Dong Energy, a national electric provider. The furor inspired mass resignations of ministers from the government's ruling coalition, as the Danish public wondered how an American investment bank could possibly hold so much influence over the state energy grid.
There are more eclectic interests, too. After 9/11, we found it worrisome when foreigners started to get into the business of running ports, but there's been little controversy as banks have done the same, or even started dabbling in other activities with national-security implications – Goldman Sachs, for instance, is apparently now in the uranium business, a piece of news that attracted few headlines.
Wall Street's War
But banks aren't just buying stuff, they're buying whole industrial processes. They're buying oil that's still in the ground, the tankers that move it across the sea, the refineries that turn it into fuel, and the pipelines that bring it to your home. Then, just for kicks, they're also betting on the timing and efficiency of these same industrial processes in the financial markets – buying and selling oil stocks on the stock exchange, oil futures on the futures market, swaps on the swaps market, etc.
Allowing one company to control the supply of crucial physical commodities, and also trade in the financial products that might be related to those markets, is an open invitation to commit mass manipulation. It's something akin to letting casino owners who take book on NFL games during the week also coach all the teams on Sundays.
The situation has opened a Pandora's box of horrifying new corruption possibilities, but it's been hard for the public to notice, since regulators have struggled to put even the slightest dent in Wall Street's older, more familiar scams. In just the past few years we've seen an explosion of scandals – from the multitrillion-dollar Libor saga (major international banks gaming world interest rates), to the more recent foreign-currency-exchange fiasco (many of the same banks suspected of rigging prices in the $5.3-trillion-a-day currency markets), to lesser scandals involving manipulation of interest-rate swaps, and gold and silver prices.
But those are purely financial schemes. In these new, even scarier kinds of manipulations, banks that own whole chains of physical business interests have been caught rigging prices in those industries. For instance, in just the past two years, fines in excess of $400 million have been levied against both JPMorgan Chase and Barclays for allegedly manipulating the delivery of electricity in several states, including California. In the case of Barclays, which is contesting the fine, regulators claim prices were manipulated to help the bank win financial bets it had made on those same energy markets.
And last summer, The New York Times described how Goldman Sachs was caught systematically delaying the delivery of metals out of a network of warehouses it owned in order to jack up rents and artificially boost prices.
You might not have been surprised that Goldman got caught scamming the world again, but it was certainly news to a lot of people that an investment bank with no industrial expertise, just five years removed from a federal bailout, stores and controls enough of America's aluminum supply to affect world prices.
How was all of this possible? And who signed off on it?
By exploiting loopholes in a dense, decade-and-a-half-old piece of financial legislation, Wall Street has effected a revolutionary change that American citizens never discussed, debated or prepared for, and certainly never explicitly permitted in any meaningful way: the wholesale merger of high finance with heavy industry. This blitzkrieg reorganization of our economy has left millions of Americans facing a smorgasbord of frightfully unexpected new problems. Do we even have a regulatory structure in place to look out for these new forms of manipulation? (Answer: We don't.) And given that the banking sector that came so close to ruining the world economy five years ago has now vastly expanded its footprint, who's in charge of preventing the next crash?
In this Brave New World, nobody knows. Moreover, whatever we've done, it's too late to have a referendum on it. Garrett Wotkyns, an Arizona-based class-action attorney who has spent more than a year investigating the banks' involvement in the metals markets and is suing Goldman and others over the aluminum case on behalf of two major manufacturers, puts it this way: "It's like that line in The Dark Knight Rises," he says. "'The storm isn't coming. The storm is already here.'"

next page > http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-vampire-squid-strikes-again-the-mega-banks-most-devious-scam-yet-20140212?page=2

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In Honor Of The Centennial Of The Birth Of Bernard Malamud- The Natural- Slim Jenkins’ Dream- Take One

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

…He, Slim Jenkins, did not know when he had picked up his grandmother’s household broom, had taken it outside and ball-less had begun to swing that instrument into the fierce Indiana farmland winds. Swung that broom, that faux Louisville Slugger as that was what he called the handle from the first no fiery superstition nicknames like Wonderboy or the Bomb from a no-nonsense world, for all it was worth. At first slapdash as one would expect from an ageless farm boy who would have picked up that slap-dashery from watching the farm hands carrying on the merciless fall harvest where every blade was whacked to perdition, no prisoners taken.

Later, later after Slim had seen balls, Grandpa’s pellets thrown at high speed at him to be swished at by a real bat, later after he had taken his, maybe ten thousandth swing, when he was seven, just turn seven that summer of his decision he would hoist that bat to his shoulders for he believed, fervently believed that his life entailed an ability to hit baseballs from both sides (left or right, right or left depending on his mood and the day) and make a memory of where the ball would land in Wrigley Field. Yes by then he had the bug, the dirt farmer’s son bug to get that hell out of dirt-rich Indiana and make himself the king of diamonds just like the Babe, just like Joe, just like the Kid.

And so he whiled away his childhood, becoming strong, farm boy harvest strong, practicing every day after school (and on some school hooky days all day) and always wondering where that damn ball would land in Wrigley Field, although he had never seen the field. All he knew was that he was destined to be the savior of that club and bring back that gold ring that every Hoosier around would be willing to pay big money just to peek at, although he had determined not change for that privilege. At about twelve he began to get picked for pick-up games over in Emmetsville by the bigger boys who saw the power of his wrists, the steadiness of his eyes and his ability to hit their fast balls and change-ups.

In the fall of his sixteenth year, after leaving school the previous spring (book learning school he had called it not wise to school of life thoughts) Slim headed to Indianapolis to find a job in a factory, the Sims Steel Plating plant, to support himself and to get himself ready to try-out off for the Indianapolis Wolves, a farm team for the Cubs. And so his new life started as Slim proved very competent at his place of work welding everything in sight and mixing it up with other guys at night in the pick-up games that each factory sponsored as part of an informal industrial league among the working stiffs of the town.

It was in that industrial league that a scout for the Cubs noticed Slim’s power, his ability to lay off bad pitches and to drop balls into spots when nobody could caught them. One day the scout showed up at Slim’s workplace with an offer for him to go to Florida come that following spring and try-out with the Cubs. Slim was as happy as he had been since he first started swinging old grandma’s broom (now deceased). One night just before he headed south for his try-out in order to celebrate his good luck Slim’s factory mates and a couple of others went to Jimmy Jacks’ Lounge over on Fourth Street for a party. It was there that he met Maggie Mason, Maggie of his dreams, Maggie of his…           

  

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The 1960s Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program-The Complete Stories

Seven –A Defense Of One’s Own

All hell was breaking loose in Mississippi in 1964 after they found those boys, those civil rights worker boys over in some ditch in Philadelphia (hell was breaking out before and after too but that year got everybody’s attention North and South, abolitionist and redneck, because a showdown was coming no question). Even Jacob Block knew some hard-ass stuff was coming down as isolated as he was from white folks (and other black folk too) on his poor excuse of a share crop farm about fifty miles outside of Hattiesburg. As he thought about it afterwards, after all hell had broken loose in his little world and its environs, he should have known it would come to that, come to a confrontation with Mister, or Mister’s rednecks acting in his name. Hell, his great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Ezra Bond, had jumped his plantation over near Savannah, Georgia, to walk down and join Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s 2^nd South Carolina Volunteers and raise some hell with the boys in grey. And later some cousin had been lynched right in broad daylight down near Biloxi, a big feisty rabid white crowd watching on, watching on with glee from what he had heard just because that cousin had tried, shotgun in hand, to defense his woman when some white rascal got his lust habits on. Yes, he should have known, known it was in the blood that when the deal went down he had to do something, had to defend his own, his sweet Martha, and the little ones.

Jacob did not know how he had first found out they were coming, about the redneck rampage, maybe something overheard in Otis Junction when he went to get his monthly provisions, maybe from somebody at the Lord’s Worship Baptist Church over in Oxbridge that time he went for Jim Jackson’s daughter’s wedding. But no question either that they were coming, coming to throw the worst fear into every last “nigger” (their term, always their term even when directly speaking to a negro, just one more way to put the black man behind the eight ball) within one hundred miles of Hattiesburg once they heard that some blacks were going right to the farms to get other blacks, farmers and small town dwellers alike, to register to vote, to exercise their American-given right to have a say in things. He had never voted, never cared if he voted, and never even really tried once he had gotten wise to Mister Jim Crow and his ways even though he could, mother taught, read and write as well as any white man in the county, hell, maybe in the state of Mississippi. He wanted no trouble, wanted no part of Mister, no part of confronting Mister Jim Crow and just wanted to be left alone. And that was that.

That was that until he heard about those Philadelphia boys, and until he had heard that they had, that white trash that had been put up to it by Mister and his damn White Citizens Councils, burned down Jack Lewis’ place, his beautiful little shack that he had spent half a life time trying to fix up, when he decided to lead his fellow church people to Hattiesburg to register to vote. Jacob still did not care whether he voted or not, registered or not, but since he was, the way things were going, to be targeted anyway just for being black, poor and nothing but a sharecropper well that was enough. Enough to get him and a few fellows, young bucks, sons of farmers he had met over the years although he did not know them or their sons well, and get ready to defend their land, come hell or high water, defend the land like some avenging angels arms in hand like they were heeding some ghost call from that old black abolitionist rabble-rouser Frederick Douglass with his call “to arms, sable warriors, to arms, the hour is at hand” to fight for freedom one more time.

Yah, it had come to that, come to simple black manhood time, time to either keep that lifetime head bent down, or walk on two black feet. And when it came to that showdown they were ready as Ebby Johnson’s son, William, a veteran of Korea, showed them how to use their shotguns to effect. And that knowledge came in handy one night, one night when they heard that a gang of whites was heading up Traversville Road about ten miles from Jacob’s land in three cars shooting and slowly setting fires at random and watching their handiwork. Probably drunk too Jacob (and William) figured.

So they set an ambush around Tyler Road, dark, with high ground and easy escape. And that night, whether it ever got recorded, reported, or noted, a small cadre of black men, black avenging angels (no niggers, nigras, or even negroes now) sent a fusillade of shotgun fire down at the three cars coming up that black night Mississippi road. And, you know, no marauding rednecks ever came within twenty miles of Jacob Block’s land again. And while he never took the time to register to vote when that became easier later he was always at pains to tell everybody he knew that one sweaty fearful night he had done all the voting he needed to do…

Ten Point Program[edit]

The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:^[43][44]
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.

8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

 

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Ta Thu Thau: Vietnamese Trotskyist Leader

From the American Left History archives, October 25, 2010:

Markin comment:

Earlier this month I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.

After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.

Today I am starting what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.

However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.

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Markin comment on this series on Vietnamese Trotskyism:

At the most fundamental level the struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism as it evolved out of the post-Bolshevik revolution Russian Communist Party inner-party disputes of the mid-1920s can be encapsulated in the differences between Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and Stalin’s theory of socialism in one country. In short, this dispute within the ostensibly communist movement is the continuation of the historic struggle in the international working class movement, and particularly in its Marxist wing, between reform and revolution. As it turns out this inner- party dispute that started out as a simple verification of Trotsky’s theory, at first applied solely to Russia, that in the age of imperialism the international bourgeoisie, and its national components, including its colonial and semi-colonial dependents no longer could, or more to the point, wanted to lead bourgeois revolutions, as exemplified by the French revolution in the 18th century came to expressed a chasm between those, like Trotsky, who favored extending the Russian revolution internationally and those, like Stalin, who wanted the Communist International, and its national sections, to merely act as agents of Soviet foreign policy.

Nowhere is the contrast between those perspectives more clearly expressed than in the struggle for the Vietnamese revolution that was central to the world-wide left-wing political milieu in the 1960s when this writer came of political age. Many of us came to defend the Vietnamese revolution first as an example of the right to national self-determination for small countries oppressed by world imperialism. Some of us moved on to defend that revolution because it was led by Stalinists, the exemplars of two-stage revolution (first a separate democratic stage, and then seemingly never, a socialist stage) and kowtowed to every move that “Uncle” Ho (and his successors) publicized. And a few of us came to defend that revolution despite its Stalinist leadership, understanding that a military victory against American imperialism was critical for revolutionary strategy and that the creation of a unitary workers state , albeit in distorted form as in North Vietnam, was a historic accretion to the international working class movement.

World-wide in the 1920s and 1930s for many reasons, great and small, personal and political, the struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism was almost totally to the disadvantage of the latter. Vietnam, in the 1930s and 1940s, represented something of an exception. As the documentation provided in this series of articles points out it took the physical liquidation of the Vietnamese Trotskyism cadre (in its two competing tendencies) to break important segments of the Vietnamese working class and its allies from a Trotskyist perspective. Although, as the articles also point out, mistakes of political omission and commission were made the fallen Vietnamese comrades are worthy of honor in the history of revolutionary struggles. A truly fitting tribute to their struggles awaits a victorious workers revolution. Remember the Vietnamese Trotkyists! Remember Vietnamese Bolshevik martyr Ta Thu Thau!

 

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. 
******** 

Ta Thu Thau: Vietnamese Trotskyist Leader

The credit for the first attempt in Britain to confront the Vietnamese Stalinists with the question of the murder of Ta Thu Thau goes to Chris Harman of the International Socialists (now the Socialist Workers Party), who broached the subject in his speech at a Ho Chi Minh Memorial Meeting, which was organised by the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and held in London on 13 September 1969. This resulted in the representative of the Stalinist regime walking off the stage in protest, and considerable pandemonium in the hall.
An eye-witness account of this meeting appears in David Widgery, The Left in Britain 1956-68, Harmondsworth 1976, pp 412-5. An account by the IS appeared in Socialist Worker (18 September 1969), and one hostile to the IS was in Black Dwarf (1 October 1969). Harman’s article, Ho – He Gave the ‘Third World’ Hope, which made much the same points as his speech, appeared in Socialist Worker (11 September 1969). A letter from Peter Sedgwick defending Harman’s position appeared in Black Dwarf (26 November 1969), with an editorial reply signed by Tariq Ali, Anthony Barnett, Fred Halliday, Adrian Mitchell and Sheila Rowbotham, saying that “Sedgwick ... knows little about Vietnam”. (The IS had previously published material on Ta Thu Thau in an article by Jim Scott, Ta Thu Thau – A Great Vietnamese Socialist, Labour Worker (7 September 1966).)
Some sections of the Trotskyist movement showed a distinct lack of principle on this issue. The International Marxist Group affirmed that “all talk of ‘Ho Chi Minh’s murder squads’ is an over-simplified distortion of an extremely complex situation” (Ta Thu Thau: Vietnamese Revolutionary, Red Mole, 15 September 1970), and Stephen Johns tried to exonerate the regime from responsibility by claiming that he had been “assassinated by a Vietminh cadre” (Stalinism and the Liberation of Vietnam, Fourth International (WRP), Volume 9 no.3, Autumn 1975, p.119).
Ho Chi Minh’s responsibility is established in the three letters and three interviews printed in Ho Chi Minh et les Trotskystes, Chroniques Vietnamiennes, no.1, November 1986, pp.13-18, from which come the pieces translated by Richard Moore in Political Terror in Vietnam, Socialist Organiser, no.295, 4 December 1986, and by Simon Pirani in Vietnam and Trotskyism, Australia 1987, pp.123-8. Tran Van Giau’s personal responsibility was raised with him when on a visit to France last year (Peter Salmon, Killer Confronted, Workers Press, 24 February 1990). Other accounts by the Groupe Trotskyste Vietnamien in France occur in Justice for Ta Thu Thau, Socialist Organiser, no.359, 9 June 1988 and Ta Thu Thau, Vietnamese Trotskyist, Socialist Organiser, no.360, 16 June 1988.
The following summary was written for us by the veteran Vietnamese revolutionary Ngo Van Xuyet, who now lives in Paris, and was translated for this magazine by Simon Pirani, and our thanks are surely due to both, as it consists of the fullest treatment of the life of this heroic figure that has yet appeared in English.

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

Ta Thu Thau was born on 6 May 1906 at Tan Binh (Longxuyên, south Vietnam), the fourth child of a large and very poor family: his father was a carpenter. In 1925 he began work as a teacher in Saigon. [1] At the age of 20, along with most of the ‘educated’ youth, Ta Thu Thau – in an experience he later called the “folly of his youth” – joined the nationalist group Young Annam, which was soon dissolved by the French colonial government. [2] On 24 March 1926 Ta Thu Thau took part in a mass demonstration to mark the return from France of the constitutional-nationalist leader Bui Quang Chiêu, and on 4 April 1926 in the demonstration marking the funeral of the veteran nationalist Phan Chau Trinh. [3] On 21 March that year he had taken part in a meeting in the Rue Lanzarotte, Saigon, organised by Nguyen An Ninh, for democratic liberties, and against the exploitation of Annamites, both natives from Annam and those from Tonkin. He wrote for the Annam newspaper of the nationalist lawyer Phan Van Truong. [4]
Ta Thu Thau arrived in France in September 1927 and enrolled at the Science faculty of the University of Paris. He joined the Dang Viet Nam Dôc Lap (Annamite Independence Party – PAI), and after its founder Nguyen The Truyen returned to Vietnam in 1928, took responsibility for its work. [5] The anti-colonialist monthly Resurrection, which began in December the same year, but was shortlived, was published by Ta Thu Thau in collaboration with Huynh Van Phuong. [6]
In January 1929, Pierre Taittinger’s Jeunesse Patriotes (Young Patriots) [7] clashed with Annamites under the PAI’s influence. Ta Thu Thau attacked L’Humanité, the French Communist Party’s newspaper, for the “bad faith” of its account, and the French Communist Party (PCF) for its failure to intervene on behalf of the Annamites arrested at this meeting, and wrote about the “retribution to be exacted from the PCF’s Colonial Commission” for its “counter-revolutionary factional work” within the PAI. The Annamite group of the PCF’s Colonial section, led by Nguyen Van Tao [8], hoped through this work to transform the PAI members into “automatons for carrying out their edicts”, as he wrote. A leaflet written by Ta Thu Thau concluded: “From our unspeakable slavery, we cry out to all the oppressed of the colonies: unite against European imperialism, white or red, if you want a part of this world for yourselves.” In March 1929 Ta Thu Thau tried in vain to defend the PAI from its legal dissolution by the Seine district court.
From 20 to 30 July 1929 Ta Thu Thau participated in the Second Congress of the Anti-Imperialist League at Frankfurt. [9] In left-wing Paris circles, he met Felicien Challaye, Francis Jourdain and Daniel Guérin. [10] He abandoned the nationalist beliefs of his early years and entered the Trotskyist Left Opposition. He was 23 years old.
Following the insurrection at Yên Bay, on the night of 9-10 February 1930, inspired by the Viet Nam Quôc Dân Dang (the Annamite Kuomintang) [11], Ta Thu Thau set out his political perspective in relation to the Indochinese revolution in La Verité, organ of the Left Opposition in Paris (April/May/June 1930).

The artificially-created indigenous bourgeoisie is not capable of making any revolution ... the indigenous bourgeois bloc, incapable of an independent existence, has welded itself firmly to the French bourgeoisie – which holds on tight to it, and uses it to break up the revolutionary struggle in the name of Annamite nationalism.

The badly-organised rising at Yên Bay ... without liaison between its organisation and the civilian population ... was launched on a confused ideological foundation ... a Sun-Yat-sen-ist synthesis of democracy, nationalism and socialism [12] ... a kind of nationalist mysticism.

This policy obscured the concrete class relationships, and the real, organic liaison between the indigenous bourgeoisie and French imperialism ... Those who speak of immediate and integral independence have nothing more than a mechanical and formalistic conception of the struggle. Not one of them can doubt that, behind these impressive words, there is a people within which operate perpetual molecular changes of the social classes, which are all the more imperceptible because they are veiled by the appearance of the conflict between races, which in many people’s eyes is real and eternal ... Neither terrorism nor Gandhism will resolve the colonial problem ... A revolution based on the organisation of the proletarian and peasant masses is the only one capable of liberating the colonies ... The question of independence must be bound up with that of the proletarian socialist revolution.

Ta Thu Thau here criticised the Third International and the PCF for their negligence in training Marxist cadres, and for their empirical approach to the so-called “continuous revolutionary situation” in Indochina; he denounced the “false policy of the International”, the adventurist policy of the Third Period, as a result of which “proletarian revolutionaries had capitulated to the nationalist parties ...” and “the Chinese revolution had been led to the graveyard.”

Sentences

On 22 May 1930 the Annamite students in Paris demonstrated in the Champs d’Elysées against more than 50 death sentences passed against participants in the Yên Bay uprising; Ta Thu Thau was arrested, and on 30 May deported from France back to Vietnam with 18 of his compatriots.
When the clandestine Trotskyist Ta doi lâp (Left Opposition) was formed in Saigon near the end of 1931, Ta Thu Thau was one of its founders. But the group soon split into three factions: Ta Thu Thau organised the Dông duong công san (Indochinese Communism) group, which from 1 May 1932 published a duplicated news-sheet, Vô San (Proletarian). Huynh Van Phuong and Phan Van Chanh, who were also among those deported from France, published communist propaganda journals under the title Ta doi lâp tung tho (Left Opposition Publications). Another deportee from France, Ho Huu Tuong, together with other opponents of the Indochinese Communist Party, formed the Thang muoi (October) group. [13]
These clandestine groups were soon hit by severe repression. Forty-one people were arrested in Saigon and in the Baclieu, Baria, Giadinh and Soctrang provinces. Arrested on 8 August 1932, Ta Thu Thau was freed with a warning on 21 January 1933; but 15 activists were sentenced to between four months and five years imprisonment at a trial of 21 Trotskyists on 1 May 1933.
At the Saigon municipal elections on 30 April and 7 May 1933, Ta Thu Thau carried out legal agitation with the Stalinist Communist Nguyen Van Tao, the nationalists Nguyen An Ninh, Tran Van Thach, Le Van Thu, Trinh Hung Ngau and others. [14] This group constituted a ‘workers’ list (so lao dong) for the elections, an unusual event for Indochina. A French-language newspaper, La Lutte (The Struggle), was published to support the campaign (Annamite-language newspapers were subject to censorship); the first issue was dated 24 April 1933 and the paper disappeared the day after the election. To a stupefied reaction from colonialist society, two candidates from the ‘workers’ list’ were elected onto the municipal council.
On 15 November of the same year, following an initiative from a study circle of former students in France, Ta Thu Thau gave a lecture on the dialectic, to a large audience of students and workers gathered at a cooperative college.
In 1934, from the ‘United Front’ of Trotskyists, Stalinists and nationalists “for the defence of the working class”, the La Lutte group was formally constituted; the Trotskyists withheld their critique of the USSR and Stalinism, the Stalinists their criticism of Trotskyism, and the La Lutte newspaper reappeared on 4 October 1934.
Their election to office annulled [15], the group’s members presented themselves anew for the municipal election of May 1935. Ta Thu Thau was among those elected. Sought by the authorities for “subversive press activity”, he was given a two year suspended prison sentence on 27 June 1935, a punishment confirmed by the appeal court on 10 September 1935. On 26 December 1935 Ta Thu Thau – along with three other elected representatives of La Lutte – was arrested for making a speech in support of striking tilbury-drivers; they were released the next day. At the trial of the La Lutte newspaper on 18 March 1936, Ta Thu Thau was fined 500 francs in the Saigon court.
The coming to power of the Popular Front government in France in June 1936 [16] triggered off a vast popular movement which swept Indochina: strikes in the rubber plantations, in the Arsenal, on the railways ... and peasant demonstrations. At a meeting on 13 August 1936, principally of militants from the La Lutte group and leaders of the constitutional-nationalist party, plans were sketched out for the Indochinese Congress movement. A committee was formed to prepare a charter of democratic demands for presentation to the Popular Front government. The Congress movement was banned on 19 September 1936, and Ta Thu Thau, who had taken part in its commission for legislation for the workers, was jailed along with Nguyen Van Tao and Nguyen An Ninh. They were all released after 11 days’ hunger strike, on 5 November.
In 1937 industrial strikes and peasant demonstrations exploded again. Ta Thu Thau found himself back in prison from 18 May to 7 June, and was then condemned by the Saigon court on 9 July to two years in prison, a sentence against which he appealed. It was at this time that the PCF ordered the Stalinists to break with the Trotskyists (cf the letter from Gitton, 19 May 1937). [17] A general strike of railwaymen landed Ta Thu Thau back in prison on 23 July 1937. After a hunger strike of 12 days, he was brought back it front of the Saigon court on 17 September on a stretcher. He was semi-paralysed. Condemned on 11 November to a further two-year sentence to run concurrently, he was released conditionally three months before the end of the sentence, on 14 February 1939, on the eve of the Annamite new year.
Working with his Trotskyist comrades Ta Thu Thau continued publication of the newspaper Tranh dau (formerly La Lutte which appeared in the Annamite language from October 1938), supporting the Fourth International. In the paper’s pages he waged a campaign for the Colonial Council elections of 16 and 30 April 1939 [18],. where he was elected with his two comrades Tran Van Thach and Phan Var Hum[19] Their programme included opposition to a national loan of 33 million piastres being raised from the people “for the defence of Indochina” – and this conflicted with the position of the Indochinese Communist Party, which was aligned with that of the PCF, that France had to get her security forces into a state of battle-readiness, as a consequence of the Laval-Stalin pact of May 1935. On 1 October 1939 Phan Van Hum was condemned to five years in prison for this anti-militarist propaganda.
Ta Thu Thau was authorised to leave Saigon on 21 August 1939 to go to Siam. He intended to seek medical treatment there. But the war broke out, and he was arrested and taken back to Saigon on 11 October 1939. The newspaper Tranh dau was among those affected by a banning order on 26 September 1939, and Ta Thu Thau’s group was among those “communistic groups and associations” affected by a dissolution order (decreed in October, 1939). Condemned in the Saigon court on 16 April 1940 to five years’ imprisonment a 10-year banning order and 10 years’ loss of civil rights, Ta Thu Thau was deported to the Poulo Condore island concentration camp in October 1940.

Coup

After his return from the camp at the end of 1944, Ta Thu Thau worked to build the Socialist Workers Party (Dan xa hoi tho thuyen). The Japanese coup put an end to French colonial power on March 1945, and replaced it with the government of Bao Dai and Tran Tron Kim. [20] By the middle of 1945, Ta Thi Thau had made his way to Tonkin, and made contact with Trotskyist militants in the Dan phuong region including Luon Due Thiep, Khuong Huu An and others who were publishing the newspaper Chieu dau (Combat) as the organ of the Socialist Workers Party of north Vietnam.
Ta Thu Thau participated in clandestine workers’ and peasants’ meetings in the mining areas of Nam dinh, Haiphong and Hai duong. After the fall of Japan and the coming to power of Ho Chi Minh in August 1945 [21], Ta Thu Thau hoped to get back to south Vietnam, but was arrested by the Vietminh at Quang ngai and assassinated in September 1945. [22]

Mourn

On the subject of Ta Thu Thau’s death, here are the words of Ho Chi Minh in 1946, as told by Daniel Guerin: “He was a great patriot and we mourn him ... but all those who do not follow the line we have laid down will be broken.”
In the month following the Saigon insurrection of 23 September 1945, Ta Thu Thau’s closest comrades led the Tranh dau group into battle against the Franco-British force which aimed to reconquer Vietnam, an engagement in which some 200 Tranh dau men lost their lives; like Ta Thu Thau, the Tranh dau leaders were assassinated by Ho Chi Minh’s partisans.
We must recall that in 1939, echoing the Moscow Trials, Ho Chi Minh wrote three letters to his “beloved comrades” describing the Trotskyists as “notorious spies and traitors”, in the service of “international, Chinese, Spanish, Italian and German fascism”. To exterminate them was the implicit, but very clear, conclusion from this.
As a person, Ta Thu Thau was likeable and had great self-possession. Answering a summons by governor Pages [23] in April 1937, he declared: “A revolutionary I am, and a revolutionary I will remain as long as there is blood in my veins.”
Ngo Van Xuyet

Notes

1. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City after the National Liberation Front’s 1975 victory.
2. France sent military missions to Vietnam from 1848 (central and south Vietnam then constituting the nation of Annam, north Vietnam being known as Tonkin). Vietnam and Cambodia were under complete French control by the 1860s, and this was extended to all Indochina with the conquest of Laos in 1893. The national independence movement took the form of bourgeois conspiracies in the early years of the twentieth century; in the early 1920s it emerged as a mass movement. A Constitutionalist Party was formed in 1923; revolutionary nationalist organisations also proliferated, of which Young Annam (Viet Nam Thanh Nien Dang) was one.
3. Bui Quang Chieu founded the bourgeois Constitutionalist Party which aroused mass sentiment against the feudal class and colonialists in the 1920s, using occasions such as Phan Chau Trinh’s funeral for this purpose. As workers' movements emerged, starting with the abortive uprisings of 1930, the Constitutionalists became extremely hostile to them and drew closer to the colonialist government and police.
Phan Chau Trinh was a mandarin at the Hue court, who quit his post in disgust at the court’s corruption in 1905, and joined nationalist veteran Phan Boi Chau in exile in Hong Kong. Returning to Vietnam in 1906, he was accused of inspiring a peasant uprising in 1908 and was jailed far three years. After being freed he continued political activity.
4. Nguyen An Ninh studied law in Paris, where he joined the nationalist movement. He returned to Vietnam in 1923 and founded the nationalist newspaper La Cloche Felée, which among other things published the Communist Manifesto in Vietnam for the first time; in the 1930s he played a leading role in the Indochinese Congress movement, and in La Lutte. The Rue Lanzarotte meeting, attended by 3,000 people, was the first-ever public political rally in Saigon. La Cloche Felée was followed by Annam in May 1926. Its editor, Phan Van Truong, had joined the nationalist movement as a student in France in 1912.
5. Nguyen The Truyen also joined the nationalist movement while studying in France, and in 1922-23 formed L’Union Intercoloniale to unite anti-imperialists from throughout the French empire. He returned to Vietnam in 1928. Back in France in 1936-37, he attempted to establish a union of oppressed nationalities together with the Algerian Messali Hadj.
6. Huynh Van Phuong came from a rich Mytho family; in 1927 he went to study law in Paris, where he joined the Trotskyist Left Opposition. Deported to Vietnam together with Ta Thu Thau in 1930, he edited the Left Opposition’s journal in Saigon, and was active in the La Lutte group. He was assassinated by the Stalinists in 1945.
7. Pierre Taittinger’s Jeunesses Patriotes were French fascists, inspired by Mussolini, who emerged as a force after the 1924 election of a Radical-Socialist coalition. These were lumpen thugs, dressed in blue raincoats and berets for their public provocations, downmarket in comparison to the Croix de Feu (predominantly ex-servicemen) and Charles Maurras’ Action Directe which headed the attempted fascist coup of February 1934.
8. Nguyen Van Tao joined the French Communist Party while studying in Paris, and became a full-timer in 1927; he was deported to Vietnam in 1931, where he played a leading part in the Stalinist organisation.
9. The Anti-Imperialist League, founded under the influence of the Stalinist Comintern leaders in 1927 at Brussels, brought together pacifists and other petty-bourgeois lefts. The Frankfurt congress, which Ta Thu Thau attended, brought its short life to an end.
10. Felicien Challaye, Francis Jourdain and historian and writer Daniel Guerin were French anti-colonialists, inspirers of numerous actions supporting colonial liberation, and founders in 1933 of an Amnesty Committee for Vietnamese political prisoners.
11. The Yen Bay insurrection began as a mutiny by Annamite troops stationed on the Chinese frontier; they massacred their officers and controlled the garrison for a night, but other garrisons either failed to rise or were defeated. The village of Co Am rose a few days later, and was suppressed by pitiless aerial bombardment. The severity of French repression following the rising finished the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dong as a political force.
12. Sun Yat Sen was founder of the Chinese bourgeois nationalist Guomindang; his philosophy combined anti-imperialist nationalism, democracy and utopian Socialist ideas.
13. Phanh Van Chanh joined the Left Opposition in Paris in 1929, and was deported along with Ta Thu Thau in 1930. He worked as a teacher, and was an editor of the Left Opposition's Saigon journal. Deported to Poulo Condore 1940-43; he was assassinated by the Stalinists in October 1945 at Ben Sue, Thu Dau Mot. For Huynh Van Phuong see note 6.
Ho Huu Tuong began his political life as a nationalist, and joined the Trotskyist movement while studying in France, at Aixen-Provence and Lyons; he returned to Saigon in 1931. The October group, which later became the League of Internationalist Communists, supported the Fourth International and published Le Militant; it would not join the La Lutte front because this would have meant withholding public criticism of the Stalinists; its members played a leading role in forming soviet-type workers’ councils in the 1945 revolution. Ho Huu Tuong also participated in 1945, although he had renounced Trotskyism during the war.
14. Tran Van Thach, a nationalist, studied in Paris and was deported to Vietnam with Ta Thu Thau in 1930. He worked as a teacher and, following the struggle within La Lutte, became a Trotskyist in 1937. He was elected to the Saigon Colonial Council in 1939, imprisoned at Poulo Condore from 1940 to 1944, and assassinated by the Stalinists at Thu Dau Mot in 1945. Le Van Thu, another of the Paris deportees, remained a nationalist but played an active part in La Lutte and the workers’ movement. Trinh Hung Ngau, who had worked with Ta Thu Thau on the Annam newspaper, was a nationalist with Anarchist leanings.
15. The elections of La Lutte councillors were annulled on spurious grounds, such as the non-payment of taxes.
16. The elections of April-May 1936 in France gave a large majority to the Popular Front of the Communist Party, Socialists, Radicals and others. A government headed by Leon Blum of the Socialist Party took office on 2 June amidst a wave of strikes and factory occupations. The Stalinists supported this government, although they did not take part in it, thus ensuring that power remained with the bourgeoisie.
17. At this time the Trotskyists advocated intensified strike struggles against French imperialism; the Stalinists wanted an abatement of strikes on the grounds that the working class should not damage the French Popular Front government, a diplomatic ally of the USSR. The letter from French CP leader Marcel Gitton to the Indochinese CP stated “we consider it impossible to continue the collaboration of the party with the Trotskyists ...” and instructed it to cease. After the Stalinists split from La Lutte, the letter was published in it (29 August 1937).
18. Colonial Councils were administrative bodies with limited powers; there was a small property qualification for franchise.
19. Phan Van Hum was a teacher of law, literature and philosophy. He began political activity as a nationalist, but joined the Trotskyist movement in France in the early 1930s. Returning to Saigon in July 1933, he took part in La Lutte, was deported to Poulo Condore during the war, and was assassinated by the Stalinists in October 1945 in Bien Hoa. For Tran Van Thach see note 13. Their joint letter to Trotsky appears below.
20. Bao Dai, last emperor of Vietnam, succeeded his father in 1925 at the age of 12, but did not take the throne until 1932. He collaborated with the French, and when the Japanese coup took place agreed to work with them; he abdicated in 1945, joined the Vietminh briefly, went into exile, and returned as a French puppet again from 1949 to 1955. Tran Trong Kim, a mild-mannered academic, was his Prime Minister in 1945.
21. Japan surrendered to the imperialist Allies on 14 August 1945, after the atom bombing of Hiroshima: this provoked a revolutionary situation in Vietnam. In the north the Vietminh marched from their jungle bases into Hanoi and declared a ‘Democratic Republic’ on 2 September. According to Stalin’s agreement with the Allies, the south was to be placed under French control again, and while the southern Vietminh tried to prepare for this, it was resisted by the nationalists, and by the Trotskyists who called for the workers’ councils which had sprung up to take power. The Stalinists arrested delegates to a congress of workers’ councils and managed to establish a ‘provisional government’ despite the unpopularity of their line; they stood by as the French reinvaded in October, concentrating their fire on the Trotskyists, all of whose leaders were killed.
22. According to a report published in the journal Quatrième Internationale in 1947, Ta Thu Thau was tried by a Vietminh ‘people’s tribunal’ after his arrest. Due to his great prestige in the workers’ movement, this tribunal could not be persuaded to find him guilty of anything; then he was shot anyway.
23. Pierre Pages was French colonial governor of Indochina throughout the 1930s.
This essay is based upon the following sources: Archives nationales (Paris) F7-13406, 13408, 13409, 13410, 13167, 13170, Archives Outre-mer D2514; La Depeche d’Indochine, Saigon, various issues 1933-40; Nguyen Van Dinh, Ta thu thau, to qudc gia toi quoc te (Ta Thu Thau, from Nationalism to Internationalism), Saigon 1938; Phuong Lan, Nha each mang Ta thu Thau (The revolutionary Ta Thu Thau), Saigon 1974; D. Hemery, Du patriotisme au marxism: l’immigration vietnamienne en France 1926 a 1930 (From patriotism to Marxism: the Vietnamese emigration in France 1926-30), in Le Mouvement social, no.90, Paris 1975; D. Hemery, Revolutionnaires vietnamiens et pouvoir colonial en Indochine (Vietnamese revolutionaries and colonial power in Indochina), Paris 1975; D. Hemery, Ta Thu Thau: l’itineraire politique d’un révolutionnaire vietnamien pendant les annees 1930 (Ta Thu Thau: the political path of a Vietnamese revolutionary through the 1930s) in Histoire de l’Asie du Sud-Est. The translation and the notes are the work of Simon Pirani, to whom, along with the author, our thanks are due.

In Honor Of Women’s History Month – Poet Jesse Baxter’s In Pharaoh Times

 

 

In Pharaoh Times

Isis, daughter of Isis major, mother- wife-sister of the human sun god

Awoke, awoke with a start weary from brother couplings; and stray poppy laden abandoned copulations

Configurations only a deacon priest filled with signs and amulets could fathom, or some racked court astrologer

To face the stone-breaking day, a day filled to the brim, overflowing, with portents

Arisen, washed, fragranced, headed to the balcony to observe unseen and to be observed seen beneath the cloudless skies      

Out in the ocean sea of whirling sand, out in the endless chiseled stone sun blazing day; her sea visage on down heads, eyes averted

Hittites, Gilts, Samians, Cretans, Nubians, Babylonians all conquered all down heads and averted eyes

Out on the ocean see, a lone sable warrior defeated, defeated with down head and upward eye disturbed the blistering heat day

Isis, daughter of Isis major, mother-wife-sister-child of the human sun king    shrinks back in fear, fear time has come

That black will devour Nubian and rise, rise

Yes, rise in Pharaoh times       

Jesse Baxter had never been so angry in his black young life as he had been at his, well, let’s call her his lady friend, Louise Crawford, since he was not sure whether girlfriend in the intricate relationship networks of the1960s in quirky old Greenwich Village in the depths of trail-blazing New Jack City was an appropriate designation for their newly flowered relationship. Jesse a budding poet, a very hopeful poet who had just begun to get noticed in that rarified Village air had become one of Louise Crawford ‘s, ah, “conquests” on her way to tasting  all that the Bohemian night offered (not quite “beat,”  that had become passé by then and not quite “hip” as in hippie that would become the fashion later in the decade so bohemian, meaning out on the cultural outer edge, would do, would do as long as Jesse thought such a term was appropriate).

Jesse had seen Louise around the Village several times at the trendy art shows, upbeat coffeehouses beginning to emerge from “beat” poetry and jazz scenes to retro folk revival stuff, and at a few loft parties large enough to get lost in without having met everybody or anyone, if that was what one wanted. He had heard of her “exploits,” exploits tramping through the budding literati but had only become acquainted with Louise through her “old” lover, Jose, Jose Guzman, the surrealist-influenced painter who was beginning to make a splash for himself in the up and coming art galleries emerging over in nearby Soho. And either she had tired of him (possible) or he had tired of her (more probable since Jose was thrown off right from the beginning by her “bourgeois “command manner and her overweening need to seem like a white hipster under every circumstance although she was quote, Jose, quote, square, unquote but a good tumble, a very good tumble under the sheets) and so one night she had hit on Jesse at a coffeehouse where he was reading and that was that.

But enough of small talk and back to Jesse’s rage. At one up-scale party held on Riverside Drive among the culturati, or what passed for such in downtrodden New York,  as they had become an “item” Louise had introduced Jesse as the “greatest Negro poet since Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance.” Jesse was not put off by the comparison with the great Hughes, no way, he accepted that designation with a certain sense of honor, although qualified a bit by the different rhythm that motivated Langston’s words, be-bop jazz, and his own Bo Diddley /Chuck Berry-etched  “child of rock and roll” beat running in his head. What he was put off by was that “negro”  designation, a term of derision just then in his universe as young blacks, especially young black men, were moving away from the negro Doctor King thing and toward that Malcolm freedom term, black, black as night, black is beautiful. Jesus, hadn’t she read his To Malcolm –Black Warrior Prince. (Apparently one of the virtues of tramping through the literati was an understanding that there was no actual need to read, look, hear, anything that your new “conquest” had written, drawn or sung. In the case of Louise she had made something of an art form out of that fact once confessing to Jesse that she had only actually read (and re-read) his Louise Love In Quiet Time written by him after some silly spat since she was the subject. His other work she had somebody summarize for her. Jesus, again.) 

And it was not like Louise Crawford, yes, that Crawford, the scion-ess [sic] of the Wall Street Crawfords who had (have) been piling up dough and gouging profits since the start of the republic, was not attuned to the changes going on underneath bourgeois society just then but was her way to “own” him, own him like in olden times. While he was too much the gentile son of W.E.B. Dubois’ “talented tenth” (his parents both school teachers down in hometown Trenton who however needed to scrimp and safe to put him through Howard University) to make a scene at that party latter in the cab home to her place in the Village (as the well-tipped taxi driver could testify to, if necessary) Jesse lashed into her with all the fury a budding poet and belittled black man could muster. In short, he would not be “owned” by some white bread women who was just “cruising” the cultural and ethnic out-riggings before going back to marry some son of some sorry family friend stockbroker and live on Riverside Drive and summer in the Hamptons and all the rest while he struggled to create his words, his black soul-saturated word .

The harangue continued up into her loft and then Jesse ran out of steam a little (he had had a little too much of high-shelf liquors and of hits on the bong pipe to last forever in that state). Louise called for a truce, said she was sorry, sorry for being a square, and called him to her bed, pretty please to her bed. He, between the buzz in his head from the stimulants and the realization that she was good in bed, if nothing else, followed. And that night they made those sheets sweat with their juices. After they were depleted Jesse thought to himself that Louise might be just slumming but he would take a ticket and stay for the ride and felt asleep. Louise on the other hand, got up and went to the window to look out at her city, lit a cigarette and pondered some of Jesse’s words, pondered them for a while and got just a little bit fearful for her future as she would back to her bed and lay down next to the sleeping Jesse.

 Later when he awakened just before dawn Jesse wrote his edgy poem In Pharaoh Times partially to contain the edges of his left-over rage and partially to take his distance from a daughter of Isis…

And hence this Women’s History Month contribution.                      

In Honor Of International Women’s Day- A Loud Voice Of One’s Own 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

She was not sure exactly how she was going to raise the rent money now that she had exhausted her unemployment benefits after having been laid off from the Excelsior Company as a line operator where for two good years she had made enough money to keep herself and her boys above water. Yes she was not sure at all. All she knew was that with three young boys, hungry young boys, nine, seven and six, that she was going to make sure they were fed, properly fed, and she was equally sure that she and they were not going back out on the streets, the homeless streets not the whore streets if that is what you were thinking (although as a runaway teenager she had tried that, tried that for about two days before giving that idea the wind). She, they, had had enough of that, trying to stay here one night, there another, someplace else the third and the boys, her precious boys, missing their schooling, schooling that she swore that they would get, take advantage of , unlike her own sorry school-less story. Yes, Alma Larkin, was fresh out of ideas, apparently fresh of  luck and not exactly sure where she would turn to, hopefully not to the Sally’s (Salvation Army) again bless them like the last time.

Just that minute, and really for the first time in over two years Alma had to take stock of her situation, and she didn’t like it but the boys’ fate demanded such reflection. Alma knew two things though, come hell or high water, first, she was not going back to Harlan, Harlan down in deep coal country Kentucky where she was brought up, brought up kind of helter-skelter, kind of like some  mountain wind coming down the hills and hollows. She would be just too shamed-faced to face her kin after all these years and after all the big deal she made about putting nothing but distance between herself and the “hillbillies” (hell, she had called them, including her Pa, nothing but white trash more than once) when wild man hot-rod king walking daddy whiskey, corn whiskey if anybody is asking, runner Lance Lane swept her off her fifteen year old feet. Never to look back, that was the way she put it. And then Lance abandoning her in Lexington for some dishy big busted blonde and leaving her to fend for herself  (and that is where that experience of couple of days of street tricks came in, came in lonesome old Lexington).      

Second, even if she could find him, Alma was not going to call on Lennie Small, the father of her three boys, to do the right thing and take care of his own. Hell, she, they, they including Lennie had tried that, tried it a couple of times but it only left her homeless in the end. See Lennie was what he himself called a rolling stone (come to think of it so did Lance, except Lance at least had sense enough not to get her pregnant as part of his rolling stone act) and he refused in the end to gather any moss. That moss thing being some red-headed waitress who took a fancy to him when they moved to Springfield and had enough dough to make it stick, for a while. The last postcard she had received from him (no letters, so no hope of child support money enclosed) he was out in California with some cocktail waitress from Reno trying to “find” himself, and still not working. So Lennie was out, out for good this time.

Then Alma got an idea, got an idea that if she pressed the issue hard enough she would get something, get another job. So she went down to the Illinois State Department of Unemployment office and did her thing. That thing included, after waiting for a couple of hours for her interview and filling out a scad of paperwork, yelling to high heaven to the intake worker that she needed a job, needed it bad, was not going to go back on the streets (implying a little those whore streets for effect), and what was the great state of Illinois going to do about it. She figured that when the office manager came to the intake worker’s desk she had blown it, that she would be arrested and that was that. Instead that office manager, who had  three children of her own, called up the Republic Manufacturing Company and told them that she had right in front of her just the line operator they were looking for.  And so who knows what will happen next week, or next month, but Alma’ Larkin’s three boys will had food and a roof over their heads for a while …

And hence this honor to one righteous woman on this International Women’s Day.