***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night -Phil Philips' Sea Of Love

 

I have recently spent some little effort making comparisons between old time country blues singers. My winners have been Skip James and Son House. Apparently, if the story behind the Robert Johnson story presented here is right I am in a minority compared to the like of guitarists Eric Clapton and Keith Richards. So be it. After viewing this very informative bio, complete with the inevitable “talking heads" that populate these kinds of film efforts I still have that same opinion, except I would hold Johnson’s version of his “Sweet Home, Chicago” in higher regard after listening to it here. Previously many other covers of the song, including the trendy Blues Brothers version seemed better, a lot better.

The producers of this film have spend some time and thought on presentation. The choice of Danny Glover as expressive and thoughtful narrator was a welcome sign. Having Johnson road companion and fellow blues artist, Johnny Shines, give insights into Johnson’s work habits, traveling ways, womanizing, whiskey drinking and off-center personality make this a very strong film. Add in footage of Son House (an early Johnson influence) and various other Delta artists who met or were met by Johnson along the way and one gets the feeling that this is more a labor of love than anything else. For a man who lived fast, died young and left a relatively small body of work (some 20 odd songs)this is a very good take on Robert Johnson. I might add that if Johnson is your number one blues man this film gives you plenty of ammunition for your position.

Note: As is almost universally true with such film endeavors we only get snippets of the music. I would have liked to hear a full “Preacher’s Blues”, “Sweet Home, Chicago”, "Terraplane Blues” and “Hell Hounds On My Heels” but for that one will have to look elsewhere.

"Terraplane Blues" lyrics-Robert Johnson

And I feel so lonesome
you hear me when I moan
When I feel so lonesome
you hear me when I moan
Who been drivin my terraplane
for you since I've been gone
I'd said I flashed your lights mama
your horn won't even blow
I even flash my lights mama
this horn won't even blow
Got a short in this connection
hoo-well, babe, its way down below
I'm on hist your hood momma
I'm bound to check your oil
I'm on hist your hood momma mmmm
I'm bound to check your oil
I got a woman that I'm lovin
way down in Arkansas
Now you know the coils ain't even buzzin
little generator won't get the spark
Motors in a bad condition
you gotta have these batteries charged
But I'm cryin please
please don't do me wrong
Who been drivin my terraplane now for
you-hoo since I've been gone
Mr Highwayman
please don't block the road
Puh hee hee
ple-hease don't block the road
Casue she's restrin (?) a cold one hindred
and I'm booked I gotta go
Mmm mmm
mmmm mmmm mmm
You ooo oooo oooo
you hear me weep and moan
Who been drivin my terraplane
for you since I've been gone
I'm on get deep down in this connection
keep on tanglin with your wires
I'm on get deep down in this connection
hoo-well keep on tanglin with your wires
And when I mash down your little starter
then your spark plug will give me a fire.
******
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
*The "Mac Daddy" Of Modern Blues- Robert Johnson

CD REVIEW
Martin Scorsese Presents; The Blues, Robert Johnson, Sony Records, 2003

I have heard the name Robert Johnson associated with country blues as long as I have been listening to the blues, and believe me that is a long time. I would venture to guess that if an average blues (or just music) fan was asked to name one blues artist the name that would, more probably than not, come up is Robert Johnson. Partially that is because his influence on later artists has been nothing short of fantastic, particularly the English blues aficionados like Eric Clapton. That said, Brother Johnson’s work leaves me cold. While I can appreciate some of his lyrics his guitar playing is ordinary, his singing can be tedious and his sense of momentum over the course of an album is very mundane.

His contemporaries, or near contemporaries like Charlie Patton, Howlin’ Wolf or Son House, to name just a few, are better in one or all these categories . Needless to say there is an element of subjectivity here but when the occasion arises I am more than willing to gush over a talent that makes me jump. Brother Johnson just does not do so. The source of his fame as an innovator is centered on his role of breaking the pattern of country blues established by Son House and other and giving the first hints of a city blues idiom, particularly as a forerunner to the Chicago blues. Okay, we will give the ‘devil’ his do on that score. Still, on any given day wouldn’t you give your right arm to see and hear Howlin’ Wolf croon "The Red Rooster" (and practically eat the microphone) or any of his other midnight creeps rather than Johnson on "Sweet Home, Chicago"? Here I will rest my case.

So what do you have to hear here? Obviously, “Sweet Home, Chicago". Beyond that “32-20 Blues” is a must listen as is his version of “Dust My Broom” (but isn’t Elmore James’ slide guitar souped-up version much better?) and “Hellhound On My Trail”. Keb’ Mo' (who I will review separately at a later time) does a nice cover here of “Last Fair Deal Gone Down”.


Lyrics to "Dust My Broom"

I'm gonna get up in the mornin',
I believe I'll dust my broom (2x)
Girlfriend, the black man you been lovin',
girlfriend, can get my room

I'm gon' write a letter,
Telephone every town I know (2x)
If I can't find her in West Helena,
She must be in East Monroe, I know

I don't want no woman,
Wants every downtown man she meet (2x)
She's a no good doney,
They shouldn't 'low her on the street

I believe, I believe I'll go back home (2x)
You can mistreat me here, babe,
But you can't when I go home

And I'm gettin' up in the morning,
I believe I'll dust my broom (2x)
Girlfriend, the black man that you been lovin',
Girlfriend, can get my room

I'm gon' call up Chiney,
She is my good girl over there (2x)
If I can't find her on Philippine's Island,
She must be in Ethiopia somewhere

Robert Johnson

 

  

 

***Off The Road With On The Road-Take Five

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

As I search the western, American western shoreline blue-pink skies just before dark I  think we will always have fugitive memories, fugitive as we lead our ordinary go along lives not filled with detours or time for detours, emerging out of the fog-horn Frisco town night. Late 1940s fugitive memories as that town readied itself to take refugees, car-borne just enough gas to get over the Bay Bridge refugees, out of the Route 101(breezing past Paseo Robles), Route 66 (out through the Arizonas and Nevadas where it counted), Route 20 (via Portland and then down), hell, even up and down the Pacific Coast Highway(up through those endless beach towns), hell, maybe especially up and down that highway, coming in from the cold war red scare Denver/Chi Town/Jersey Shore (dare I say Trenton or Paterson)/Village/Lowell/Hullsville American monster dreaded night. Second-hand fugitive memories in some cases transported by books and strange human travelogues. Some of us having been just a little too young to have been word-blasted directly by that fog-horn beat, that high white Sonny note floating out of some basement café toward the cruel seas at the time.

Later once the horde, the ones who actually made the scene, gathered in the North Beach, Big Sur and other points south sweeps and began listening, be-bop frantic listening, to some homoerotic scatological son of Abraham howling forth the new dispensation, the new beat, the new blessed, the new meek shall inherit the earth or at least have a voice coming from the depths, the be-bop, be-bop message if they would only heed the beat, we would add that factor in as well. Yes add in that wounded mad monk, all be-spectacled, all loaded on cheap wine, tea and unfiltered cigarettes, speaking churchly deadpan of Negro streets, hipster angels, that sanctified tea, constant tea-induced dreams, and Moloch dreads, spreading and spewing out of their industrial-sized flames. A bit later still mocking to no one in particular speaking of one million Trotskyite revolutions in order to de-flame the night except for stars and fogged city lights (if only that were true, the one million part rather than the one millionth part).   

Of course he/they/the motley brethren who cruised the Embarcadero wharf streets of the mind spoke, speak, will speak unto the umpteenth generation to those who seek their own open roads. Sweet Jesus there will always be a few who must devour road miles, a few who dream of surviving outside the box, who take seriously the open road expanses and movement, and so we too will always have Jack Kerouac’s novel, On The Road. The Sal-Dean stream dream filled with stolen (borrowed/lent/rented/travelers aided?) broken down standard- shift cars shift right on the steering wheel made when automobiles were automobiles stirring every young blade with dreams of the open road and hidden sex. Not some robotic flash lighted inventions made to make choke-hold commutes easier cars. Then a dollar’s worth of gas in pocket flashing out in some desperate smoke-hazed (unnamed smokes) wine jug-swigged (get Thunderbird wine it is cheaper and lasts longer under human thirst beatings), bed jumped night novel that sent one, and maybe the next two, generations on the road, on the road to some mystical discovery thing never quite explained, never quite grasped.  Some foreboding search for language, for words, for the right words that never seemed to come, or if they came came in million word torrent deluges for chrissakes. Words to explain our short existence, to make sense of things in the Moloch-fumed (beautiful word) modern world that required explanation but that has no time for reflection on the big cosmic questions. The Zen/koan/infinity/circle questions.  

Yes, we will always have Kerouac’s finely wrought be-bop word plays jumping off the page out in the desolate 1950s chicken-in-every-pot-and-two-cars-if-not-three-cars-in-every-garage, in every suburban ranch house sub-division garage. (And he of secret cravings for such a life although kept well-hidden from smoky waterfront taverns. Village juke joints and cabarets, riverside snorts, hobo jungles, bracero sweated labor fields, jazz joints, poetry garages and Big Sur cabins.)

Speaking out of the vastness of the fellaheen world like some broken down drummer from Merrimack rivers (although speaking, not strangely, not strangely at all, for a guy trying to half break-out of that river world, not to that world but the city literati make no mistake) about lost adventures, about lost time (like some bedded sniffling Proust not river-bend Wolfe  was some ancient kin), about lost remembrances but mostly about the desolate life for the dusty bedraggled fellahin left without words down in the sinking sweated sun-bake fields of the world. Not the million Trotskyite words, not the Negro streets words, not the North Beach hipster angel words (although he tried) but cool be-bop words refracting the total mass anxieties of a long-gone daddy world, a world from which one had to to run and hide, with or without a bottle or some tea.

Yes, we too will always have Sal (a.k.a Jeanbon Kerouac) the errant river-borne son searching for that tea dream high world to make the anguish stop and will always have Dean, Dean Moriarty (a.k.a. Neal Cassady), the father we did not know, could not know, while we were vicariously sitting on those Jersey shores (damn I will not say Trenton or Paterson), be-bopping in the oil slick Hudson night, shooting “pools” in Larimer Street Denver, looking for a long gone daddy fixer man in some Division Street Chi town dark night, sweating out in those Ames cornfields like some busted sod-buster, worse, doing stoop bracero labor in Fresno, hell, even sitting second-hand on the seawall down in those old Hullsville beach fronts looking for the great blue-pink great American West night.

We will always have Charlie, Sonny, Slim, Big Red, the Duke, blowing out brass, trying to reach and sometimes making it, that high white note, after hours, after the paying customers, the carriage trade, went home to bed and they blew to heaven, or tried to, with the boys, with the guys who knew when that note floated out of some funky cellar bar door winding its way down to the harbor, down to the turgid bay seeking passage to the Japan seas. With more blows at that dark hour before the dawn to get the hemp squared, to be right with that tangled mass of brethren who constituted the beat-down, beat around world.

We will always have Sal, Carlos, Bull, Dean and an ever changing assortment of , well, women, women, mainly, at their beck and call, riding, car-riding, riding hard over the hill and dale of this continent searching, well, just searching okay. We will always have the lost father and son (odd combination since they could have been brothers), Sal and Dean, playing off of each other’s strengths (and weaknesses) as they try to make sense of their world, or if not sense then to keep high, keep moving, and keep listening. And we will always have a great American novel to pass on to the next wanderlust generation, if there is another wanderlust generation.           

We will always have that beat down novel, praise be.              

***Out In The 2010s Be-Bop Night-Michael Douglas’ Last Vegas             

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Last Vegas, starring Michael Douglas, Robert DeNiro, Morgan Freeman, Mary Steenburgen, and Kevin Kline, 2013  

Some cinematic efforts are aimed at a general audience, some toward teens and some, well some to the AARP generation, the now AARP generation since the stars in this film under review, Last Vegas, won their acting spurs when we were young and thought they were cool with their new way of interpreting acting. Well they still are cool, Michael, Robert, Morgan, Mary, and Kevin, even if they have lost a step or seven along the way. This is such an age-centered niche film that I defy anybody to tell me that anybody under say forty would appreciate the story-line.

Here is why. Michael Douglas a 70 something life-long bachelor and ladies’ man decides in the face of mortality to get married to a woman significantly younger than himself. Naturally for the geriatric set this wedding was to take place in Las Vegas, the land of ageless dreams. In order to do things up right for Michael it is decided that he and his old time corner boys from Brooklyn (that’s in NYC for the clueless) should meet up for one last go-round in Vegas.       

 After rounding up the old crew in Vegas all the natural pratfalls of the old and set in their ways dodge the foursome (except for a duel run at Mary by Michael and Robert). The major question though is the propriety of Michael marrying that young thing which is of course resolved against the notion of intergenerational alliances. The stop of the wedding is aided by that age-appropriate Mary and her beguiling of Michael as well as sage advice from Robert. Along the way all the issues of aging-sickness, assisted living, over-protective children, sexual impotence, sexual desire, and mortality are dealt with either comically or more seriously- issues that those who relate to the wisdom of  50 Cent would be either clueless or indifferent about but that the generation of ’68 is dealing right now with as this is written. Definitely a feel-good movie for oldsters.  

***Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- The King Of The Skee Ball World

Peter Paul Markin comment:

I have plenty of my own carnival and amusement park stories to tell, and will, but today I am giving my space over to Frankie, Frankie straight up, Frankie in his own voice, and his story about how he became a skee addict. The time of this story is just before I linked up with him in middle school, the old North Adamsville middle school (then called junior high school). Other stories, later stories, I was there as an eye witness so I can trust them a little this one though seems kind of well Frankie-like so let him take responsibility for telling it.

Francis Xavier Riley comment:

Walking on tiptoes its seemed, it always seemed, I enter Playland not much of a name by today’s hyped-up standards for any fly-by-night operation but then an enchanted castle in my youthful skinny dreams, at least at night when one did not notice the daytime noticeable missing slats on one of the outside walls or the desperately needed painting, maybe two coats, or the angry smell of the refuge left behind by the who spent and lost, like the skimpy winnings were going to change somebody's whole life around.

Yah, I enter, a solemn entry, quietly as I eye (or spy) the doings and adjust my hearing to the ear-splitting sounds of twenty (or more) pinball machines getting plenty of play. Some guy, some older guy, meaning over sixteen and allowed to play the pinball machines that we younger ones could only watch (and wait for our sixteen turn), slender, sleek, slinky girl friend hanging from his side is on a roll at one of the machines, Madame LaRue’s from the look of it. That’s the one with the full-busted, vivacious women (maybe lusty is better, but all of this is mere reflection on innocent, or almost innocent dreams) looking back from the point total/games remaining total area (or whatever it is called), urging the player on and on, like they were the prize and not the twenty extra games that you “win” by beating some score. This guy, this guy on a roll is working that old lady of a machine like crazy, this guy is a pro, because he knows just how to sway those hips of his to get his points, and I notice that his sweetie is alternating between looking at that old pinball hitting the banks as it rolls down the chute, and those swaying hips. All this, of course, had only subterranean meaning then, I would get hip to the thing when I had my own sixteen sweetie, and was hoping, hoping against hope that she was checking out my own wobblier swaying hips. Yah, Playland was nothing but sexual tension in the air from the “get-go”, if you knew the signals, that’s what drove rationale guys to place their honor and their manhood on the line for those extra games. But that is later, now it is all chaste, my chaste, and for all I knew we could have been in church.

Sure the place had sex, if you understood that in the widest sense but it also had strictly kids stuff, stuff virile eleven and twelve year old boys like me wouldn’t give the time of day, stuff like stick-a-dime-in-the-machine and “ride” the wild bronco, or donkey, or whatever. Or, get this, put your dimes in the machine to “win” a prize if you can successfully navigate this crane mechanism and hold it long enough to get to the chute that opens up and gives you the prize. Or step on some weight machine and get your fortune ticket, or at another get your name placed on a metal I.D. tag, or further on get pictures of your favorite cowboy actors, or other favorites by inserting coin in machine. Or, and this is strictly for lamesters, crank out your dough on one of the bubblegum machines. See what I mean, strictly kid's stuff.

Then I mosey (yah, that’s what I did, I moseyed, I swear ) around the back and be-still my heart I am, in fact, in church there are the skee ball lanes. Now I have been in any number of amusement parks, carnivals, county fairs, and the like, from back-county fair Frieburg, Maine to New York's Coney Island to the California Santa Monica Pier, and sometimes it is called skee ball and in other places it is called skeet ball. Hey, they are both the same. At least every place that I have ever been, under either name they have had the same set-up. You don’t know skee ball. Seriously? No, sure you do. It’s kind of like bowling, poor man’s bowling, I guess. You put your dime in [at the time] and down a chute come ten small wooden (sometimes ceramic) balls. That’s the bowling-like part. The lane is tilted up with a bump barrier that leads into a bulls-eye type target area made up of different values (10, 20, 30, 50, obviously the higher the value the harder the shot) and you have to get your hand-held small ball into the hole to score points. The more points the bigger the prize (at some point), although you need very high point totals to win anything beyond gee-gads. What this is, and this is probably the first attraction reason why I fell, and fell hard for the game, was beyond a certain degree of eye-hand coordination you can be an un-coordinated, clumsy, hit your head on everything, stumble on everything kind of boy and still do pretty well.

Yah, sure, that sure-fire, low-level skill idea may have been the first reason, maybe, that I fell for skee ball, but think about it, I was an eleven year old boy and while sex, eleven year old ideas about it anyway, were not uppermost in my mind, and I didn’t then quite have it figured about girls, or rather about their charms overcoming their incessant giggles, their scent was in the air. So, maybe, I would have played a few games here and there, and dropped it as too easy, too kid’s stuff, or too boring like me and every other kid did with lots of things, and moved on to, oh, archery, let’s say. But you know there has to be a woman, or really a girl, come into this story somewhere, else why tell the story in the first place. There is plenty about carnivals and amusement parks to describe without bringing women in, right? And certainly no one is going to hold their breathe for more than six seconds over the mysteries of skee ball, straight up. At least I hope that's the case.

Okay, to the story. Yah, it was a dame, a dame, well, maybe, a mini-dame let’s say that led me to a life of skees. And it wasn’t intentional, or at least I don’t think so, but reflecting back you never know. See, after a while, whenever we went to Playland, or rather to the beach where Playland was, I bowed out of going on rides, playing the odd-ball carny-type games like putting a quarter down on a number and have some barker spin a wheel for fame and fortune or trying to hit milk bottles to win a prize, or throwing darts at balloons, or, well, you get it, I was single-mindedly devoted to skees. After six or seven times I got good at it, or at least figured out the torque angle on the thing that got you to the bigger point circles in the target area. Yah, yah, I know this is not rocket science or even close but a small victory to an awkward-gaited kid.

Now skee then, and now probably, is not exactly a game that world-beating pinball wizards then (or video game masters-of-the-universe today) would even give an off-hand tumble. Nor would girls who were crazy for pinball wizard guys, with their swaying hips and all. But, maybe, just maybe, kind of awkward, wayward eleven or twelve year old girls might, mightn’t they? Well, that idea, that possibility is what drives this story. I was
minding my own skees business when this twist (girl, although I didn’t call them twists then, just girls) came up to a skee lane a couple of lanes over (no waiting in skee-world), puts her money in and starts playing. I don’t know exactly which one it was but either on her second or third roll she went “crazy” and rolled the ball so hard that it bounced over into my lane. Naturally, skee master of the universe that I was got miffed, no more than miffed. She came over to apologize and I could see that she really was sorry-so what are you going to do, right?

Now in the universe of female beauty, even eleven or twelve year old female beauty, this girl, this Mary Beth when she told me her name later, was nothing but middling, and that may be giving her the best of it. But here is the thing and I picked up on it right when she came over to offer her apologies, she had this very winning, very winning smile. Well, like I say what are you going to do. Obviously this maiden in distress needed a little help in the skee department and before I could offer her some tips she boldly asked me if couldn’t, pretty please, pretty please, please help her with her game. Well, yah, what are you going to do, right.

So naturally we go back to her lane and, after showing her one of my moves on the target, I got behind her a little to show her the right way to do it. Whee! I probably had been closer to a girl before, dancing, or some quick-artist petting party kiss thing but this was the first time that I seriously noticed that girls had curves, curves that kind of fit nicely together. And she noticed that I noticed to because she did not back away, or anything like that. But, come on now, I am a serious skee man and so after showing her the ropes I excused myself, and head back to my own lane. A couple of minutes later after she had finished her game she came over to my lane and offered me her coupons (these coupons automatically came up after your game and gave you the appropriate amount based on your score. You later redeemed them for prizes, etc.) saying that she wouldn’t be using them. And get this she said, and I will give an exact quote here, “Wasn’t it too bad that I couldn’t be good enough at skee like you to win a prize and go home happy.”

Yah, I know, I know, I know now the oldest trick in the book. But then, well I did try to help her with her game and maybe she could learn something by watching me, and she had those curves and all. So naturally, I was compelled to win a little trinket for her. And I am off. I will say having sweet Mary Beth at my side inspired me and I scored pretty, pretty well. Well, enough in skee world language to win her a lucky rabbit’s foot key chain. Pretty good, right. She thought so, and was so delighted by her prize that she said she would keep it forever and wouldn’t I like to go for walk down to the sea wall and talk. Well, she had my head spinning, for sure, but like I said before I was eleven and didn’t have the girl thing, the girl charm thing, quite figured out then. I said, I needed to keep playing to hone my skills but maybe some other time. She said yes, in a voice a little hurt now that I think about it, some other time. I went to those skee lanes plenty of times later when I wised up about girls and their charms, hoping, looking to see an awkward girl with curves and a rabbit’s foot key chain dangle named Mary Beth but I never saw her again. But maybe, just maybe, that is why I roll skees still.

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Hans David Freund-Letters From Madrid
 
BOOK REVIEW

THE SPANISH REVOLUTION, 1931-39, LEON TROTSKY, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, 1973

THE CRISIS OF REVOLUTIONARY LEADERSHIP
AS WE APPROACH THE 75 th ANNIVERSARY OF THE BEGINNING OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR MILITANTS NEED TO LEARN THE LESSONS FOR THE DEFEAT OF THAT REVOLUTION.
I have been interested, as a pro-Republican partisan, in the Spanish Civil War since I was a teenager. What initially perked my interest, and remains of interest, is the passionate struggle of the Spanish working class to create its own political organization of society, its leadership of the struggle against Spanish fascism and the romance surrounding the entry of the International Brigades, particularly the American Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the 15th Brigade, into the struggle.

Underlying my interests has always been a nagging question of how that struggle could have been won by the working class. The Spanish proletariat certainly was capable of both heroic action and the ability to create organizations that reflected its own class interests i.e. the worker militias and factory committees. Of all modern working class revolutions after the Russian revolution Spain showed the most promise of success. Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky noted that the political class consciousness of the Spanish proletariat at that time was higher than that of the Russian proletariat in 1917. Yet it failed in Spain. Trotsky's writings on this period represent a provocative and thoughtful approach to an understanding of the causes of that failure. Moreover, with all proper historical proportions considered, his analysis has continuing value as the international working class struggles against the seemingly one-sided class war being waged by the international bourgeoisie today.

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 has been the subject of innumerable works from every possible political and military perspective possible. A fair number of such treatises, especially from those responsible for the military and political policies on the Republican side, are merely alibis for the disastrous policies that led to defeat. Trotsky's complication of articles, letters, pamphlets, etc. which make up the volume reviewed here is an exception. Trotsky was actively trying to intervene in the unfolding events in order to present a program of socialist revolution that most of the active forces on the Republican side were fighting, or believed they were fighting for. Thus, Trotsky's analysis brings a breath of fresh air to the historical debate. That in the end Trotsky could not organize the necessary cadres to carry out his program or meaningfully impact the unfolding events in Spain is one of the ultimate tragedies of that revolution. Nevertheless, Trotsky had a damn good idea of what forces were acting as a roadblock to revolution. He also had a strategic conception of the road to victory. And that most definitely was not through the Popular Front.

The central question Trotsky addresses throughout the whole period under review here was the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletarian forces. That premise entailed, in short, a view that the objective conditions for the success of a socialist program for society had ripened. Nevertheless, until that time, despite several revolutionary upheavals elsewhere, the international working class had not been successful anywhere except in backward Russia. Trotsky thus argued that it was necessary to focus on the question of forging the missing element of revolutionary leadership that would assure victory or at least put up a fight to the finish.

This underlying premise was the continuation of an analysis that Trotsky developed in earnest in his struggle to fight the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the mid-1920's. The need to learn the lessons of the Russian Revolution and to extend that revolution internationally was thus not a merely a theoretical question for Trotsky. Spain, moreover, represented a struggle where the best of the various leftist forces were in confusion about how to move forward. Those forces could have profitably heeded Trotsky's advice. I further note that the question of the crisis of revolutionary leadership still remains to be resolved by the international working class.

Trotsky's polemics in this volume are highlighted by the article ‘The Lessons of Spain-Last Warning’, his definitive assessment of the Spanish situation in the wake of the defeat of the Barcelona uprising in May 1937. Those polemics center on the failure of the Party of Marxist Unification (hereafter, POUM) to provide revolutionary leadership. That party, partially created by cadre formerly associated with Trotsky in the Spanish Left Opposition, failed on virtually every count. Those conscious mistakes included, but were not limited to, the creation of an unprincipled bloc between the former Left Oppositionists and the former Right Oppositionists (Bukharinites) of Maurin to form the POUM in 1935; political support to the Popular Front including entry into the government coalition by its leader; creation of its own small trade union federation instead of entry in the anarchist led-CNT; creation of its own militia units reflecting a hands-off attitude toward political struggle with other parties; and, fatally, an at best equivocal role in the Barcelona uprising of 1937.

Trotsky had no illusions about the roadblock to revolution of the policies carried out by the old-time Anarchist, Socialist and Communist Parties. Unfortunately the POUM did. Moreover, despite being the most honest revolutionary party in Spain it failed to keep up an intransigent struggle to push the revolution forward. The Trotsky - Andreas Nin (key leader of the POUM and former Left Oppositionist) correspondence in the Appendix makes that problem painfully clear.

The most compelling example of this failure - As a result of the failure of the Communist Party of Germany to oppose the rise of Hitler in 1933 and the subsequent decapitation and the defeat of the Austrian working class in 1934 the European workers, especially the younger workers, of the traditional Socialist Parties started to move left. Trotsky observed this situation and told his supporters to intersect that development by an entry, called the ‘French turn’, into those parties. Nin and the Spanish Left Opposition, and later the POUM failed to do that. As a result the Socialist Party youth were recruited to the Communist Party en masse. This accretion formed the basic for its expansion as a party and the key cadre of its notorious security apparatus that would, after the Barcelona uprising, suppress the more left ward organizations. For more such examples of the results of the crisis of leadership in the Spanish Revolution read this book.

Revised-June 19, 2006

 

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. 
******** 

Hans David Freund-Letters From Madrid

These letters and the following article are the work of Hans David Freund (1912-1937). The letters, dated 24 August and 27 September 1936, are translated from the Information and Press Service of the Movement for the Fourth International, nos 7 and 12, 4 September and 21 October 1936, in which they appeared under the name of ‘Moulin’. The article first appeared as La Dualité de pouvoirs dans la Révolution espagnole: la Question des Comités, Quatrième Internationale, no.3, March-April 1937, pp.28-30.
Freund, a “pure and devoted militant”, according to Katia Landau (Stalinism in Spain, Revolutionary History, Volume 1 no.2, Summer 1988, p54), was born of Jewish parents in Germany, but spent most of his adult life abroad due to Hitler’s terror. He became disillusioned with Stalinism after a visit to the Soviet Union, appears to have studied at Oxford for a while, and then in Switzerland, where he organised a Trotskyist group amongst the students in Geneva. He went to Spain in September 1936, and whilst in Madrid he assisted Paul and Clara Thalmann in the German language broadcasts of the POUM group there, which was very much influenced by Trotskyism. He then went to the Guadarrama front, where the Stalinist Galán threatened to have him shot for promoting Trotskyist propaganda amongst the militiamen.
Early 1937 found him in Barcelona, where he tried to bring about a unification of the two Trotskyist groups, the El Soviet (Bartolomeo) and Voz Leninista (Munis) organisations, and was the main contact between the Bolshevik-Leninists and the Friends of Durruti at the end of April and the beginning of May. He found himself in charge of the Bolshevik-Leninists when the May Days broke, as Munis was in Paris consulting with the International Secretariat, and it was he who wrote the leaflet distributed on the barricades that was noticed by George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia, Penguin edition, p.148).
But the NKVD was closing in on him, as on so many others, and he had been photographed whilst on the barricades. He took refuge with the Anarchists, who extended their protection to other revolutionaries hunted by the Stalinists. Reports differ as to how he met his end. One is that he went to an Anarchist collective in the countryside, and was killed in a Stalinist raid on it. Another is that he was simply picked up by the NKVD in the street in Barcelona at the beginning of August and was never seen again. (Cf. the full and useful notes and introductions in Pierre Broué“s edition of Trotsky’s La Révolution espagnole, Minuit, 1975, and Freund, dit Moulin, Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no.3, July-September 1979, p.135.)

Letter of 24 August 1936

The POUM has not ceased to be a centrist party. Even though it denounced its electoral pact with the Popular Front after the event, in fact it has never ceased to be the left wing of the Popular Front, carrying out a policy of sacred union with the anti-Fascist bourgeoisie. Even if it did refuse to enter into the Casanovas government [1], we ought to note that the PSUC itself had to withdraw after a few days under the pressure of the masses, and that the POUM did respond favourably to the invitation of the government to collaborate with the Economic Council of Catalonia, whose only function was the elaboration of draft laws intended to hold back and divert the movement for socialisation, restore the fortunes of the left bourgeoisie, create new parliamentary illusions among the masses, and to restore the class collaboration that had now become impossible for the government. The POUM is very proud of being the only party that did not submit its press to governmental censorship, but it refuses to denounce the Republican government openly as well as the parties of the Popular Front and the Anarchist leaders, allies in the government in the common cause of smashing the proletarian revolution and of preventing up to now the rapid and decisive victory of the anti-Fascist military forces, given that this victory, if it resulted in a revolutionary situation, risked being the prelude to the proletarian revolution. “Fascism is the only enemy”, such is always the message of the POUM ...
Even in Madrid, where the POUM is for the greater part composed of old left oppositionists from the Communist Party, the attitude of the POUM is more correct than in Barcelona. Thus, in contrast to the POUM in Barcelona, the Madrid POUM does not seem to have illusions in Caballero, etc.
The main slogan of the POUM at present is that of the workers’ government. But the POUM does very little to put this correct slogan into practice. It does not educate its cadres. It doesn’t, or hardly does, send propagandists to the front. It should have dissolved some of its combat units, and distributed the members in the Anarchist and other units. It does not have a correct tactic of the United Front. As well as working at the base, which it did insufficiently, it should at the same time have made overtures to the reformist organisations, etc, for talks on determining a date and a programme for a soviet congress, for which it makes propaganda in a general fashion, to be able at the same time to denounce the reformist leaders, etc, in the probable event of their refusal. Instead of alerting the working class to the Caballero-Prieto-Azaña Bonapartist danger, it confined itself to saying that the bourgeois government had become “useless’ (sic), and that only Socialism could rebuild the Spanish economy disrupted by civil war.
The POUM remains firmly linked internationally with the London Bureau. Pivert, translated by Gorkin, greeted the workers “in the name of the SFIO and the CGT” at a meeting of the POUM. The POUM seems to be in favour of an “International Congress of Marxist Reunification”. On the other hand, it is ready to accept unity in action with the Bolshevik-Leninists, particularly the French. Our task is to enter systematically into relations with the POUM, convey our interest in and understanding of the problems that are posed for it and for the entire working class vanguard, and to serve as a liaison between the French and Spanish proletariat.
The POUM’s manpower, along with its mass influence, is growing considerably. The POUM militias, which during the crucial night in Barcelona played an important part, have more than 10,000 members. The youth (Juventud comunista ibérica) has multiplied tenfold since the insurrection. The party cadres are growing stronger, and fresh local sections are set up every day. La Batalla is read with great interest. The POUM publishes a daily in Lérida. It has just started a weekly for its militias (El Combatiente rojo). Every week the POUM gains more influence in the Anarchist trade unions, and the Anarchist workers no longer confuse the POUM with the reformist ‘politicos’, etc. The influence of the POUM is equally strong in the UGT. It controls union executive positions throughout the whole country. The POUM militants, moreover, have their own trade unions (office workers, textiles, potash mines) which they are preparing for entry into the united trade union, the CNT, in which the POUM will have the majority control. Among the foreigners (above all among the Italians in Barcelona) the POUM can count upon a relatively strong influence. Including as it does at present some tens of thousands of members, if it continued its progress at the same rate during the coming months, it could win the majority of the conscious proletariat in order to proceed to the conquest of power.
There does not exist a revolutionary force in Spain outside of the POUM. We must work towards the Bolshevisation of the POUM, although we cannot predict whether it will accomplish this by changing its present leadership for another one, or by the evolution of its leaders in the direction of Bolshevism-Leninism.

Letter of 27 September 1936

Some weeks ago a letter of the SIP (International Press Service for the Fourth International) stated that the POUM had not ceased to be a centrist party and the left wing of the Popular Front, prophesying a policy of sacred union with the ‘anti-Fascist’ bourgeoisie. This judgement seemed to be too severe at the time to some of the Bolshevik-Leninist comrades of the POUM. In fact, these lines were written in the course of a relatively leftist period of the POUM, when it could be thought that the leadership was evolving towards Leninist positions. Well, it was nothing of the sort. The facts today, unfortunately, confirm completely the appraisal that was stated a few weeks ago. In the person of Andrés Nin the POUM has entered the government of the Generalitat of Catalonia in the capacity of the Minister of Justice. Is this in order to administer bourgeois or proletarian justice? According to La Batalla of 17 September (an article on the “necessity for forming a government or council conforming to the revolutionary needs of the present time”) the present government has the aim of resolving the duality of power in Catalonia. For the benefit of which class?
Has Companys decided to govern and carry on government in the name of the proletariat? The government’s executive power is concentrated in the hands of a minister of the Catalan Left. [2] Is this the executive power of the proletariat? Is the emancipation of the proletariat, then, no longer the task of the proletariat itself, but of the ‘anti-Fascist’ bourgeoisie? Nin has become a minister, but he did not become so by the decision of a congress of the militias, workers and peasants, any more than as a result of a victorious proletarian insurrection. He became this following upon negotiations in the antechamber of the bourgeois Generalitat of Catalonia.
A resolution unanimously decided by the Central Committee of the POUM is unfortunately the only document that has been published about this important meeting. Given the lack of any preparation and of any serious political motivation, it is on its own the most overwhelming expression of the centrism that has definitely taken hold among the leadership of the party. Instead of taking up a position with reference to the different problems that the revolution poses, the resolution concentrated upon one point alone: the justification of participating in the next government in Catalonia. So why, then, did it take so long to assume this liquidatory attitude? Why did it refuse point blank to participate in the Casanovas government? What has changed in it? Absolutely nothing, unless you want to base yourself upon the change of position by the Anarchists, which is also in a reformist direction.
The excuses that are invoked for this surrender are based upon several points. First of all is emphasised “the popular character of the organisations of the petit-bourgeoisie in Catalonia”. Who is making fun of whom? The ‘proof’ of this serves only to render the POUM worthy of its French ally, M. Pivert. (Its present differences with Pivert are simply a reflection of the real differences between the interests of the French Popular Front and the Spanish Popular Front.) Is not the party of Companys a reactionary party, then? The same La Batalla which described the Caballero government as a counter-revolutionary government (Madrid is far away, and Madrid governments have never been highly rated by the Catalan ‘people’) gave the title of ‘popular’ representative to Companys, who gave up without a serious struggle on 6 October 1934, instead of giving arms to the workers and peasants who were clamouring for them, and who also refused arms to the alerted proletariat a few hours before the Fascist insurrection of 18 July, so being responsible for the greater part of the deaths of the three glorious Barcelona days, the man who recently proclaimed that there was no land problem in Catalonia, the man who does not really represent the petit-bourgeoisie but the big bourgeoisie well and truly, on whose account he held back the progress of the revolution everywhere, sabotaging community control, protecting the banks, and undertaking the reconstruction of the army and the police.
This is what can be read in the Official Bulletin of the Catalan Generalitat:

Casanovas, the national hero of Catalonia ... There was a march past that lasted for four hours. Regimental bands, Republican troops and sisters and doctors of the Red Cross were marching in the street with red flags and the national colours of Catalonia. The militiamen were roundly applauded, as also were the shock troops and the Civil Guard, who had discarded the old three-cornered hat for the red-rimmed bonnet.

It was a perfect example of victory that is being announced here, that of the Popular Front over the proletarian revolution. In fact here is a bourgeois demonstration (a national demonstration) but in which all the working class organisations are taking part, as a preliminary to collaboration in the government of the Generalitat.
Our petit-bourgeoisie are not to be compared with the others, say our autonomous revolutionaries in the leadership of the POUM. Centrists and reformists in every country have always emphasised the exceptional popular character of the left bourgeois organisations of their respective countries. Is not the Radical movement in France social, progressive and secularist? Isn’t its basis the small peasantry, led by the advanced forces of the intellectuals of the land of France? What difference is there in fact between collaborating with Herriot [3] and with Companys?
The leaders of the POUM use yet another argument – that of the radicalisation of the petit-bourgeoisie and of some of their leaders during these last few weeks. This argument proves precisely the opposite of what it intends to support. Yes, the petit-bourgeoisie is radicalised: one proof of it, among others, is the abandonment of the union of rabassaires [4], Companys’ own trade union base, by hundreds of the Catalan small farmers in order to enlist in the workers’ trade unions. Is it, then, the time to enter a government formed by a reactionary leader of this organisation? As for the leftist language of the leaders of the petit-bourgeoisie, that is also a fact. This language (partly out of fear, and partly from calculation) is of a generally more revolutionary type than that of the Stalinists and reformists and the other ‘workers’’ representatives. But does it follow that we should ally with the former against the latter? The absurdity of this criterion of the POUM is self-evident.
It is stated in La Batalla that the revolution is assuming a more proletarian character every day. If the revolution is indeed going forward, then why are you accepting a programme that is manifestly going backwards compared with your programme six weeks ago? We are talking about the programme of the Economic Council, elaborated, so it seems, by Nin himself. In the governmental declaration it pretends that the economic programme of the government is identical with that of the Economic Council. A comparison between the two very quickly reveals the falsity of this assertion. The “monopoly of foreign trade to avoid foreign manipulation against the newborn economic order” is replaced by pure and simple ‘control’ of foreign trade, which exists in every capitalist country. The “compulsory collectivisation of agricultural products farmed by middle and small ownership” is replaced by a pure and simple appeal for “respect for small property”. The “prompt suppression of all taxes in order to attain a single tax” is replaced by a promise of “a prompt suppression of the different indirect taxes, in time and to the extent of possibilities’. These examples could be multiplied.
Before the formation of the new government La Batalla said that if it was to be worthy of the participation of the POUM it should affirm its intention to “translate into revolutionary legality the initiative of the masses who are moving in the direction of the Socialist revolution”. Today, on the other hand, the POUM is entering a government that proposes to end the war “quickly and victoriously”, to this end creating “compulsory militias’, and which only demands “the economic reconstruction [?] of the country”, whereas for all that the Economic Council had demanded the “collectivisation of the economy”. We criticised the participation of the POUM in the Economic Council at the time by declaring that its constitution, in spite of the revolutionary appearance of its programme, would only serve to divert and in other words break up the revolutionary wave. The march of events has yet again proved that we were right. The first revolutionary wave had hardly started to abate before the workers’ ‘leaders’ renounced essential points of the programme, proof that they had never taken it seriously in the first place.
In the sphere of the army the POUM was exposed yet again as fundamentally centrist. Did not the POUM on several occasions envisage a red army and soviets, and make political reservations about its submission to the technical authority of Madrid? Today La Batalla envisages its unconditional subordination to the General Staff. Isn’t this already virtually disarming the proletariat? Especially since orders from Madrid mean an end to any political or trade union intervention at the front and the formation of a new Republican army, within which the militias must dissolve themselves? The formation of an army of volunteers proved to be impossible, as the workers and peasants refused to enrol in it, and preferred to join the ranks of the workers’ militias. The militiamen tore off and burned their bourgeois army uniforms, preferring their rags to the costume of capitalist coercion. Are we going to witness Nin, the Minister of ‘Popular’ and ‘Catalan’ Justice, laying down a decree against these acts of disobedience? We will speak again more fully about the question of the army, which is a central question of the Spanish Civil War.

Notes

1. Juan Casanovas was a member of the Esquerra, the Catalan nationalists, who was entrusted by President Companys with forming a government in Catalonia on 2 August 1936. Although the Stalinists (Comorera) joined, there was such hostility from the CNT and the POUM that they had to withdraw, and his administration was replaced on 26 September. He was later involved in a failed Catalan coup d’état, and had to withdraw to France.
2. The Prime Minister, Minister of the Interior, and Councillor for Defence in the Taradellas government were all members of the Catalan Esquerra.
3. Edouard Herriot (1872-1952) was the most well-known leader of the Radical Party in France.
4. The rabassaires was a union of leasehold tenant farmers, holding their land for the lifespan of the vines they cultivated, and looking to the Catalan nationalists to make their tenancies permanent.

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Hans David Freund

Dual Power in the Spanish Revolution

The Question of the Committees

Ever since the beginning of the revolution, the proletariat, lacking a revolutionary leadership, has not ceased to fall back upon the bourgeoisie. The Central Committee of the Militias as a sub-committee of the Generalitat (the end of July), the Economic Council of ‘containment’, in other words channelling and breaking up the initiative of the masses (mid-August), a government of sacred union with the CNT and POUM (mid-September), and governments with full powers to liquidate the revolution (mid-December): such are the stages of the counter-revolution as they express themselves in representative organisations.
This has been a successive evolution in a direction opposite to that of the leading organisations of the French Revolution, from the States General up to the Convention. [1] This comparison also shows the more democratic character of the French Revolution: the Spanish proletariat, which did not know how to provide itself with a party of class dictatorship, has up to now also been incapable of providing itself with a representative organisation on a democratic basis. The authority of the trade unions, and the revolutionary inclinations of the Anarchist centre, had let it be known that that democratic foundation, which was Soviets in Russia and elsewhere, was at the same time impossible and superfluous. The trade union unification that is being prepared is perhaps going to reinforce this opinion even more in the mind of many a militant. Is the Workers’ Alliance [2], in the mind of a great many, in reality anything more than the coordination of the two trade union centres? And are not the political parties, the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, at the same time marching towards unification, with the POUM itself begging for unification with them? Isn’t the Alliance of the Youth [3] in the process of being realised?
In reality – and there are more and more comrades who are seeing this reality – the intensification of these discussions about unification is proportional with the extent to which the proletariat is drawing back from power, and the bourgeoisie is preparing a fresh triumph, unthinkable only a few months ago.
Under the sign of ‘anti-Fascist unity’ the CNT-Taradellas-Nin government has dissolved the local committees of the militias, and re-etablished the military code of the monarchy.
Under the sign of trade union unity, the specific weight of the trade union bureaucracy moving towards corporatism has been reinforced, and is preparing to halt and reverse the movement of the proletariat and small peasantry for economic and political emancipation.
Under the sign of unity, the Committee for the Coordination of the United Youth (Stalinists) and the Libertarian Youth are tying down the revolutionary tendencies, particularly among the latter, not to mention the slogan of the National Alliance of the Spanish Youth of which we shall speak in another context.
In the same way, inasmuch as it does not remain on paper, in present political circumstances, a single command in the army means the subordination of the proletariat to the liberal bourgeoisie, the stagnation of military operations, and the preparation of a shameful armistice.
‘Anti-Fascist Unity’ reveals itself as anti-Communist and anti-revolutionary unity. The problem of the unity of the proletariat remains posed, more strongly and more urgently than ever.

The Workers’ Alliances

In October 1934 the Workers’ Alliances represented to a certain extent the democratic and effective union of the proletarian forces. They owed their existence first of all to the agitation of the Bolshevik-Leninists, to which was added in Catalonia Maurín’s Workers and Peasants Bloc. But the Catalan Anarchists refused to take part, and the Socialists refused to recognise the Workers’ Alliances as organisations of proletarian power. The sectarianism of the organisations more often made them into organisations of local liaison than into soviets.
The double weakness of the Workers’ Alliances was that they simultaneously lacked a central national leadership and failed to be organisations of the United Front at the base. The theory according to which the United Front in Spain must be realised neither at the top nor at the base, but ‘locally’ is obviously absurd. Because of the ascendancy of the bureaucracy in many places, the existence of the Workers’ Alliances remained purely nominal and fictional. Elsewhere they were dominated by the Socialists, who refused to place their weaponry at their disposal. [4] As we know, the Stalinists termed the Workers’ Alliances (which in spite of their weaknesses constituted the highest organs of struggle that the Spanish proletariat had been able to create up until that time) “holy alliances of counter-revolution”, only finally to enter them a few days before the insurrection of October 1934. The history of this demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of the Workers’ Alliances.
In May 1936, at the Congress of Saragossa, the CNT voted for a resolution recommending the Workers’ Alliances, but this was only the bureaucratic deformation of the project of the left minority, which had demanded unity in action at the base, or at least in the ‘middle’, but lacking a firm ideology, gave in to the Congress. The entry of the CNT into the counter-revolutionary Madrid government was accomplished thanks to this evolution of the Workers’ Alliances, and the bureaucratic unification of the two trade union centres will take place under the same auspices.

The July Revolution

The July Revolution, a tardily prepared response to the Fascist coup, caused committees of every type to spring up. Local committees came to replace the bourgeois municipalities; moreover, to secure the executive and judicial functions, etc., of the state, at the same time the revolution democratised and decentralised its functions to the limit, and dismantled the repressive arms of the state.
The Central Committee of the Militias in Barcelona was the expression on the one hand of the victory of the anti-Fascist insurrection, and on the other of the continued existence of the structure of the bourgeois state. There were “absences of bourgeois legality”, but not its pure and simple abolition. The dual power regime (proletariat and bourgeoisie) established by the July Days expressed itself in the course of the first few weeks in the collaboration of the petit-bourgeoisie with the proletariat.
But the nature of this collaboration was reversed in proportion to the extent to which the profoundly shaken foundations of the bourgeois state recovered; the one which ‘collaborated’ was no longer the bourgeoisie, but the proletariat. Some days after the formation of the September government, the Central Committee of the Militias dissolved itself: from then on the system of dual power expressed itself in the coexistence of the bourgeois government and of the many committees, both of them entering into a more or less sharp phase of struggle, in which the leadership of the parties (including the POUM) and of the unions (including the CNT-FAI) in effect took the side of the reactionary bourgeoisie.
After the dissolution of the local militia committees, the following committees remained:

1. Committees in the police barracks, etc. These committees formed a very relative, insufficient guarantee against the use of the armed force of the bourgeois state against the working class.
2. Committees in the ‘collectivised’ industries. These committees suffered from scarcity and bureaucratic nepotism, as well as the workers’ incapacity to manage the economy without an intermediary period of education (workers’ control). In the absence of a renewed upsurge of the revolutionary wave, their inactivity and incompetence led to their being swept aside by reaction.
3. Committees of workers’ control. These committees exist in the most important firms that have generally not been collectivised. Trade union control of the banks is practically nil; likewise for small trade.
4. House committees in Madrid. These committees suffered from the same bureaucratic tendencies, but carried on the tasks of repression, vigilance, medical aid, etc. They were centralised by a system of delegation by districts, etc.
5. Local committees, continuing mainly in Aragon, the Levante, [5] etc.
6. Militia committees, existing on different fronts (Sierra, Aragon, etc.).
7. Peasant committees, existing in many places for the collectivisation of production, commerce and supply. In conflict with the state and the trade union bureaucracy.

The main weakness of all these committees is that they lacked a revolutionary party which could give their best elements a sound ideological grounding. Anarchism dominated the greater part of them in Catalonia and the Levante. Hence, without understanding the question of the state, these committees were bound to be destroyed by it. The Anarchists, who agreed to collaborate within the bourgeois state, themselves always refused to coordinate the committees on a regional basis: they became authoritarian without becoming democratic.
Today they would make the workers believe that the period of the class struggle – which they never previously admitted – has ended with the boss being liquidated, seeing that he has now accepted responsibility in the committees or the factory on a salary equal to that of the workers. Now today, more than ever, the main preoccupation of the working class is not economic, but political. Or rather, economic problems can only find their solution, more than ever, in the political struggle.
The POUM itself has never understood that the problem of the committees, of keeping them at all costs, and of transforming them into truly democratic organisations of advanced struggle, constitutes the central problem of the revolution. It has, moreover, added its signature to the decree calling for the dissolution of the local militia committees. It has offered the reactionary government of the Generalitat its collaboration, whilst in an abstract way and with many reservations calling for the formation of an assembly of the committees. To bring together such an assembly it is first necessary to reform the committees, creating better ones out of them wherever the masses are struggling for their conditions of life. But the POUM is incapable of proceeding in this direction in a systematic and consistent fashion. [6] The slightest threat of reaction causes it to draw back. The slightest possibility for collaboration makes it abandon its reserve arsenal of Leninist slogans.
“Long live the strong state! Down with the committees!” cries the reaction. “Down with the state, long live the committees, rejuvenated, politicised, democratised, strengthened and broadened for all the functions of public life as instruments for the seizure of power by the proletariat!” – that is the slogan of the revolutionaries.
January 1937

Notes

1. The French Revolution of 1789 began by the aristocracy forcing the king to convene the States General, which contained all of the three orders in France (nobility, clergy and Third Estate). As it gathered momentum and entered into its radical phase this body was replaced by the revolutionary Convention, dominated by the Jacobins.
2. The Alianza Obrera (Workers’ Alliance) had been the main slogan of the Trotskyists and the Bloque since the Asturian uprising of October 1934.
3. The Socialist Party and the Communist Party, along with other groups, combined in Catalonia in 1936 to form the Stalinist PSUC. Unity in the rest of Spain was prevented by the opposition of the mass left wing of the Socialist Party, led by Largo Caballero. But the leaders of the Socialist Party Youth deserted to set up a “united” organisation with the Communist Party’s youth, which then became an appendage of Stalinism.
4. Julián Bestiero and other right wing Socialist Party leaders had denounced the workers’ resort to arms in the Asturian uprising of 1934. It was as a result isolated and crushed by Franco’s troops with great brutality.
5. The Levante is the area around Valencia on the eastern coast.
6. Moreover, the POUM has launched the slogan of an assembly of the committees allied to the Constituent Assembly. But the formation of a constitution is only a secondary requirement among all the tasks to be fulfilled by the future central representative organisation of the proletariat. [Author’s note]

On The 11^th Anniversary Of The Iraq War-U.S./Allied Troops Out Of Afghanistan Now! 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

[No this writer is not lost in a time warp, nor  is he suffering from a senior moment in noting the 11^th Anniversary of the ill-fated, ill-advised, ill, well, let’s just keep it as the previous two, start of the now seemingly completed fiasco in Iraq. However although American troops have mainly been withdrawn many thousand American bought and paid for “contract” soldiers are still operating in that theater. Moreover the wreckage from the huge American footprint (boot print, really) is still wreaking havoc on that benighted land from lack of electrical power to unexploded bombs to speak nothing of the current constant political turmoil between the myriad factions struggling for power. Then there is the question of those tens of thousands of soldiers switched over within a heartbeat from benighted Iraq to benighted Afghanistan. The call for immediate troop withdrawal from Afghanistan if not drawing much support in these back- burner concern days is still a necessary call. Finally, if there is a modern example  of the follies of war, of a needless imperial adventure, of flat-out American imperial hubris to do something explosive (in more ways than one) then the ill-famed Iraq invasion started on March 19, 2003 should be etched in every leftist militant, hell, every thoughtful citizen’s brain.]        

*******

After listening to the evening news that May1st 2003 Tim Reid was deeply satisfied that he had stuck to his guns and defended President Bush’s decision in March to go into Iraq and get rid of that mad man and vicious killer Saddam Hussein before he unleashed holy hell on the United States and the world with those dreaded weapons of mass destruction that Tim was sure would be discovered very soon. That evil bastard had had plenty of time to hide them in some out of the way place not easily accessible especially with military operations proceeding apace. That evening President Bush had announced that major operations had been suspended against the porous melting Iraqi army and that the road to democratic nation-building in Iraq could now go forward, full- steam ahead. Some lives, sadly some American lives, had been lost, but not many not as against what might have happened had Saddam not been toppled. The military operation had been in the words of one correspondent who quoted an anonymous military source “a slam dunk.”       

Tim thought back to his younger days, days when he had opposed the President’s father, George H.W., in the first Iraq war back in 1991 and was able to draw a very big distinction between that opposition which to his mind was basically being drawn into a squabble between dictators and sheiks and not really any of our business and this. Times had changed (and he would take into the mix that he had changed too now being the father of two young ones and, as any father would do, trying to protect them from a dangerous world any way he could), 9/11 happened, happened right here in New York City , and happened to people he knew and cared about,  and no further reference was needed that there were bad guys in the world, bad guys aiming their arrows in our direction, and they needed to be stamped out like cockroaches. And Saddam was the numero uno state actor on that list especially with atomic bombs and biological bombs and other stuff the CIA and other national security agencies knew he had hidden somewhere. Now that the dust of battle had settled they would be able to go in and destroy all those damn things and while it might still be a dangerous world at least it was a smidgeon less so.      

Later that night, that May Day night, after the kids had gone to bed, and Sheila was doing something in the study, some homey thing like she did after the kid wars of the day were done he sat on the sofa, television now off, a book in hand to finish the night off, a snooze off probably, Tim flashed back for just a minute to those 1991 days. Days when he was ready to raise infinite amounts of hell to stop that first Iraq war, had even joined an ad hoc anti-imperialist committee here in the city made of old time progressives, pacifists, and socialists in order to combine with others in his fury against the big bad American military machine wreaking havoc on the world . He had that year, ironically, even marched in the small May Day parade down at Union Square, the place where today’s anti-war activists had launch their latter-day marches. How times had changed, how he had changed. And just for one second he wished he could still be that old Tim Reid. But just for a second…