AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Friday, May 16, 2014

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Marxists and Military Thinking

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.
********

II: Marxists and Military Thinking

Before we move on to our case studies of mutiny and dissent in various places and at various times, it is useful to consider Marxist analyses of military questions more generally. We are delighted to publish the following article by Ian Birchall. Through its study of a minor character, Kersausie, who flits through reports on the uprising in the pages of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in July 1848, Ian Birchall broaches questions of historical method, as well as shedding light on Friedrich Engels as a military thinker. Socialists have written much about the necessary connections between capitalism and war. In the writings of Marx and Engels, war and military technique provide a point of fascination: through analysis of military conquest, Marx and Engels gauge political and economic progress and reaction. As materialists they were not squeamish about the rôle of violence and force in history. Engels, known to his friends as ‘the General’, wrote extensively on military matters and the military aspects of insurrection. As a young man, Engels had undertaken military training. In 1841, keen to be in Berlin and in contact with the Young Hegelians, he volunteered for the Berlin-based Brigade of Artillery, so that he could simultaneously complete a final year of military service and participate in the intellectual life of the capital. Though lacking the formal requirements, he attended lectures at the university, and made contact with the Young Hegelian circle of The Free, formerly the Doctors’ Club, where Karl Marx was also to be found.
In subsequent years, Engels put his military training to practical use, taking an active part in the armed popular uprising against the Prussian armies in Elberfeld, close to his home town of Barmen, and later in Baden and the Palatinate. When the revolt was defeated, he escaped across the border to Switzerland, and then joined Marx in London. In the subsequent years, he would analyse contemporary military affairs and historical questions of force and violence in history. Gilbert Achcar informs us that Engels’ articles on the European uprisings were so good, that Wilhelm Liebknecht later reported that the pieces on Hungary were ‘attributed to a high-ranking officer in the Hungarian army’, just as, 10 years later, Engels’ pamphlets published unsigned in Berlin, The Po and the Rhine (1859) and Savoy, Nice and the Rhine (1860), were to be attributed to some Prussian general who was anxious to preserve his anonymity. Many of Engels’ articles on military affairs from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung are in Volume 9 of Marx and Engels, Collected Works (Progress, Moscow). Volume 13, Marx and Engels, 1854–55, also contains many key articles.
See also W.H. Chaloner and W.O. Henderson (eds.), Engels as a Military Critic, Manchester University Press, Manchester 1959 (articles by Engels reprinted from the Volunteer Journal and the Manchester Guardian of the 1860s, with an introduction by Chaloner and Henderson), reviewed by Brian Pearce, Labour Review, Volume 5, no. 3, October/November 1960, p. 99.
Studies of Engels’ military thought include Paul Morris, “The General” on War and Insurrection, Workers Power, June 1995; Michel Lequenne, Chroniques politico-militaire du Marx et Engels (a review of Volume 1 of their military writings), Quatrième Internationale, no. 49, May 1971, pp.54–7; Gilbert Achcar, Engels: Theorist of War, Theorist of Revolution, International Socialism, no. 83, Winter 2001; Leon Trotsky, Engels’ War Articles, 19 May 1924, How The Revolution Armed: Military Writings and Speeches, Volume 5, London 1981; Wilhelm Liebknecht, Reminiscences of Engels (1897), in W.A. Pelz (ed.), Wilhelm Liebknecht and German Social Democracy, Greenwood Press, Westport 1994, pp. 140–2; Martin Berger, Engels, Armies and Revolution, Archon Books, Hamden, 1977.
The second article in this section is Karl Radek’s article, Marxism and the Questions of War, translated here by Esther Leslie from Volume 1 of Radek’s collected works, entitled In den Reihen der Deutschen Revolution, 1909–1919, Kurt Wolff, Munich 1921. This was written for the journal Lichtstrahlen. We publish it here because it conveys something of the theoretical shock and confusion that befell Social Democracy upon the outbreak of world war in 1914. The development of an anti-war movement was the task of the very few twentieth century socialists who expressed opposition at the outbreak of the nationalistic bloodfests in 1914. Karl Radek was one of those isolated socialist voices, writing journal articles in 1914 such as Marxism and the Problems of War and Why Should We Bleed?, to which the resounding answer is ‘for capitalist interests’. He stated that socialist opposition to this warmongering is a response to a number of changes: the objectively reactionary rôle of the bourgeoisie, once it has secured its political and economic victory and is now in imperialist pursuit of worldwide profits; the changing technological modes of warfare (which multiply the victims of the slaughter, and shift the horror from the battlezone into civilian arenas); and the new mass mobilisation of men into conscripted armies. Modern total war exhausts great resources of energy, technology and human life. In My Life, Trotsky pinpoints the contradictions of the capitalist push to war: ‘It was as if a man, to prove that his pipes for breathing and swallowing were in order, had begun to cut his throat with a razor in front of a mirror.’
Karl Radek (Sobelsohn, 1885–1939?) was born in Lvov (Lemberg). He participated in the 1905 Revolution in Warsaw as a member of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, and was a member of the RSDLP from its foundation. He took an anti-war stand during the First World War, living in exile in Switzerland. He became a Bolshevik in 1917, and, in 1923, a member of the Left Opposition. He was expelled from the party in 1927, re-entered after ‘recanting’ in 1930, but was again expelled in 1936. He confessed to the charge of treason in the Second Moscow Trial, and is believed to have died while in prison. Victor Serge described Radek as ‘a sparkling writer … thin, rather small, nervous, full of anecdotes which often had a savage side to them … just like an old-time pirate.’
Biographies of Radek include Warren Lerner, Karl Radek: The Last Internationalist, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1970, and Jim Tuck, Engine of Mischief: An Analytical Biography of Karl Radek, Greenwood, Westport 1988. Materials relating to Radek’s trial include The Moscow Trial, January 1937 (a summary of the proceedings in the trial of Yu.L. Pyatakov, K.B. Radek and others) plus two speeches by Stalin, compiled by W.P. Coates and Z.K. Coates, London 1937; D. Collard, Soviet Justice and the Trial of Radek and Others (appendix: verbatim report of Radek’s evidence), Victor Gollancz, London 1937. The German author Stefan Heym wrote a novel about Radek’s life in 1995, entitled Radek: The Conscience of a Revolutionary, Fischer, Frankfurt 1999.
Lichtstrahlen (Rays of Light) was published in Berlin and was edited by Julian Borchardt, a leader of the International Socialists of Germany. Born in Bromberg, Prussia in 1868, he died in Berlin in 1932. Borchardt was the author of a widely translated digest of Das Kapital. He edited Lichtstrahlen during 1913–16 and 1918–21. The journal was banned in 1916 and re-emerged as Der Leuchturm (The Lighthouse), but appeared once more as Lichtstrahlen from November 1918. The journal gave a platform to German and international anti-war oppositionists. The Lichtstrahlen-Gruppe was staunchly anti-militarist and was opposed to party-truce politics and the approval of war credits in August 1914. Borchardt never joined the Communist Party, for he believed in decentralised forms of political organisation, attempting to make links with the anarchists in Berlin in November 1914. Trotsky mentioned the group around the journal Lichtstrahlen in 1915:

In the delegation representing the left section of official German Social Democracy, there was in turn its own left wing. In Germany, two publications gave ideological expression to these tendencies: Julius Borchardt’s little propagandist bulletin Lichtstrahlen, which was formally very uncompromising but in effect very restrained and had little political influence, and Die Internationale, the organ of Luxemburg and Mehring, which in fact was not an organ but one issue in all, militant and lucid, after which the journal was closed down. Around the Internationale Group were such influential elements of the German Left as Liebknecht and Zetkin. No less than three delegates were supporters of the Luxemburg–Mehring group. One supported Lichtstrahlen. Out of the remaining delegates, two Reichstag deputies were by and large backers of Ledebour, two others possessed no definite physiognomy. Hoffmann, as we have said, is an ‘extreme’ left but he is a man of the old cast, and the younger generation of Lefts are seeking new paths. (L.D. Trotsky, Political Profiles, Ledebour and Hoffmann, Kievskaya Mysl, no. 296, 25 October 1915)

Ian Birchall, The Enigma of Kersausie: Engels in June 1848

Karl Radek, Marxism and the Problems of War

Thursday, May 15, 2014

In Honor Of May Day 2014-From The American Left History Blog Archives-Notes Of An Old Soldier-Greetings On May Day 2012 From The Boston Rally- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan –Ten Years Is Enough!

Sisters and Brothers, Hermanas y Hermanos, greetings on this glorious May Day, a day of international solidarity with the working people and oppressed of the world. Veterans for Peace proudly stands in solidarity with and defense of the just struggles of all people for political, social and economic justice in this wicked old world. And as witness our defenses of the encampments at Dewey Square in October and December of last year, and on a myriad other occasions, these are not just flowery words used on holiday occasions.

May Day is a very appropriate day to address the lessons of war and peace, lessons, as our organization’s name indicates, that have been dearly learned by war-hardened veterans on many of the battle fields of the 20^th and 21^st century. I want to tell you a secret, a secret though that I want you to spread far and wide. I do not give a damn about the Obama Administration’s timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. I say, no I cry out to high heaven- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal of All U.S./Allied Troops and Mercenaries from Afghanistan. Ten years is enough!

And since this May Day is a day for actions I call on our sister and brother rank and file soldiers in Afghanistan, abandoned by the Obama administration to international expediency, to tell, no order, their commanders from that lowly platoon leader out in the boondocks to Commander-In Chief Obama to rev up the jeeps now, rev up the truck transports now, rev up the transport planes now. All Troops Out Now! And when they get back here heal them! Enough of war! Thank you.

***Of This And That In The Old Adamsville Neighborhood-The Early “Projects” Days

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

A while back I went on to the class website established for the 50^th Anniversary reunion of my North Adamsville High School Class of 1964 (that’s in Massachusetts) to check out a new addition to the list of those who have joined the site. Now the way this site, like lots of such sites, works is that each classmate who logs in gets a profile page to tell his or her story of what has happened of interest over that previous 50 years, stuff at least that they wanted classmates to know about. After looking at the information provided by that new addition, a guy I did not know but who I had seen around the school (you would have seen almost everybody in the four years you were there with one thing or another even though the class had baby-boomer times over 500 students), I clicked on another feature of the site a “Message Forum” page which is supposed to be used for general comments and stuff like that. On that page I noticed some comments and photographs from Danny Valentine, a guy whom I did know, a guy who I actually knew prior to high school from down in the old Adamsville projects and who I had gone to elementary school with, the Snug Harbor School. I responded to his message asking about other members of the class who had also gone to that school with a comment and that started an exchange. I have posted my comments below with some information placed in brackets to give content to the exchange.

********

[Danny had taken a trip down memory lane and had actually gone back to the old Adamsville projects and taken photographs of the place, including the Snug Harbor Elementary School we both attended. Those photos triggered an exchange about how tough it was growing up until age thirteen in the projects for me (and for my brothers). Danny whose family had only stayed in the projects a few years before moving to North Adamsville had not been washed over by the experience like I had and so spoke of more pleasant memories. Things like fishing off the jetty with his father, certain block parties that he attended, and various holiday events highlighted by the 4^th of July bonfire. That was a cue for me to express some of my own kid memories. ]

Danny- Thanks for the note and I definitely appreciated the photos. The old school looked pretty much the same as in the days when we attended and raised holy hell whenever we could. I am sure that a couple of generations later there are new Danny Vs and Frank Js raising the same kind of hell to make their mark in the world. The small world of isolated projects life, if not in the bigger picture world. I noticed in one of your photos taken from the front of the building that the old Thomas Crane Library was not down in the basement anymore. Someone had told me previously, or I had looked it up on the North Adamsville city website, that it had been moved up the street, up to Sea Street, to its own building.

All I know is at a critical point in the sixth grade that hallowed library saved me from the lore of becoming a junior gangster once I found out it was better to read and get smart than doing crime. And doing time like a lot of the guys we knew then, Ronny G., George H., and Sammy C. all veterans of Cedar Junction last I heard, wound up doing as you well know. Kenny G. who died in some prison farm down south after an armed robbery bust. And of course Peter M. found face down in some dusty back street in Sonora, Mexico with two slugs in his skull after a busted drug deal went awry and his people could never bring him home. Yeah, all to make some big noise in an isolated world for a minute on the back pages of the newspaper. I don’t know about you but even after I got “religion” on the crime stuff I was still held in thrall of those hard guys for a long time after. So it was a very close thing, very close indeed.

The picture of that old Carter’s Variety Store brought a tear to my eye since many times I went down to that place for penny candy, soda, and other sweets when I had a few cents of my own or when I grabbed some change from my mother’s pocketbook. Everybody who came out of “the projects” back in the 1950s (that is what everybody, residents and non-residents, called the Adamsville Housing Authority four-unit apartment complexes then, for good or evil) knows that there was only that one little convenience store to service the whole place if you needed some quick food purchases. The place is still there under a different name. Strangely there was not, and still is not, any large supermarket on the whole peninsula. I estimated once that the nearest shopping area is about four miles away, not easy when you like in my day had no family car or, as likely, a junk box that ran erratically. That lack of shopping access despite the fact that there were/are several hundred families living in those apartments many as least somewhat dependent on public transportation.Then the dreaded never-coming Eastern Mass bus which I spent half my youth waiting for, or I should say would have spent half my youth waiting for if I had not taken matters into my own hands and just walked to Adamsville Center or wherever I needed to go.

The real draw for us when we were young kids then at Carter’s was certainly the vast, vast to young eyes, display cases of penny candy (you know Mary Janes, no, not that Mary Jane, not then anyway, Bazooka bubble gum, Tootsie rolls, Milk Duds, root beer barrels, Necco wafers, etc.), soda (then called, ah, tonic by the civilized New England world now out of fashion, the word and the world) in a big ice-filled chest containing the Cokes and Pepsis of the day but also various flavored Nehis, Hires Root Beer, Robb’s, etc.), and Twinkies/Hostess cupcakes/Devil Dogs, Table Talk pies and I might as well add etc. here too. In short that sugar high we are all guarding against these days with a vengeance with weight programs, arcane and profuse medical advice, and sheer will-power but which fueled our fast brave young hearts then.

Many a night I would sneak out of the house after dark and walk down that seawall street, after hitting Ma’s pocketbook or bringing back bottles for redemption, to satisfy my sweet tooth ( which I still am inclined to have). There are other later stories, eleven and twelve year old stories, coming of age stories, some maybe true, some urban legends that my gang and I (some of those same guys who did not make it mentioned above) learned our first “clipping” skills (you know “five-finger discount,” hell, petty larceny) at Carter’s by the old diversionary scheme of having one guy grab Mrs. Carter’s attention and the other (s) grab what they could and nonchalantly flee the place. And later “clipped,” a tougher clip, our first packages of cigarettes, mine Parliament filtered, to be smoked behind the old school. Like I said some truth, some urban legend just in case the statute of limitations hasn’t run out.

From the photograph of the unit that your family lived in at 115 Tally Road the old housing project looked the same, like it has existed in a time warp with the four-unit complexes looking exactly like I remembered them except the color of the houses has changed and the roads looked like they had not been repaved since about 1950. The view of the old beach where we swam in the summer and where when I was eight I almost drown and was saved just in time by the swimming instructor and is now, according to your photograph, overgrown and returned to nature brought another tear to my eye. No tears though for the photo of the channel where all the tankers came in providing materials for the Proctor & Gamble plant across the way. I know that you and your father fished off of that jetty on the projects side of the channel providing pleasant memories but I will never forget that sickeningly sweet soap smell we would get in summer when the wind was up. Tears again though for missing the now torn down ship-building superstructure that filled up the skyline then and that provided work for my hard-pressed father when he had work and provided more steady work for many fathers in the old days. Thanks again.

Your projects experiences seemed to have been more positive than mine, maybe because your family left after a few years and didn’t get mired down into the beat down, beat around fellahin (peasant) culture, but I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about that. Certainly not all those childhood “projects” experiences of mine were unrelentingly awful. A lot of that sense of things, that wanting habits/feeling of being an outsider/being poor came more from my reflections later. When everybody was poor, or close to it, as a kid you really wouldn’t be that aware of it. I wasn’t really that aware of the divide while there except for one instance with a girl I liked who had a father who would not let me see her because I was from the projects, end of discussion as she told me. I had it rubbed in my face more when we moved to North Adamsville when I was in junior high and the kids would make fun of my clothes and lack of adequate hygiene. Worse in high school when the kids found out my father was from Hazard, Kentucky a place mentioned in Michael Harrington’s famous book on poverty at the time, The Other America. Hell, our school was raising money and supplies to be sent to that very town. Jesus.

Sure, during the projects days there were fun bike rides around the peninsula and up to the Blue Hills, treasure hunts down at Adamsville beach, an occasional barbecue across the street at the park when the family had a car and some extra money, trips over to that abandoned farm adjacent to the outer edge of the projects and which had, true or not, some history as being haunted which scared the bejesus out of us when we were young, skating, if you could call my efforts skating more like tumbledown jack, on that make-shift pond they would ice up in front of the rental office, and the like.

One of my two favorite memories was when I and my two brothers, Paul and Kevin, you knew them although maybe you did not know that they would eventually succumb to the “life,” do time and live on the margins of desperado society, would hit every house in the neighborhood twice on Halloween. We had it down to a science, never a wasted step. The way we did it was to have one of us “scout” for apartments with lights on signifying they were providing candy and the other two would go for the “kill” with the scout then going to that unit. Then one of the other two would scout the next place. That saved time so that by eight o’clock or so when the lights would be turned off signifying either the supply of candy at that unit was gone or that the people in the unit were done for the night we had big sacks full. Enough for a while although I think our mother used to throw some out after a while when we tired of the stuff. The other memory came from right after Christmas when we would scour the neighborhoods for trees to be used for the New Year’s Eve bonfire. A lot of families like ours would take down the tree the day after Christmas so we spent the whole Christmas vacation on the look-out as soon as we saw a tree on the sidewalk. I think, and maybe you remember, that a prize went to the kid who provided the most trees. In any case that work collecting the trees was worth it when New Year’s Eve came and the tree bonfire went up. I know a bunch of other stuff was thrown on the pile too like old chairs, stuff from the school, cartons, paper and such, and dried wood from the beach.

[Danny had mentioned an amusement park, Paragon Park, that everybody went to which was located about twenty miles away on the water in Nantasket. Our family would go there on those occasions when we had a car, an iffy thing at best in those days. Or, more likely, we would take the Eastern Mass bus (or rather two buses, one to Adamsville Center and from there another to Nantasket) but that would make for a very long day.]

Danny-a couple of years ago when I was feeling a little nostalgic for the old days I went back down to Nantasket to see what was left, if anything. The beach was still great and expansive especially heading toward Boston Harbor and the lighthouse that marked the channel. All that was left of the amusement park though was the merry-go-round well worth preserving and a couple of arcades which perhaps were not. I, while there, got to thinking about all the smells, the taffy, cotton candy, steaming hot dogs, sizzling hamburgers and steaks complete with onions and green peppers smells mixed in on windy days with the salt sea air. Thinking too about the rides, the Wild Mouse, bumper cars, Ferris wheel and when older the rocking rolling roller coaster which I was finally able to ride only because a girl I was with was crazy for to do it (and crazy for me which explains my bravery in a nutshell). And most of all I still miss not playing Skee which is how I met my first “girlfriend” at age twelve or thirteen (not the girl crazy for me, that was later). See for some reason I had developed a certain skill for the game and would win some decent prizes so one day this girl was watching me and watching my technique. She tried to play but was a bust. She then came up to me and say, please, please win her a prize. Well naturally when a girl says that what is a guy to do but do as commanded. I think I won her a small doll or something. She was delighted and to show her delight she asked me to walk over to the beach with her and sit on the seawall. Later we, as the sun started going down, kissed for a while, a long while. So you see why I miss Skee and see why later in life I was a sucker for any woman who said please, please. But Danny you knew that.

The same fate is true for the Surf Ballroom which as you may remember was located at the far end of the beach, it too now long gone replaced by condos from what I could see. That was the place we went for the dances on Friday and Saturday nights later on when we were out of high school and we went in order to meet girls who wanted to dance and… A lot of girls from North Adamsville went to those dances but strangely they would not give North Adamsville guys the time of day, or would not give me the time of day, saying they were looking for new blood, new guys and not guys they have known or seen around forever. (Probably they didn’t want to have to hear about their shattered reputations back in the old town was the real reason.) Still I met some nice young women there while dancing like crazy to the local favorites, the Rockin’ Ramrods, who did great covers of the Stones and their signature song, and end of the evening song too, was the Kingsmen’s Louie, Louie which everybody went crazy over. Of course since we were under-age then if we wanted to drink liquor we had grab some wino and get him to make a purchase and drink the stuff out on the beach or in a car. The booze was certainly a draw for some of the young women who were more than happy to go outside during intermission and walk the beach or sit in a car and have a drink. Or, if you were lucky, after the dance was over but that is a different story for some other time.

[Danny mentioned that he used to hitchhike places in order to get around, mainly around town and asked whether I had done so. Pretty easy to do in those days when you probably knew who was picking you up when you did it in North Adamsville.]

Danny- I too used to hitch-hike everywhere in the old days, including a few times across the country in the spirit of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. I have been stuck in more Podunk towns at two in morning trying to hitch a ride than I care to remember. I always had a good word about truckers in those days because, long hair or short, they would pick you up for the company or because you reminded them of their sons or something and drive you long distances (buy you a diner dinner too if you got a good guy). Now young people have to look it up on Wikipedia to find out what hitch-hiking is.

I remember a few years ago just outside of Carlsbad, California I spied a young couple on the entrance ramp of U.S. 5 hitching and was so surprised to see them out there on the freedom road that I went from the fourth lane over to the breakdown lane to pick them up (and to make sure the cops didn’t grab them). I took them to their destination LA about 100 miles up the road although I had only planned to go to Laguna Beach that day. Needless to say I regaled them with stories about the old hitchhike days, days when any given VW bus or stray automobile would pick you up within two minutes of sticking out your thumb. They listened a little non-plussed but were thankful for the ride. But such a method of travel is too dangerous these days (maybe back then in the 1960s too).

[Danny finished up one exchange asking me if I “skid-hopped” in the old days. That was what we used to do in winter when there was snow on the ground, usually just after a big storm which left snow on the streets even after plowing. You would get on the back fender of a car (now almost impossible to do with melded fenders to the auto body), crouch down and let the car move you along. Sometimes you would get an irate driver who would stop the car and run after you. Not for the faint-hearted that was for sure. ]

Danny-I think “skid-hopping” these days is on the order of hitch-hiking, record players, corner boys, transistor radios-“Say, what?” We always skid-hopped the old Eastern Mass buses going up Palmer Street because the bus driver could not see us in back.

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Mutiny and the Cohesion of the Armed Forces

Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

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

I: Mutiny and the Cohesion of the Armed Forces

Mutinies may be conspired into existence by activists, or they may be spontaneous. They may have limited demands, such as swift demobilisation, respect from the officer class, or better food. Or they may be more ‘politically conscious’ and develop new forms of self-governance or articulate internationalist sentiments and agitate for an end to war against their brothers. Mutinies may express a high level of class-consciousness and definite political demands – or they may appear to be more chaotic, a riotous breakdown of the chain of command. But even the temporary breakdown of such a key command chain has potentially great implications. Any mutiny can be a flashpoint of revolution.

This issue of Revolutionary History is especially keen to trace the connections between mutiny, social class and class consciousness. It is for this reason that we open this section with Ted Crawford’s article on changing social and technological relations in the armed forces, in particular in the navy. Mutinies are frequently associated with sea-based rather than land-based forces. This impression may be based on the widespread cultural resonance of one notorious mutiny: the mutiny on the Bounty. However, it is also the case that the most dramatic mutinies have occurred at sea or in ports. The ship of war in the modern period was a condensed rendition of the larger class society, its hierarchy was extremely rigidly enforced, and its conditions harsh for some and less harsh for the few with whom those abused sailors shared close quarters. When the majority decides to overturn that inequity, there are few places for the officer class to hide.
We begin by implicitly posing a question of immediate relevance to the present – to what extent is mutiny possible in the hi-tech, professional armies of today’s advanced capitalist nations? Is widespread ‘political’ mutiny a possibility in today’s hi-tech professional armies of Europe and the USA (where mutiny – or the ‘fragging’ of officers – was last experienced during the Vietnam war)? Or is mutiny reserved for the under-equipped and overwhelmed armed forces in faraway countries facing the might of NATO in today’s new perma-war adventures? The reader is also pointed to Ted Crawford’s further work on these matters – Military Matters, New Interventions, Volume 7, no. 3, Autumn 1996, pp. 18–24.
Also of interest for broader questions of Marxism, militarism and war are Siegfried Kissin, War and the Marxists, two volumes, London 1988; reviewed by Ted Crawford in Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no. 1, Summer 1990, pp. 39–40; Dona Torr (ed.), Armies and the People and Antimilitarism, in Marxism, Nationality and War, Volume 1, London 1940, pp. 109–21.
Leon Trotsky was, of course, also well versed in military matters. Key writings include How the Revolution Armed: The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky, five volumes, New Park Publications, London 1981 – Volume 1 (1918), Volume 2 (1919), Volume 3 (1920), Volume 4 (1921–23), Volume 5 (1921–23); Marxism and Military Affairs, Colombo 1969; Leon Trotsky, The Balkan Wars, Pathfinder Press, New York 1980.
See also Harold Walter Nelson, Leon Trotsky and the Art of Insurrection, London 1988; reviewed by Ted Crawford in Revolutionary History, Volume 3, no. 1, Summer 1990, pp. 37–9; Hal Draper, War and Revolution: Lenin and the Myth of Revolutionary Defeatism, edited by E. Haberkern (from articles originally published in New International), New Jersey 1996, also excerpted in Lenin and the Myth of Revolutionary Defeatism, Workers Liberty, Volume 2, no. 1, pp. 84–110.
The old Socialist classic on the question of war is Jean Jaurés, L’Armée nouvelle, 1910, reprint reviewed by Genéviéve Lagrange in Lutte ouvrière, no. 85, 15–21 April 1970. Other key texts include Karl Liebknecht, Militarism and Anti-Militarism, Writers and Readers, London 1972 (original 1907); Karl Liebknecht, The Future Belongs to the People (speeches made during the First World War), New York 1918; Ralph Lyndal Worrall, Footsteps of Warfare: A Study of the Origin and Development of War, Peter Davies, London 1936.
Questions of cohesion, discipline and disintegration within the armed forces are discussed in Bruce Allen Watson, When Soldiers Quit: Studies in Military Disintegration, Praeger, New York, 1997; Dale O. Smith, What Is Morale?, Air University Quarterly Review, Winter 1951–52, pp. 42–50; S.P. MacKenzie, Politics and Military Morale: Current Affairs and Citizenship Education in the British Army, 1914–50, Clarendon, Oxford 1992; Brian Holden Reid and John White, “A Mob of Stragglers and Cowards”: Desertion from the Union and Confederate Armies, 1861–65, Journal of Strategic Studies, no. 8, 1985, pp. 64–77; Desmond Morton, Kicking and Complaining: Demobilization Riots in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1918–1919, Canadian Historical Review, Volume 61, no. 3, September 1980, pp. 334–60.
Social class and the armed forces is also considered in C.B. Otley, The Social Origins of British Army Officers, Sociological Review, Volume 18, 1970; C.B. Otley, Militarism and the Social Affiliations of the British Army Élite, in J. van Doorn (ed.), Armed Forces and Society, Mouton, The Hague 1968; C.B. Otley, The Educational Background of British Army Officers, Sociology, Volume 2, no. 2, September 1963; P. Razzell, Social Origins of Officers in the Indian and British Home Army, British Journal of Sociology, Volume 14, 1963, pp. 248ff.; D. Englander and J. Osbourne, Jack, Tommy and Henry Dubb: The Armed Forces and the Working Class, Historical Journal, 1978, pp. 593–662.
For a general study of naval mutinies across history, see Leonard Guttridge, Mutiny: A History of Naval Insurrection, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis 1992; Lawrence James, Mutiny: In the British and Commonwealth Forces, 1797–1956, Buchan and Enright, London 1987. This study of mutinies includes the Spithead mutiny, the revolt of Sudanese troops in Uganda in 1898, mutineering Indian troops in Singapore in 1915, the mutiny of British forces in Etaples in 1917 and the mutiny, shortly afterwards, by Chinese Labour Corps workers on the Western Front; and revolts by the Slavo-British Legion in Russia in 1919, the Connaught Rangers in India in 1920, British forces at Salerno in 1943, and the Royal Indian Navy in 1946.
For a study of mutiny across history but with particular reference to Vietnam and the US army, see the work of peace activist David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: The American Military Today, Anchor/Doubleday, New York 1975; reviewed in The New York Review of Books, 13 May 1976, p. 30. See also David Cortright and Max Watts, Left Face: Soldier Unions and Movements in Modern Armies, Greenwood Press, Westport 1991. Also of interest, for a view of mutiny as a part of the creation of the modern working class on all sides of the Atlantic, is Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Verso, London 2000.
Others too, of course, have argued that the term ‘to strike’ has its origins in mutiny, particularly the ‘Great Mutinies’ at Spithead and the Nore in 1797 when sailors would strike the sails – that is, lower them – in order to hold up the flow of trade and disrupt the war machinery of state. The OED registers the first usage of the word ‘strike’, referring to a concerted cessation of work by a body of workers, in an American document from 1810.
This section closes with a short article by Julian Putkowski. These observations from a historian of British Army mutinies discuss the difficulties of defining what mutiny is and assessing what any particular mutiny means politically. The article exposes and accounts for a tendency to over-value the significance of mutinies within the socialist tradition. In pointing out the shortcomings of previous attempts, the article hopes set further research in this area on a more secure and self-aware footing.

Ted Crawford, Mutiny and the Cohesion of the Armed Forces

Julian Putkowski, Observations on Mutinies

***In The 50th Anniversary Year Of The Beatles Explosion

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The anniversary of the Beatles 50 years ago invasion drives the following comment from several years ago but is tempered today a little by the fact that both bands were miles ahead of what we had been listening to previously.

Stones or Beatles?

I make no bones about my preference for the Rolling Stones and will motivate that point a little below but here let me just set the parameters of the discussion. I am talking about the stuff they and the Beatles did when we were in high school, circa 1964. The time of the "invasion." I do not mean the later material like the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper or The Stones' Gimme Shelter. And no, I do not want to hear about how you really swooned over Bobby Darin or Bobby Dee rather than Mick or Paul.

I am not sure exactly when I first hear a Stones song although it was probably Satisfaction. However, what really hooked me on them was when they covered the old Willie Dixon blues classic Little Red Rooster made famous by the mic-eating Howlin’ Wolf. If you will recall that song was banned, at first, from the radio stations of Boston. Later, I think, and maybe someone can maybe help me out on this, WMEX broke the ban and played it. And no, the song was not about the doings of our barnyard friends. But beyond the sexual theme was the fact that it was banned that made me, and perhaps you, want to hear it at any cost. That says as much about my personality then, and now, as any long-winded statement I could make.

That event began my long love affair with the blues. And that is probably why, although the blues, particularly the Chicago blues, also influenced the Beatles, it is the Stones that I favor. Their cover still holds up, by the way. Not as good, as I found out later, as the one by the legendary Howlin' Wolf's mentioned above but good. I have also thought about the Stones influence recently as I have thought about the long ago past of my youth.

Compare some works like John Lennon's plaintive Working Class Hero and the Stones' agitated Street Fighting Man (yes, I know these are later works but they serve to make my point here) and I believe that something in the way the Stones from early on presented that angry, defiant sound appealed to my sense of working- class alienation. But enough. I will close with this. I have put my money where my mouth is with my preference. When the Stones toured Boston at Fenway Park in the summer of 2005 I spend many (too many) dollars to get down near the stage and watch old Mick and friends rock. How about that.

Street Fighting Man Lyrics
Artist(Band):The Rolling Stones
(M. Jagger/K. Richards)

Ev'rywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy

'Cause summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy

But what can a poor boy do

Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band

'Cause in sleepy London town

There's just no place for a street fighting man

Hey! Think the time is right for a palace revolution

'Cause where I live the game to play is compromise solution

Well, then what can a poor boy do

Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band

'Cause in sleepy London town

There's just no place for a street fighting man

Hey! Said my name is called disturbance

I'll shout and scream, I'll kill the king, I'll rail at all his servants

Well, what can a poor boy do

Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band

'Cause in sleepy London town

There's just no place for a street fighting man

"Working Class Hero" lyrics- John Lennon

As soon as your born they make you feel small,

By giving you no time instead of it all,

Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all,

A working class hero is something to be,