From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-

 

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. 
******** 

VI: Disaffection in the Army
in the Second World War

The first piece in this section is an article by David Renton on Trotskyists in Egypt during and immediately after the Second World War. The article is particularly concerned with relationships between the British Trotskyists and the Egyptian Trotskyist organisation Bread and Freedom. The article draws on David Renton’s wider researches into Egyptian Trotskyism, and comes replete with many footnotes pointing out guides for further reading, as well as to the whereabouts of source materials. Bread and Freedom is an under-researched organisation. A few articles did appear in the contemporary left press, including J. Damien, Social and Political Conditions In Egypt Today, Fourth International, Volume 7, no. 7, July 1946; Egypte: Un Manifeste Programmatique Des Trotskystes Égyptiens, Quatrième Internationale, July–August 1947; and Egypt, Fourth International, Volume 8, no. 7, July–August 1947.

David Renton has recently tried to correct this omission, publishing a full-length history of the Egyptian group: Soldats britanniques et trotskysme égyptien: Pain et Liberté, Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no. 68, 2000, pp. 95–120. He has also published an article on the web, Egypt: A People’s History, Voice of the Turtle (at http://voiceoftheturtle.org/), July 2001. In addition he is co-author (with Anne Alexander) of a chapter in a book that will appear this year, Imperialism and Resistance in Egypt 1890–1990 in L. Zeilig, Marxism and Africa, New Clarion Press, Bristol 2002.
For our second piece, we are grateful to Julian Putkowski for permission to publish his interview with Dave Wallis, a Young Communist League activist, who carried on the class struggle while serving with the British army in Egypt. The interview reveals details of the methods of political organisation and covert activities in the British army in Egypt during the Second World War. This piece is supplemented by Ian Birchall’s interview with Duncan Hallas, concentrating on dissent amongst the British forces in Egypt in 1946.
Disaffection amongst the ranks of the British army in the Second World War is dealt with in two publications by Raymond Challinor, The Struggle for Hearts and Minds: Essays on the Second World War, Bewick Press, Whitely Bay 1995, pp. 79–86; Military Discipline and Working Class Resistance in World War II, What Next?, no. 17, 2000, pp. 34–7.
Also of interest are Class War on the Home Front, Wildcat, 1986, which contains Socialists and the Army, reprinted from Solidarity, August/September 1942, reviewed by Martin Durham, Anti-Parliamentary Communism, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, Volume 54, part 1, Spring 1989. Peter Ward Fay, The Forgotten Army: India’s Armed Struggle for Independence, 1942–1945, Michigan 1994, deals partly with the mutinies in the Indian army, reviewed by Tariq Ali, The Third Man, Guardian, 24 May 1994; David Duncan, Mutiny in the RAF: The Air Force Strikes of 1946, with a Foreword by John Saville, Socialist History Society Occasional Papers Series, no. 8. Noel Crusz, The Cocos Islands Mutiny, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, WA 2001, describes the mutiny of gunners in the Ceylon Garrison Artillery on 8–9 May 1942, which resulted in three Ceylonese mutineers being executed.
For further information on the Cairo Forces’ Parliament, see Murray Armstrong, The Cairo Commons, Guardian, 27 May 1989; Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, War and the International, London 1986, pp. 88–9 (the forces’ parliaments in Cairo and Cyrenaica where Workers International League member Arthur Ledbetter was Prime Minister and Home Secretary); Tony Aitman, The War Within the War, Militant, 15 September 1989; The Eighth Army Defends Workers’ Right to Strike (an excerpt from Labor Action quoting the Eighth Army News), Workers Liberty, no. 22, June 1995, p. 11; Harry Ratner, Reluctant Revolutionary, Socialist Platform, London 1994, pp. 49ff. Gerry R. Rubin’s Durban 1942: A British Troopship Revolt (Hambledon Press, London 1992) investigates, especially from a legal perspective, events on 13 January 1942 when hundreds of army and air force servicemen refused to board an eastwards-bound British troopship, the City of Canterbury. Albert Meltzer’s I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels (AK Press, Edinburgh 1996) has a section in Chapter 5 on the strikes for demobilisation in Egypt and the Cairo Parliament. Vote for Them, a television play about the Cairo Forces Parliament, was screened on BBC2 on 2 June 1989. Of related interest is Evangelos Spyropoulos, The Greek Military (1909-–1941) and the Greek Mutinies in the Middle East (1941–1944), Eastern European Monographs, Boulder, CO 1993.

---

David Renton, Bread and Freedom

Julian Putkowski interviews Dave Wallis:
Backwards from Wivenhoe to Cairo

Swimming Against the Tide:
Duncan Hallas on his Experiences in Egypt

 

***Of This And That In The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-In Search Of……Lost Classmates 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

I have spent not a little time lately touting the virtues of the Internet in allowing me and the members of the North Adamsville Class of 1964, or what is left of it, the remnant that has survived and is findable with the new technologies to communicate with each other some fifty years and many miles later on a class website recently set up to gather in classmates for our 50^th anniversary reunion (some will never be found by choice or by being excluded from the “information super-highway” that they have not been able to navigate). I had noted in earlier sketches my own successes with this website in being able to tout a guy whose photos of my old childhood neighborhood send me spinning down memory lane, another about an old corner boy and our Adventure car hop misadventures looking for the heart of Saturday night, writing a tribute to our classmates fallen in Vietnam, and in answering a perplexing question about what I saw as my role as a commentator on the site. I admitted I had to marvel at some of the communications technology that makes our work a lot easier than back in the day. The Internet was only maybe a dream, a mad monk scientist far-fetched science fiction dream then as we struggled with three by five cards and archaic Dewey Decimal systems.

I also admitted in one of those sketches that for most of these fifty years since graduation I had studiously avoided returning to the old town for any past class reunions but this one I had wanted to attend, the reasons which not need detain us here. Or I should say rather wanted to attend once the reunion committee was able to track me down and invite me to attend. Or a better “rather” to join a NA64.com website run by a wizard webmaster, Donna, who was also our class Vice-President to keep up to date on progress for that reunion.

Part of the reason I did join the class site was to keep informed about upcoming events but also as is my wont to make commentary about various aspects of the old hometown, the high school then, and any other tidbit that my esteemed fellow classmates might want to ponder after all these years. All this made simple as pie by the act of joining. Once logged in one is provided with a personal profile page complete with space for private e-mails, story-telling, various vital statistics like kids and grandkids, and space for the billion photos of that progeny, mostly it seems for those darling grandkids that seem to pop up everywhere.

However taking trips down memory lane is a chancey thing and as I became engrossed in some of the early stories, some of the photos, and some of the comments I began to think that I should become more active in trying to gather in the clan for the upcoming reunion. Put myself in harness and get some of the leg work done. Now lately, mercifully lately, when I volunteer for some project or other task I do it with the idea that I will be an active participant and not just some name on a committee listing. Otherwise I prefer to pass. So after some thought I decided to leap in, to join the North Adamsville Class of 1964 reunion committee.

Now as one might expect in the modern age most of the committee members were scattered about, although most were in Massachusetts. But here is the beauty of the Internet Donna, our webmaster introduced above, actually lives in Florida for the winter. Not to worry though the tasks at hand, the one that interest me here, finding lost classmates (“missing” we call them on the website until they join) can be divvied up via the Internet. And so most of the last winter was spent working the “net” trying to find those elusive scattered to the winds classmates.

My assigned task since part of my professional work is on the computer anyway was to cull what existing social networking class-related websites had and to invite the classmates on those sites to come on board. There were four main sites that I was able to find after some preliminary Googling-those on Facebook obviously, those who had joined a commercial classmates site, those who had joined a local North Adamsville site, and those who had joined through an all-American high schools site. Easy stuff right. Well, kind of-at least for those who were listed on those sites. All I did was to copy and paste the following simple message (later expanded and more targeted):  

First Notice (Made Simple I Hope- Just Click Below) –Save The Date -Spread The Word To Any Class Of 1964 People You Are In Contact With

 

Fellow classmates from the North Adamsville High School Class of 1964- On behalf of the Reunion Committee I invite you go to the newly established class website- click here-

http://www.northadamsville64.com/class_index.cfm

-to find out more information about the planned 50^th anniversary class reunion. The reunion is scheduled for the weekend of September 20^th 2014 at the Best Western Adams Inn in North Adamsville (adjacent to the Neptune Bridge and river if you haven’t been to NA lately). The theme “Try To Remember.” We also invite you to join the website, create your own profile page, and share whatever you want to share with your fellow classmates. Sorry for the generic nature of this message. Sorry also if you received this message more than once if you belong to various NA-related sites.      

 

Naturally there were some snafus, for example, on Facebook    unless you wanted to “friend” every person who was on the North Adamsville Class of 1964 group page you could only leave messages on a secondary message space-which the classmate, depending on how  Facebook-crazed they were (an iffy proposition for AARP-worthies), might or might not get around to checking. On a commercial classmate site I had to actually join the site for a nominal fee since in order to send internal site e-mails one of the party’s had to be a paying member. Moreover after matching names on that site with names on our class website, including those who have passed away, I noticed that a number of names were of those who were now deceased so that site had not been updated for a while. On the local North Adamsville site I also had to pay a nominal fee and their internal e-mail was erratic to say the least. Finally the all-American site although free had a substantial number of names found on the other sites. Normal detective work problems looking for people who have been “missing” for fifty years.       

Of course this kind of work is labor intensive for the amount of results. The Internet-related population came in at around 200 names. The NA Class of 1964 was a big baby-boomer cohort with over 500 graduates. Unfortunately in conformity with any actuarial table you care to consult about seventy of our classmates have passed on leaving about 440 possible contacts (not including spouses, of course except those 15 couples, those 15 class sweetheart couples who heroically married each other and lived happily ever after). We leveled off at about 200 who joined the site and each of those brave souls received a message from Donna upon joining which went like this:    

Hi- Welcome to our class website-

 

For those who have, uh, lost, misplaced or sold off their “Manet” [class yearbook] to the highest bidder we have a link to the Thomas Public Library site on the left side of the home page so you can take that big trip down memory lane. By the way (BTW, okay) the theme for this reunion is “Try To Remember” so everybody better check that site out or get your yearbook out of the attic. Spread the word to others from NA64 who you are in contact with and sent any information that might help us to find missing classmates to webmaster Donna Murphy McGraw. Also send photos of any previous reunions you may have attended. Yes, and write stuff, put photos and video on your personal profile site too. We want to hear about everybody’s story over the past 50 years.  

And so it goes…

In Honor Of May Day 2014-From The American Left History Blog Archives -From The May Day Organizing 2012 Organizing Archives –May Day 2013 Needs The Same Efforts

Boston's International Workers Day 2013

BMDC International Workers Day Rally
Wednesday, May 1, 2013 at Boston City Hall
Gather at 2PM - Rally at 2:30PM
(Court St. & Cambridge St.)
T stops Government Center (Blue line, Green line)

To download flyer click here. (Please print double-sided)

Other May Day events:

Revere - @ City Hall - gather at 3:pmbegin marching at 3:30 (to Chelsea)
Everett - @ City Hall - gather at 3:pm begin marching at 3:30 (to Chelsea)
Chelsea - @ City Hall - rally a 3:pm (wait for above feeder marches to arrive) will begin marching at 4:30 (to East Boston)
East Boston - @ Central Square - (welcome marchers) Rally at 5:pm

BMDC will join the rally in East Boston immediately following Boston City Hall rally

Supporters: ANSWER Coalition, Boston Anti Authoritarian Movement, Boston Rosa Parks Human Rights Day Committee, Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition, Harvard No-Layoffs Campaign, Industrial Workers of the World, Latinos for Social Change, Mass Global Action, Sacco & Vanzetti Commemoration Society, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party of Boston, Socialist Workers Party, Student Labor Action Movement, USW Local 8751 - Boston School Bus Drivers Union, Worcester Immigrant Coalition, National Immigrant Solidarity Network, Democracy Center - Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge/Somerville/Arlington United for Justice with Peace, International Socialist Organization, Community Church of Boston

********

All Out May Day 2012: A Day Without the 99% -General Strike Occupy Boston Working Group

In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other political issues such as transparency and horizontal democracy that have become associated with the Occupy movement are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.

May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a time for the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America to join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy.

Some political activists here in Boston, mainly connected with Occupy Boston (OB), decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). GSOB has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan our own May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 8, 2012.

Early discussions within the working group centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and some did close in solidarity.

That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its sparse recent militant labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. GSOB also came to a realization that successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 would not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Our focus will be actions and activities that respond and reflect the Boston political situation as we attempt to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.

Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive immigration actions in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national actions this year. One of the first steps GSOB took was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. After making such efforts GSOB has joined forces with BMDC in order to coordinate the over-all May Day actions.

Taking our cue from the developing Occupy May Day movement, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of Occupy Wall Street, GSOB has centered our slogans on the theme of “Occupy May First - A Day Without the 99%” in order to highlight the fact that in capitalist America labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Highlighting the increasing economic gap, political voiceless-ness, and social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions we face under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated by Occupy Boston last fall.

On May Day GSOB is calling on the 99% to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement that general slogan. We encourage working people to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the 99% in the streets.

For students at all levels GSOB is calling for a walk-out of classes. Further we call on college students to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward think tank should plan its own strike actions and GSOB suggests at some point in the day that all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.

In the early hours on May 1st members of the 99% will converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party will start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.

At noon there will be a permit-approved May Day rally at Boston City Hall Plaza jointly sponsored by BMDC and GSOB. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.

That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.

The GSOB is urging the following slogans for May 1st. - No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the 1% that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without the 99% really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. GSOB urges -All Out For May Day 2012!

***A Simple Act Of Bravery-Concerning The Second Selma To Montgomery Civil Rights March, Circa 1965

 

 

From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin

We all know the heroes or at least the names of the highly publicized heroes of the black civil rights movement down South (and later up North and West) in the 1960s led by the courageous Doctor Martin Luther King and his compatriots. Less well known, and generally unknown except perhaps at the margins of specialty books on the subject, are the mass of average, well maybe more than average, citizens, mainly from the North, and mainly students or the young who put themselves on the line, put themselves on the line of fire to do the right thing in the face of civil evil. This is a short sketch about one such simple act of bravery.  

Not everybody who participated in the civil rights struggles down South came to those tasks fully aware politically or with the deepest motives-but they were there. Take the case of Dave Patrick from my hometown of North Adamsville, a small city just outside of Boston which despite its proximity to the city had virtually no blacks living there in the early 1960s the time of the great struggles down South (and according to some fairly current census information the black population of the town today is still minuscule). And we had no blacks, none in our graduating class and one sole black  teacher during our four year stay. Dave Patrick, although we graduated together in 1964 was unknown to me until recently when through a 50^th Anniversary class reunion site we “met” and he related the information that he had participated in the second Selma to Montgomery march in 1965. Not necessarily for the highest political motives at first but he went.

I was surprised by the story of his action because I believed, as mentioned below in my e-mail responses that I was the only vocal pro-civil rights activist in the school or the neighborhood. Certainly the town, white working-class, mainly third and fourth generation Irish and Italian, at its core and dependent on the local ship-building industry for many jobs and industry-related jobs held the common racial views of day and might have had, if it rose to that level then, some sympathy with the whites down south. And certainly in the high school to the extent that such dramatic social issues drew any attention at all as against who the hot girls or guys were, who had a hot car, who was doing what to whom down at the midnight “submarine races” lovers’ lane beachfront well-detailed in Monday morning before school boys’ and girls’ “lav” talkfest, students would reflect for the most part what was being said at home. Of course once a lot of us got away from the town, got emerged in issue-oriented campus life and away from the high school norms many things changed. They did for David anyway.  

David had gone away to college after being a very bright high school student. But he like a lot of us then (and maybe now too but I see very little when I am on real campuses) got caught up in the turbulent social life of the times, the experimental 1960s time of blessed memory -drugs, sex and rock and roll to put a short name to it. While at one particular party, a frat party at his school he was confronted with a blatantly racist-themed event (mock, and maybe not so mock, honoring the KKK) and plenty of street-wise racist talk and he balked at it. Dave told me that event, and the cold hard fact that he was going to flunk out of school anyway because of his excessive social life, led him to the Selma march. A mixed motive, no question. He also said that he was afraid every minute that he was down there in Alabama since he had never been that far south, had been heckled, and the whole police state presence there unnerved him.  But he marched and survived to tell the tale.      

Below are my e-mail responses to the details of his story and some observations of my own.  
**********
Kudos, Dave Patrick, Kudos

Although you really should have placed your fine piece about your participation in the second Selma to Montgomery march in 1965 in the “Message Forum” section so all your fellow classmates could read it I am just glad you placed the piece somewhere.

Since we have exchanged previous e-mails on this subject I would now publicly honor your brave act of heading south whatever your private reasoning. Alabama and Mississippi were murderous dangerous places foremost for militant black freedom- fighters and just behind then white Yankee civil-rights supporters.  As you know from one of our previously exchanged e-mails in the summer of 1964 when the civil rights movement was desperate for people to head south to Alabama I had volunteered to go. When my family, including my mother usually supportive but not on this one, heard about that idea they threatened to disown me, to throw me out of the house. I buckled under and did not go. The most I did in those times was to be part of a small group of students in high school sending books to children in Alabama, earlier on joining an occasional picket line in front of Woolworth’s in downtown Boston in support of the lunch counter sit-in demonstrators down South, and some work a few weeks one summer on voter registration in North Carolina. So you can see why I say, and continue to say, kudos, brother, kudos.

As we have been recollecting those bedeviled times I keep feeling how strange it was that you and I, others too maybe, who came out of very white working-class North Adamsville and were just a step or two economically above the blacks we were supporting had decided to cast our fate with what Jack Kerouac called the fellaheen of the world, the downtrodden and forgotten ones. Given the racial climate around town then, and probably now too, it seems almost impossible except as an act of extreme idealism that I could have thought of heading, and you did, head south then. Those were certainly heady times.   

******

Dave- interesting story about how you got to Alabama. I will tell you however that rather than hide the fact you should have just left it as is on your profile page. It did not matter why you went. YOU WENT and coming out of lily- white North Adamsville where we only had one black teacher and no black fellow students (we might as well have been in the South on that account) despite the historic black community of Roxbury being within a stone’s throw right over the bridge  that speaks to me as a very brave and honorable act.

Moreover- to place your act in context- in high school I, along with some students from North Adamsville and Hullsville High were involved in a books for Alabama program sponsored by the NAACP in Boston and we took a lot of heat from our friends and neighbors for that small action. As well as the few times I went into Boston in support of trying to de-segregate the lunch-counter down south by picketing Woolworth’s where we took much heat from local yahoos. You actually went down to the heart of the beast so kudos, brother, kudos.

My more serious work with the black liberation struggle actually came later when I lived in Oakland and got involved with Black Panther defense as the government was trying to jail and/or kill every black militant it could get its hands on and still later on apartheid in South Africa. I will keep what you sent to me by private e-mail in confidence if you wish but believe me I have great admiration for what you did.

Later Peter Paul Markin      
*******
Dave

To finish up on the Selma-Montgomery March second e-mail of 3/16 I should note that I faced some of the same family hostility that you encountered. With the exception of my mother who has some kind of low-level Dorothy Day Catholic Worker spirit that drove her on social issues (her social concerns for other people, for her sons nothing but rancor and “disappointment”) that hostility was palpable. My mother is probably where I picked up my own fledgling sense of social consciousness (overlaid back then with that loner, existential “king hell king” thing). My father was nothing but a good old boy Kentucky coalminer displaced by World War II and the Marines who wound up being stationed at the Hullsville Naval Depot before being demobilized. The best I/we could ever get him to say about black people was “nigras.”

On my mother’s side there were nothing but Irish rednecks many of whom still lived over in the old family town of South Boston and who in our generation were well known in the fight against desegregation that rocked that area in the mid-1970s and 1980s. Hell I could not even go over there then without being harassed the minute I hit L Street where they hung out. Here is the kicker though- in 1964 when the civil rights movement was desperate for people to head south to Alabama I had volunteered to go. When my family, including my mother on this one, heard about that they threatened to disown me, to throw me out of the house. I buckled under and did not go. So you can see why I say, and continue to say, kudos, brother, kudos.

Later Peter Paul Markin
*********
Kudos again Dave of such small acts human history rather than an unending story of crushed piles of bones gives hope.

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Comintern Work in Western Armed Forces
in the 1930s

 

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. 
******** 

V: Comintern Work in Western Armed Forces
in the 1930s

We are grateful to David McKnight for his location and translation of an archive document on a little known aspect of the work of the Communist International: underground work in the military forces of the non-Communist world. Some of the consequences of such underground work – which also extended to work in the civil service and diplomatic service – were the espionage witch-hunts of the Cold War. This article introduces a document found in the Comintern archives in 1996. A longer treatment of many aspects of underground work will appear in David McKnight’s book Conspiracy Against the State, to be published by Frank Cass.

In addition, for issues relating to the security services and Communism, see David Turner’s recently awarded PhD thesis: Reds at the Heart of the Empire: Aspects of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the Medway Towns, 1920–1943, Canterbury Christchurch University College/University of Kent. His website http://www.canterbury.u-net.com/ contains valuable material and bibliographies.
As an important background to this Comintern document stand the events of the Invergordon Mutiny in 1931. Led by a Communist, sailors among a fleet in Invergordon struck against naval lower-deck pay cuts imposed by the National Government in the economic crisis. Chapter Two of The Balham Group: How British Trotskyism Began (Pluto Press, London 1974) describes events thus:

Excitement grew when, on 15 September, the men of the Atlantic Fleet at Invergordon refused to obey orders to sail, and, in tidy Navy fashion, took over the ships, ‘refusing to serve under the new rates of pay’. The government quickly appeased the sailors; but teachers and civil servants, not given in that period to militant protest, now marched and met in great numbers. In Britain’s major cities, the unemployed in tens and scores of thousands surged in turbulent protest, often clashing violently with the police. The men of money began shifting their cash away from Britain, government credit tumbled and on 20 September, a government set up to keep Britain on the gold standard was forced to go off it. On 11 October, postal workers, civil servants, teachers, unemployed and trade unionists staged a 100,000-strong united demonstration in Hyde Park.

The strike had some success, with all cuts for public servants being restricted to 10 per cent. But another consequence was the strengthening of the law against sedition. In 1934, the Incitement to Disaffection Bill was introduced to replace the Mutiny Act of 1797, which made it an offence to seduce a member of His Majesty’s Forces from his duty or allegiance. Captain R.A. Henderson’s Invergordon Papers 1931 are deposited at the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge.

For further reading, see Dave Sherry, Red Letter Days: 15 September 1931 – The Invergordon Mutiny, Socialist Review, no. 244, September 2000; Alan Ereira, The Invergordon Mutiny: A Narrative History of the Last Great Mutiny in the Royal Navy, and How it Forced Britain Off the Gold Standard in 1931, Kegan Paul, London 1981; David Divine, Mutiny at Invergordon, Macdonald, London 1970; David Turner, Navy on Strike, Militant, 22 November 1991; Anthony Carew, The Lower Deck of the Royal Navy: 1900–1939; The Invergordon Mutiny in Perspective, Manchester University Press, Manchester 1981; Alan Coles, Invergordon Scapegoat: The Betrayal of Admiral Tomkinson, Sutton Publishing, Glos 1993; R. Spector, The Invergordon Mutiny, MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, Volume 14, no. 1, Autumn 2001; Len Wincott, Invergordon Mutineer, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1974; Where is Len Wincott?, Socialist Current, Volume 1, no. 1, May 1958; Martin Ceadel, The First Communist “Peace Society”: The British Anti-War Movement 1932–1935, Twentieth Century British History, Volume 1, no. 1, 1990, pp. 84–6; Kenneth Edwards, The Mutiny at Invergordon, Putnam, London 1937.

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Communist International, Work in the Army

 

***Of This And That In The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-The High School Cruising For The Heart Of Saturday Nights Time   

 

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 works, like lots of such sites, is that each classmate who logs in gets a profile page with some boilerplate stuff like marital status, kids and grandkids but also space for each 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.  Over the past several months the site has been up classmates have done a fair amount of updating of their profiles, especially adding a zillion photos of those grandkids. Some have taken advantage of the Message Forum page to let everyone know some important information while others have, as I know in my own case, used the private e-mail message system to deliver news to particular fellow classmates. This sketch is about my remembrances after receiving a private e-mail from guy, Sam Lowell that I used to be best buddies with but who went off my radar after high school.     

I noticed that I had a private e-mail waiting for me on my profile page after looking at that 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). It turned out to be from Sam Lowell who I used to run around with along with the great track runner from our era, Brad Badger. Sam was also on the track team, a high jumper, a tall rail thin high jumper in those days. The gist of Sam’s e-mail was all about information of his doings since high school which I will intersperse with other stuff below. That e-mail though got me wondering about some details of the stuff we used to do then, you know, where did we hang out, what did we do with our spare time, and most importantly what did we do about searching for the heart of Saturday night-in short looking for girl companionship. I sent him a return e-mail asking about such things and the following sketch is gleaned from that exchange.  

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[One of the innovations that the class website’s wizard webmaster, Donna (who had also been the Vice-President of the class), had placed on the homepage was a survey format to poll fellow classmates about various questions. The first question was about which elementary school you had gone to of the five feeder schools to North Adamsville High and an additional “other” for those who had gone elsewhere to click onto. I had clicked on “other” since I had gone to Snug Harbor Elementary, a feeder school for cross-town rival Adamsville High. Memory is a strange thing so I was not sure whether Sam remembered that I had not gone to one of the feeder school as he had, the Parker School.]

“Hi Sam –Long time no see. Sorry I have not gotten back to you sooner but I have been out of town. Did you click on and answer that poll question about where you went to elementary school on the home page? I know many a summer afternoon and evening, hot and sweaty, we, you, Brad Badger and I spent hanging around the basketball courts at the Parker School. Spent time with pick-up games with guys who hung out there or games against other teams.

Remember Jim Slater’s team, beautiful (although you could not call guys that then) and graceful Jim with that sweet swish jump shot who fell in Vietnam in 1968, and how the competition was pretty intense but afterward we went for sodas at Jack and Ted’s Variety, losers buying, and when we were older (but still under age) we would get some illegal smile beers from some unknowing father’s stash. Remember too how the corner boy situation divided up by tenth grade with Jim’s crowd setting up on any given weekend night in front of Doc’s Drugstore and we, serfs for our lord Frankie Riley, would perch in front Salducci’s Pizza Parlor looking all college-cool (or so we thought) and hoping against hope that some passing car traffic girls would honk our way.

You at six feet-four inches (I think that is right since you towered over me) were pretty good with those sharp elbows of yours even though in those days you were a rail at about one hundred and fifty pound. Brad was pretty good too with that fast break speed but I never had the co-ordination to play very well, except at the foul line. You guys all used to laugh when I did those two-hand bucket shots but I was deadly and it helped us win more than one game and grab those sodas and beers.

I know the Parker was where you went to school but I am not sure if you knew or not but I went to Snug Harbor Elementary down in the Adamsville projects from grade 1 to 6. I recently went down there to take some photos (see Message Forum #30) and the place has not changed all that much structurally since the later 1950s when my family left. A number of NA64ers went there at some point, including our old friend Brad. That is where I met him and where he went to school until fourth grade, then left for Holden to return to Adamsville showing up at North in the 10^th grade. I was in contact with him about five or six years ago after my mother died in 2007. After her death I all of a sudden after many years of statutory neglect I got North Adamsville patriotic for the old days. That’s when I contacted him on an unrelated commercial classmates site and we stayed in touch for a while but then as such things do, we faded out again once the glow of talking about the old days wore off and we found we had little else to talk about now. I recently noticed that Roger French who still lives in North Adamsville and who has stayed in contact with Brad  all these years from what Brad had told me back then is also on this site and I sent him a note asking Brad’s whereabouts since he is not at the last address and telephone number I have for him. You don’t know where Brad is, do you?

 The main reason for this note however is to mull over some of the olds days in NAHS times. I have gone back to North Adamsville a number of times over the past few years thinking about such things. As I said before I remember we hung out at the basketball courts but also at the drugstore (no longer there) near your house on Flynt Street. What was the name of it? I know it had a soda fountain and we used to sit in there and talk to the soda jerk (what a description) and mainly about the ugly Red Sox of those years. Also didn’t we hang also around that Mom and Pop variety store toward the Downs run by a couple of brothers?

Moving on-I will always remember those trips, mainly futile, down Adamsville Boulevard and on to the Southern Artery for pizza at that Leaning Tower of Pizza after we had struck out in the girl department on any given Saturday night. That sounds about right doesn’t it? I know we were crazy for girls but they did not then, at least NAHS girls, give us a tumble. I know that I never had a date with an NAHS girl while I was there. ( I did later after graduation and I will tell you about it sometime and about the things she told me about some North girls that will surprise you. What about you? I noticed the name Betty Thomas with a note to you recently on your profile page but did you date her?  I don’t remember if you did or not. I know I never saw in the car when we were around but you could have at other times.   

Funny about all the times we struck out with girls who mattered, who more than one time desperately mattered when dance times came, wherever we went. Let’s face it we weren’t exactly anybody’s choice for best looking guys, or best dressed, or best athletics, probably most girls didn’t even know we had a track team. I remember once telling a girl, Sarah Lane I think who was in my Problems in Democracy class senior, that I was on the track team and she was clueless that the school has such a team. Even with all the publicity that Brad received over the PA system from Coach Lyons, in the school newspaper and in the local newspapers. I bet the lowliest scrub football player got more notice than us.

Here is the other funny thing though I would have thought, although this might be in hindsight, that the “boss” ’57 Chevy that you had and that we drove around town in would have been a “babe” magnet. Remember how you would have us shut up when the Supremes’ Baby Love came on WMEX on the car radio so the girls could hear what was playing. Hah. Today anyway if you see one on the street everybody looks, looks more than once too, and from what I hear guys who own such vehicles have no problem getting women, good-looking women too, to ride up front with them.  I forget the colors of your car, were they red and black that two-toned combination that everybody was in to back then.              

I remember that time when you sold me your old car, some junk box Plymouth that you had gotten from your father after he traded up, for about ten bucks or something when you got that ’57 Chevy. I know you had it the summer after graduation when we were still in touch after Brad went into the Navy rather than go to college but how long did you keep it for? (Brad’s home-life was so bad that he decided he had get out right away and there was really no family money for college anyway.) Until you went into the service in 1966? Interesting how you kept in the same banking profession all your life. I remember you taking business courses in high school and then later at Bentley figuring that was the way you were going to make a name for yourself. And you did so kudos to you.     

I will let off for now and let you answer my questions if you like but I hope that things have gone well for you since the old days. By your profile page that seems to be true. A proud many times over grandpa and tinkering around with antiques now that you are retired. Later Frank Jackman “

In Honor Of May Day 2014-From The American Left History Blog Archives -From The May Day Organizing 2012 Organizing Archives –May Day 2013 Needs The Same Efforts

 

 

All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of International Working Class Solidarity Actions- An Open Letter To The Working People Of Boston From A Fellow Worker

 

 

All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!

 

Why Working People Need To Show Their Power On May Day 2012

 

Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. I will stop there although I could go on and on. Sounds familiar though, sounds like your situation or that of someone you know, right?

 

Words, or words like them, are taken daily from today’s global headlines.

But these were also similar to the conditions our forebears faced in America back in the 1880s when this same vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind, Jay Gould, stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.

 

What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight connected with the heroic Haymarket Martyrs in 1886 for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.

 

No question over the past several years (really decades but now it is just more public and right in our face) American working people have taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Start off with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers like at General Electric or the auto plants). Move on to paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, in some cases literally paying nothing, we pay). And finish up with mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a life-time deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”

 

Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and many women and the grievances voiced long ago in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us, great-grandparents).

 

That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like hell, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front-man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.

 

The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.

 

I have listed some of the problems we face now to some of our demand that should be raised every day, not just May Day. See if you agree and if you do take to the streets on May Day with us. We demand:

 

*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! No More Wisconsins! Hands Off All Our Unions!

 

* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!

*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!

 

* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!

 

* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!

 

* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!

 

* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!

 

*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation!

 

To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:

 

*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day strike around some, or all, of the above-mentioned demands.

 

*We will be organizing at workplaces where a strike is not possible for workers to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.

 

*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand left-wing think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, and to rally at a central location.

 

*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.

 

All out on May Day 2012.