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
Tuesday, December 02, 2014
Free Chelsea Manning - President
Obama- Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!
Birthday Vigil for Chelsea Manning In Boston
In
honor of Chelsea Manning’s 27th birthday this December 20th 2014,
responding to a call from the Chelsea Manning Support Network, Payday Men’s
Network and Queer Strike, long-time
supporters of freedom for Chelsea Manning from the Boston Chelsea Manning
Support Committee, Veterans For Peace, along with the weekly Saturday vigil at
Park Street organized by the Committee for Peace and Human Rights will celebrate Chelsea’s birthday. We invite
you to join us. Currently actions are planned for London, San Francisco,
Berlin, and Philadelphia.
Supporters are encouraged to also organize an event in their
area, and The Chelsea Manning Support Network and Payday Men’s Network and
Queer Strike will publicize it. Write to http://www.chelseamanning.org/
or payday@paydaynet.org for more information and to share details of your
event.
Boston vigil details:
1:00-2:00 PM Saturday, December 20
Park Street
Station Entrance on the Boston Common
Imprisoned in 2010 and held for months
under torturous conditions, Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in August 2013 for releasing many military secrets about US crimes in the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan among other things.If this stands, she’ll be out in 2045.
We cannot let this happen- – we have to get her out! We will not leave our
sister behind. Bring yourself and encourage others to attend and sign the
petition for a presidential pardon from Barack Obama in this important show of
support to Chelsea Manning
***On Her Majesty’s Secret Service-Graham Greene’s Our Man In Havana
DVD Review
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Our Man In Havana, starring Alex Guinness, based on a screenplay
and novel by Graham Green, 1959
Yes Virginia, there was a Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a
cinematic version anyway, before Sean Connery’s James Bond exploded onto the
screen with his then high tech-aided acts of derring-do. Whether that old time secret
service was worth its salt, was anything but a good old boys’ club for unemployed
university graduates without first son gentry (you know second sons and later
unable to grab a share of the encumbered property), noble (again second sons
and later unable to be the Earl, Duke, Count, Marquis, etc. of Stumblebrook or
whatever rotten borough they represented in the Lords), or royal (you know the
second in line just waiting around hoping that number one falls down and has no
kids before the fall)status and without
other means or gainful employment is an open question. Certainly for the time
period of the film during the height of the Cold War frenzy that is an open to
question in light of the ease with which Kim Philby and the Cambridge spies did
what they assumed was heroic work on behalf of the Soviet Union. As a recent
Philby biography has once again shown the secret service operations were an
open sieve shop filled with all kinds of good old boy implicit trusts but that
issue is a separate question for another day when I am reviewing the Philby
biography.
Of course any governmental agency is entirely capable of
bureaucratic inertia and pratfalls, with or without Cold War backdrops,
otherwise unemployable wayward sons, and oddball placeholders, but Graham
Greene in the film under review, Our Man
in Havana, knew enough about the inner workings of the agency to have a
field day poking fun at its follies, and at its sometimes bizarre ways of
looking at the rational world.
This film has an added dated aspect to it since
its time frame was just before the Castro Brothers-Che-July 26ht movement led
Cuban Revolution that would change Havana, change Cuba from a free-wielding
anything goes American sin city outpost to a thorn in the side of Western
capitalists. A thorn that played (and plays today against all reason) a key
part in keeping things in an uproar in the American lake, the Caribbean, and
elsewhere during the Cold War. That said one of the imperatives of the Cold War
for both sides was to have “boots on the ground,” or maybe better shoes on that
ground, in any locations that might be of interest as listening posts for what
the locals were, or were not, doing. Normal spy stuff that has been going on
since the first powerful guy who was curious about his neighbor’s intentions
sent out a sacrificial lamb to scout the works.
And that is where run-of- the-mill British exile and vacuum
cleaner salesman James, understatedly played by Alex Guinness, comes in to foul
up the works, fouls up the best laid plans, for his own simple purposes. Purposes
which non-professional spies, taking advantage of the paranoid “spook”
mentality, have been doing since, well, whenever they started spy services.
That is to get some serious dough to keep his doted upon young daughter in some
kind of style, and away from the riffraff.
So despite all appearances to the contrary Hawthorne, a decidedly
good old boy network station chief for the Caribbean played by Noel Coward
recruits James, and tells him about his expected tasks. Tasks that James is
incapable of performing since he is not spy material. But get this, maybe he is.
In order to keep the money rolling in James, in lieu of
any real intelligence provided or local agents recruited figured out that he
could make stuff up and nobody would be the wiser. Hell, it done all the time
to make busy work in that trade. Just look at the bungles of the real life CIA
over the half century or so (and of course that Philby-tricked British
equivalent mentioned earlier).
And so the comedy of errors commenced and James’ creativity had
given him all the financial rewards he desired. But then, as things must in
such a comedy of errors, the other shoe fell. The other shoe being that no one,
not James, not Hawthorne, not the nefarious Cuban secret police captain, played
by Ernie Novacs, who was also sweet on James’ young daughter, can pull the
thing together before the service finds out that James is a fraud. A fraud who
moreover as such things go winds up getting people killed before he is brought
to ground. But here is the real beauty of this film. Once everything has been
exposed, at least within the agency, the cover your ass high sign was on. So
James instead of facing hard time in some dank Coldwater prison never to be
heard or seen again was essentially pensioned off and the agency swept the
whole thing under the rug, locked the door, and never looked back. Sound
familiar about the doings of a certain American spy agency. Ask Kim
Philby.
Monday, December 01, 2014
Veterans
For Peace members have witnessed the brutality and the futility of war,
including the war in Iraq. We were sent to a war based on lies and we
became part of the killing of a nation, along with as many as one million of
its people. We watched as U.S. policy makers consciously stirred up ethnic and
religious divisions, creating the conditions for civil war today.
Veterans
know from first hand experience that you cannot bomb your way to peace. More bombing will
ultimately mean more division, bloodshed, recruitment for extremist
organizations, and a continual cycle of violent intervention.
Last year the American people overwhelmingly sent a message to President
Obama and the Congress: No U.S. Bombing in Syria. Last month, the House of
Representatives overwhelmingly passed H. Con. Res. 105 stating that there is no
legal authority for U.S. military involvement in Iraq without express
Congressional approval. By unilaterally pursuing military action in Iraq and
Syria, President Obama is acting in contempt of the American people, as well as
of U.S. and international law.
We support the troops who refuse to fight and who blow the whistle on war
crimes. Under international law, military personnel have the right and the
responsibility to refuse to be part of illegal wars and war crimes. U.S. troops
are not the cops of the world. There is no legitimate mission for any U.S.
service members in Iraq or Syria. We encourage GI's to find out their rights at
the GI Rights Hotline.
Veterans For Peace absolutely opposes U.S. military intervention in the
Middle East, no matter what the rationalization. We call on all our members
to speak out against any U.S. attacks on Iraq and Syria.
We wish to see a U.S. foreign policy based on true humanitarianism and
real diplomacy based on mutual respect, guided by international law, and
dedicated to human rights and equality for all.
Free Chelsea Manning - President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!
Birthday Vigil for Chelsea Manning In Boston
In honor of Chelsea Manning’s 27th birthday, this December 20th 2014, responding to a call from the Chelsea Manning Support Network and Payday Men’s Network and Queer Strike long-time supporters of freedom for Chelsea Manning from the Boston Chelsea Manning Support Committee, Veterans For Peace and other activists in Boston will celebrate Chelsea’s birthday. Currently, Payday Men’s Network and Queer Strike actions are planned for London, San Francisco, Berlin, and Philadelphia.
Supporters are encouraged to also organize an event in their area, and Payday Men’s Network and Queer Strike will publicize it. Write to payday@paydaynet.org for more information and to share details of your event.
Boston vigil details:
1:00-2:00 PM Saturday, December 20
Park Street Station Entrance on the Boston Common
Imprisoned in 2010 and held for months under torturous conditions, Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in August 2013. If this stands, she’ll be out in 2045. We cannot let this happen- – we have to get her out! We will not leave our sister behind. Bring yourself and encourage others to attend and sign the petition for a presidential pardon from Barack Obama in this important show of support to Chelsea Manning
The Latest From The
Partisan Defense Committee Website- And A Personal Appeal From The American Left History Blog - Remembering The Class-War Prisoners During The
Holiday Appeal
James
P. Cannon (center)-Founding leader of The International Labor Defense- a model
for labor defense work in the 1920s and 1930s.
Click below to link to the Partisan
Defense Committee website. http://www.partisandefense.org/ Reposted from the American Left History
blog, dated December 1, 2010, updated December 2014. Markin comment: I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent
supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to
social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the
international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the
organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were
being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost
abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean
miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times
with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO
three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly
Bradley).
Moreover the PDC is an organization
committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war
prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive.
Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for
many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist
class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very
one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting
to silence voices from zealous lawyers like Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row
prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, anti-fascist street fighters
like the Tingsley Five to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the
Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop
and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio
Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition
to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Others, other
militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention
here but remembered. Normally I do not need any prompting in
the matter. This year tough I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in
Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names,
organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own
radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our
political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact
term at the time). That recognition included names like black
liberation fighter George Jackson’s present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s
San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when
the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and
in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in
places from Oakland to New Haven, as represented by two of the Omaha
Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the
fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today
(also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who,
rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American
imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of
course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to
the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you
get the point. That point also includes the hard fact
that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the
late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society
on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory,
maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let
them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture
wars” since just to keep from falling further behind. And the class-war prisoners, our class-war
prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. Many, too many
for most of that time. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every
pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the
news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference
between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing
when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war
prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P.
Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls.
Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the
holidays and throughout the year. The class-war prisoners must not stand alone.
The Eugene V Debs Reader
Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism
'Historical materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution.' Georg Lukács
A collection of writings and speeches by one of the most radical of America's early 20th century labour leader which brings to life a once powerful Socialist movement. Eugene Victor Debs (1855-1926), one of America's most famous socialists, was an important political figure on the American political landscape in the early 20th century. He ran as the Socialist Party's (SP) presidential candidate five times and obtained nearly a million votes in 1912 and 1920. Debs was born into a family from Alsace and started on work on the railways. He was an elegant and fiery writer and orator. His literature is a pleasure to read. Throughout the book, Debs rails against the injustices of capitalism, arguing for a socialist system based on political and industrial democracy. He defends workers and trade unions that are being assaulted by employers while advocating the formation of industrial unions and rejecting craft unions that only included skilled workers. At a time when Blacks faced segregation and hostility from whites, Debs, in several speeches and articles, makes it clear that class and not skin colour was the only important factor. "Foolish and vain is the working man who makes the colour of his skin the stepping stone to his imaginary superiority," laments Debs. His writings witness to a broad and tolerant socialism. In "Sound Socialist Tactics" he opposes the SP leadership's attempts to limit debate. In "A Plea for Solidarity" Debs believed that the anarchist-led Industrial Workers of the World (for whom he had great respect) and their campaign of direct action and industrial sabotage alienated workers. The book is biographical in the sense that the speeches and articles paint a broader canvass of Debs' life. He writes that it was during his first time in jail, in 1894 for leading a strike of railroad workers, that he was led to become a socialist.
Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism 'Historical materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution.' Georg Lukács
Sunday, September 14, 2014
The passion of Ed Miliband
Ed Miliband rarely shows any passion about anything - so to see him revealing his passionate desire to preserve the unity of the British imperialist state while giving a speech in Scotland warning against independence - came as a bit of a shock to the system. It is a damning indictment of Miliband that he refuses to show 0.0001 percent of the same passion when it comes to supporting striking Care UK workers in his own constituency of Doncaster, which he refuses to do despite the fact these workers are victims of NHS privatisation, which Miliband is supposed to be passionately against... perhaps the reason he shows such newly discovered passion about the Scottish referendum is because his own job as Labour leader will be threatened if Scottish people vote Yes?
On the 18th September, 1.6 million people (45% of voters) in Scotland voted yes to independence. It was a truly historic referendum result with 97% of eligable voters registered and an 85% turnout, breaking all existing voting records in British history.
Although the referendum result narrowly rejected independence by 55 percent to 45 percent. Scottish voters gave the British ruling class the fright of its life—and politics in Scotland will never be the same again.
The genie is out of the bottle! There is a new movement that has emerged from the independence campaign. A movement with a positive vision for the future and the ideas, the creativity and the potential to transform Scotland.
Last year over 250 socialists, campaigners and activists attended Marxism in Scotland.
This year's event takes place just 3 weeks after the independence referendum result and one week before the major anti-austerity demonstrations in both Glasgow and London.
Come along and be part of a fantastic day for sharing experiences, political discussions, debates, strategy and tactics with local, national and international speakers on how we can take the struggle for a better world forward.
Speaking at Marxism in Scotland...
Kevin McKenna, Observer Scottish columnist
Bob Thomson, former Scottish Labour Party Chairman and leading supporter of Labour for Independence
Cheryl Gedling PCS Union NEC member, President Scottish Government Group (personal capacity)
Professor Greg Philo, research director of Glasgow University Media Unit. Co-author of Bad News from Israel (2004), More Bad News from Israel (2011) and Bad News For Refugees, written with Emma Briant and Pauline Donald
Amal Azzudin, community worker and one of the Glasgow Girls whose struggle against the deportations of asylum seekers from Glasgow has since been turned into a play and television drama/documentary.
Ian Hodson, president, Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union)
Alex Callincos, author of Imperialism and the World Economy
Weyman Bennet, Unite against Fascism National Joint Secretary, recently returned from Ferguson, Missouri
Keir McKecknie. author of top selling 'Independence Yes, Nationalism No' pamphlet
Full programme coming soon with speaker details of the opening rally, the closing plenary and workshops on...
How can Palestine be Free? Understanding Imperialism Today - Iraq, Syria and Ukraine The Struggle for Womens Liberation Fighting Racism and Fascism Today The Assault on Welfare Fighting Austerity in the Workplace.
Monday, 10 November 2014, 7pm, Khalili Lecture Theatre (KLT) at SOAS
Alex Callinicos’s new book deals extensively with the question of Marx’s method and its relationship to Hegel’s Science of Logic. It emphasizes Marx’s understanding of capital as a set of relations constituted by two separations – that of workers from the means of production, giving rise to the exploitation of wage labour, and that between capitals, from which arises their competitive struggle. This understanding also informs the book’s presentation of Marx’s multi-dimensional conception of crises. Marx strove to make Capital a study of capitalism as a global system, and not merely a portrait of the mid-Victorian British economy: the cycle of financial bubble and panic that he investigated has come in the neoliberal era to regulate the world economy, with the devastating effects witnessed in the 2007-8 crash.
Alex Callinicos is Professor of European Studies at King’s College London and editor of International Socialism. His recent books include Imperialism and Global Political Economy, Bonfire of Illusions, and most recently Deciphering Capital (Bookmarks, 2014)*.
Christopher Arthur taught philosophy at the University of Sussex. His books include Dialectics of Labour and Marx’s Capital and the New Dialectic.
Michael Roberts is a Marxist economist who blogs at: http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/
How poppies and patriotism muffle the truth about the First World War
The only point which matters about the First World War and its sequels is that they must not be allowed to happen again. Honouring and worshipping those who died in them, praising them for their patriotic sacrifice and wearing poppies as symbols of their blood on the ground where they fell serves only to glamorise the atrocity and pave the way to the next one. Paul Foot, Galmorising an atrocity, 1989.
It does not matter now, a century after it started, how sad we are about those the first world war killed. Our soulfulness won’t bring back a single slaughtered soldier. What can make a difference is our historical understanding of the Great War, its causes and consequence. History is worth far more than the illusion of memory, when none of us today actually have a memory of being soldiers in 1914-18...
Out of the millions who died, this installation is very specific about who it mourns. It does not include the French, who lost a tenth of their young men, or Russia, where the war precipitated revolution, civil war and famine. And of course it does not include a single German. Instead it is accumulating 888,246 ceramic poppies each of which – explains the Tower of London website – “represents a British military fatality during the war.”
If we can only picture the Great War as a British tragedy we have not learned very much about it. Yet some historians today glibly encourage that blinkered vision. It sells books. Popular history has been invaded by revisionists who tell us that far from being lions led by donkeys in a futile bloodbath, the British soldiers who fought from 1914-18 were fighting, as the propaganda at the time claimed, to defend democracy from militarist authoritarian Germany...In so explicitly recording only the British dead of world war one, this work of art in its tasteful way confirms the illusion that we are an island of heroes with no debt to anyone else, no fraternity for anyone else...
Jonathan Jones, History and all its grisly facts are worth more than the illusion of memory, 2014.
The John Lilburne 400 anniversary conference
The John Lilburne 400th Anniversary Conference 14 March 2015, 11m-9pm, Bishopsgate Institute, London Born 400 years ago, John Lilburne’s courage and passion for justice was unfailing during the turbulent years of the English Revolution. Whipped, pilloried and often imprisoned in his lifetime, John Lilburne was a Leveller activist and pamphleteer who campaigned for radical change. He fought to establish many of the liberties and political freedoms that we take for granted today. He was a champion of popular sovereignty, trial by jury and the rights of the ordinary citizen.
Don’t miss this one-day celebration of the life and legacy of ‘Freeborn John’.
Speakers include Martine Brant and Peter Flannery (writers of The Devil’s Whore series on Channel 4), Ted Vallance (author of A Radical History of Britain), Dr Ariel Hessayon (Goldsmiths, University of London), Katherine Clements (author of The Crimson Ribbon), Jason Peacey (author of Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution), Dr Rachel Foxley (University of Reading and author of The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution), Jeremy Corbyn MP and Rev. Hammer (singer/songwriter and creator of the Freeborn John song cycle).
In partnership with The Levellers’ Association.
Financially supported by the Amiel and Melburn Trust and the Goldsmiths Annual Fund.
http://www.bishopsgate.org.uk/event/526/The-John-Lilburne-400th-Anniversary-Conference Edited to update:
New speakers include Michael Braddick (author of God's Fury, England's Fire) and Elliot Vernon (co-editor of The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution).
Also the event has a twitter account:
@levellers1649
1640: The First English Revolution
John Lilburne - calling for a spiritual revolution in England about 350 years before Russell Brand...
Russell Brand may have played his part in helping the word 'revolution' return to a degree of fashionability recently, but even in sleepy England revolutionary ideas have not simply been widely circulated long before him, but have actually been put into practice. That Norah Carlin's pamphlet on 1640, The First English Revolution (1983) is now online is therefore most timely - for those wanting more on the historiography of revolution in England, see her earlier analysis of Marxism and the English Civil War.
Justice for Mike Brown - US Embassy Emergency Protest
Justice for Mike Brown – US Embassy Emergency Protest 5.30pm Wed 26 Nov called by Stand up to racism
Wed 26 November 5.30pm 24 Grosvenor Square, London W1A 2LQ
We condemn the decision of the Grand Jury not to indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson for killing 18-year-old Michael Brown in St Louis. This comes on the same day that Tamir Rice, a 12 year old boy, was shot dead by the police after carrying a toy gun. We call on all those who oppose this injustice to join us at the US Embassy tomorrow for an emergency protest.
Speakers will include Carol Duggan, aunt of Mark Duggan and Marcia Rigg of the Sean Rigg Justice and Change campaign, anti-racist campaigners and others.
Diane Abbott MP said: “My deepest sympathies go out to the family of Mike Brown. Not only have they lost a loved one but following the Grand Jury’s decision they no doubt feel the strongest sense of injustice, which can only make their pain worse. The anger and disruption that has already followed this decision extends beyond the killing of Mike right to the root of long standing issues with the criminal justice system. Just as in Britain, the Black community in the US has a fraught history with the police. It is one of the reasons I have always been against the arming of police. A recent report has shown that in recent years young black males in the US were 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than their white counterparts. This is shocking, but inequality in policing is not a new phenomenon. Therefore how can it ever be reasonable to allow police to use deadly force against an unarmed young man? And just this week-end A 12-year-old boy has been shot dead by police in the US as he played with a fake gun in a park. And time and time again no one is held accountable. When yet another unarmed young black man is killed and it is “lawful”, it can be no surprise that black people are questioning how much value these same laws place on their lives"
Carol Duggan, aunt of Mark Duggan who will be speaking at the event said: “Murder is not legitimate. No one should lose their child. Michael Brown has not got justice and neither has Mark Duggan. The Police are there to protect, not to kill our children”
Marcia Rigg of the Sean Rigg Justice and Change campaign said: “My heart goes out to Michael Brown’s family and the community in Ferguson. No Justice No Peace.”
Zita Holbourne National Co-Chair BARAC UK said: "Until there is a balance of powers there will be no balance of the scales of justice. Oppression, institutional racism, inequality, poverty & injustice occur because of a division of rights where black people are treated like third class citizens. As Martin Luther King said, a riot is the voice of the unheard. When will the powers that contribute to injustice be prepared to hear?"
Aaron Kiely NUS NEC said: "We join the family of Mike Brown in calling for an indictment of the officer who shot their son dead. We currently live in a world where young black people can be shot dead on the street with impunity. This has got to stop. No justice, no peace."
Sabby Dhalu for Stand up to racism said: “We fully support the family of Mike Brown. Having seen at first hand the pain of his family in Ferguson. We fully support the family’s call for the indictment. This comes within a day of Tamir Rice, a 12 year old boy, being shot dead by US police carrying a toy gun. The cheapness of black lives in the US is a reflection of racism that black communities face at the hands of the police that must be stopped.”
Weyman Bennett of Stand up to racism said: “I went to Ferguson and met Mike Brown’s family. They have our full support justice must be served.”
for more information contact info@standuptoracism.org.uk https://www.facebook.com/events/742965182457535/
***Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-The Doors
Peter Paul Markin comment December 2013:
A while back, maybe a few years ago, I started a series presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By where I posted some songs that I thought would get us through the “dog days” of the struggle for our socialist future. Posted at a time, 2009, when it was touch and go whether there would be some kind of uprising against the economic royalists (chastised under the popular sobriquet “the one-percent”) who had just dealt the world a blow to the head through their economic machinations. Subsequently, while there were momentary uprisings, the response from the American and world working classes has if anything entrenched those interests. So as the dog days continue I have resumed the series. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs selected; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this kind of formation would mean political death for any serious revolutionary upheaval and would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
**********
WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin
My old friend from the summer of love 1967 days, Peter Paul Markin, always used to make a point of answering, or rather arguing with anybody who tried to tell him back in the day that “music was the revolution.” Meaning, of course that contrary to the proponents (including many mutual friends who acted out on that idea and got burned by the flame) that eight or ten Give Peace A Chance, Kumbaya, Woodstock songs would not do the trick, would not change this nasty, brutish, old short-life world into the garden, into some pre-lapsian Eden. Meaning that the gathering of youth nation unto itself out in places like Woodstock, Golden Gate Park, Monterrey, hell, the Boston Common, or even once word trickled down, Olde Saco Park, would not feed on itself and grow to such a critical mass that the enemies of good, kindness, and leave us alone would sulk off somewhere, defeated or at least defanged.
Many a night, many a dope-blistered night before some seawall ocean front Pacific Coast campfire I would listen to Markin blast forth against that stuff, against that silliness. As for me, I was too into the moment, too into finding weed, hemp, mary jane and some fetching women to share it with to get caught up in some nebulous ideological struggle. It was only later, after the music died, after rock and roll turned in on itself, turned into some exotic fad of the exiles on Main Street that I began to think through the implications of what Markin, and the guys on the other side, were arguing about.
Now it makes perfect sense that music or any mere cultural expression would be unable to carry enough weight to turn us back to the garden. Although I guess that I would err on the side of the angels and at least wish they could have carried the day against the monsters of the American imperium we confronted back in the day.
Thinking about what a big deal was made of such arguments recently (arguments carried deep into the night, deep in smoke dream nights, and sometimes as the blue–pink dawn came rising to smite our dreams) I thought back to my own musical appreciations. In my jaded youth I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. Perhaps it initially started as a reaction to my parents’ music, the music that got them through the Great Depression of the 1930s and later waiting for other shoe to drop (either in Normandy or at home waiting in Olde Saco), and that became a habit, a wafting through the radio of my childhood home habit. You know who I mean Frank (Sinatra for the heathens), Harry James, the Andrews Sisters, Peggy Lee, Doris Day and the like. Or, maybe, and this is something that I have come closer to believing was the catalyst, my father’s very real roots in the Saturday night mountain barn dance, fiddles blazing, music of his growing up poor down in Appalachia.
The origin of my emergence into roots music first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House , Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James, then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Roy, Big Joe and Ike, and later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, folk music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan, Dave Von Ronk, Joan Baez, etc. As I said I have often wondered about the source of this interest.
I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Meaning rootless or not meaningfully or consciously rooted in any of the niches mentioned above. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music (paying final conscious tribute to the mountain DNA in my bone) and so on.
And all those genres are easily classified as roots music but I recall one time driving Markin crazy, driving him to closet me with the “music is the revolution” heads when I mentioned in passing that The Doors, then in their high holy mantra shamanic phase epitomized roots music. That hurt, a momentary hurt then, but thinking about it more recently Markin was totally off base in his remarks.
The Doors are roots music? Well, yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derived from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of The Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native- American culture that drove the beat of many of his trance-like songs like The End. More than one rock critic, professional rock critic, has argued that on their good nights when the dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired up The Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here, and it is not a far stretch to classify their efforts as in the great American roots tradition. I argued then and will argue here almost fifty years later when that original statement of mine was more prophetic the Doors put together all the stuff rock critics in one hundred years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men (and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll for keeps.
So where does Jim Morrison fit in an icon of the 1960s if he was not some new age latter day cultural Lenin/Trotsky. Jim was part of the trinity – Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young. The slogan of the day (or hour) - Drugs, sex, and rock and roll. And we liked that idea however you wanted to mix it up. Then.
Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most political among us, including Markin in his higher moments, felt those cultural winds blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative vision as part of the chosen. The righteous headed to the “promise land.” Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.
0 Comments: