From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky –Learn The Lessons Of History Before It Is Too Late- Cops Are Not Workers

In the early 1930s, reformist leaders of the German working class politically disarmed the workers by preaching reliance on the police to stop Hitler’s Nazis. Those cops had largely been recruited over the years from among pro-socialist workers. Leon Trotsky—one of the leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which saw the proletariat smash the existing capitalist state apparatus and establish their own state power—sharply warned in What Next? (1932): “The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop, not a worker…. And above all: every policeman knows that though governments may change, the police remain.”

 

Workers Vanguard No. 1059	9 January 2015

Amid Protests Against Racist Police Terror

NYC Cop Backlash

 

Weeks of mass protests that erupted after the policemen who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner got off have left cops across the country seething. These hired guns of the capitalist rulers are howling over any criticism of how they do their job, which in racist capitalist America does include terrorizing and killing unarmed black people. Leading the pack in New York City are the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) and its ilk, which have seized on the December 20 killing of two Brooklyn cops to further push their agenda of bonapartism: that is, to stand above the law as judge, jury and executioner. The nationwide mobilization of police for the funerals of the two cops on consecutive weekends was a chilling show of force. Now the Fraternal Order of Police is building a January 17 “End the Madness: Sea of Blue” march in Washington, D.C.

The NYPD has once again gone ballistic at the very suggestion that there should be some checks on its enforcement of racist “law and order” in the city. The cops want an entirely free hand, and it is no accident the PBA and similar groups are spearheading the backlash to the protests. The PBA is not a union in the sense of a workers organization but a political club reflecting the cops’ awareness of their social role as the guard dogs of the capitalist order.

As the mayor of New York City, which he manages on behalf of the Wall Street plutocrats and real estate barons, Bill de Blasio is commander-in-chief of the NYPD. So when he expressed a little sympathy for those opposing cop terror, de Blasio’s thugs in blue were furious, blaming him for encouraging the protests. The rabid PBA head Patrick Lynch denounced the mayor for supposedly throwing cops “under the bus.”

De Blasio also set off the cops when he stated in a TV interview that he had to warn his 17-year-old son Dante, who is biracial, to be careful not to make any sudden moves when dealing with police—common-sense advice for black youth in this vicious capitalist society that is racist to the core. In response, Ed Mullins, head of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, slammed the mayor: “He may want to think about moving out of New York City completely. He just doesn’t belong here.” Mullins, Lynch and their cohorts insist that de Blasio either tell protesters to stop or get out of the way.

After Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who has been described as mentally unstable, killed the two NYC cops, Lynch went on a tear over the “blood on many hands,” citing “the office of the mayor” and those in the streets protesting police brutality. De Blasio called for a pause to the protests and Police Commissioner William Bratton pronounced the killings their “direct spinoff.” Over 20 people have since been arrested for allegedly threatening cops, including a 16-year-old who was held in jail for a week over Christmas because he posted “Let’s Kill the Cops” on his Facebook page. Despite the NYPD’s sinister ravings and the mayor’s admonishments, the protests have not come to a halt. The initial wave of protest was a measure of how fed up a wide swath of society is with daily cop violence.

The two funerals were attended by tens of thousands from across the country, with the New York Times (28 December) describing the scene at the first as “nothing but thick rows of police officers as far as anyone could see.” Large numbers of cops turned their backs on de Blasio when he spoke at the funerals, as had been done when he visited the hospital where the two cops were taken. Here was a demonstrative show of insubordination and resistance to being put on a leash by civilian authorities when what they really want to do is run wild, wreaking vengeance on protesters and the ghetto and barrio poor with impunity.

Among the bourgeois politicians speaking at the first funeral was U.S. vice president Joe Biden, signaling that the maintenance of “law and order” in NYC, the center of American finance capital, is of vital concern to the highest levels of the capitalist rulers. Reflecting this concern, the bourgeoisie’s paper of record, the New York Times, issued an editorial titled “Respect for NYPD Squandered in Attacks on Bill de Blasio” (29 December). The next day, after statistics were released showing that the police were engaging in a slowdown (summonses for minor offenses had plunged by over 90 percent compared to the previous week), the Times instructed the cops to “do your jobs.” The capitalist rulers in the city and beyond are worried that the NYPD has gone too far, doing further damage to the illusion that the police “serve and protect” the population as a whole. In reality, the job of the cops is to maintain the rule of the capitalist exploiters through violent suppression of the working class, black people and all the oppressed.

In New York City, as elsewhere, the cops have a longstanding appetite for bonapartism. In 1992, when black Democratic mayor David Dinkins moved to replace the cops on the sham Civilian Complaint Review Board with civilians appointed by the mayor, a 10,000-strong cop mob stormed the steps of City Hall. That veritable lynch mob was an example of how in America, where capitalist rule has always had racial oppression at its base, even those black people who have supposedly made it are still branded by the color of their skin. (For more on PBA bonapartism, see article on page 2.)

Today, there are racist undertones to the vitriol aimed by the cops and their supporters at de Blasio, whose wife and children are black. A racist, pro-NYPD throng gathered outside City Hall on December 19, where some disgustingly sported shirts reading “I Can Breathe,” a mockery of Eric Garner’s last words as cops were choking him to death. Al Sharpton, who in the past wore a wire to spy on black politicians for the FBI and cops, has also been a target, receiving death threats for supposedly being “anti-cop.” Sharpton has been prominent around the protests against cop terror, working overtime to direct the outrage into support for the capitalist Democratic Party and reliance on the federal government. He serves to reinforce illusions that the police can be reformed to act in the interests of the oppressed by getting rid of a few “bad apples,” never passing up an opportunity to emphasize how much he supports the police.

The tensions between the PBA and the mayor boil down to how much democratic window dressing to put on the police. During his 2013 mayoral bid, de Blasio attracted support from many black people and Latinos by running as an opponent of stop-and-frisk. Lynch’s hysterical claims that de Blasio “thinks he’s running a fucking revolution” couldn’t be further from the truth; de Blasio’s policies are at bottom a repackaging of racist cop terror.

While stop-and-frisk has been curtailed and a few other largely cosmetic reforms have been introduced, arrests for minor offenses have continued unabated under de Blasio/Bratton’s “broken windows” policing strategy. And, of course, it was “broken windows” that brought about the death of Eric Garner, who was targeted for selling loose cigarettes. Bratton introduced “broken windows” policing to NYC during his first stint as police chief in the 1990s. De Blasio’s reappointment of Bratton as chief gave a green light to the NYPD to keep up the war on black and Latino youth.

Cops Are Not Workers

The utter contempt that cops have for black lives has come to the fore in the past few months. But the question is what to do about it. The answer must flow from an understanding of how this class-divided society works. Under capitalism, a tiny elite that owns the factories, mines and banks lives off the sweat and toil of working people. The cops are a core part of the state machinery of repression that ensures the domination of capital over labor. With black oppression rooted in this system of production for profit, cop terror is wielded by America’s rulers to maintain the forcible segregation of the black masses at the bottom of society, despite their lying assertion of equality. Efforts to reform the police cannot alter its fundamentally anti-working-class and racist nature. As our comrades chanted during the December 13 “Millions March NYC”: “Police reform is a hustle, fists in the air for class struggle!”

The crimes of the cops should be met with massive, militant protest based on the social power of labor. The pro-capitalist union bureaucracy, though, pushes the suicidal lie that cops are “fellow workers” and that the PBA & Co. are part of the labor movement. A prime example in NYC is the leadership of the transit union, TWU Local 100, whose president, John Samuelsen, issued a statement referring to the two dead cops as “our Union Brothers.” The Local 100 tops welcomed Lynch onto the platform of union rallies in the lead-up to the 2005 transit strike—which defied a state ban on public employee strikes. For leading the workers out, Samuelsen’s predecessor, Roger Toussaint, was later arrested and briefly jailed.

For this multiracial union, embracing the racist cops is particularly grotesque. Eric Garner’s mother, sister and niece are all Local 100 members, but the leadership did almost nothing to organize solidarity with them in their grief. When the grand jury decision not to indict the cop who killed Garner was announced, Samuelsen offered: “In federal court, in civil suit and in the next life we will bear witness until justice is served.” What is needed is a mobilization of the social power of the unions to fight racist capitalist injustice in this life!

The role of the cops as deadly enemies of labor is starkly demonstrated when workers go on strike. It’s the cops who enforce court injunctions, protect scabs, attack picket lines and arrest strikers. In fact, the unions were built in hard, often bloody, struggle against the bosses and their cops, National Guard, company goons, etc. From the Haymarket martyrs of 1887, hanged in Chicago for fighting for the eight-hour day, and the Ludlow, Colorado, massacre of striking miners and their families by the Rockefellers’ hired guns in 1914, to the PATCO air traffic controllers fired and dragged away in chains for striking in 1981, labor struggles have always run up against the capitalist state. When there are long periods with little to no class struggle like today, the social role of the cops can become obscured to the working class.

A vivid expression of the anti-working-class nature of the PBA was its denunciation of unions that had co-sponsored a march last August in Staten Island against police brutality, above all the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). The steering committee of the UFT caucus “Movement of Rank and File Educators”—which counts a supporter of the reformist International Socialist Organization, Brian Jones, as a founding member—issued a statement urging “the leaderships of the UFT and PBA, to find ways to work together and unite us.”

Rather than building unity with the shock troops of capitalist rule, there must be a fight for the independence of the labor movement from all agencies of the capitalist state. It speaks volumes that the first thing the NYPD’s Peter Liang reportedly did after shooting the unarmed Akai Gurley in a Brooklyn housing project in November was to text his PBA rep, while Gurley lay dying. Or take the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association that is defending its members’ sadistic reign of terror against inmates in the Rikers Island jail. What the cop organizations want is more officers and weapons and fewer restrictions in going after workers, blacks, immigrants and leftists—and to get paid more for doing it.

In the early 1930s, reformist leaders of the German working class politically disarmed the workers by preaching reliance on the police to stop Hitler’s Nazis. Those cops had largely been recruited over the years from among pro-socialist workers. Leon Trotsky—one of the leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which saw the proletariat smash the existing capitalist state apparatus and establish their own state power—sharply warned in What Next? (1932): “The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop, not a worker…. And above all: every policeman knows that though governments may change, the police remain.”

Over recent decades, while workers unions in the U.S. have been decimated, “unions” representing cops, prison guards and security guards have grown tremendously. The presence of large numbers of cops and security guards within unions like the SEIU and AFSCME is especially dangerous. Cops out of the unions!

A recent Daily News (30 December) opinion piece titled “Labor Must Reject Pat Lynch’s Bitter Bile” by Jonathan Tasini, former president of the National Writers Union who has twice sought the Democratic Party nomination for public office, reflects unease within a section of the union bureaucracy over its association with the PBA. Recoiling from Lynch’s venom, Tasini beseeches city union leaders to speak out against the PBA head because “standing by while a rogue union leader launches vituperative attacks may weaken public support for the mayor.” For Tasini, the overriding priority is to preserve labor’s ties to the Democratic Party, which no less than the Republicans is a political instrument of the class enemy.

What is necessary is to mobilize the social power of labor to fight for its own interests and those of the oppressed, in opposition to the bosses, their political representatives and their state. But the possibility for such a mobilization is undermined by the sellout labor bureaucracy, which shackles the potential power of the unions by feeding workers the lies that cops are their union brothers and sisters and that Democrats are their friends. The way forward is to fight for a class-struggle leadership of the trade unions. As long as the capitalist system remains, so will racist cop terror. To lead it in the struggle to break the capitalist state power and expropriate the bourgeoisie, establishing a workers government, the working class needs its own, revolutionary party.

 

 

 

Free All Our Class-War Brother And Sister Political Prisoners Now-The Cause That Passes Through The Prisons  

 

The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee Website-

 

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. 

*Free The Last of the Ohio Seven-They Must Not Die In Jail

COMMENTARY

ONE OF THE OHIO SEVEN -RICHARD WILLIAMS- RECENTLY DIED IN PRISON (2006). THAT LEAVES JAAN LAAMAN AND TOM MANNING STILL IN PRISON. IT IS AN URGENT DUTY FOR THE INTERNATIONAL LABOR MOVEMENT AND OTHERS TO RAISE THE CALL FOR THEIR FREEDOM. FREE ALL CLASS WAR PRISONERS.

Free the last of the Seven. Below is a commentary written in 2006 arguing for their freedom.

The Ohio Seven, like many other subjective revolutionaries, coming out of the turbulent anti-Vietnam War and anti-imperialist movements, were committed to social change. The different is that this organization included mainly working class militants, some of whose political consciousness was formed by participation as soldiers in the Vietnam War itself. Various members were convicted for carrying out robberies, apparently to raise money for their struggles, and bombings of imperialist targets. Without going into their particular personal and political biographies I note that these were the kind of subjective revolutionaries that must be recruited to a working class vanguard party if there ever is to be a chance of bringing off a socialist revolution. In the absence of a viable revolutionary labor party in the 1970’s and 1980’s the politics of the Ohio Seven, like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, were borne of despair at the immensity of the task and also by desperation to do something concrete in aid of the Vietnamese Revolution and other Third World struggles . Their actions in trying to open up a second front militarily in the United States in aid of Third World struggles without a mass base proved to be mistaken but, as the Partisan Defense Committee which I support has noted, their actions were no crime in the eyes of the international working class.

The lack of a revolutionary vanguard to attract such working class elements away from adventurism is rendered even more tragic in the case of the Ohio Seven. Leon Trotsky, a leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution of 1917, noted in a political obituary for his fallen comrade and fellow Left Oppositionist Kote Tsintadze that the West has not produced such fighters as Kote. Kote, who went through all the phases of struggle for the Russian Revolution, including imprisonment and exile under both the Czar and Stalin benefited from solidarity in a mass revolutionary vanguard party to sustain him through the hard times. What a revolutionary party could have done with the evident capacity and continuing commitment of subjective revolutionaries like the Ohio Seven poses that question point blank. This is the central problem and task of cadre development in the West in resolving the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

Finally, I would like to note that except for the Partisan Defense Committee and their own defense organizations – the Ohio 7 Defense Committee and the Jaan Laaman Defense Fund- the Ohio Seven have long ago been abandoned by those New Left elements and others, who as noted, at one time had very similar politics. At least part of this can be attributed to the rightward drift to liberal pacifist politics by many of them, but some must be attributed to class. Although the Ohio Seven were not our people- they are our people. All honor to them. As James P Cannon, a founding leader of the International Labor Defense, forerunner of the Partisan Defense Committee, pointed out long ago –Solidarity with class war prisoners is not charity- it is a duty. Their fight is our fight! LET US DO OUR DUTY HERE. RAISE THE CALL FOR THE FREEDOM OF LAAMAN AND MANNING. MAKE MOTIONS OF SOLIDARITY IN YOUR POLITICAL ORGANIZATION, SCHOOL OR UNION.

YOU CAN GOOGLE THE ORGANIZATIONS MENTIONED ABOVE- THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE OHIO 7 DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE JAAN LAAMAN DEFENSE FUND.

 **

Greece- Prospect of Syriza victory raises workers’ hopes

www.socialistworld.net, 20/01/2015
website of the committee for a workers' international, CWI

Mass intervention of working class to struggle for socialist policies is vital
Interview with Andros Payiatsos, from Xekinima (CWI in Greece)

On 19 January, six days before the Greek general elections, socialistworld.net spoke to Andros Payiatsos from Xekinima (CWI in Greece).

Last time we spoke you told us of the campaign of fear by the establishment to try and prevent people voting for Syriza. How has this developed?

The circus of the ruling class and its political representatives are now demoralised. They started a big fear campaign but it became absolutely clear that it would have no significant effect and that Syriza will be the next government. The question now is, will it be a minority or a majority government? Although the ruling class still try to keep the fear campaign going, it’s very weak and not effective. They have now shifted their focus to further “domesticating” Syriza, to ensure that it governs within the limits they impose.

What now seems the likely outcome of the election?

It’s generally accepted here and internationally that Syriza will win. In the last week there is a small increase for Syriza in the opinion polls – of about 1%. Really this is a stabilisation of Syriza’s lead. Including abstentions, Syriza’s support stands around 25-27%, discounting these it rises to about 30-33% – close to, but not sufficient for, a majority government.

What are the alternatives to a majority Syriza government?

The Syriza leadership see “Independent Greeks” party – a “patriotic”, populist split from New Democracy (the main right wing, capitalist party) as the most viable possibility for a coalition partner. This party took a position against the Memorandum and the Troika from the beginning.
Most of the left are not willing to cooperate with Syriza. The Communist Party rejects even the possibility of voting in parliament for Syriza to form a government - they have a disastrous sectarian position.
If the “Independent Greeks” do not have enough MPs either, then Syriza would be pushed to collaborate with parties which are considered to be “Troikan” parties (those that have accepted and implemented or supported in general the austerity policies inflicted on Greece by the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the European Central Bank), such as “The River” or former Pasok Prime Minister, George Papandreou’s new party, “Social Democratic Movement”.

What is the response of the ruling class to the increasing likelihood of a Syriza victory?

They now concentrate on trying to make sure a Syriza government will be as stable and effective as possible for them. There are big sections of capitalist spokespeople in Greece and internationally which say “it’s time to negotiate” and that “we must be flexible” etc. This is an attempt to incorporate Syriza into the establishment and to put a break on the dangers which Syriza may represent for their interests in terms of releasing powerful mass movements and taking measures which go against austerity.
But it’s important to know that this is not uniform. For example, the German ruling class and the countries around it still have a hard-line position against any serious negotiation. They will undoubtedly be willing to make some concessions to a Syriza government in negotiations, but of a very limited character.

How is Syriza responding to this pressure?

The leadership is responding in precisely the way that the ruling class would like. The whole programme has become absolutely blurred. Even some of the reforms that have been considered very basic are now under question.
For example, Syriza leader Tsipras was recently asked in an interview about the major struggle of the people of Halkidiki against the gold mines. He didn’t take a clear position but he said “the law will be enforced” and “the contracts will be scrutinised” – what does that mean?
In relation to the minimum wage, which was one of the major points in the programme of Syriza, it’s now not clear when it’s going to be done - there’s now talk of a gradual implementation. In regard to the privatisations and the sackings of thousands from the public sector that have taken place, they say: “we shall study the lawfulness of what took place”.
Given this, there is little real enthusiasm for Syriza in society. But there is also a feeling that there is no choice, we have to vote for Syriza and give it a majority government if possible. There is a feeling that even if they do one tenth of what they promise, things will still be better than today.

Andros Payiatsos speaking at Xekinima meeting in December 2014

How has Xekinima (CWI in Greece) participated in the elections and why?

We support a vote for Syriza and have launched a very big campaign. We produced 150,000 four-page bulletins and a special edition of our paper which sold out, so we have reproduced it, which is impressive considering the election campaign is, actually, only 11 days long!
As part of the “Initiative of 1000” (coalition of left groups united around a radical anti-capitalist programme), we discussed with Syriza about standing candidates on its lists. Unfortunately, we have not been able to do so. The Syriza leadership wanted an alliance with other forces on the Left, but of a merely token symbolic nature, in which these other forces would stand no real chance of being elected. They ruled us out from standing candidates in the areas in which we would have a very powerful and effective campaign. We said if there is going to be collaboration with other forces of the left then Syriza has to give these forces the potential to get a good result – there’s no point if you take away their strongholds and only allow them to have candidates where they stand little or no chance of being elected. On top of this, there was a very limited time to campaign. On this basis both Xekinima and other comrades in the Initiative of the 1000 decided that we would not stand.
The attitude of the Syriza leadership to this is indicative of a wider trend. For example, 50 individuals who are not members of Syriza were included in the Syriza lists across the country. Of these, only 1 is to the left of SYRIZA! They want a parliamentary group that will be very well controlled by the right wing of the party.
The main reason we support Syriza, despite these limitations, is that its victory will have a liberating effect on the working class, the movements and society in general. There is an expectation from the working class that under a Syriza government the massive attacks will stop and, at least, to a certain extent be reversed, and that some of the demands of the mass movement will be satisfied. So, despite the lack of clarity on the part of the leadership, and its accommodation to the demands of the ruling class, we believe that a Syriza victory will represent a significant shift in the balance of class forces in Greek society – it can have a catalysing effect and unleash a new period of working class struggle.
Maybe Syriza will not change the laws on the labour market, which has been completely deregulated, but workers will come out to demand their right not to be sacked, to an eight hour day, to overtime payments, and to collective bargaining. Maybe Tsipras is not ready to kick the gold mines of “Eldorado Gold” out of Halkidiki but people of Halkidiki have no choice but to come out and demand that the company stops the works on the gold mines. We expect this to take place throughout the working class movement in Greece. Maybe Tsipras won’t be willing to abolish TAIPED, the body that is overseeing all the “fast track” privatisations now taking place, but workers will feel that now they can move into action to resist these sell offs – whether they be of public utility companies or of beaches, mountains and forests.
Whatever compromises the leadership is willing to make, the workers will feel there’s a much better environment to fight to defend their rights and this is the fundamental reason that Syriza should be given conditional, critical support.
We make it very clear that we don’t just call for a vote for Syriza itself, we call for a radical, revolutionary socialist programme as the only viable road for a Syriza government.

What does Xekinima think that a Syriza government should do the day after its elected?

Of course, it should immediately paralyse the payment of the debt and rip up the memorandum with the Troika, which are fundamental to any plan to combat the misery of the Greek people.
It should immediately change the labour laws and laws for the universities (to allow for asylum on campuses, freedom of speech, free assembly etc). Raise the minimum wage to what it was before the onset of the Troika – back to €750. Close down TAIPED the body which is responsible for the privatisations of the public works and the natural beauties and resources of the country. And freeze and repeal all privatisations that have taken place in recent years. Put an end to controversial projects which are under construction now – like in Halkidiki.
This would cause a reaction by the capitalist establishment, nationally and internationally. This could only be challenged successfully by implementing bold anti-capitalist measures, nationalising the banks and the commanding heights of the economy to plan the economy on the basis of need, not profit. This should be done on the basis of democratic workers’ control and management.
And it must be linked to the struggles of the workers across Europe. We are sure that if Syriza went ahead with such a programme it would have a major effect internationally, particularly for the working class of southern Europe. This could lay the basis for an international socialist alternative to the capitalist EU and Troika rule.
In the election campaign Syriza does refer to the international aspects of their policies and to Podemos (the new left party in Spain), and other “progressive” movements internationally. Despite Syriza’s programme being so mild and compromising, it is still having a major effect on a European and international level. This shows what could be achieved if it had a more radical, socialist programme - the potential is there. At the moment, Syriza’s policies are neo-Keynesianism - for an end to austerity within the capitalist system.
In the conditions of capitalist crisis, such a programme is not really viable. Only a programme which breaks with the capitalist system can offer a way forward. This can only be achieved through the mass intervention of the working class, and the popular masses, which could, under certain conditions, push Syriza far further to the left that the leadership envisage or imagine. This is what Xekinima will be struggling for in the period after SYRYZA is elected to government.

When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of Dave Van Ronk’s Time

Sure everybody, everybody over the age of say fifty to be on the safe side, knows about Bob Dylan. About how he, after serving something like an apprenticeship under the influence of Woody Guthrie in the late 1950s, became if not the voice of the Generation of ’68, my generation, which he probably did not seriously aspire in the final analysis, then the master troubadour of the age. (Troubadour in the medieval sense of bringing news to the people and entertaining them as well.) So, yes, that story has been pretty well covered. But of course that is hardly the end of the story since Dylan did not create that now hallowed folk minute of the early 1960s but was washed by it when he came East into the Village where there was a cauldron of talent trying to make folk the next big thing, big cultural thing for the young and restless of the post-World War II generations. And one of the talents who was already there, lived there, came from around there was the late Dave Van Ronk who deservedly fancied himself a folk historian as well as musician.    

That former role is important because we all know that behind the “king” is the “fixer man,” the guy who knows what is what, the guy who tells one and all what the roots of the matter were. Dave Van Ronk was serious about that part, serious about imparting that knowledge about the little influences that had accumulated during the middle to late 1950s especially around New York which set up that folk minute.

He told a funny story, actually two funny stories about the folk scene and his part in which will give you an idea about his place in the pantheon. During the late 1950s after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking road wanderlust adventure novel that got young blood stirring, On The Road, the jazz scene, the cool be-bop jazz scene and poetry reading, poems reflecting off of “beat” giant Allen Ginsberg’s Howl  the clubs and coffeehouse of the Village were ablaze with readings and cool jazz, people waiting in line to get in to hear the next big poetic wisdom if you can believe that. The crush meant that there were several shows per evening. But how to get rid of one audience to bring in another in those small quarters was a challenge. Presto, if you wanted to clear the house just bring in some desperate from hunger snarly nasal folk singer for a couple, maybe three songs, and if that did not clear the high art poetry house then that folk singer was a goner. A goner until the folk minute of the 1960s who probably in that same club played for the “basket.” And so the roots of New York City folk. The second story involved his authoritative role as a folk historian who after the folk minute had passed became the subject matter for, well, for doctoral dissertations of course. Eager young students breaking new ground in folk history who would come to him for the “skinny”. Now Van Ronk had a peculiar if not savage sense of humor and could not abide academia and its’ barren insider language so when those eager young students came a calling he would give them some gibberish which they would duly note and footnote. Here is the funny part. That gibberish would then be cited by some other young and eager student complete with the appropriate footnote. Nice touch, nice touch indeed on that one.       

As for Van Ronk’s music, his musicianship which he cultivated throughout his life, I think the best way to describe that for me is that one Sunday night in the early 1960s I was listening to the local folk program on WBZ hosted by Dick Summer (who was influential in boosting local folk musician Tom Rush’s career and who is featured on a recent Tom Rush documentary No Regrets) when this gravelly-voice guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, sang the Kentucky hills classic Fair and Tender Ladies. After that I was hooked on that voice and that depth of feeling that he brought to every song even those of his own creation which were spoofs on some issue of the day. I saw him perform many times over the years and had expected to see him perform as part of Rosalie Sorrels’ farewell concert at Saunders Theater at Harvard in 2003. He had died a few weeks before. I would note when I had seen him for what turned out to be my last time he did not look well and had been, as always, drinking heavily and his performance was subpar. But that is at the end. For a long time he sang well, sang us well with his own troubadour style, and gave us plenty of real information about the history of American folk music.                   

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Writers’ Corner  

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school but the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists and  Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements, those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man. They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course.  

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate  ….            

First World War Literature By A.D. Harvey Published in History Today Volume: 43 Issue: 11 1993 First World War Military, Literature Print Email A.D. Harvey reflects on why the Great War captured the literary imagination. The 1939 war had barely completed its second year when writer Robert Graves began an article in The Listener, 'I have been asked to explain as a "war poet of the last war" why so little poetry has so far been produced by this one'. More than half a century later it seems one might equally well be asked to explain why the First World War looms so much larger in English Literature, as taught in schools and universities, than in the literatures of the other belligerents. From the very first week, the 1914-18 war inspired enormous quantities of poetry and fiction. The claim that three million war poems were written in Germany in the first six months of hostilities is difficult to substantiate, but Catherine W. Reilly has counted 2,225 English poets of the First World War, of whom 1,808 were civilians. For example, William Watson (then an esteemed poet, today virtually forgotten) quickly decided that his war poems should be 'so much in evidence that people [would] be saying that W.W. is the real national poet in this crisis', and had sixteen different war poems printed in various newspapers in the first six weeks. The listing of wartime poets writing in French in Jean Vic's La Litterature de la Guerre runs to eighteen pages. By 1915 the publication of war novels and personal reminiscences was also under way. One of the most influential of all war novels, Henri Barbusse's Le Feu, appeared in 1916, won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in the following year, and by the Armistice had sold 200,000 copies in French: an English translation (Under Fire) came out in 1917, and a German translation was published in Zurich during the last months of the war. Among the novel's admirers were the English poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen. Vincente Blasco Ibanez's international best-seller, Los Cuatro Jinetes del Apocalipsis, which was made into a spectacular film after the war, starring Rudolph Valentino, was also first published in 1916, the English version, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, appearing in 1918. There can be no dispute that the 1914-18 conflict was far more of a literary event than the previous continent-wide war, that of 1792-1815, though one tends to overlook how much was also written about this earlier struggle. William Matthew's British Autobiographies (1955), under the index entry for the Napoleonic and Peninsular Wars, lists eighty-seven published journals and memoirs by army personnel alone – including, in anticipation of Siegfried Sassoon's 1950s classic, a volume entitled Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. There were also a couple of score novels by participants (John Davis' The Post-Captain of 1806 was the model for authors like Frederick Marryat, Edward Howard and Frederick Chamier whose naval yarns were a staple of young people's literature later in the nineteenth century) and a quantity of verse, some of it by combatants, nearly all of it deathly rather than deathless. It seems however that warfare was not regarded as a suitable subject for literature, and though the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars extended over twenty-three years they figure as little more than an off-stage rumble in the works of most writers of the period. This was the case not only in Britain, where there was no military conscription and where the war was mainly something reported (very sketchily) in the newspapers, but also in France, Spain and the Italian states. A partial exception was Germany, where the nationalist revival between 1809 and 1814 engendered some novels (quickly forgotten) and a great deal of verse, much of it still in print and making a contribution to German nationalist sentiment in 1914. It is actually difficult to demonstrate that popular chauvinism was stronger, deeper or more widespread in 1914 than it had been a hundred years earlier, but a good case can be made for arguing that when the First World War began, the literary and intellectual climate was much more favourable to war literature than in any earlier period. Tolstoy's War and Peace, with its graphic evocations of combat and its interweaving of peacetime preoccupations and wartime catastrophes, was internationally admired as one of the world's greatest novels – perhaps the greatest – and was still recent enough to suggest imitation. Amongst writers influenced by it was Walter Bloem, whose novel trilogy about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was a best-seller in Germany: later, his reminiscences of life as a frontline officer in the First World War were to show the advantages both of a practised pen and of a trained sensibility. In France the tradition of naturalisme was the determining influence on Barbusse's Le Feu; he had already made his name as a neo-naturalist novelist with L'Enfer before the war. Amongst British writers the rather different brand of realism popularised by Thomas Hardy (both as novelist and as poet) was a major influence. The degree to which the war came in 1914 at just the moment when the idiom by which to describe it was being developed is even more evident in painting: among British artists, Christopher Nevinson found in Italian Futurism, and Paul Nash in the newly voguish art of Paul Cezanne, a pictorial medium with which to portray the effect of machine-age warfare on men and on landscape. By contrast, the 1939-45 war began when many of the artistic and literary innovations of the earlier years of the century were wearing themselves out. Perhaps more important, the battlefield horrors which had had a shocking novelty in 1914 were now drearily familiar. As the poet Keith Douglas explained in 1943: Hell cannot be let loose twice: it was let loose in the Great War and it is the same old hell now, The hardships, pain and boredom, the behaviour of the living and the appearance of the dead, were so accurately described by the poets of the Great War that every day on the battlefields of the western desert – and no doubt on the Russian battlefields as well – their poems are illustrated. It is probable however that the real difference between the literature of 1914-18 and of 1939-45 is in the way in which we see it. Of Catherine W. Reilly's 2,225 English poets of the First World War, scarcely a dozen are remembered, and perhaps fewer than a dozen others have any real claim to be added to the anthologies. In Germany and Italy there were writers who had major reputations in the 1920s and 1930s but whose standing has been radically affected by the downfall of the German and Italian dictatorships in the 1940s. In both countries the works of frontline authors such as Ernst Junger, Werner Beumelberg, Paolo Monelli and Piero Jahier made a crucial contribution to the intellectual and ideological climate within which the fascist regimes established themselves. In Germany doctoral students even wrote dissertations about Frontliteratur, and there were a number of influential articles in academic journals like Zeitschrift fur Deutschkunde and Dichtung und Volkstum which explored the ideological implications of First World War memoirs and fiction. The present estimate of most of these texts is in inverse relation to the esteem in which they were held in the Nazi period. But just as the defeat of Nazism had the effect of discrediting authors who could be presented as extolling war, so First World War authors like Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Erich Maria Remarque whose work embodied an anti-war message benefited from a renewed wave of war-weariness after 1945. It is no coincidence that the reputation of the First World War poet who is most admired today, Wilfrid Owen, dates from the 1960s, a period which developed its own distinctive image of the 1914-18 war. The moral and intellectual timeliness of what writers have to say is at least as important for their standing with the critics as the way they say it: this has been evident in more recent times in the case of books (and films) about the Vietnam War. In terms of actual quantity, more has now been written about the Second World War than about the First World War, except, it seems, in verse. That there is less poetry of the Second World War than the First must be attributed to a shift in the status of poetry during the intervening years, though this shift is not in itself a sign of decline in the form's real vitality, as the vast majority of First World War poems are distinctly reminiscent of nineteenth-century album verse and are less a statement of contemporary sensibility than a proof of the capacity of the outmoded to survive, in literature as elsewhere. Equally, the lesser bulk of Second World War poetry is still bulky enough to include, potentially, some major poets. But, as already suggested, more than 99 per cent of First World War poetry is not very impressive, and if 99.9 per cent of First World War poets were not as good as Wilfred Owen or Isaac Rosenberg, the fact that none of the Second World War poets were as good may be put down to chance – including the chance of being recognised – as much as anything else. With regard to prose writing in general, Second World War writing simply has never had the benefit of the ideological cross-currents that helped establish the reputation of Ernst Junger, Erich Maria Remarque, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, though some of the Second World War memoirs that have been published are very good indeed, especially some of those printed during the last twenty years when war reminiscences have been somewhat out of fashion. With regard specifically to fiction, the Second World War has probably inspired work of much higher quality than the First, though in many instances Second World War novels were produced by authors who either had previously written, or were later to write, better things: Evelyn Waugh, Norman Mailer, Albert Camus, Heinrich Boll may be cited as examples. Two British authors whose very best work, somewhat lost amongst large oeuvres of consistently high quality, was inspired by their wartime experiences at some distance from the firing line, are Anthony Powell and Graham Greene. None of the six writers just mentioned are normally seen specifically as war writers in the way Junger, Remarque or Sassoon are seen, despite their writings on other topics. There is no real objective reason for this: it is simply a matter of perspective, perhaps one should say, of critics' convenience. But the question of how we see the past is not merely theoretic and academic. We live in a world which the events of 1914-18 helped to shape – for example both Iraq and the still-not-quite-dead federal state of Yugoslavia were creations of the post-war settlement – and, more important, our perception of modern warfare is to a large extent something which has been transmitted to us by those who experienced the 1914-18 war at first hand. What e they have to tell us, despite its remote incongruous- seeming and extravagantly horrific details, is still painfully relevant. The First World War ended seventy-five years ago this month, but events in Sarajevo still mock our hopes of a peaceful and secure future. A.D. Harvey is a former lecturer and author of Collision of Empires - Britain in Three World Wars, 1795-1945 (Hambledon Press, 1992). - See more at: http://www.historytoday.com/ad-harvey/first-world-war-literature#sthash.GLrbinjc.dpuf

The ABCs Of Massachusetts Politics- George V. Higgins’ A Choice Of Enemies 


Book Review 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

A Choice Of Enemies, George V. Higgins, 1984

A lot of times when an author “speaks” to me I tend to go on a rampage going through the litany of whatever he or she has written. That is the case of late with the late Boston novelist an dprofessor George V. Higgins whose work is a special case (like Dennis Lehane of late) since most of the locales and most of the types who populate his novels are very familiar, maybe too familiar to me almost from childhood. Too familiar from the robber baron corner boys turned gangsters who preyed on the edges of our working class neighborhoods to the “on the make” politicos mapping out their career paths from about their eighth year (in full disclosure I went some distance on that route until I realized that I had to try to live with myself most days and would have not been able to say that on most days on that path) to renegade priests trying to conceal their lusts under the collar to the copper who made life easy for the previously mentioned brethren. We were all mixed together down there at the dangerous base society, the grim place when the working poor hung with their outsized hungers and it is only happenstance that one goes one way and the other another.

The material in the book under review, A Choice Of Enemies, a handbook in the 1980s (and a quick look at the headlines on any given day confirms that in 2015) on the whys and wherefores of Massachusetts state and local politics falls under that category as well. Recently I wrote a review of another Higgins’ book, The Mandeville Talent, where I gave the genesis of my interest in the books written by Higgins and, indirectly, my take on the kind of novels that this very prolific writer had spot on, and other than were less so:      

“Hey, any friend of Eddie Coyle’s is a friend of mine. You know Eddie, right, the Cambridge-bred corner boy who got tied up with some guys who did some things, a little of this and that late at night, a little of this and that about giving guys the means to go rooty-toot-tooton their appointed chores, did some things that “Uncle” might take umbrage at and try to put a guy away for, for a nickel or a dime, maybe. And poor middle-aged sag Eddie did not want to do the time, no way, but also got caught up in something too big for him to handle. So you know Eddie Coyle, the guy who was found not looking too pretty one cop car morning in the back of a stolen Chevy in some back parking lot in some dead-drop bowling alley off Dorchester Avenue in Boston.

Actually now that I think about the matter I don’t know, never heard of, could not say word one about some guy, what was his name again, oh yeah, Eddie Coyle. And of course while a lot of ex-corner boys (Jack Slack’s bowling alleys in North Adamsville for me) knew plenty of guys exactly like benighted Eddie no one could actually know him since he was the fictional creation of the author under review, George V. Higgins, in his first and most famous crime novel, The Friends Of Eddie Coyle published in 1972 (and later adapted for the cinema starring Robert Mitchum as the stand-up guy of the title). But, see, Brother Higgins was a prolific writer and although many of his best works and pieces of righteous ear for “street” dialogue involved low-end, well, gangster types he wrote other crime-centered books where the “bad guys” were not front and center, did not in the final push get away with murder. Although in the book under review, The Mandeville Talent, it was a close thing, a very close thing.”      

And that comment about what Higgins had a master ear for and ability to put dialogue to paper about, the low-life drifters, grifters and midnight sifters of the Boston gangster world, applies as well here where he gives his take on the ways of Massachusetts tribal politics when nobody, or almost nobody is looking. The subject is almost more interesting and certainly more dastardly in real time than having to drift through a few hundred pages of the inner workings up on the Hill and out in the districts. 

Here is the big secret-Massachusetts politics is corrupt. No Higgins did not tip me to that hard fact, nor did some hard-hitting Boston Globe expose. The person who gave me the “skinny” when I was about eight or nine years old was my departed late sainted unworldly house-bound grandmother, Anna Riley, who knew that hard fact from when she was a girl told to her by her mother. And if kindly grandmothers are hip to the politics then almost everybody else is too. And that is the enduring weakness of writing several hundred pages about the corrupt graft state contracts, the tenuous political alliances that last for a minute, the momentary do-gooders who fade when the target falls (to be replaced by the next from hunger guy or gal) and those who try to get anything done without greasing the skids.

Naturally the best spot to see what is going on is to go to the State House and not to the Governor’s office as important as that front is but to the Speaker’s office where the real action goes down. Here Higgins gives us the Speaker Bernie and “fixer man” Frank show (there is always a fixer man behind the throne necessary to follow the bouncing ball). The ins and outs of how thing get done, or not done, up the Hill. Almost a manual like I said.   

Higgins has got it all there the graft and corruption but why after reading this one did I have a hankering to hear those low-life grifters, drifters and midnight sifters like the late Eddie Coyle talking their self-interested low whisper street talk and making do with their small hungers.

When Women Sang The Blues For Keeps-With Ethel Waters In Mind

 

Lightning Hopkins the old Texas country blues player famously (or infamously depending on your perspective) once said when asked to define the blues that “the blues ain’t nothing but your good girl on your mind.” Personally more times than I can count that statement rang true, rang true about the blues too. Of course women can, and did, turn that around back in the days when black women dominated the  blues circuit by saying that some “no good” man was on her mind (although Bessie Smith turned that around on at least one song when she was moaning for her lost good man Hustlin’ Dan). All of this to say that blues, male or female was, is, a particularly important part of the American songbook and back in the 1960s folk minute along with the “discovery” of old male country blues singers like Lightning, Sleepy John Estes, Son House, Bukka White, Skip James and above all Mississippi John Hurt  and the reemergence of electric blues stars like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf a whole galaxy of female black blues singers came in their own, again. The likes of Bessie Smith, a number of other last name Smith women, Memphis Minnie, Sippy Wallace, Alberta Hunter and the singer here Ethel Waters.                

Above I mentioned above these women came into again because back in the 1920s and 1930s these woman were headliners in their own right at a time when the blues, at least on the circuit, was more than likely to be sung by female singers, mainly in the barrelhouse style. And Ethel Waters held her own in that genre. But she was also able to sing Broadway tunes, torch songs, and a whole lot more, whatever was put it front of her it seemed. Of course despite all that ability some blacks, blacks who had the wherewithal, exiled themselves from America, exiled themselves from Mister James Crow then in its height and went like Josephine Baker famously did to Europe, mainly to Paris where they were probably treated the best although given France’s colonial power status especially in Africa that statement has to be qualified. But here or in Europe Ethel Waters showed her stuff.       

The best example I can give of that premise is a song from this album  Am I Blue made famous in the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have And Have Not where songwriter Hoagy Carmichael and Lauren Bacall do their version. Another version, a torchy one which gave me the feeling the person could actually be blue, had been by the legendary Billie Holiday. Ethel Waters’ take is to do a lively version shaking those old blues away, banishing them from her mind. Must have been that her “no good” man finally did right. Enough said.        

The Real Scoop Behind Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?-With Martha and the Vandellas- Dancing In The Streets In Mind

This sketch takes place in the 1970s at the outer edge of the time of the Generation of ’68 musical jail  break-out  started in the mid-1950s with the roll out of classic rock but is driven, and driven hard, by the music of the early 1960s when the grifter described here first came of age and hence its inclusion.

“Hey, brother, can you spare a dime?,” (or sister now something unheard of back in the day, back in the early 1960s, when some cop might pinch you at her request for disturbing the fair sex  for  being unseemly in public asking a proper lady for anything. Now here in the go-go 70s any human form is qualified for the hustle where every low-rent guy takes a shot figuring maybe to get something so the other party, particularly women, can get you out of their faces and move on) followed by “Got an extra cigarette, pal (or gal, ditto the sister thing except unlike back in the day, pal or gal, in the new age, as likely as not, probably has no butts, has no “cigs,” doesn’t touch the stuff ever since the Surgeon-General’s report put the fear of God into lots of people)?”

Yah, Billy Bailey, William James Bailey, used-to-be brash corner boy, a contender for the title of king hell king of the corner boy night around Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, “up the downs” back in North Adamsville in the old days, the old days these days being the early 1960s before smart and brash corner boy Frankie Riley put an end to that dream by trumping all upstarts since  he was “in” with the shop owner, certainly had the panhandler lingo down, down pat, after only a few days on the bum. Funny during these few days on the bum this time he would almost blush when he thought back to the days when he used to laugh in the faces of swollen-faced raggedy-assed guys trying to pan-handle him for dough, trying to bum a smoke, and here he was with the brethren. Hustling maybe a little cleaner in attire that the brethren since he had not gotten down to second-hand Sally goods yet (that Sally for the clueless is not somebody’s aunt but the Salvation Army which took in many a stew bum without question when they were on the skids and nobody else would take them in so throw some change in the bucket the next time you see them around Christmas time in some shopping mall ringing their ubiquitous bells)although a few more weeks with constant use of the few clothes that he did have might have him howling. Hustling too with cleaner breathe since he did not drink (that jones long over and done with substituted by several subsequent joneses including his current burden. He still felt that contempt for the buggers since he “knew” that a few days of this street work and he would be off the skids, on his feet again and then able to go back to laughing at the brethren, a good laugh too, while they pipe-dreamed their lives away.

Yeah, this was strictly temporary because his ship would come in before he wound up on cheap street like the boyos hanging around the Common swilling rotgut wine (or maybe low-rent whiskey if the day’s take was good) smoking tobacco “roaches,” butt end really off the ground and pissing all over themselves. However every once in a while he would get a funny feeling, kind of turn up his collar a little more, push his baseball cap lower on his head, put on sunglasses ( a real no-no in the pan-handler racket since you want the “marks” to see your desperate eyes, your pleading desperate eyes, to close the deal. Besides sunglasses might make them feel you just blew in from the coast) when he realized that he was on the bum in his own home town, his ever-lovin’ roots, Boston. (His growing up hometown of North Adamsville close enough so that he did not have to tell people who asked the name of the town and could get by with Boston unlike if he was from Lowell or Lawrence or places like that.) Sure he had been on the bum a few times, nothing big, once on the Mission in Frisco (where in the same day he walked across the Golden Gate Bridge and that night slept, slept newspaper for a pillow sleep, under that edifice), a couple of times on Larimer Street in Denver before they gentrified the damn place and along the arroyos down in Los Angeles with a bunch of Vietnam veterans like himself who unlike him couldn’t adjust to the “real” world. 

Yeah, those were a few days’ bums, maybe a week, couple of weeks, no more than a month and then back to the world. Short falls, maybe drunk too much and jobless, later maybe too much gambling on run-out horses and dogs (and no money coming in to feed the habits once he got behind), maybe some twist threw him over for a steady guy after he wore out his welcome (and her pocketbook). On the bum this time, this time though a real fall, in hock and up to his ass in debt, mostly big score no-go dope on credit deal debts,  when he had tired of drunk risks, gambling risks, frail risks,  guys looking for him, not Boston guys thankfully, well, looking for him to pay up. During the long days of pan-handling this time though he would think back to the old days, the days before the “falls” when hustling dough was just for some short money, pick up some spare change, to wander into free campsite, Volkswagen bus pick-up sharing stews, brews and dope hitchhike roads looking for the great blue-pink American West night with some honey, some Angelica honey, bum like a few years back.

Angelica, the proto-type of his sexual desire in those days, all Midwest blonde, slender, frisky, proud and sensible, traipsing after him across half the continent before going home to Indiana and then later joining him in southern California before she decided on white picket fences and kids. Sweet kiss, baby, you were probably right when that last night you said your gallant knight was made of sawdust. Yeah, that was a while back, late 1960s back when even he sensed the world might be turned upside down. Hoped maybe he and his would get a fair shake in the world even though more pressing personal issues drove his days and nights. 

*******

Those days, those days after the hellish army routine, the ‘Nam bummer, the ‘Nam bummer before he hightailed it with the arroyos brothers who couldn’t face the “real” world down in L.A. he practically made a religion, yah a religion out of living “free,” living out of the knapsack(oddly an old World War II surplus job found at Snyder’s Army and Navy the kind which he father had told him he carried all thorough Europe when it was time to kick ass with the Nazi), living under bridges (not “arroyo brother” bridges but nice, meaning girl company nice, sleeping bag also Army surplus and light campfires and fine stews), no sweat, if need be. But those “golden days” dried up a few years back and now here in 1976 he was facing a real skid row choice. How it happened he will get to along the way but first let’s set the parameters of what 1976 panhandling, to put an eloquent name on it for “bumming”, shiftless bumming , looked like and how to survive in the new age of everybody me-ing themselves, even with people who were not on the bum. Christ, lord the times were hard, hard times in old Babylon, no question.

See, a guy, a guy who called himself “Shorty” McGee for obviously physical reasons but who knows what his real name was, maybe he didn’t remember either after all the rum-dum sterno heat years and the endless backsides of skid row haunts, that he had hitched up with for a minute, an overnight minute at the Salvation Army Harbor Lights Center over in the South End kind of hipped him to the obvious tricks of the new down-at the-heels road. Like putting the two requests, got any change and “got a cig,” together when you were panhandling. See, Shorty said it was all a matter of psychology, of working the crowd, the downtown crowd, the bustling workaday Park Street Station crowd hurrying to and fro looking for quick lunches, maybe a minute shopping spree in Jordan Marsh’s or Filene’s, and the Copley Square sunning themselves crowd on the benches across from the library maybe reading a book or feeding the pigeons, right to get you out of their sights and back to whatever sweet thing they were doing. So you endlessly put the two requests together, time after time after time, and always. And what happened was that when they turned you down for the dough ( as happened a lot), or maybe took you literally and pieced you off with just a dime, Christ a dime that wouldn’t even buy a cup of joe, or could feel good about themselves, if they smoked, smoked cigarettes anyway, by passing you a butt. Billy thought, nice, this Shorty really does have it worked out just about right. Of course dimes and drags were not going to get him out from under, not this time.

Well, rather than leaving the reader out in the dark, Billy Bailey this fair 1976 spring was not just on the bum, but on the lam as well, keeping his head very far down just in case there were some guys who were looking for him, or worst, the cops, in case some irate victim of one of his scams took a notion to “fry his ass.” Of course he was counting on them, those victims, being mainly friends and acquaintances, of not putting “the heat” on him since he had already promised through the grapevine that he would make restitution. But we are getting a little ahead of the story, let’s step back.

The early 1970s were not kind to “free spirits” the previous name for what on this day were “free-loaders” and Billy, well, got behind in his expenses, and his bills, his ever expanding bills. But see the transition from free “s” to free “l” caught him off-guard, moreover he was just then in the throes of a fit of “the world owes me a living,” a serious fit. Why? Well see, he as a pauper son of the desperate working poor, “felt” that since he missed out on the golden age benefits of his youth that he was to make up the difference by putting the “touch” on the richer friends that he had acquired through his doing this and that, mainly high-end drug connections (not really rich but richer since the really rich were hunkered down behind about fifteen layers of fortresses, physical and legal, and as some writer who knew what he was talking about really were different that you and me, no question).

The long and short it was that he work the deal this way, this way once he got his hard wanting habits on first he would “borrow” money off Friend A under some scam pretext of putting it to good use, usually using some exotic drug story as the front (yes, his own good use, including several long airplane fight trips to California and other points west-no more hitchhike roads for this moving up the food chain lad) and then borrow dough off Friend B to cover some of his debt to Friend A. Something like an unconscious classic Ponzi scheme, as it turned out. And then when he got to Friend X or somewhere around there things got way too complicated and he started “kiting” checks, and on and on as far deep into his white- collar crime mind as he could think. That could only go on a for a short while and he calculated that "short while" almost to the day when he would have to go “underground” and that day had sprung up a couple of weeks before.

So it took no accountant or smart-ass attorney to know that dimes and drags were not going to get him back on his feet. Nor were many of the schemes that Shorty had outlined over at Harbor Lights as ways to grab quick cash. Hitting the poor boy charity circuit, good mainly one time, grabbing stuff on credit using somebody’s credit card gained through guys who sold fake credit cards and then selling the stuff quick and deeply discounted. Some check finagling. All things that really took sunnier times to work and squeak maximum benefit from. These were chicken feed for his needs, even his immediate needs, although some of the scams would fill the bill for a rum-dum or life-long skid row bum. But here is the secret, the deep secret that Billy Bailey held in his heart, after a few nights on bus station benches, cold spring night park benches, a night bout under the Andersen Bridge over by old haunt Harvard Square (girl-less and with no cozy sleeping and stew campfires), and a few nights that he would rather not discuss just in case, he finally figured out, figured out kicking and screaming, that the world did not owe him a living and that if he wanted to survive past thirty he had better get the stardust and grit out of his eyes. But just this minute, just this undercover spring 1976 minute, he needed to work the Commons. “Hey, brother, hey sister, can you spare a dime?” “Pal, have you got an extra cigarette?”

Postscript: Not all wisdom ends happily, and not all good intentions grow to fruition. Yes, Billy paid off his debts to his friends, mostly. However, Billy Bailey was killed while “muling” in a drug war shoot-out in Juarez, Mexico in late 1979 trying to do an independent score when the bad boy Mexican and South American cartels were bundling things up. Found face down with two in the back of the head. Yeah, Billy Bailey had moved down the chain a lot since the days when he was a contender for the king hell king of the corner boy night.