When The Fight To Turn The World Upside Down Was In Full Flower- With The Doors The Unknown Soldier In Mind 

 

 

Wait until the war is over
And we're both a little older
The unknown soldier

Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Unborn living, living, dead
Bullet strikes the helmet's head
And it's all over
For the unknown soldier
It's all over
For the unknown soldier
Hut, hut, hut ho hee up
Hut, hut, hut ho hee up
Hut, hut, hut ho hee up
Comp'nee, halt
Present, arms
Make a grave for the unknown soldier
Nestled in your hollow shoulder
The unknown soldier
Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Bullet strikes the helmet's head
And, it's all over
The war is over
It's all over
War is over

Well, all over, baby
All over, baby
Oh, over, yeah
All over, baby

Ooh, ha, ha, all over
All over, baby
Oh, woah, yeah, all over
All over, heh
Add song meaning

Songwriters
Robbie Krieger;John Densmore;Jim Morrison;Ray Manzarek

From The Pen of Frank Jackman

There was no seamless thread that wrapped the counter-cultural dominated 1960s up tightly, a decade or so that is beginning to look like a watershed time not just for the first wave immediate post-World War II baby-boomers who came of social and political age then washed clean by the new dispensation but for the country as a whole. More so since we of the generation of ’68 who are still up for a fight are continuing to fight a rearguard action to keep what little is left of accomplishments and the spirit of those time alive. A thousand things, or it seemed like a thousand things, something new in the social, economic, political or cultural forest popping up out of nowhere in many cases, came together in pretty rapid succession to draw down in flames the dread red scare Cold War freezes of our childhoods. The Cold War time when what did we know except to keep our obedient heads down under our desks or face down on the floor when the periodic air-raid shelter tests were performed at school to see if we were ready to face the bleak future if we survived some ill-meant commie atomic blast. (Personally I remember telling somebody then that I would, having seen newsreel footage of the bomb tests at Bikini, just as soon take my chances above desk, thank you, for all the good the other maneuver would do us.)

For a while anyway we were able to beat back that Cold War mentality, that cold-hearted angst, and calculated playing with our world, our world even if we had no say, zero, in creating what went on. Not so strangely, although maybe that is why people drifted away in droves once the old bourgeois order reasserted itself and pulled down the hammer, none of us who were caught up in the whirl thought it would on be for only a while or at least fade so fast just as we thought, young and healthy as we were, that we would live forever. But if you took a step back you could trace things a little, could make your own “live free” categories of the events that chipped away the ice of those dark nights.

Start in with the mid-1950s if you like, which is where I like to start dating my own sense of the new breeze coming through although being a pre-teenager then I would not have had sense enough to call it that, with the heat of the black struggle for some semblance of civil liberties down South with the fight for voter rights and the famous desegregation of buses in Montgomery and the painful desegregation of the schools in Little Rock (and some sense of greater  equality up North too as organizations like the NAACP and Urban League pushed an agenda for better education and housing). Also at that same time, and in gathering anecdotal evidence I have found that these are a common lynchpin, the first break-out of music with the crowning of rock and roll as the wave of the future (black rhythm and blues, scat, rockabilly music all mixed up and all stirred up), and the “discovery” of teen alienation and angst exemplified by sullen movie star sullen James Dean, who lived fast, and died fast a metaphor that would work its way through youth culture over the next generation. (And throw in surly “wild one” movie star Marlon Brando and a brooding Montgomery Cliff.)   

An odd-ball mix right there. Throw in, as well, although this was only at the end and only in very commercial form, the influence of the “beats,” the guys who blew the cool be-bop jazz that you would hear around cafés even if you did not understand it unlike rock and roll, the guys who hitchhiked across the American landscape creating a wanderlust in all who had heard about their exploits, and, of course, the bingo bongo poetry that threw the old modernists like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound out with a bang. Then start to throw in the struggles against the old authority in places like Frisco town where they practically ran the red-baiters in the HUAC out of town (what we, or some of us, would learn to call “bourgeois authority working hand in hand with the capitalists”), the old certitudes that had calmed our parents’ lives, made them reach out with both hands for the plenty in the “golden age of plenty.” Of course the biggest event that opened the doors for liberals, radicals, hell, even thoughtful conservatives was the sweet breeze coming down the road from Boston with the election of Jack Kennedy. Ike, the harmless uncle, the kindly grandfather, was for our parents we wanted guys who set the buzz going.    

That event opened up a new psyche, that it was okay to question authority, whatever the limitations and shortness of the Camelot times with the struggles against some hoary things like segregation, the death penalty, nuclear proliferation, the unevenness of social life which would get propelled later in the decade with fight for women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the fight against the draft, the damn war in Vietnam that drove a nail into the heart of our generation. A river of ideas, and a river of tears, have been, and can be, shed over that damn war, what it did to young people, those who fought, maybe especially those who fought, and those who refused to, that lingers on behind the scenes even today.

There were more things, things like the “pill” that opened up a whole can of worms about what everyone was incessantly curious about and hormonally interested in doing something about, a newer sensibility in music with the arrival of the protest folk songs for a new generation which pushed the struggle and the organizing forward. Cultural things like the experimenting with about seven different kinds of dope previously the hidden preserve of “cool cat” blacks and white hipsters, the outbreak of name changes with everybody seemingly trying to reinvent themselves in name, fashion, and affectation. More social experiments gathering in the “nation” through rock concerts, now acid-etched, new living arrangements with the arrival of the urban and rural communes (including sleeping on more than one floor in more than one church or mission). They all, if not all widespread, and not all successful as new lifestyles all got a fair workout during this period as well.     

Plenty of us in retrospective would weigh the various combinations of events differently in figuring out how the uprising started just as plenty of us have our specific dates for when the tide began to ebb, when the mean-spirited and authoritarian began their successful counter-offensive that we still live with for not taking the omens more seriously. (My ebb tide, as I have described elsewhere, was the events around May Day 1971 when we seriously tried, or thought we were seriously trying, to shut down the government in DC if it would no shut down the war and got nothing but billy-clubs, tear gas, beatings and mass arrests for our efforts. After those days I, and others, figured out the other side was more serious about preserving the old order than we were about creating the new and that we had better rethink how to slay the monster we were up against and act accordingly.)

Then we have the photograph (see above) that graces this short screed, and which pictorially encapsulates a lot of what went then, a lot about which side were you on when the deal went down. This photograph is almost impossible to imagine without some combination of that hell broth anti-war, anti-establishment, pro-newer world mix stirred up in the 1960s. Three self-assured women comfortable with the loose and individualistic fashion statements of the day from floppy hats to granny dresses to bare legs, bare legs, Jesus, that alone would have shocked their girdled, silk stocking mothers, especially if those bare legs included wearing a mini-skirt.

They are also uncomfortable about the damn Vietnam war, no outraged is a better way to put the matter, that was eating up boyfriends, brothers, just friends, guys they knew in college or on the street who were facing heavy decisions about the draft, Canada exile, prison or succumbing to the worst choice, military induction, at a heavy rate and they unlike their mothers who came through World War II waiting patiently and patriotically for their military heroes to come home, come home in one piece, have a very different sense of the heroic. A sense of the heroic going back to ancient times, Greek times anyway, when one group of women like their stay-at-home-waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop World War II mothers demanded that their men come home on their shields if they had to rather than speak of defeat. Others, the ones that count here, refusing their potential soldier boys any favors if they went off to war, providing a distant echo, a foundation to make their request stand on some authority, for these three women pictured here. I wonder how many guys would confess to the lure of that enticement if they had refused induction. I did not but then I did not have any girlfriends who made that demand, mine early on anyway were as likely to want me to come back on a shield as those ancient Greek women. Too bad. More, much more of the latter, please as we continue in the nightmare world of endless war.                     

The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War –In Honor Of Abraham Lincoln-Led Union Side-The First International's Salute To Abraham Lincoln On His Re-Election In 1864 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

I would not expect any average American citizen today to be familiar with the positions of the communist intellectuals and international working-class party organizers (First International) Karl Mark and Friedrich Engels on the events of the American Civil War. There is only so much one can expect of people to know off the top of their heads about what for several generations now has been ancient history.  I am, however, always amazed when I run into some younger leftists and socialists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. I, in the past, have placed a number of the Marx-Engels newspaper articles from the period in this space to show the avidity of their interest and partisanship in order to refresh some memories and enlighten others. As is my wont I like to supplement such efforts with little fictional sketches to illustrate points that I try to make and do so below with my take on a Union soldier from Boston, a rank and file soldier, Wilhelm Sorge.  

 

Since Marx and Engels have always been identified with a strong anti-capitalist bias for the unknowing it may seem counter-intuitive that the two men would have such a positive position on events that had as one of its outcomes an expanding unified American capitalist state. A unified capitalist state which ultimately led the vanguard political and military actions against the followers of Marx and Engels in the 20^th century in such places as Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam. The pair were however driven in their views on revolutionary politics by a theory of historical materialism which placed support of any particular actions in the context of whether they drove the class struggle toward human emancipation forward. So while the task of a unified capitalist state was supportable alone on historical grounds in the United States of the 1860s (as was their qualified support for German unification later in the decade) the key to their support was the overthrow of the more backward slave labor system in one part of the country (aided by those who thrived on the results of that system like the Cotton Whigs in the North) in order to allow the new then progressive capitalist system to thrive.       

 

In the age of advanced imperialist society today, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we find that we are, unlike Marx and Engels, almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And we are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to be a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in the eyes of our forebears, and our eyes too.

 

Furthermore few know about the fact that the small number of Marxist supporters in the United States during that Civil period, and the greater German immigrant communities here that where spawned when radicals were force to flee Europe with the failure of the German revolutions of 1848 were mostly fervent supporters of the Union side in the conflict. Some of them called the “Red Republicans” and “Red 48ers” formed an early experienced military cadre in the then fledgling Union armies. Below is a short sketch drawn on the effect that these hardened foreign –born abolitionists had on some of the raw recruits who showed up in their regiments and brigades during those hard four years of fighting, the third year of which we are commemorating this month.

 

Below is the First International's Address to Abraham Lincoln on the occasion of his re-election in 1864

 

The International Workingmen's Association 1864

Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America

Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams January 28, 1865 ^[A]

---

Written: by Marx between November 22 & 29, 1864
First Published: The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 169, November 7, 1865;
Transcription/Markup: Zodiac/Brian Baggins;
Online Version: Marx & Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000.

---

 

Sir:

 

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

 

From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

 

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

 

While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

 

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world. ^[B]

 

Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association, the Central Council:

Longmaid, Worley, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Osbourne, Howell, Carter, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Dick, Denoual, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet, Talandier, Dupont, L.Wolff, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri, Nusperli, Eccarius, Wolff, Lessner, Pfander, Lochner, Kaub, Bolleter, Rybczinski, Hansen, Schantzenbach, Smales, Cornelius, Petersen, Otto, Bagnagatti, Setacci;

George Odger, President of the Council; P.V. Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France; Karl Marx, Corresponding Secretary for Germany; G.P. Fontana, Corresponding Secretary for Italy; J.E. Holtorp, Corresponding Secretary for Poland; H.F. Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland; William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.

18 Greek Street, Soho.

---

^[A] From the minutes of the Central (General) Council of the International — November 19, 1864:

"Dr. Marx then brought up the report of the subcommittee, also a draft of the address which had been drawn up for presentation to the people of America congratulating them on their having re-elected Abraham Lincoln as President. The address is as follows and was unanimously agreed to."

^[B] The minutes of the meeting continue:

"A long discussion then took place as to the mode of presenting the address and the propriety of having a M.P. with the deputation; this was strongly opposed by many members, who said workingmen should rely on themselves and not seek for extraneous aid.... It was then proposed... and carried unanimously. The secretary correspond with the United States Minister asking to appoint a time for receiving the deputation, such deputation to consist of the members of the Central Council."

---

Ambassador Adams Replies

Legation of the United States
London, 28th January, 1865

Sir:

 

I am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United [States], has been received by him.

 

So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.

 

The Government of the United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and good will throughout the world.

 

Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies.

 

I have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant,

 

Charles Francis Adams

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

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 the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists/Constructivists, Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements (hell even the Academy spoke the pious words when there was sunny weather), 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 gazebo 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, putting another man to ground or lying their own heads down for some imperial mission. 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, beautiful poets like Wilfred Owens who would sicken of war before he passed leaving a beautiful damnation on war, its psychoses, and broken bones and dreams, and the idiots who brought humankind to such a fate, like e. e. cummings who drove through sheer hell in those rickety ambulances floors sprayed with blood, man blood, angers, anguishes and more sets of broken bones, and broken dreams, like Rupert Brooke all manly and old school give and go, as they marched in formation leaving the ports and then mowed down like freshly mown grass in their thousands as the charge call came and they rested, a lot of them, in those freshly mown grasses, like Robert Graves all grave all sputtering in his words confused about what had happened, suppressing, always suppressing that instinct to cry out against the hatred night, like old school, old Thomas Hardy writing beautiful old English pastoral sentiments before the war and then full-blown into imperium’s service, no questions asked old England right or wrong, like old stuffed shirt himself T.S. Eliot speaking of hollow loves, hollow men, wastelands, and such in the high club rooms on the home front, and like old brother Yeats speaking of terrible beauties born in the colonies and maybe at the home front too as long as Eliot does not miss his high tea. Jesus what a blasted night that Great War time was.   

And do not forget when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of ordinary human clay as it turned out

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, artists, beautiful artists like Fernand Leger who could no longer push the envelope of representative art because it had been twisted by the rubble of war, by the crashing big guns, by the hubris of commanders and commanded and he turned to new form, tubes, cubes, prisms, anything but battered humankind in its every rusts and lusts, all bright and intersecting once he got the mustard gas out of his system, once he had done his patria duty, like speaking of mustard gas old worn out John Singer Sargent of the three name WASPs forgetting Boston Brahmin society ladies in decollage, forgetting ancient world religious murals hanging atop Boston museum and spewing trench warfare and the blind leading the blind out of no man’s land, out of the devil’s claws, and like Umberto Boccioni, all swirls, curves, dashes, and dangling guns as the endless charges endlessly charge.        

And do not forget when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of ordinary human clay as it turned out 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 ….            

There Was Life Before Sam Spade-Dashiell Hammett’s The Hunter And Other Stories

 

 

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

The Hunter and Other Stories, Dashiell Hammett, edited by Richard Layman and Julie Rivett, The Mysterious Press, New York, 2013

I have spent a considerable amount of cyber-ink in this space extolling the crime detection virtues and spare and functional language of Dashiell Hammett’s major writings. That exaltation has, rightly, been centered on the crime novels, The Glass Key, The Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon, especially in the aftermath of the film adaptation of the latter putting hard-boiled but dogged detective Sam Spade, Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor in a classic mix of the stuff that dreams are made of that still is very watchable over seventy-five years later. Although Dashiell Hammett had a relatively short, productive published writing career he did, as the book under review, The Hunter and Other Short Stories testified to write other material not as well known for crime detection magazines and other such journals. And, as is the case here, material, particularly early material which either never was published, or meant to be published.           

 A while back, maybe a year or so ago now I did a book review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, an unfinished novel at the time of his death. I noted there that despite the fairly recent frenzy of publishers or those who own the rights to the works of famous writers to publish lesser or previously unpublished work to a broader than academic or aficionado public that such efforts do not always serve that writer’s heritage to god effect. I get something of the same feeling here and although I greatly admired Fitzgerald work I was not an aficionado of his every word. With Hammett, yes. So in reading the stories presented here I had mixed feelings that this material while of serious interest to an aficionado is not something that such a person has to absolutely have access to in order to feel that he or she had got the essence of Hammett down.       

No question there are some decent stories here which show that Hammett had some real promise, had some real skill with using parsed but powerful language to set his tales up. The title story is one but many of the others did not draw this reader to read feverishly and devoured at one sitting like he did with the complicated Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon or the murder and mayhem every which way in The Red Harvest. Interestingly the section that did work, did give me a feel for classic Hammett, were the various screenplays, especially the development of the character of the private detective, Gene Richmond, in the screenplay (never produced I believe) On The Make where like Spade with Bridget in Falcon he doesn’t get the trophy girl in the end. Commentary in each section giving the history of each story by the editors was very welcome and informative, and who also in the Introduction explain how this material had only recently come to light through their aficionado interests and plodding through the Hammett Archives.            

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.

From The Archives Of  Women And Revolution

Markin comment:

The following is a set of archival issues of Women and Revolution that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting articles from the back issues of  Women and Revolution during Women's History Month in March and periodically throughout the year.

Women and Revolution-1971-1980, Volumes 1-20  


http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/w&r/WR_001_1971.pdf

Before The Deluge- Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage

 

 

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Sabotage, Sylvia Sidney, Oscar Homolka, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1936

The late suspense and thriller director Alfred Hitchcock (okay, okay, the late Sir Alfred Hitchcock since he pursued that title all his life) produced some genuine genre classics like Psycho and The Birds. But not all his work, especially his earlier work when he was as interested in framing a mood or doing clever cinemagraphic shots as scaring us half to death, reached that level. The film under review, 1936’s Sabotage, in a case in point. Frankly, the plot is plodding, the dialogue is stilted and the characters are if anything rather wooden. And while there are plenty of mood-creating facial shots and crowd scenes and some nice camera tricks this is strictly second-shelf Hitchcock.        

Let me make my case. The lights go out, the lights in 1936 London which causes a certain initial panic although the plucky British wind up laughing about this modern inconvenience. However this caper was no accident since it had been touched off by a foreign agent, Mr. Verloc (Oscar Homolka), who is using movie theater ownership in the heart of London as a cover. The country that Verloc is working for is not identified but it does not take too much imagination to assume that in 1936 that country would be Germany as the war clouds were again beginning to form in Europe. Of course if the idea is sabotage, here to put fear in the civilian population, then laughter is not what had been expected by the agent who was handling Verloc. So another, scarier, caper would be necessary to do the trick, bomb planted somewhere where it would cause carnage and put that desired fear into the hearts of ordinary citizens.           

But whatever the foreign network Verloc was working for Scotland Yard was on to him, had him covered by one of their top dog agents, Ted Spencer (John Loder) working undercover as a grocer’s assistant next to the theater. As the plot thickens Ted tries to see if Verloc’s wife (played by Sylvia Sidney) is involved in the plot so he takes her and her brother, Stevie, who is living with the Verlocs above the theater to dinner. She checks out clean. Along the way Verloc is making his preparations, connecting with a bomb-maker to do his dirty deed set for the Lord Mayor’s Day, a day when there will be throngs around town. A lot of the film is then set on the figure of Stevie who, Verloc being thwarted in his efforts to carry out the deed himself, becomes the sacrificial innocent lamb who will carry the bomb to its destination. The bomb goes off on a bus killing all, including Stevie. Mrs. Verloc is beside herself when she finds out Verloc had set Stevie up, had committed the deed, and kills him in a moment of anger and disgust. And she will go to prison as she is filled with remorse over her murder of her husband and tells Ted to take her in. End of story.       

Well not quite end of story. See, two things happen to let her off the hook. First Ted in the process of getting to know her has fallen for her and is ready to stake all on them getting away, a not unusual cinematic and literary devise when love-smitten cops have to put their loved ones in gaol. Second the bomb-maker to cover his tracks goes to Verloc’s apartment to recover any evidence (especially a bird-cage, complete with bird, he had sent along the bomb in). But the cops are on to him. Cornered, he blows himself up with what today would seem an eerily current bomb-jacket thus destroying all the evidence of Mrs. Verloc’s crime. And the chastised pair set of into the sunset, or rather fog. See what I mean. The only guy who plays to form as a bad guy is Verloc who looks sufficiently like a primitive bad guy to do such evil work. Fortunately old Sir Hitchcock will do better as he goes along.    

Hello antiwar friends of UNAC and Supporters of the UNAC Conference,

Stop the Wars at Home and Abroad, May 8-10, Seacaucus, NJ  (UNACconference2015.org).

Our national conference is developing nicely with an exciting and Impressive array of speakers, panels and workshops.  Be sure to see the latest details on the conference website.

We believe this national gathering of activists from a wide range of antiwar and social justice movements is not only timely, but critical to movement building in the U.S. today.  It has been a long time since a conference of this scope has been held.  While the U.S. government and military is busily expanding its wars for profit, at home, Washington is targeting communities of color, voting rights, women’s rights, unions, while militarizing the police and enforcing the surveillance state.

By uniting all the struggles at home and abroad, we will connect activists from different movements to forge a common understanding and unity of purpose.  As we know through experience, we can’t rely on elections as the vehicle for peace and social change.

Change can happen, but only if we join together as a mighty force and take action

The conference looks good on paper but we will only be effective if large number of activists attend.  That is why we need your help and participation.

This is what we ask you to do:

1. Come to the conference.  Register now (whether you are able to pay now or not).  Presenters are asked to register as well.  If you can’t attend, please make a donation so that we can subsidize those who need financial help.
2. Publicize the conference widely among your associates and organizations.  Ask your organizations to endorse and build the conference.  Organize transportation and subsidies.
3. Put an ad in the Conference Journal.  (Details on the website.)  Add your name to the list of supporters.
4. Join UNAC and support our coalition efforts.  There is a form to fill out on the UNAC website (UNACpeace.org) or write to us at UNACpeace@gmail.com.

(If you would like to help in the organizing of the conference and learn more about UNAC’s current activities, you are invited to join the UNAC Coordinating Committee conference call on Sunday, March 29, 7:30.  Let us know if we should send you the call-in numbers.

Marilyn Levin and Joe Lombardo

Co-Coordinators

Join Hatem Abudayyeh, Susan Abulhawa, Pam Africa, Abayomi Azikiwe, Ajamu Baraka, Media Benjamin, The Cuban 5, Lamis Deek, Steve Downs, Bernadette Ellorin, Glenn Ford, Sara Flounders, Bruce Gagnon, Teresa Gutierrez, Lawrence Hamm, Chris Hedges, Joe Iosbaker, Charles Jenkins, Antonia Juhasz, Chuck Kaufman, Kathy Kelly, Jeff Mackler, Christine Marie, Ray McGovern, Cynthia McKinney, Michael McPhearson, Malik Mujahid, Lucy Pagoada, Lynn Stewart, David Swanson, Clarence Thomas, Ann Wright, Kevin Zeese & many more at ...

A national conference to connect all the issues:

“Stop the Wars at Home & Abroad!”

(to register now, click the link below)

The United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) invites you to attend the “Stop the Wars at Home & Abroad!” conference, to be held May 8-10, 2015, in Secaucus, N.J, just outside New York City.

More and more, we can see how all the problems of the world are connected. The trillions of dollars being spent on wars-for-profit abroad could be used here at home to rebuild our cities, educate our youth, employ our jobless, repair damage to the environment – and try to make up for the endless suffering the Pentagon is inflicting on people around the world, most of them people of color, the vast majority of whom have nothing to do with threatening us or anyone else.

Some of the connections are even more striking. Some of the very same kinds of military equipment used in Iraq was seen this past summer on the streets of Ferguson, Mo. Surveillance drones developed for use by the military are now being used by domestic police departments. The endless “war on terror” is being used to justify taking away our civil liberties here at home. Wars for oil in the Middle East keep fossil fuels flowing, accelerating the climate change that threatens all humanity.

This conference will be an opportunity to meet and network with activists from across the country and learn about the many struggles going on today, both at home and around the world. Speakers with decades of experience will be joined by members of the new generations of activists who are bringing fresh energy and ideas into the movement. Together, we will learn from and inspire each other.

Most conferences cost many hundreds of dollars to attend, but UNAC organizers are doing their best to keep this one affordable for young activists and working people. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to expand your knowledge, make many new progressive friends and build the movement for fundamental social change. 

 

Stop the Wars at Home & Abroad!

For more information and to register for the conference, see: 

www.unacconference2015.org

To place an ad in the conference journal, see:

http://www.unacconference2015.org/p/endorsers.html

 

UNITED NATIONAL ANTIWAR COALITION (UNAC)

P.O. Box 123, Delmar, NY 12054  ●  Ph:  518-227-6947

Email:  UNACpeace@gmail.com  ●  Web:  www.UNACpeace.org

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