The Great Blue-Pink American West Ghost Dance Night-With The Late Peter Paul Markin In Mind

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Sam Lowell had for the past twenty or so years regularly tuned to the local National Public Radio station on his car radio when one day recently when after he started his car up he heard a sound, a familiar sound from the past, the sound of the primordial chant of some Plains Indians, warriors, echoing off the walls of some canyon as they took part in a ghost dance  (Indians now called variously Native Americans or Native Peoples but when he told his story to several old high school acquaintances he preferred to call them Indians a term of usage the first time he encountered the experience back in the late 1960s before AIM and others changed the nomenclature). He had had to stop what he was doing, stop getting ready to head back to his law office, and just sit and listen in order to find out why that ancient sound was coming from his car speakers that day. As it turned out the program, a talk program whose segments were each day dedicated to some topical subject, had been on the subject of a recent extraordinary exhibition of Plains Indian art and crafts being held at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and the ghost dance chants had been used as background to end one section of the program. As Sam put the car in gear once he knew what had transpired with the radio on in the background he began to think back to the days in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he and the late Peter Paul Markin (always called just Markin by everybody except his mother and a first wife who tried to impress her Mayfair swell parents with the old WASP-ish three name moniker to no avail) travelling the hitchhike road like many in their generation found themselves out into the New Mexico high desert, high as kites on drugs, performing their own version of the ghost dance, the dance that Sam believed united them, he, Markin and two other travelling male companions with the memories of ten thousand years of warriors who had roamed that ancient space.     

That high heavens chanting haunted Sam Lowell, usually these days an unassumingly lawyer getting ready to down-size his life, down-size along his life with that of his long-time companion, Laura Perkins, but those sounds brought back all kinds of memories of those youthful days when he and Markin had believed that they could turn the world upside down, and live to tell about it. Markin, unfortunately, had paid the price by his over-indulgence into everything from money to women to drugs he could get his hands on and like many over-reachers he got burned, burned badly later in the 1970s when a drug deal down in Sonora went bad and he wound up face down in some dusty back alley for reasons that were still murky some forty years later.

That unclaimed fate in some dusty unmarked wooden plank grave in potter’s field with the wolves baying in the background, haunted Sam for years, especially since he had been warned by others who were in the know not to attempt to go to Mexico and find out what the hell happened under penalty of finding himself too down in some dusty back alley with half his head blown off and left to simmer in an unmarked grave in potter’s field. Sam, unlike Markin, had seen the writing on the wall as he sensed well before Markin that the ebb tide of the search for a “newer world” had been marked by  early 1970, the bourgeois reaction (Markin’s term but rightly used  under those circumstances) was getting ready to pull the hammer down, pull it down hard and he had walked back to the “new normal” (law school, budding law practice, first marriage, kids, white picket fence, and settling down to that bourgeois lifestyle Markin was always railing against right up until the last time Sam had seem him in late 1975 before that fateful trip to Sonora.

Funny Sam thought as he thought back to the early days, the days when he and Markin and a six or seven other guy would hang around holding up the wall in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street in their hometown of Carver about thirty miles south of Boston, Markin had been the “prophet,” the guy who sensed the flood tide of the 1960s well before any of them. They were mostly poor ass corner boys into small larcenies and scams to grab dough for “hot” dates with girls from other towns, cars and swilling up cheapjack liquor. Markin had practically invented the words angst and alienation to define what they were about and would spout forth on any dough-less, girl-less Friday night that the new breeze that he could palpably feel when he would sneak up to Harvard Square in Cambridge to see what was what and they would kid him, kid him mercilessly about being a “beatnik” or a fag (yeah, it was that kind of time among the hard-core working-class guys in a million towns like Carver when nobody thought anything of fag-baiting just as a test of manhood, thankfully done with, mostly).       

All this memory business was too much for Sam to handle on his own, had him preoccupied for days and Laura who had not known Markin having entered Sam’s life after his two hard-bitten failed marriages (hers too, two failed marriages) except by Sam harping on his legend whenever he got a drunk or melancholy. Laura made it clear on several occasions that she did not want Sam to talk about those times, the times of Sam’s two unsuccessful marriages which intersected with Markin’s time, and so she was no help in this matter. So Sam did what he had begun to do more frequently since he had been leaving more of the legal business in his office he had built up in Carver to his two younger partners and since he had a couple of years before had been involved with his 50^th anniversary class reunion committee and got in contact with his fellow still living corner boys. Guys like Frankie Riley, a fellow lawyer who had migrated to Boston and a large law firm, the guy who had been the unquestioned leader of the corner boys and one of the great midnight creep sneak thieves who ever lived in Carver, Jack Dawson, the now widowed print shop owner in town who had made a ton of money back in the day by expanding his business to include silk-screening posters and tee-shirts when that was all the rage, Jack “Mr. Toyota” Callahan, the great Carver High running back who subsequently became the owner of the biggest Toyota dealership in the area, Jimmy Jenkins, a pretty good car mechanic, and before he very recently had passed away, Allan Johnson, the great naval draftsman who designed several big ships.            

Since that reunion committee time, a committee which Sam had been active in around the edges and which had permitted him to connect with the old corner boys who had not been together since they had scattered to the winds a couple of years after high school, the guys would periodically get together at Frankie Riley’s favorite Boston bar, the Sunnyville Grille, over near Copley Square. (Although all the other guys had attended the reunion Sam had not attended the event since he had had a “run-in” with old high school flame Melinda Loring, run-in meaning serious steps leading to an affair which she called off before it got to that stage since he was balking over leaving Laura, which precluded his attendance under penalty of endless embarrassment and baiting by the guys). This “ghost dance” memory, no question, required a meeting in order for Sam to talk about that long ago event that some of the guys knew about vaguely when they too had headed west with Markin on different hitchhike road trips. So one Friday night, a spring Friday night, Sam gathered everybody n around a small side room table that they frequently used once Frankie became friendly with Johnny O’Connor the owner of the grille and told his story.  Frankie, who had an old habit of writing notes going back to law school days so he would not forget something, took notes of this session and gave the notes to me after he told me the story and I have tried to recreate what Sam told the group here, with just a little flourish:

The last time Sam went out on the road with Markin, or maybe the time before that, they had had some pretty tough luck after they got a ride to Chicago from a forlorn trucker who picked them up at the old Coca-Cola bottling plant right next to the Boston side of the Charles River but more importantly right at the entrance to the Mass Turnpike which led all road west. Sam thought he was pretty sure the guys knew where that now long gone spot had been (Frankie had nodded his head in the affirmative) once a professional drifter he had run into out in Springfield as he was heading to Albany to see some woman told Markin that was the place to start hitching west out of Boston proper. Most of the guys who had headed out from Carver with Markin had left from there and picked up the Pike closer to Sturbridge. (Heads nodded in the affirmative.) But in those days there was a truck depot in back of that Coca-Cola plant spot and you could go and ask guys, truck drivers mostly but once in a while a guy in a big old sedan (maybe with a girl, maybe not, but never a woman, or women, without guys, not until you got to California anyway) on where they were heading. Your best bet was older guys, older truck drivers, who were tough enough for the life and  who didn’t mind “hippies, ” guys like Sam and Markin then with long hair, wispy beards, the whole regalia (laughter), since maybe his son or daughter had caught the “bug” and he wanted to get your take on what was with young people in those days so when he got home, if he ever did so he could “relate” to the kids he hardly ever saw since those kids, that wife, and those house mortgage and credit card payments had him glued to the road. Some guys just liked to have somebody in the cabin to “yeah” them while they were chewing bennies like jelly beans with black coffee chasers and yakking away about the federal regulators, what they were carrying running overweight on the scales, their no good ex-wives bleeding them for alimony, their no-good girlfriends running around with every Johnny in town while they were humping out in white line night, taxes, and the country going to hell in handbasket right before their eyes into a sullen breeze at seventy-five miles an hour.

So the guys had had the usual good luck out of Boston, getting a ride from that forlorn Yale Freight truck driver named Denver Slim carrying a big load of motors to the Windy City who was neither from Denver (Baltimore, with alimony wife, kids who didn’t know him, and the eternal mortgage and assorted debts which were going to he said drive him to an early grave) nor slim (maybe two hundred and fifty pounds of  softness although neither of them would have wanted to tackle him if got his dander up) but after Chicago it was tough going, about three rides or four to Denver, maybe a couple more outside to Steamboat Junction and then a guy in a big black Cadillac stopped them on the road out of the Junction and asked them if going to New Mexico would help, Gallup, he said. Markin in those days didn’t care how or where he landed in California as long as he got to his precious Pacific Ocean so he could talk about that old flame of his, Angelica, whom he had met after he got out of the Army while he was on the road one time down in Steubenville, Ohio, who went on the road with him for a couple of months before deciding she was not built for the nomadic road life, and whom Sam thought he never got over despite two subsequent short marriages.

Angelica had come out to see him in California when he was living in a tent up at Point Magoo a few month later to see if they could go on together and she had flipped out the first time that she, a Midwestern girl from some Podunk town in Indiana, had ever seen the ocean and almost drown in a riptide around Malibu. Markin had had to pull her out just as she was going under. Things didn’t work out but he had a great story to tell about some big thing sex thing that had when she got stoned for the first time out there and they had some Zen experience as the sun went down on the ocean out to the Japan seas. Sam could always tell when they were within about fifty miles of the Pacific, maybe more, maybe out in Reno someplace, because Markin would start on his Angelica story. Jesus, what a mad man then (and Jesus they all agreed they still missed the bastard now too).

He thought that saving Angelica was the greatest thing because as the guys knew, especially Allan, who had known Markin the longest having known him back in the third grade down in the Carver housing projects where they had both grown up. Allan had been on the beach the day Markin almost drowned himself when he was eight or nine over in Plymouth when he did some bone-head thing, grabbed a log and sailed out sea and then let go when he was too far out and some lifeguard had to go save him. Markin had that mysterious furious love-hate thing about the ocean his whole misbegotten life, and hated the idea of being too far away from the ocean always making everybody laugh about not letting him be buried in Kansas or someplace like that. (The guys had all gotten melancholy more than a few times since they reconnection that there he was buried down in some sullen grave in some old dusty Mex town far from ocean breezes.)

Sam apologized for getting off track about Angelica and the old days in the great blue-pink great American West night that Markin always called what he was searching for but Markin really didn’t care which end of the state he landed in so they had taken that big old Cadillac ride, the first time either of them had been in a Caddy, down to Gallup. It seemed to take forever though since the guy, Billy Bob somebody Sam could not remember his last name from Odessa out in the Texas night, was an insurance salesman and he stopped in about twenty towns along the way to check out the local agents and their activities. That trip, or rather that part of the trip kind of made Sam realize that deep down he was not cut out for the eternal hitchhike road, was basically a small town boy rooted to home and no longer ready to take on the monsters who were holding the young,” youth nation” Markin used to call it trying to put some glue to the ten million things everybody young was doing, sometimes at cross purposes, back from that “newer world” Markin loved to talk about. Yeah, Sam had had enough of the road by then so there was a certain tension between them as they drifted toward Gallup.

Yeah, Sam had enough of muddy, rutted, always bum-busting rutted, country back roads, enough of breathless scenic vistas and cows, enough of trees dripping sap, rain, and bugs, strange bugs, not city bugs, that was for sure, but biting frenzy worthy anyway. (Laughter.) Enough of all that to last a life-time, thank you. Enough too of Bunsen burners used to heat quicksilver coffee when they were camped out in some desolate campsite  (that instrument last seen in some explosive chemical flash-out flame out in high school chemistry class and, maybe, they have rebuilt the damn lab since then, maybe though they have left it “ as is” for an example), Coleman stoves (too small for big pots, stew worthy, simmering pots to feed hungry campers and hard, country willowing winds hard, to light) wrapped blankets (getting ever more mildewed with each wet ground experience), second-hand sweated army sleeping bags (which they had gotten not from Markin’s Vietnam army gear but as World War II surplus from Eddy’s Army and Navy store over in Plymouth and which Markin would slyly hint that his had last been in desperate need of washing after a couple of month of night exertions with Angelica, those ever laughing hands of his reaching out to her in those two to a bag days), and minute, small, no speed in throwing up, especially when rains came pouring down and they were caught out  without shelter from the storm, a metaphor maybe, pegged Army surplus pup tents too, also from Eddy’s. And enough too of granolas, oatmeals, desiccated eastern mountain stews, oregano weed, mushroomed delights, and nature in the raw. Cities, please. Large Atlantic or Pacific-splashed roar of ocean cities with life in sheltered caverns and be quick about it. Yeah, Sam had tired of the road after a couple of years running back and forth across the country, each trip seemingly with less purpose, less Sam purpose.

Sam told the others after that blast that he was sorry for ranting about all the stuff that they probably all remembered, or half-remembered about and how they all, after Markin insisted on making it his fashion statement, had the obligatory green Army surplus rucksack on one shoulder which Markin said contained all a man, “a new man,” or really an old Johnny Appleseed American primitive man needed to survive in the world of the road and  the bedroll, complete with ground cloth against the wetness and dampness if you found yourself alongside some cow pasture or some such unlikely place on the other shoulder. Lately though, as he had unburdened himself of the day to day running of his law office, Sam had been almost possessed by a certain line of thinking he was going through to take a whack at summing up a lifetime of activity. He thought in all fairness there were a million good lawyers out there, a goodly number better than he would ever be, and the world when he came through law school in the early 1970s would not have crumbled if he had not been the one million and first, had thought too that anybody of the billions of people in the world could have put two unsuccessful marriages together (although surviving that dual madness ultimately lead to Laura when she came his way in the later 1980s, a definite plus) but maybe if he had stuck it out with Markin and his dreams, hadn’t gotten tied up with those bourgeois dreams Markin kept putting holes in that had dragged at Sam’s heart back then, maybe kept that mad man in check a little, maybe had help try to turn the world upside down like Markin wanted when he got political, hell, got to be a street fighter after that Vietnam stint, he would be here with his old corner boys now, and he could tell this story that Sam was now bound to tell. Sam though also had thoughts mixed in that he did not know with Markin’s big, what did he call them (Frankie had shouted out “wanting habits,” adding Markin got it from a line in a Bessie Smith song), that’s right “wanting habits” snapped back maybe he was that doomed “half-Mick, half swamp hillbilly” that he was always talking about but that had been what Sam had been thinking about of late. [This is not the place to go about Markin’s genealogy but he had been raised by a half-crazed Irish mother who had been totally bewildered by motherhood and by the down cast of her life when she met up with certain good-looking po’ boy Marine from out into hill-billy hills of Appalachia and that division of the gene pool probably did give him reason to think he, like lot of political black guys at the time, that he was doomed.]  

After that insurance salesman left Sam and Markin off at Gallup, actually at a hobo “jungle” camp beside the Southern Pacific railroad tracks just outside of town they had stayed at that camp for a few days before heading west on Interstate 40 heading toward Los Angeles. They had had to leave that camp one night in a hurry once some ornery wino stew-bum, Blind Blinky, got an idea in his head that two good-looking (to him anyway) young boys (again to him) might make good bed companions and from what they had heard from other stew-bums if he wanted something like that he would get his way and nobody could stop him. Markin by the way always called them hobos telling Sam that some guy with the moniker Black River Blackie who was some kind of royalty in the stew-bum world of the Gallup camp told him there were three grades of stew-bums-tramps, bums, and hobos and that tramps and bums were not allowed in that camp since hobos were the kings of the drifter night. Someone else could figure out the “jungle” sociology they just wanted to get the hell out of there before they were both somebody’s sissies.   

After a couple of rides Sam and Markin had put many a mile between them and Gallup closing in on Phoenix before they stopped for a breather first getting a ride from a good old boy trucker from Alabama named Buck White who while chiding them on their Yankee-ness had been kindness itself with cigarettes, bennies, buying meals, good cheap meals too at the out of the way diners he frequented after a life-time of learning every good and bad truck stop from Boston to San Diego, but by then they really were well clear of that prairie fire nightmare and after that on to sweet winter high desert night California (still hot during the day, jesus, one hundred at Needles, although not humid, thank Christ otherwise Sam said he would have melted into the ground right there, Markin too who would sweat like a fiend the minute the weather got the least bit hot) not far from some old run down, crumbling Native American dwellings on Joshua Tree reservation that keep drawing their attention. Those sights, once Sam saw them, made him think of home for some reason, made him want to utter that oath, that Joyell fealty oath since in preparation for a previous trip she had tried to stop him saying did he want to be boy scout living in the wilderness forever. (Joyell, Sam’s first disastrous wife had threated to leave him and marry another guy, a guy from Plymouth who had a car, a steady job, and worked at the shipyard making “good money” as she would badger him with if he did not stop hitting the road every time Markin clanged his bell which helped to get him to kick the road habit. In the end she had waited for Sam but that whole set-up had been wrong about seven different ways as Markin would periodically warn him but on the trip he was fretting about her and that latest leaving threat). Buck has gone, and thanks, over to Twenty-nine Palms. (Marines watch out when guys like Buck and his tribe come through because no way did you want to tangle with him, or guys like him, young or old.)

Part of the reason for heading to Joshua Tree once they had taken the ride and the road south toward Gallup and Interstate 40 had been to connect up with a couple of guys that Markin had run into the year before, Jack and Mattie, whom Markin had told Sam about, both fellow ‘Nam vets although they were all “in country” at different times, good guys, on the hitchhike road out of Massachusetts heading to Washington, D.C. for a big anti-war Vietnam veterans action and whom he had continued to stay in contact afterward as they ambled their way across the country. Originally Markin had arranged to meet Jack and Mattie in Denver but they had already headed west to avoid the snow-blazed trails which could have occurred any time before real winter had set in. They had thereafter agreed to meet Markin in Joshua Tree if they all got there by the end of October otherwise in Los Angeles where they all were going to stay with an up and coming “new age” film director, the guy who made one of the definitive “hippie” films of the time Something Happened you can get on NetFlix now, who had a communal house set up in Topanga Canyon. (After Joshua Tree and a few misadventures around Indio they all did get to Topanga Canyon and stayed at that commune for the winter.) Markin and Sam arrived while Jack and Mattie, and a Volkswagen bus filled with the usual assortment of freaks and good-looking “chicks” (a term of art at the time, sorry), were still in a primitive campsite in Joshua Tree. For a few days the dope flowed freely, the wine maybe a little less so as in the battle between getting “high” on drugs and booze drugs usually won out, and the big kettle on the fireplace brew stew made up of who knows what that every member in good standing of “youth nation” survived on during that whole time even less, mostly eating just enough to keep the vultures away.

One of those nights, maybe the third, third night of grass, mescaline, hash, some low-grade opium, and for the first time, first time for Sam, peyote buttons Jack had gotten from some Navajos on the way out to Joshua Tree. Jack had traded a stash of grass for the buttons, bartering being one form of payment transfer during those days when the talk was rife about how once “youth nation” was in charge they were going to abolish money. Markin would rant for hours about the need to abolish money and just trade stuff you needed for stuff the other guy needed although that did not stop him from conning money out of everybody he met, especially women who gave it to him without a quarrel, that “wanting habit” thing never far from his benighted fellahin head. That night they were all sitting by this big Joshua night camp fire that somebody, “Jumping” Jones the owner of the Volkswagen bus Sam thought, kept blazing, casting weird ghost night-like shadows that just made Sam’s Joyell hunger worst. Got him thinking about how she never really did fit into the Markin-Lowell-Riley-Johnson et al campfire road trip scene even close to home. And old now well-traveled soldiers turned “hippies,” Jack (something out of a Pancho Villa recruitment poster wearing a huge sombrero and sporting a long handle-bar mustache and, in another age, the look of a good man to have beside you in a street fight) and Mattie (some Captain America easy rider poster boy brimming with all that old long gone Buck White found ugly in his America although Mattie had done two hard tours in ‘Nam), playing their new-found (at least to Sam) flute and penny whistle music mantra to set the tone.

And so there they were making that last push to the coast but not before they absorbed these Native American lands that, as it turns out, Markin, Jack, Mattie and Sam all had been interested in ever since their kid days watching cowboys and Indians on the old black and white 1950s small screen television. You know Lone Ranger, Hop-A-long Cassidy, Roy Rogers and their sidekicks’ fake, distorted, prettified Old West stuff. Stuff where the rich Native American traditions got short shrift.

Earlier on this day Sam had been talking about they had been  over to Black Rock for an Intertribal celebration, a gathering of what was left of the great, ancient warrior nations that roamed freely across the West  not all that long ago but who were now mere “cigar store” Indian characters to the public eye. (This before the great AIM movement break-out and Wounded Knee/Pine Ridge/Leonard Peltier kick ass times later in the 1970s.) The sounds, the whispering shrill canyon sounds and all the others, the sights, the colors radiant as they pulled out all the stops to bring back the old days when they ruled this West, the spirit, ah, the spirit of their own warrior shaman trances were still in their heads in front of this now blazing camp fire night. Sam was still in some shamanic-induced trance from the healing dances, from warrior tom-tom dances, and from the primal scream-like sounds as they drove away the evil spirits that gathered around them (not hard enough to drive out marauding “white devil” who had broken their hearts, if not their spirits though). Not only that but they had all started in on those peyote buttons Jack had scored (scored from those wily Navajos who used it strictly for religious purposes, and as you so did they, kind of) and the buttons had started to kick in along with the occasional hit from the old bong hash pipe (everybody laughed that old time knowing laugh when Sam said that had been strictly for medicinal purposes as well).

Just then in this dark, abyss dark, darker than Sam had ever seen  the night sky in the citified East even though it is star-filled, million star-filled, in this spitting flame-roared campfire throwing shadow night along with tormented pipe-filled dreams of Joyell he was embedded with the ghosts of ten thousand past warrior- kings and their people. And his ears didn’t deceive him,  and they didn’t, beside Jack’s flute and Mattie’s penny whistle Sam heard, and heard plainly, the muted gathering war cries of ancient drums summoning paint-faced proud, bedecked warriors to avenge their not so ancient loses, and their sorrows as well.

After more pipe-fillings that sound got louder, louder so that even Jack and Mattie seem transfixed and begin to play their own instruments louder and stronger to keep pace with the drums. Then, magically, magically it seemed anyway, Sam swore, swore on anything holy or unholy, on some sodden forebear grave, on some unborn descendent that off the campfire- reflected red, red sandstone, grey, grey sandstone, beige (beige for lack of better color description), beige sandstone canyon echo walls he saw the vague outlines of old proud, feather-bedecked, slash mark-painted Apache warriors beginning, slowly at first, to go into their ghost dance trance that he had heard after so many defeats against the blue soldiers’ guns in the late 19^th century, got them revved up for a fight. Suddenly, the four of them, three of them having seen hard combat in ‘Nam first-hand (Sam had been deferred from the military draft as the sole support of his mother and four sisters after his father died in 1965), those four, those four television-sotted Indian warriors got up and started, slowly at first so they were actually out of synch with the wall action, to move to the rhythms of the ghosts. Ay ya, ay ya, ay ya, ay ya...until they sped up to catch the real pace. After what seemed an eternity they were, Sam too, were ready, ready as hell, to go seek revenge for those white injustices.

 

But then just as quickly the flickering camp fire flame went out, or went to ember, the shadow ghost dance warriors were gone and they crumbled in exhaustion to the ground. So much for vengeance and revenge. They, after regaining some strength, all decided that they had better push on, push on hard, to the ocean. These ancient desert nights, sweet winter desert nights or not, would do them in otherwise. But just for a moment, just for a weak modern moment they, or at least Sam knew, what it was like for those ancient warriors to seek their own blue-pink great American West night.

     

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Artists’ 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 the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists/Constructivists, Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements (hell even the hide-bound Academy filled with its rules, or be damned, spoke the pious words of peace, brotherhood and the affinity of all humankind when there was sunny weather), those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society in its squalor, it creation of generations of short, nasty, brutish lives just like the philosophers predicted 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 laying 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 as 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, like Umberto Boccioni, all swirls, curves, dashes, and dangling guns as the endless charges endlessly charge, like Gustav Klimt and his endlessly detailed gold dust opulent Asiatic dreams filled with lovely matrons and high symbolism and blessed Eve women to fill the night, Adam’s night after they fled the garden, like Joan Miro and his infernal boxes, circles, spats, eyes, dibs, dabs, vaginas, and blots forever suspended in deep space for a candid world to fret through, fret through a long career, and like poor maddened rising like a phoenix in the Spartacist uprising George Grosz puncturing the nasty bourgeoisie, the big bourgeoisie the ones with the real dough and their overfed dreams stuffed with sausage, and from the bloated military and their fat-assed generals stuff with howitzers and rocket shells, like Picasso, yeah, Picasso taking the shape out of recognized human existence and reconfiguring the forms, the mesh of form to fit the new hard order, like, Braque, if only because if you put the yolk on Picasso you have to tie him to the tether too.          

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 ….           

The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

 

The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

Funny how trends get started, how one person, or a few start something and it seems like the whole world follows, or the part of the world that hears about the new dispensation anyway, the part you want to connect with. That new dispensation for my generation began back in the late 1950s, early 1960s so maybe it was when older guys started to lock-step in gray flannel suits (Mad Men, retro-cool today, okay) and before Jack and Bobby Kennedy put the whammy on the fashion and broke many a haberdasher’s heart topped off by a soft felt hat. It would be deep into the 1960s before open-necks and colors other than white for shirts worked in but by then a lot of us were strictly denims and flannel shirts or some such non-suit combination. Maybe it was when one kid goofing off threw a hard plastic circle thing around his or her waist and every kid from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon had to have one, to be tossed aside in some dank corner of the garage after a few weeks when everybody got into yo-yos or Davey Crockett coonskin caps. Or maybe, and this might be closer to the herd instinct truth, it was after Elvis exploded onto the scene and every guy from twelve to two hundred in the world had to, whether they looked right with it or not, wear their sideburns just a little longer, even if they were kind of wispy and girls laughed at you for trying to out-king the “king” who they were waiting for not you.  

But maybe it was, and this is a truth which I can testify to, noting the photograph above, when some girls, probably college girls (now called young women but then still girls no matter how old except mothers or grandmothers, go figure) having seen Joan Baez on the cover of Time (or perhaps her sister Mimi on some Mimi and Richard Farina folk album cover)got out the ironing board at home or in her dorm and tried to iron their own hair whatever condition it was in, curly, twisty, flippy, whatever  don’t hold me to hairstyles to long and straight strands. (Surely as strong as the folk minute was just then say 1962, 63, 64, they did not see the photo of Joan on some grainy Arise and Sing folk magazine cover the folk scene was too young and small then to cause such a sea-change).

Looking at that photograph now, culled from a calendar put out by the New England Folk Archive Society, made me think back to the time when I believe that I would not go out with a girl (young woman, okay) if she did not have the appropriate “hair,” in other words no bee-hive or flip thing that was the high school rage among the not folk set, actually the social butterfly, cheerleader, motorcycle mama cliques. Which may now explain why I had so few dates in high school and none from Carver High (located about thirty miles south of Boston). But no question you could almost smell the singed hair at times, and every guy I knew liked the style, liked the style if they liked Joan Baez, maybe had some dreamy desire, and that was that.                   

My old friend Sam Lowell, a high school friend who I re-connected with via the “magic” of the Internet a few years ago, told me a funny story when we met at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston one time about our friend Julie Peters who shared our love of folk music back then (and later too as we joined a few others in the folk aficionado world after the heyday of the folk minute got lost in the storm of the British invasion). He had first met her in Harvard Square one night at the Café Blanc when they had their folk night (before every night was folk night at the place when Eric Von Schmidt put the place on the map by writing Joshua Gone Barbados which he sang and which Tom Rush went big with) and they had a coffee together, That night she had her hair kind of, oh he didn’t know what they called it but he thought something like beehive or flip or something which highlighted and enhanced her long face. Sam thought she looked fine. Sam (like myself) was not then hip to the long straight hair thing) and so he kind of let it pass without any comment.

Then one night a few weeks later after they had had a couple of dates she startled him when he picked her up at her dorm at Boston University to go over the Club Blue in the Square to see Dave Van Ronk hold forth in his folk historian gravelly-voiced way. She met him at the door with the mandatory long-stranded hair which frankly made her face even longer. When Sam asked her why the change Julie declared that she could not possibly go to Harvard Square looking like somebody from some suburban high school not after seeing her idol Joan Baez (and later Judy Collins too) with that great long hair which seemed very exotic, very Spanish.

Of course he compounded his troubles by making the  serious mistake of asking if she had it done at the beauty parlor or something and she looked at him with burning hate eyes since no self-respecting folkie college girl would go to such a place where her mother would go, So she joined the crowd, Sam got used to it and after a while she did begin to look like a folkie girl (and started wearing the inevitable peasant blouses instead of those cashmere sweaters or starched shirt things she used to wear).     

By the way let’s be clear on that Julie thing with Sam back the early 1960s. She and Sam went “dutch treat” to see Dave Van Ronk at the Club Blue. Sam and Julie were thus by definition not on a heavy date, neither had been intrigued by the other enough to be more than very good friends after the first few dates but folk music was their bond. Despite persistent Julie BU dorm roommate rumors what with Sam hanging around all the time listening to her albums on the record player they had never been lovers. A few years later she mentioned that Club Blue night to Sam as they waited to see Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie with me and my companion, Laura Talbot, to see if he remembered Van Ronk’s performance and while he thought he remembered he was not sure.

He asked Julie, “Was that the night he played that haunting version of Fair and Tender Ladies with Eric Von Schmidt backing him up on the banjo?” Julie had replied yes and that she too had never forgotten that song and how the house which usually had a certain amount of chatter going on even when someone was performing had been dead silent once he started singing.

As for the long-ironed haired women in the photograph their work in that folk minute and later speaks for itself. Joan Baez worked the Bob Dylan anointed “king and queen” of the folkies routine for a while for the time the folk minute lasted. Mimi (now passed on) teamed up with her husband, Richard Farina, who was tragically killed in a motorcycle crash in the mid-1960s, to write and sing some of the most haunting ballads of those new folk time (think Birmingham Sunday). Julie Collins, now coiffured like that mother Julie was beauty parlor running away from and that is okay, still produces beautiful sounds on her concert tours. But everyone should remember, every woman from that time anyway, should remember that burnt hair, and other sorrows, and know exactly who to blame. Yeah, we have the photo.           

 

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues... Some Remembrances-The First Small Anti-War Cries-Leon Trotsky-The First Year of War (1915)
 

 

 
 
 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman  

The events leading up to World War I from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources to the supposedly eternal pledges not honored by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those war-hungry parties in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history.

Also decisive, although shrouded in obscurity early in the war as he languished in exile, was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a necessary nom de guerre held over from the hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to send one and all to the Siberian frosts for the slightest opposition. That alias moniker business not a bad idea in today’s NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the Second International although not for long as that “mailbox drop” organization went from bad to worse), architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many revolutionary experience in Russia and Europe in the 19^th century, particularly the Paris Commune which was a short-lived but decisive event for all revolutionaries after Karl Marx’s sterling stirring defense), and author of an important, important to the future communist world perspective, study on the tendencies of world imperialism, the ending of the age of progressive capitalism, and the hard fact that the then current system was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by the establishment of the socialist order.

Lenin also has a "peace" plan, a peace plan of sorts, a way out of the stinking trench warfare stalemate eating up the youth of the Eurasian landmass. Do what should have been done from the beginning, do what all the proclamations from all the beautifully-worded socialist manifestos called on the international working-class to do. Not a simple task by any means especially in that first year when almost everybody on all sides thought a little blood-letting would be good for the soul, the individual national soul, and in any case the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everybody could start producing those beautifully worded-manifestos against war again. Lenin’s hard-headed proposition: turn the bloody world war among nations into a class war to drive out the war-mongers and bring some peace to the blood-soaked lands. But that advanced thinking is merely the wave of the future as the rat and rain-infested sinkhole trenches of Europe were already in the first year a death trap for the flower of the European youth.   

The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way as did the various German-induced wars attempting to create one nation-state out of various satraps almost could not be avoided in the early 20^th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and range and the increased rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last wars. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas.

The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began the damn thing among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht, who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to give rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’s prisons. That last, that prison business the only honorable place for a socialist deputy once the bloody capitalists got their war lusts up. Voices like Rosa Luxemburg with her cryptic Junius pamphlets which brought reason into play ( she, the rose of the revolution, also honorably prison-bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and who got out of their respective places of exile just in time), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America Big Bill Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war) and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, to “club fed” in Atlanta and ran for president in 1920 on the Socialist Party ticket out of his jail cell),  were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.

Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well as the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. So imagine in 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody trenches and death.                   

Over the next period as we continue the long night of the 100^th anniversary of the start of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before the first frenzied shots were fired, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in places like Russia, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the hodge-podge colonies all over the world map, in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.     

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Leon Trotsky-The First Year of War (1915)

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Written: 1915
First Published: Originally published on 4 August 1915 in Nashe Slovo (Our Word), a Paris-based newspaper for Russian revolutionaries. The original Russian article was published in Nashe Slovo on August 4, 1915 and it appears in Volume IX of Trotsky’s Sochineniia. You can read the original Russian version here.
Source: Socialism Today Issue 180 July/August 2014
Translated: Pete Dickenson for Socialism Today 2014
Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters
Copright: Socialism Today. Republished here with their permission.

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On the first anniversary of the start of the war, LEON TROTSKY wrote this perceptive assessment of the situation, and the need for a Marxist analysis and programme. Originally published on 4 August 1915 in Nashe Slovo (Our Word), a Paris-based newspaper for Russian revolutionaries, this is the first time it has been translated into English – by Pete Dickenson.

The past year – 365 days and nights of continuous mutual extermination of the peoples – will go down in our history as a staggering testament to how deeply humanity is still imprisoned in shameful blind barbarism by its social roots.
In order to stigmatize the German Mausers, which have a bigger diameter than the Allied guns, and the German shells, which spread their suffocating stench further than those of the Quadruple Entente¹, Allied rhetoric created a special term, ‘barbarie scientifique’ or scientific barbarism. The perfect term! It is only necessary to extend it to the entire war and its socio-historical background – regardless of state and national borders. All those technical forces that created human progress moved to the business of the destruction of the cultural foundations of society and, above all, of the annihilation of mankind: this is the ‘mobilisation of industry’, which is now spoken about in all the languages of European civilization. Educated barbarism is armed with all the conquests of human genius – from Archimedes to Edison – to erase from the surface of the earth everything created by humanity collectively, by Archimedes and Edison. If the Germans stand out in this bloody, insane competition, it is only because they are more widely, systematically and efficiently organised than their mortal enemies.
As if to give the fall of mankind the most humiliating character, the war, using the latest proud technological conquest of aviation, has driven man into trenches, into dirty earthen caves, sewers, where the rulers of nature, eaten away by parasites, lying in their own filth, lie in wait for other troglodytes, covered with lice, and newspapers and politicians in various languages all say that it is precisely this that is now serving civilization. Crawling on all fours from the dark primordial swamp, humanity brought its organised mind to bear in the struggle with nature. By heroic revolutionary upheavals, it brought elements of reason to state structures, displacing blind inertia, ‘by the Grace of God’, with the idea of popular sovereignty and a parliamentary regime. But in the very foundations of its social life, in its economic organisation, humanity remains entirely in the grip of dark forces, beyond rational control, which are always threatening to spontaneously explode with accumulated contradictions and then bring them down onto the head of mankind, in the form of global catastrophes.

Colossal, shameful war

Europe, torn by capitalist development from medieval provincialism and economic inertia, in a series of revolutions and wars, created incomplete ‘national’ states, from both large and small powers, and linked them in a transient and ever-changing scheme of antagonisms, alliances and agreements. Nowhere having achieved national unity, capitalist development came into conflict with the state framework it had created, and for the last half-century sought a way out in continuous colonial plunder, leading, untypical for Europe, to an ‘armed peace’. This system, in which the ruling upper classes economically, politically and psychologically adapted themselves to the monstrous growth of militarism, gave birth to a war for world domination – the most colossal and shameful war that history has known.
The war has already involved seven of the eight great powers and threatens to involve the eighth²; in order to broaden its base, it draws in the minor powers one after the other (all the work of diplomacy now consists of this). It automatically dissolves individual subordinate aims into the mechanics of mutual debilitation, exhaustion and extermination. With the generality, formlessness and multiplicity of its aims, combining and throwing against each other all races and nationalities, all state systems and all stages of capitalist development, this war of usurpation wants to show that it is completely free from any racial or national origins, religious or political principles – it simply expresses the bare fact of the impossibility of the further coexistence of peoples and states on the basis of capitalist imperialism.
The system of alliances, as it developed after the Franco-Prussian war, was generated by a desire to create a guarantee of stability of states through a rough military balance of opposing forces. This equilibrium, demonstrated by the current ‘guerre d’usure’ (war of attrition), precludes the possibility of a fast and decisive victory of one party and makes the outcome of the war dependent on the gradual depletion of the approximately equal material and moral resources of the opponents.
On the western front, the thirteenth month of the war finds the trenches in about the same place they were in the second month. Here they have moved tens of metres in either direction – through the bodies of thousands and tens of thousands of soldiers. On the Gallipoli Peninsula, as well as on the new Austro-Italian front, the lines of trenches immediately signified lines of military hopelessness. On the Russian-Turkish border it is the same picture on a provincial scale. Only on the eastern (Russian) front, giant armies, after a series of movements in both directions, now roll back to the east onto the body of ravaged Poland, which each party promises to ‘liberate’.
In this picture, generated by the blind automatism of capitalist forces and the conscious shame of the ruling classes, there are absolutely no points of reference that, from a military point of view, would allow, in any way whatsoever, any hopes and plans to be linked with a decisive victory for either side. If only the ruling powers of Europe had as much historical good intent as bad, then they would still have been powerless by force of arms to resolve the problems that caused the war. The strategic situation in Europe gives a mechanical expression to the historical impasse, into which the capitalist world has driven itself.

International’s bloody crime

Even if the socialist parties were powerless to prevent the war in its first period, or to hold the rulers to account, if from the outset they had declined to take any responsibility for the global carnage, and the parties had used their close links to warn the people against the rulers and to denounce them, played a waiting game – in the sense of revolutionary action, counting on the inevitable turn in the mass mood – how great would now have been the authority of international socialism to the masses. Deceived by militarism, weighed down by mourning and increasing want, all the more would the masses have turned their eyes to the true shepherd of the peoples!
Look! In a condition of desperation, both groups of military powers are now grasping for every small state: Romania, Bulgaria or Greece, for the l’etat du Destin (the country of destiny), whose weight could finally tip the balance in one direction or another. What really would be a ‘make or break’ weight under these conditions is the International, the great power of international socialism, whose every word would find an ever greater echo in the minds of the masses! The liberation programme, which individual sections of the broken International are now dragging through the bloody filth in the tail of the General Staff baggage train, would become a powerful reality in an international appeal of the socialist proletariat against all the forces of the old society.
But history, even at this time, remained stepmother to the oppressed class. Its national parties incorporated into their organisations not only the initial successes of the proletariat, not only its desire for total liberation, but also all of the indecision of the oppressed class, its lack of self-confidence, its instinct for submission to the state. These parties have been passively dragged into the world catastrophe and, making a cowardly virtue of necessity, took it upon themselves to cover up an unprincipled bloody crime with the lie of liberation mythology. Arising from a half-century of world antagonisms the military catastrophe was a disaster transferred onto the edifice of the fifty year-old International. The anniversary of the war is also the anniversary of the most terrible fall of the strongest parties of the international proletariat.

The only way out

And yet we meet the bloody anniversary without any mental decline or political scepticism. Revolutionary internationalists had the inestimable advantage that they held their position in the face of the world’s greatest catastrophe, with analysis, criticism and revolutionary foresight. We renounced all the ‘national’ point-scoring issuing from the General Staff, not only those with a cheap price tag, but even those with a surcharge. We continued to see things as they are, to call them by their names and anticipate the logic of their further movement. We have seen how, in a mad kaleidoscope in front of bleeding humanity, old illusions were adopted and new programmes hastily adapted to them, they were approved and, in the maelstrom of events, failed, yielding place to new illusions and more new programmes that hurtled to the same fate, all the more exposing the truth. And the social truth is always revolutionary!
Marxism, the method of our orientation to the historical process and the instrument of our intervention in this process, is able to withstand the blows of 75mm guns, as well as the 42cm Mausers. It prevailed when the parties standing, it seemed, under its banner were shattered. Marxism is not a snapshot of working-class consciousness – it gives the laws of historical development of the working class. In its struggle for liberation the working class can be unfaithful to Marxism – by sheer force of circumstances, the analysis of which constitutes Marxism – but in betraying Marxism, the working class betrays itself. Through downfall and disappointment, through tragic disasters, arriving at new, higher forms of self-knowledge, the working class again comes to Marxism, consolidating and deepening in its consciousness its latest revolutionary conclusions.
This is the process that we have seen over the last year. The logic of the situation of the working class powerfully drives it out everywhere from under the yoke of the national bloc and – an even greater miracle! – clears out from many socialist brains the mould of possibilism. Despite their apparent success, how pathetic and contemptible seem the hasty efforts of the official parties once again to proclaim at their meetings, the revolutionary role of the states’ melinite³ and to inculcate, through multiple repetition, the slavish illusion of ‘the defence of the fatherland’, not leaving the great imperialist road!
The hopeless military situation, the parasitic greed of the ruling capitalist cliques feeding on this hopelessness, the widespread growth of armed reaction, the impoverishment of the masses and, as a result of this, a slow but steady sobering of the working class – this is a genuine reality, the further development of which will not be held back by any force in the world! In the bowels of all the parties of the International is a process, as yet only an ideological revolt, against militarism and chauvinist ideology – a process that not only saves the honour of socialism, but also indicates to the nations the only way out of the war, with its slogan ‘to the end’, this finished formulation coming up against the blind alley of ‘scientific barbarism’.
To serve this process is the highest task which now exists on our bloody and dishonoured planet!

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1. Quadruple Entente referred to the alliance of Britain, France, Russia and Japan.
2. The seven powers were Germany, Britain, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Japan and Italy. The eighth referred to was the USA.
3. A chemical used to make explosives.   
 

The Promise of a Socialist Society

(Quote of the Week)

Workers Vanguard No. 1025	31 May 2013

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Promise of a Socialist Society

(Quote of the Week)

In the selection below, Friedrich Engels makes plain how proletarian revolution opens the road to an emancipated future in which the productive powers of humanity are unleashed for the benefit of all mankind.

Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them.

Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself....

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears.... Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history—only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.

—Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878)

 

As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):

“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.” 

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!