A View From The Left-Capitalism Means Wage Slavery

For Class Struggle Against Poverty Wages!

Break with the Democrats! For a Workers Party!

 

Workers Vanguard No. 1067	1 May 2015

Capitalism Means Wage Slavery

For Class Struggle Against Poverty Wages!

Break with the Democrats! For a Workers Party!

While profits are booming for the rapacious U.S. capitalists, wide swaths of the working population struggle daily to survive. More than 40 percent of wage-earners make less than $15 an hour. One-quarter of the workforce depends on some form of public assistance, which itself has been slashed to the bone. One out of every five households with children is unable to put enough food on the table. The exorbitant cost of health care means that an accident or illness can plunge a family into crippling debt. People working two and three jobs to get by still cannot afford the spike in rents, driving many families into homelessness.

On April 15, rallies calling for a higher minimum wage took place across the country as part of the Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) Fight for 15 campaign. The protests had wide appeal, drawing in non-union employees from fast-food chains and other service sectors as well as unionized UPS, airport, hospital and hotel workers, many of whom also get rock-bottom wages. However, the SEIU tops’ Fight for 15 campaign is based on the lie that the way to raise wages is to lobby capitalist Democrats, like those given pride of place at the rallies, and to appeal to the supposed good conscience of the employers. To begin to address the burning needs of working people requires a completely different approach: mobilizing the power of the multiracial working class against the capitalist exploiters.

In the course of the two-year Fight for 15 campaign, the largely female and heavily black and Latino fast-food workers have demonstrated their courage and militancy. Rallying in front of their workplaces and taking to the streets, they have risked their jobs as well as arrest. The struggle of the fast-food workers has the potential to inspire broader layers of the working class to action. Food-service workers, easily replaced and dispersed among hundreds of thousands of establishments, cannot win this battle alone. It is necessary to mobilize food processing, warehouse and transportation workers, who have the potential to shut down the fast-food chains by stopping the delivery of food. The unions must fight to organize the unorganized!

In opposition to such a class-struggle perspective, the existing leadership of the unions promotes the so-called partnership of labor and capital, subordinating the needs of the working class to what is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. By chaining the unions to the class enemy, primarily through support to the Democratic Party, the trade-union bureaucracy has effectively done the dirty work of keeping class peace while yielding to the bosses’ wage-slashing attacks. In the process, they have grievously undermined the strength of the labor movement—over the last four decades, unionization in manufacturing, transportation and construction has been cut in half.

All the while, the trade-union tops have poured hundreds of millions of dollars and countless man-hours into Democratic election campaigns. In contrast to the Republicans, Democrats occasionally strike a pose as “friends of labor,” which can make them more effective in wresting concessions from workers and sticking it to the poor. For example, Bill Clinton rammed through Ronald Reagan’s dream project of “ending welfare as we know it,” forcing people to work for their benefits. That measure also aimed at undercutting the unions. Barack Obama escalated his predecessor’s attacks on public education and the teachers unions. At the April 15 rally in San Francisco, SEIU president Mary Kay Henry gushed over Hillary Clinton’s purported solidarity with the working poor—Clinton’s regard for workers and the poor can be seen in the carnage and destruction unleashed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and beyond when she was Secretary of State.

In bourgeois quarters, there is some sentiment for slightly raising the minimum wage. With an eye to the 2016 elections, Democrats have come out for miserly increases. The Wall Street Journal has reported that some retail and fast-food employers are raising wages slightly to reduce employee turnover. Liberal commentators and establishment ideologues alike complain that taxpayers are having to subsidize Wal-Mart and McDonald’s workers who are on welfare because their wages are so low. Some more far-sighted elements of the U.S. bourgeoisie also worry that they are sitting on top of a tinder pile of discontent that could be ignited by the spark of social protest.

Even if the minimum hourly wage were increased to $15, an amount higher than what Democrats are generally proposing, it would amount to only $31,000 a year, assuming a 40-hour workweek. And many employers try to avoid hiring full-time workers because they do not want to pay for benefits. Of course, any increase in the minimum wage would be welcome. But what is on offer is still poverty wages.

The drive to pauperize the working class is inherent to the capitalist system of wage slavery. The profits of the capitalist class, which owns industry and the banks, come from the exploitation of labor. On average, the wages that workers receive are equal to the amount necessary to maintain themselves and raise the next generation of toilers. Wages correspond to only a fraction of the value that labor creates during the workday. For example, a worker may produce eight hours’ worth of value but be compensated for only three of them in his wages. The other five hours create “surplus value,” the source of profit for the capitalist.

The capitalist class is constantly driven by competition to ratchet up the rate of exploitation (the ratio of surplus value to wages) by lengthening the workday, reducing wages, speeding up production, etc. By withholding their labor and cutting off the flow of profits, workers have the power to wrest better wages and working conditions from the capitalists. The level of wages at any given time is determined by the balance of forces between the working class and the bourgeoisie.

To emancipate itself, the proletariat must sweep away the system of capitalist production for profit through socialist revolution. In the 1848 Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observed:

“The bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him instead of being fed by him.”

More than 150 years later, the indictment is even more damning of the obscenely wealthy U.S. bourgeoisie, the world’s dominant imperialist power, which has unleashed untold misery on working people and the oppressed around the globe.

For a Fighting Workers Movement!

Even in auto manufacturing, which historically had high-paying union jobs, half of all production workers currently make under $15 an hour. The anti-union assault on auto workers kicked into high gear when the U.S. auto giants ceased to be competitive with their German and Japanese imperialist rivals, who had rebuilt their industrial base in the two decades after World War II. With the aim of keeping U.S. auto manufacturing competitive, the United Auto Workers (UAW) bureaucracy has for many years presided over a sharp decline in wages and working conditions.

The floodgates were opened by the 2009 bailout of the U.S. auto industry that the Obama administration engineered with the complicity of the UAW misleadership. As part of that betrayal, the union tops agreed to the slashing of wages and tens of thousands of jobs, the gutting of the retirement fund and a six-year no-strike pledge.

When the auto bosses expanded production again, adding 350,000 jobs, new-hires were brought in at half the pay of senior workers. Temp agencies have been increasingly used to undermine union protections and divide the workforce, with temporary contract workers toiling side by side with permanent employees for a fraction of the pay and no benefits. Many of these jobs are located in the open shop South, where not only U.S. companies but also German, Japanese and Korean corporations have opened plants to take advantage of low labor costs.

The struggle to unionize the South cannot be conducted on a narrowly economic basis but will have to directly confront the deep racial divide that has crippled past organizing efforts, depressing the living standards of all Southern workers. The importance of this struggle is underscored by the fact that low-wage production in the South has driven down the wages of workers more broadly—the wage and benefit gap between Midwestern and Southern workers narrowed from $7 in 2008 to $3.34 by the end of 2011.

Conditions in auto today are a clear condemnation of the UAW leadership’s class collaboration. In fact, the UAW was built through militant class struggle like the heroic 1936-37 Flint sit-down strike, which defied court injunctions and faced down brutal cop assault. Such tumultuous class battles gave rise to the CIO unions. At Ford’s River Rouge plant, union recognition was won through strike battles in 1941 that were forced to confront the racial prejudice that set white workers against their black class brothers.

The class-struggle methods that built the unions—strikes, mass pickets, plant occupations—are what is needed to secure higher wages, organize the unorganized and otherwise reverse the one-sided class war that the American bourgeoisie has been waging. The starting point must be the understanding that there is no common interest between workers and their capitalist exploiters. In the crucible of the struggles to revitalize the labor movement, a new, fighting leadership of the unions must be forged.

This task goes hand in hand with the fight to build a revolutionary internationalist workers party, a section of a reforged Fourth International—world party of socialist revolution. Such a party is needed to arm the workers with the political understanding of their capacity to liberate the working class and all the oppressed from the chains of capitalist bondage. A revolutionary workers party would champion full citizenship rights for immigrants and take up the fight against black oppression, the cornerstone of American capitalism, linking labor’s cause to the struggles of all those ground down by capitalist rule.

In order to unite unionized and unorganized workers with the unemployed, a workers party would demand jobs for all and a shorter workweek with no loss in pay! Rising food and rent costs are eating away at pay—the workers need a sliding scale of wages to keep up with the cost of living. Quality medical care, including access to abortion and contraception, must be provided for all, free at the point of service, so that health care is not dependent on employment. These demands are not contingent on the bourgeoisie’s ability to provide them—they flow from the needs of working people. As revolutionary Marxist leader Leon Trotsky wrote in the Transitional Program (1938), such demands provide a bridge starting from “today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.”

Reformism vs. Revolution

The reformists of Socialist Alternative (SAlt) have become the poster boys of the left in the fight for raising the minimum wage. In imitation of the SEIU’s Fight for 15 campaign, SAlt launched its own initiative for a $15 minimum wage, based not on class struggle but on getting state legislatures, city councils and mayors to mandate a higher wage. Rather than viewing the unions as potential organs to wage class struggle, SAlt presents them as lobbyists. In an article building for the April 15 protests, SAlt’s Ty Moore complains that “while many union leaders will demand McDonald’s and other employers pay $15, few put this same demand on city, state, and federal politicians” (15Now.org, 28 March).

SAlt’s claim to fame is its spokesman Kshama Sawant’s election to the Seattle city council in 2013, following a campaign focused on the $15 minimum wage. Sawant and her co-thinkers have hyped the subsequent passage of a Seattle minimum wage ordinance as a “historic moment.” Beginning this month, big companies will have two years to phase in the $15 minimum wage and small companies—defined as having fewer than 500 employees—will have six years. SAlt’s perspective of relying on capitalist politicians to raise wages reflects its reformist view that “socialism” can be achieved through legislative reform of the capitalist system. SAlt’s ultimate demand is to take into public ownership the largest corporations and run them under democratic control. Thus its newspaper’s “What We Stand For” column does not even mention the word revolution.

It will take a workers revolution to wrest control of the productive capacity of society from the capitalist exploiters. The capitalist state, a machine for the repression of working people and the oppressed, will be swept away and a workers state set up in its place. Socialism, a society of material abundance, cannot be achieved short of workers revolutions on an international scale that will allow the tremendous expansion of the productive forces of society, creating conditions for the disappearance of all social inequalities.

URGENT: Calls Again Needed to Save Mumia's Life! Stop the attempted murder of Mumia through medical neglect! Keep the pressure on!
HEAR Mumia’s 26 April message thanking the movement!		Please call these numbers and any other numbers you have for the Prison and the Governor. (Dialling code from UK for the USA is 001.  Pennsylvania is five hours behind London.) John Wetzel Secretary, Department of Corrections ra-crpadocsecretary@pa.gov 717-728-4109 717-728-4178 Fax 1920 Technology Pkwy, Mechanicsburg PA 17050 John Kerestes Superintendent SCI Mahanoy 570-773-2158 x8102 570-783-2008 Fax 301 Morea  Road, Frackville PA 17932 Tom Wolf PA Governor 717-787-2500 governor@PA.gov 508 Main Capitol Building, Harrisburg PA 17120 Susan McNaughton Public Information Office PA DOC Press secretary: 717-728-4025 smcnaughton@pa.gov
Mumia's Condition Grave Take Action NOW!
On Friday, April 24, Mumia Abu-Jamal was visited by his wife, Wadiya Jamal, who reported that his condition has worsened. She saw him again on April 25 and he appeared even more gravely ill.  Everyone is asked to call the prison and the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections immediately. Please continue to call on throughout this week. Mumia was released from the prison infirmary three days ago even though he was in no condition to be in general population. His request to be seen by independent medical specialists was denied by the PA Department of Corrections. Yet he is in need of 24-hour care and supervision. He is too weak and in this state he may not be able ask for help.
Please call the numbers listed.  Along with Mumia's name his prison number is AM 8335.  Call local news sources in your area that would report on this crisis. Share this email with your contact lists. Get out the information via any social media you use especially Facebook and Twitter using the hashtag #MumiaMustLive. Demand that prison officials call Mumia’s wife and his lawyer Bret Grote to discuss his condition. Demand that Mumia Abu-Jamal see a competent doctor of his choice immediately, that he be taken to the hospital for emergency care and not be left to go into a diabetic coma.
It is clear that Pennsylvania prison officials are intent on carrying out their plans to murder Mumia through medical neglect. This situation is urgent.  Every call matters.  Every action matters.  Call your friends, your neighbours. We must speak out now before it’s too late. For more information: Free Mumia, Move organization, Campaign to Bring Mumia Home, International Action Center and Mumia’s Facebook.
Circulated  by: Women of Colour Global Women’s Strike & Payday men’s network

 

 

Workers Vanguard No. 1066	17 April 2015

Medical Crisis

Mumia’s Life in Danger—Free Him Now!

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

The following statement was issued by the Partisan Defense Committee on April 13.

On March 30, class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal was rushed from the SCI Mahanoy, Pennsylvania state prison to the Schuylkill Medical Center Intensive Care Unit, verging on a diabetic coma. With consummate cruelty, prison authorities initially not only prevented his wife, Wadiya, and other family members from seeing Mumia but also refused to divulge information about his condition. Pam Africa, Mumia’s designated emergency contact, was denied visitation as well. When prison officials relented after numerous protests, Wadiya, Mumia’s son Jamal Hart and his older brother Keith were granted just 30 minutes with Mumia. They found him with an insulin drip in one arm and handcuffs on the other, barely able to sit up, shaking and in pain, his breathing labored. Wadiya described being “shocked at his condition.” On April 1, a frail Mumia was sent back to the same Mahanoy prison where the contempt and medical neglect of his jailers had brought him to the threshold of death.

It is no secret that leading government officials, not just in Pennsylvania but across the country, want Mumia dead. This latest emergency highlights that Mumia’s life is in danger every day he remains in the clutches of the state authorities that for 30 years sought his legal lynching. With the overturning of his frame-up death sentence in 2011, they are determined that Mumia’s prison cot be his deathbed.

Three months ago, Mumia reported a full-body outbreak of eczema with bloody sores and blisters. Mumia’s skin erupted in reaction to treatment by prison doctors. Since then, Mumia has lost over 50 pounds. Results of three blood tests performed in February were reportedly withheld from him. Even the most incompetent medical personnel would have recognized something was awry—but Mumia was left to waste away while his blood sugar hit the roof. Not passing up any opportunity, prison authorities disciplined Mumia for missing roll call in early January because he had fallen into a trance-like sleep induced by his condition.

The shroud that prison authorities placed over Mumia’s condition recalls the mysterious death of his comrade Phil Africa at the State Correctional Institution in Dallas, Pennsylvania, on January 10. Phil was held in total isolation in the hospital for five days, during which time his wife of 44 years, Janine, was denied the right to speak to him until two days before he died. To this day, prison officials have never revealed the cause of Phil’s death.

We have long championed freedom for Mumia, an innocent man. Now the elementary demand for adequate medical treatment requires his immediate release. Free Mumia now!

Mumia has been in the crosshairs of the capitalist state since his days as a teenage Black Panther Party spokesman in the 1960s. That enmity toward him grew in the 1970s when, as a journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless,” Mumia exposed the racist Philly police vendetta against MOVE, the largely black back-to-nature group he came to support. Mumia was framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Daniel Faulkner. Police and prosecutors manufactured evidence to convict him, including by terrorizing witnesses and concocting a fake confession two months after his arrest. Following a 1982 trial in which Mumia was denied the right to represent himself and was repeatedly ejected from the courtroom, he was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views, primarily his Black Panther membership. Federal and state courts have time and again refused to consider evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, especially the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner.

Mumia’s unwavering dedication to the cause of the oppressed can be seen in his delivering, despite his debilitated condition, a radio commentary on April 10 about the cold-blooded racist cop killing of 50-year-old black man Walter Scott by a white cop in South Carolina six days earlier. In their vendetta against Mumia, the forces of racist “law and order,” led by the Fraternal Order of Police, have fought to silence Mumia and vilify just about anyone—from union and student activists to liberal celebrities and an occasional politician—who in any way expresses support for Mumia’s rights. The same day Mumia was rushed to the hospital, hearings opened in a Pennsylvania court on his lawsuit challenging the “Revictimization Relief Act” enacted last October with the express aim of shutting down Mumia’s prison commentaries and suppressing his books.

Following an outcry in the bourgeois press, Marilyn Zuniga, a third-grade teacher in Orange, New Jersey, was suspended on April 10 without pay for the honorable act of encouraging students to send “get well” messages to Mumia. The PDC has sent a protest letter demanding Zuniga’s immediate reinstatement with no loss in pay.

Medical neglect of those incarcerated in America’s dungeons is epidemic. While the absence of care for those suffering from severe psychiatric problems has drawn some attention, most recently thanks to the torture chambers of New York City’s Rikers Island detention center, the denial of necessary medical attention to those, largely black and Latino, behind bars has been overwhelmingly ignored.

The medical neglect of those in prison hell has been exacerbated by the privatization of prison health care to penny-pinching concerns such as Corizon Health Inc., which alone covers nearly 350,000 inmates in 27 states. Corizon is the subject of numerous lawsuits, including one filed by the family of Javon Frazier, who was an inmate in a county jail in Florida. After four months of complaints of left shoulder pain, which were answered only with Tylenol, Frazier was ultimately hospitalized and diagnosed with bone cancer and his arm amputated. Frazier died just months after his release, at the age of 21.

The grotesque treatment of prisoners is exacerbated many times over for those, like Mumia, locked away for fighting against this racist capitalist order. The PDC has contributed to Mumia’s medical care, and urges union militants, fighters for black freedom and student activists to demand freedom now for Mumia Abu-Jamal. Readers who want to help defray Mumia’s expenses can make contributions at www.indiegogo.com/projects/mumia-abu-jamal-needs-medical-care-now. To correspond with Mumia, write to: Mumia Abu-Jamal, AM 8335, SCI Mahanoy, 301 Morea Road, Frackville, PA 17932.

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 ….           

In The Time Of The Second Mountain Music Revival- A Songcatcher Classic Song- "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies"-Maybelle Carter-Style

 

 

 

 

 

A YouTube film clip of a classic Song-Catcher-type song from deep in the mountains, Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. According to my sources Cecil Sharpe (a British musicologist in the manner of Francis Child with his ballads, Charles Seeger, and the Lomaxes, father and son)"discovered" the song in 1916 in Kentucky. Of course my first connection to the song had nothing to do with the mountains, or mountain origins, or so I though at the time but was heard the first time long ago in my ill-spent 1960s youth listening to a late Sunday night folk radio show on WBZ in Boston hosted by Dick Summer (who is now featured on the Tom Rush documentary No Regrets about Tom’s life in the early 1960s Boston folk scene) and hearing the late gravelly-voiced folksinger Dave Van Ronk like some latter-day Jehovah doing his version of the song. Quite a bit different from the Maybelle Carter effort here. I'll say.

You know it took a long time for me to figure out why I was drawn, seemingly out of nowhere, to the mountain music most famously brought to public, Northern public, attention by the likes of the Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, The Seegers and the Lomaxes back a couple of generations ago. The Carter Family famously arrived via a record contract in Bristol, Tennessee in the days when radio and record companies were looking for music, authentic American music to fill the air and their catalogs. The Seegers and Lomaxes went out into the sweated dusty fields, out to the Saturday night red barn dance, out to the Sunday morning praise Jehovah gathered church brethren, out to the juke joint, down to the mountain general store to grab whatever was available some of it pretty remarkable filled with fiddles, banjos and mandolins.

The thing was simplicity itself. See my father hailed from Kentucky, Hazard, Kentucky long noted in song and legend as hard coal country. When World War II came along he left to join the Marines to get the hell out of there. During his tour of duty he was stationed for a short while at the Portsmouth Naval Base and during that stay attended a USO dance held in Portland where he met my mother who had grown up in deep French-Canadian Olde Saco. Needless to say he stayed in the North, for better or worse, working the mills in Olde Saco until they closed or headed south for cheaper labor and then worked at whatever jobs he could find. All during my childhood though along with that popular music that got many mothers and fathers through the war mountain music, although I would not have called it that then filtered in the background on the family living room record player.

But here is the real “discovery,” a discovery that could only be disclosed by my parents. Early on in their marriage they had tried to go back to Hazard to see if they could make a go of it there. This was after my older brother Prescott was born and while my mother was carrying me. Apparently they stayed for several months before they left to go back to Olde Saco before I was born since I was born in Portland General Hospital. So see that damn mountain was in my DNA, was just harking to me when I got the bug. Funny, isn’t it.            

 

Mumia's condition grave: Take Action

Dateline: Friday April 24th, 8:45pm Dear friend, Mumia Abu-Jamal was seen today by his wife and his condition has worsened. He, is gravely ill.  We are asking everyone to call the prison. Right now. It may be late, but call whenever you get this.  Mumia needs 24 hour care and supervision. He can not be in this condition in general population. In this state he may not be able ask for help, he may lose consciousness. He is too weak. (He was released from the infirmary two days ago). His condtiion: He is extremely swollen in his neck, chest, legs, and his skin is worse than ever, with open sores. He was not in a wheelchair, but can only take baby steps. He is very weak. He was nodding off during the visit. He was not able to eat- he was fed with a spoon. These are symptoms that could be associated with hyper glucose levels, diabetic shock, diabetic coma, and with kidney stress and failure.  Please call these numbers, and any other numbers you have for the Prison and the Governor. Demand that Mumia Abu-Jamal see a doctor ASAP. Right Now! Demand that the prison officials call his wife Wadiya Jamal and his lawyer Bret Grote immediately. Demand that he be seen immediately, and the not be left to go into a diabetic coma.     John Kerestes, Superintendent SCI Mahanoy: 570-773-2158 x8102 | 570-783-2008 Fax | 301 Morea Road, Frackville PA 17932 Tom Wolf, PA Gvrnr: 717-787-2500 | governor@PA.gov | 508 Main Capitol Building, Harrisburg PA 17120 John Wetzel, PA DOC: 717-728-4109 | 717-728-4178 Fax | ra-contactdoc@poc.gov | 1920 Technology Pkwy, Mechanicsburg PA 17050 Susan McNaughton, DOC Press secretary 717-728-4025.  PA Doc smcnaughton@pa.gov   We need your help right now.  Please forward this far and wide. We need more phone numbers to call inside SCI Mahanoy. If you have one send them to us info@prisonradio.org. Every call matters.  Every action matters.  We need to be in the streets. Call your friends, your neighbors. Take action. freemumia.com   prisonradio.org   bringmumiahome.com Noelle Hanrahan Prison Radio   Rise For Mumia >>     Share   Tweet   Forward

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The Latest From The British Leftist Blog-Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism

 
Click below to link to the Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism blog  

http://histomatist.blogspot.com/
 

Markin comment:

While from the tenor of the articles, leftist authors featured, and other items promoted it is not clear to me that this British-centered blog is faithful to any sense of historical materialism that Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky would recognize I am always more than willing to "steal" material from the site. Or investigate leads provided there for material of interest to the radical public-whatever that seemingly dwindling public may be these days.

Of late (2014) the site of necessity had taken to publicizing more activist events particularly around the struggle to defend the Palestinian people in Gaza against the Zionist onslaught in the summer. That is to be commented. However, in the main, this site continues to promote the endless conferences on socialism, Marxism, and Trotskyism that apparently are catnip to those on the left in Britain all the while touting the latest mythical "left" labor leader who is willing to speak anywhere to the left of the Milibrands. I continue to stand willing with the original comment above about "stealing" material from the site though.      

No question since the demise of the Soviet Union as a flawed but vital counter-weight to world imperialism and the rise of the basically one-superpower world socialism, communism as poles of attraction except in spots (like South Africa or Greece) to the working and oppressed masses of the world has taken a serious hit. Have become seen something of “utopian” schemes by labor militants in the world despite the desperate situations today in many parts of the world, including America and Great Britain, which cry out to high heaven for socialist solutions.

As the weight of that demise has set in there has been a corresponding demise in the level of programmatic and theoretical understandings by those who still espouse the cause. The events and works by socialist commentators emphasized by this Histomat blog amply demonstrates the proposition that in the post- Soviet period (if not before) there has been a dramatic tendency to throw out all the experiences since the Russian Revolution of 1917 and try to begin anew as if that event never occurred. Unfortunately that meaning generally to go back to pre-World War I theories of revolutionary organization (and in some cases to forgo the necessity of revolution as if capitalism were the permanent condition of humankind). The main organizational form to face the scrap heap is Lenin’s theory, a theory many times honored more in the breech than in the observance, of the “vanguard party” of conscious revolutionary intellectuals and advanced workers working as full-time professionals as revolutionaries.           

The clearest example of this is the revival of certain pre-war theorists like the “Pope of Marxism,” Karl Kautsky, although interestingly not back to Marx and Engels of the post-1848 period. A main organization concept of Kautsky’s German Social-Democratic of which he was a leading theorist was the “party of the whole class,” a concept which denied, or muted the differences in the working class movement in the interest of numbers (numbers of votes in parliamentary elections really) that would somehow be worked out in the course of the revolution. Well life itself, with many, many examples, has shown how worthless that type of organization was when the deal went down. There are, granted, many new concepts necessary in the 21^st century to reach the masses in order to revive the socialist message with the new technology, the new urgency, and the new allies necessary to fight for socialism but the threadbare theory of the “party of the whole class” is not one of them.        

Additional Markin comment:

I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past. 
 
 

One of the great sins of Stalinism (which the latter-day Social-Democrats of various stripes have honed to a fine art as well) was to silence both internal dissent inside the party and try like hell to keep other tendencies silent outside the party. Instead of letting various positions and programs be fought out to see who had something to add to the revolutionary arsenal the “word” came down (sometimes changing overnight) and that was that. It looks to be from this great distance that the very much still Stalinized Greece Communist Party is saddled with some of those old-time attributes when there should be in the Greek situation a bubbling up of discussion and clash of programs. Else the capitalists will once again prevail in a situation where they should be sent to the dustbin of history as Leon Trotsky once said.   

 
Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on.