A View From The Left-Greek Trotskyists Say: Syriza Is Class Enemy of Workers!-Down With the Imperialist EU!

Workers Vanguard No. 1068	15 May 2015

Greek Trotskyists Say: Syriza Is Class Enemy of Workers!-Down With the Imperialist EU!

 

We reprint below an article issued by our comrades of the Trotskyist Group of Greece on April 22 and distributed at May Day rallies in Athens and Thessaloniki.

 

Syriza’s January 25 election victory raised the hopes of many working people for some relief from the devastation of the economic crisis and the austerity imposed by the EU [European Union] and the IMF [International Monetary Fund]. Less than a month later, Syriza capitulated to a four-month extension of the terms of the [EU-IMF austerity] Memorandum and has reversed numerous pre-election promises. Nonetheless, many working people still hold out hope for some improvement in jobs, wages and pensions and have the perception that at least Syriza is trying to stand up to the Troika [EU, IMF and European Central Bank]. But sooner or later it will become clear that Syriza cannot fulfill its promises. This is because, as we explained in our election statement, Syriza is not only “committed to keeping Greece in the EU, which is a pledge for more hunger and joblessness, but also…does not in any way represent the interests of the working class” (“No Vote to Syriza! Vote Communist Party!” Trotskyist Group of Greece statement, 15 January [reprinted in WV No. 1060, 23 January]).

Syriza has always been committed to preserving the capitalist system and for continuing Greece’s membership in the EU and euro zone. This means submitting to the purpose of the EU, which is to maximize capitalist profit by driving down the working and living conditions of workers and the oppressed throughout all of Europe, including in imperialist countries like Germany. It also means making working people pay for the debts racked up by the capitalists and their bloodsucking banks. It is not only the imperialists, but also the Greek capitalist class who have benefited from the EU’s destruction of labor rights and imposition of austerity.

Our party, the International Communist League, has always stood in opposition to the imperialist EU and the euro—including our sections in imperialist countries like Germany, France and Britain. We understand that the EU is an unstable consortium of capitalist powers—because it is based on bourgeois nation-states—and is dominated by the imperialists, centrally Germany. The EU is therefore a union of the capitalist exploiters against the workers so that they can gain a competitive advantage over their imperialist rivals like the U.S. and Japan. For this reason, the EU cannot be reformed into a “social” Europe that serves the interests of working people, as Syriza and others claim. Down with the imperialist EU!

We gave critical electoral support to the reformist KKE [Communist Party of Greece] in the January 25 election because of our principled, class opposition to the bourgeois Syriza party and to the imperialist EU. But as our propaganda explained, we called for a vote to the KKE while sharply criticizing the KKE’s nationalist populist program, which is an obstacle to the fight for socialist revolution. We opposed any vote to Syriza as well as to any of the reformist leftists who tail it, like Antarsya. And we stand in irreconcilable opposition to this so-called “left” capitalist government. No support to the Syriza government!

Marxists give no support to any capitalist government, whether it is run by a bourgeois party like Syriza or even by a reformist workers party like the KKE. This is true on both a national and local level. In opposition to so-called Marxists who promote the idea that the workers can take over the existing state, Marx explained in The Civil War in France (1871), “The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” And as Lenin explained in The State and Revolution (1917), the working class has to “smash the bourgeois state machine” through revolution and replace it with its own class dictatorship, the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” based on organs of workers rule like soviets. In opposition to this understanding, reformists like Antarsya and others promote the illusion that this bourgeois government can be pressured to reform Greek capitalism in a socialist direction. The nationalist populist illusions promoted by the left, including the KKE, are also contrary to Marxism and Leninism because they dissolve the social power of the working class into a Greek “people,” all of whom supposedly have common national interests against the imperialists and the big monopolies.

The Leninist Struggle for Proletarian Class Independence

The precondition to the victory of the 1917 October Revolution, the world’s only successful workers revolution, was the forging of a Leninist vanguard party that fought to guard the complete political and organizational independence of the workers party from all bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political forces. As Lenin put it in a polemic against the Mensheviks: “The thinking worker knows that the most dangerous of advisers are those liberal friends of the workers who claim to be defending their interests, but are actually trying to destroy the class independence of the proletariat and its organization” (“The Liberals’ Corruption of the Workers,” 31 January 1914). The question of whose class interests a party or movement actually represents, even if it has some left rhetoric, is thus a vital question for revolutionaries.

Much of the Greek left, including the KKE, falsely refers to Syriza as a reformist or social-democratic workers party. But such parties have a working-class base and a pro-capitalist leadership. Syriza has never been rooted in the working class and openly represents the class interests of the bourgeoisie. Syriza’s base was always among the petty bourgeoisie: students, small business owners, farmers and professionals like doctors, lawyers and professors. Why does this matter? Because, unlike the proletariat, this heterogeneous section of society has no independent class interests. The upper layers of the petty bourgeoisie are linked directly to the big bourgeoisie, while its middle layers are squeezed by the big capitalists. While the petty bourgeoisie’s lower strata are often oppressed under capitalism, it does not have a direct class interest in the overthrow of capitalism and thus tends to follow the bourgeoisie in political outlook.

In capitalist society, what makes the proletariat different is its relationship to the means of production: its labor in large-scale industry is the source of the enormous profits of the capitalist class, which are derived from the exploitation of the worker who owns nothing but his labor power. This gives the proletariat the power to stop the flow of the bourgeoisie’s profits by striking. Moreover, the proletariat can only end its exploitation by destroying private ownership of the means of production—by ripping the factories, mines and banks out of the hands of the capitalists and putting them under the ownership of society as a whole: collectivization. This is why the proletariat alone has both the power and the historic interest to carry out a socialist revolution. Such a revolution would not only end class exploitation, but also lay the basis for eliminating all the different forms of capitalist oppression suffered by the masses, such as women’s, racial and national oppression. Socialist revolution would thus serve to liberate the oppressed layers of the petty bourgeoisie also.

Contrary to the myth promoted by the Greek left that a revolution will be carried out by the “people,” Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto (1848):

“Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.... The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat...they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.”

Thus, the battle to overthrow capitalism is not a battle between a revolutionary “people” and the monopolies, but between the two fundamental, antagonistic classes under capitalism: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The proletariat must seek to win oppressed layers of the petty bourgeoisie to its side in this battle. But it can only do so by fighting for a revolutionary solution to the capitalist crisis, by showing that only with the working class in power and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie can the oppression of the masses end.

Reformist Left Joins Orgy of “National Unity”

The Troika has so far blocked Syriza’s plan to give some crumbs to working people in order to stabilize the capitalist order in Greece. So Syriza has had to resort more and more to the ideology of nationalism to line up working people behind the Greek bourgeoisie. Nationalism is a bourgeois ideology maintaining the lie that workers have a shared national interest with their own capitalist rulers. Syriza pushes this poison. Not only did it give the anti-immigrant, anti-Jewish and anti-gay Independent Greeks (ANEL) the defense ministry, but from its first days in power the new government made a big point of demonstrating its nationalist hatred against Turkey—with [Minister of Defense Panos] Kammenos’ Imia [disputed islets off the Turkish coast] trip and [Prime Minister Alexis] Tsipras’ visit to Cyprus to denounce Turkish “provocations.”

Syriza’s pledge to remain in the EU was also a pledge to continue policing the borders of racist “Fortress Europe” and to keep out the desperate victims of imperialist starvation and war who risk their lives to come here from Asia, the Near East and Africa. Syriza’s pretensions that it would help relieve the plight of immigrants are completely exposed by its continuation of anti-immigrant police raids and collaboration with imperialist agencies like Frontex [EU border control agency]. The working class must fight against the Greek bourgeoisie’s efforts to divide and rule by scapegoating immigrants. We say: Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! No deportations!

Far from opposing the government’s “national unity” campaign to save Greek capitalism, much of the left has flocked to pro-government demonstrations, such as the one that took place on February 11 in Syntagma [Square, Athens]. Under slogans that echoed Tsipras’ speeches in parliament, such as “We will not be blackmailed!”, thousands gathered in demonstrations filled with Greek flags to show the imperialists that the Greek “people” supported the government in its negotiations with the Troika. But Greece’s negotiations with the Troika are about maintaining the imperialist subordination of Greece, not ending it. Syriza just wants to renegotiate the terms of oppression.

Antarsya made its illusions in Syriza’s government clear in its call for people to join the protests on February 11: “The government must immediately meet the demands of the mass movement.” Also joining the orgy of “national unity” with Syriza, the Workers Revolutionary Party (EEK) saluted the pro-government protests in February as “a proud militant response to the capitalist Troika” (“No to Imperialist Thieves’ Blackmail!” New Perspective, 15 February). The EEK falsely claims the heritage of Trotsky’s Fourth International, which from its founding stood in opposition to “popular front” alliances between workers parties and bourgeois forces. But a popular front is exactly what the EEK called for when it demanded that the bourgeois Syriza form a government together with the KKE, a reformist workers party (“The Greek People Has Shaken the World,” 3 February).

The KKE did not participate in this orgy of national unity and opposed the coalition government’s “national concord” demonstrations. But when it comes to the defense of capitalist Greece’s borders, even with a far-right Minister of National Defense in power, the KKE puts its rhetoric against national unity back into its Stalinist closet. In its 8 March Rizospastis, the KKE complains that the government is weakening Greece’s national interests against Turkey (“The Turkish Notification (NOTAM) and the Government”). This is poison for the consciousness of the working class and does nothing other than deflect the anger and the desperation of the working masses away from the real enemy, the Greek bourgeoisie, and toward the workers of neighboring countries like Turkey.

For Proletarian Internationalism!

The Syriza government has ratcheted up the campaign begging the German bourgeoisie of Auschwitz to pay billions in reparations for the horrors inflicted on the population of Greece under Nazi occupation. The Greek bourgeoisie uses this campaign to whip up nationalist hostility among Greeks against all Germans. We oppose the lie that the German “people” are collectively responsible for the crimes of the German imperialists. Germany is a class-divided society in which the capitalist rulers exploit and oppress their “own” working people, as capitalist rulers do everywhere.

For the Greek bourgeoisie to call for reparations is pure hypocrisy. A large section of the bourgeoisie collaborated with the Nazi occupiers while the other wing of the bourgeoisie allied with the “democratic” British and U.S. imperialists who butchered the revolutionary worker and peasant masses of Greece, including by using the fascist security battalions. Syriza’s campaign is a nationalist maneuver to divert attention from the bankruptcy of their “anti-austerity” politics and has nothing to do with real justice for the victims of imperialist war crimes. Such crimes include not only massacres like those in [the Greek villages of] Distomo and Kalavryta, but also the Holocaust in which most of Greece’s Jewish population was wiped out. The victims of forced labor and the families of those massacred should of course receive any financial compensation they claim.

Workers in Germany have also seen their wages slashed and living conditions undercut in the name of profitability in recent years and a staggering 12.5 million people are classified as poor there. It is toward the working class of imperialist countries like Germany that the Greek workers must look for allies in the struggle against the imperialist EU and all the exploiters. As our comrades in Germany wrote: “Class struggle in Germany as well as France in solidarity with Greek, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese workers would not only broaden their struggles against austerity but also would help workers throughout Europe to free themselves from nationalism and break from their own bourgeoisies” (“Economic Crisis Rips Europe,” WV No. 992, 9 December 2011).

To the degree that organizations on the left here call for Greece to get out of the euro zone and EU, it is from a nationalist and reformist perspective. If Greece were to exit the EU as the result of militant workers struggles, this would be an important step forward, allowing Greece to devalue its currency and helping to shake up the imperialist order in Europe. But this is not a solution in itself. As a small country, with a low level of industry and resources, Greece will always remain dependent on imperialism under capitalism. Furthermore, the economic crisis Greece is suffering is part of a worldwide economic crisis of the imperialist system. The only way out for workers and the oppressed is the struggle for socialist revolution here and internationally, including in the imperialist centers. For a Socialist United States of Europe!

The KKE’s call for Greece out of the EU is based not on internationalism, but nationalism. In opposition to a revolutionary internationalist perspective, the KKE maintains: “In Greece there exist the material conditions for socialist construction” and that such “can safeguard the satisfaction of the people’s needs” (“Programme of the KKE,” 19th Congress, April 2013). For Marxists, socialism means a society of material abundance premised on the collectivization and qualitative development of the most advanced productive forces, which are today centered in the imperialist countries. As Engels wrote in his “Principles of Communism” (1847):

“Question 19: Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone?

“Answer: No. Large-scale industry, already by creating the world market, has so linked up all the peoples of the earth, and especially the civilised peoples, that each people is dependent on what happens to another.... The communist revolution will therefore be no merely national one.... It is a worldwide revolution and will therefore be worldwide in scope.”

The KKE’s program thus rejects a fundamental premise of Marxism.

For Mass, Proletarian Mobilizations to Stop the Fascists!

By promoting reactionary Greek nationalism, Syriza and the reformists are reinforcing the ideology that nourishes the fascists. Anyone with eyes can see that the [fascist] Golden Dawn and other right-wing forces are preparing for Syriza’s failure in order to step in and be the “saviors” of the nation from the EU and from its destruction by the “left.”

If the ruined petty bourgeoisie and masses of unemployed do not see the working class fighting for a program of radical demands to end mass unemployment and poverty, they will be increasingly attracted to the “radical” solutions offered by the fascists. The fascists divert the indignation and despair of the petty bourgeoisie away from big capital and exploit the masses’ disgust with the parliamentary politics of the “left.” As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky wrote in the 1930s when the fascists were on the rise in France: “Big capital ruins the middle classes and then with the help of hired fascist demagogues incites the despairing petty bourgeois against the worker.” (Whither France?, October 1934).

This underscores the urgency for the organized workers movement to fight to stop the fascist menace before it gets any larger. Despite its anti-fascist rhetoric, the Greek left is in practice politically disarming the workers and oppressed in the fight against fascism. For example, you have the criminal passivity of the trade-union misleaders, including the KKE’s PAME union front, in response to the fascists. The historic purpose of the fascists is to destroy the organized workers movement and suppress political liberties when the capitalists can no longer govern with the help of the “democratic” machinery of the state. Tens and hundreds of thousands of workers are regularly mobilized in the streets by the unions and PAME for all kinds of demonstrations. Yet this social power is not mobilized when it counts the most—to prevent the much smaller forces of the Golden Dawn from holding their mass rallies, which serve to give the fascists the confidence to carry out bloody attacks on immigrants, leftists and gay people.

A massive, united-front show of force by the workers who have the power to shut down the capitalist flow of profits would not only send the fascists back into their holes, but would also give the workers a sense of their own power. In this way, the proletariat can demonstrate in action that it has confidence and can win over sections of the oppressed petty bourgeoisie to its side. Thousands of workers must also be organized through their unions into defense guards to protect the victims of the fascist gangs in the neighborhoods. The workers united front poses the fact that the struggle is not about “democracy” vs. fascism, but class against class. It provides a vehicle for revolutionaries to fight for leadership of the working class in struggle, and must therefore be based on the principle explained by Lenin: “March separately but strike together.” This means revolutionaries continue their polemical struggle to expose the reformists and trade-union misleaders from within the united front.

The central obstacle to a powerful, united-front struggle against the fascists is the profound illusions promoted by the left in the “democratic” capitalist state. The most explicit in promoting these illusions is the Socialist Workers Party (SEK) and its Movement Against Racism and the Fascist Threat (KEERFA), who relentlessly call for “prison for the neo-Nazi murderers.” The SEK even calls on the minister who oversees the police to “clear away the Golden Dawn enclaves that exist inside the police” (Workers’ Solidarity, 11 March). These are calls on the same capitalist system that gave birth to the fascists to stop them. As Trotsky wrote in opposition to such reformist illusions in the state:

“Suppose the police of Daladier-Frossard [French Radical and Socialist Party leaders] ‘disarm the fascists.’ Does that settle the question? And who will disarm the same police, who with the right hand will give back to the fascists what they will have taken from them with the left? The comedy of disarmament by the police will only have caused the authority of the fascists to increase as fighters against the capitalist state.”

—Whither France?

The SEK and Antarsya may talk about building a “united front” but what they mean is a class-collaborationist movement with the bourgeois Syriza. While a mass, working-class united front must include all anti-fascist workers, including those who still support Syriza, PASOK or other bourgeois parties, we do not call on these parties to join the struggle against fascism. This is because we understand that fascism is an outgrowth of the capitalist system itself and that calls on the capitalists to stop the fascists can only serve to divert workers from revolutionary struggle. The united front is a tactic for carrying out a common action around specific concrete demands—such as stopping a fascist provocation—and not an ongoing political bloc of the kind the SEK and Antarsya build.

Not “People’s Power” but Workers Power!

One justification for the KKE’s passivity in response to the fascists is the argument that the “only road to abolish fascism” is socialist revolution, which is true. But does this mean workers don’t have to defend themselves and the oppressed until then? Aren’t unemployment, women’s oppression and racism also inherent to capitalism? Should the workers not fight against these in the here and now? Should the workers allow themselves to be slaughtered by the fascists? Who will then lead the socialist revolution? The struggle against fascism today must necessarily be linked to the struggle to eliminate fascism once and for all through the overthrow of capitalism. The KKE’s refusal to fight to defend the workers movement against the fascist threat demonstrates that their program is not to organize the workers for a revolutionary seizure of power.

The KKE might say it is for “isolating” the fascists ideologically, but when they appeal to a national interest of the people, they echo the populism of the right: “Men and women of the Military and Security Forces, we call you to support the KKE, for the interest of the people, for the interest of our country” (KKE statement of April 2014 about the European elections). Didn’t the Communist Manifesto declare: “The workingmen have no country” [emphasis added]? The KKE’s nationalist appeals to the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state have nothing in common with Marxism or Leninism. The KKE’s Communist Review No. 1 (2015) contains a long article on the “bourgeois state and government” in which they endlessly quote Lenin on the oppressive nature of the state and the need to overthrow it. But these words are exposed by the KKE’s deeds. Didn’t the KKE run as an election candidate Giannis Douniadakis, a former admiral of the Greek navy and member of the Movement for National Defense (KETHA), which fights for “the patriotic orientation of the armed forces” of capitalist Greece? And hasn’t the KKE repeatedly sent delegations to show solidarity with reactionary police organizations falsely called “unions”?

Cops are not part of the workers movement. They are the hired thugs of the capitalist state, and their role is not to “protect the citizen” but to keep the bourgeoisie safe from the struggles of the proletariat. Their role is to arrest and torture immigrants, to smash picket lines, to break strikes together with scabs hired by the big and small capitalists and to defend their private property, and to suppress campus protests. This was seen on April 17 with the arrests of anarchists at the University of Athens, under the orders of Tsipras. Hands off the anarchist protesters! A prime example of the strike-breaking role of the cops was shown by their attack on the months-long strike at the steel factory in Aspropyrgos. Yet the KKE leadership has no problem offering its “solidarity” to the police organizations whose cops broke this strike—a strike in which PAME was part of the leadership! Cops, prison and security guards out of the unions!

What is really behind the KKE’s talk of “people” vs. “monopolies” is an accommodation to “small capital” vs. “big capital.” Greece has a very small industrial proletariat and correspondingly large urban petty bourgeoisie. The Greek private sector overwhelmingly consists of small enterprises, in which workers are largely not unionized. Revolutionaries should fight to win the unions to a massive campaign to organize these workers and overturn the law barring the formation of a union in workplaces of less than 21 employees. But the KKE in its “For the Self-Employed, Small Professionals, Craftsmen and Merchants—Theses of the Central Committee of the KKE” says that the party needs to organize the “self-employed with personnel,” i.e., the exploiters of these workers! This political orientation to the small exploiter is a concrete example of how the KKE dissolves the working class into the “people.”

Where the real social power for a revolutionary transformation rests in Greece is not in a broad front of the people as the KKE maintains, but in the small but militant proletariat, i.e., seamen, longshoremen, mass transit and rail workers, miners and electrical workers. This is the class that has the power to shut down production, stop the flow of profits, seize the means of production and overthrow the bourgeoisie. The relative weakness of the Greek proletariat, due to its small size, underscores the necessity to look for allies outside the country. A workers revolution in Greece would inspire support from the powerful proletariat of larger countries from Turkey to Spain to Germany.

It was the working class, and not the “people” who took power in Russia in October 1917. It was a proletarian revolution that established the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the mass of oppressed peasants, not “people’s power.” Lenin argued in “The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution” (10 April 1917), for “pouring of vinegar and bile into the sweet water of revolutionary-democratic phraseology,” “preparing and welding the elements of a consciously proletarian, Communist Party” and “curing the proletariat of the ‘general’ petty-bourgeois intoxication.” It was with such a sharp, independent class program that Lenin and Trotsky led the proletariat to power. This is the opposite of what the KKE leadership did in the 1940s in Greece when it betrayed a revolution by subordinating the workers to the Stalinist alliance with the “democratic” imperialists in World War II (see “Greece 1940s: A Revolution Betrayed,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 64, Summer 2014).

We in the ICL, genuine Leninist-Trotskyists, fought to defend the gains of the October Revolution until the end despite the Soviet Union’s degeneration under Stalinism. We unconditionally defended the Soviet Union against the forces of internal and external capitalist counterrevolution. We uniquely fought on the ground in 1989-90 in the deformed workers state of East Germany, and in 1991-92 in the Soviet Union, to stop the unfolding of capitalist counterrevolution. We called for workers political revolutions to oust the Stalinist bureaucrats and establish regimes of workers democracy as well as for the extension of revolution internationally. The KKE, in contrast, backed Gorbachev, supporting his economic reforms which opened the road to capitalism. In a lame self-criticism, the KKE admits: “The Conference of 1995 criticised the fact that our party uncritically accepted the policy of perestroika, assessing it as a reform policy which would benefit socialism” (“Resolution on Socialism,” 18th Congress, February 2009). Contrary to the KKE’s claim that it carries the flag of Red October, what it actually carries is the rotten banner of Stalinism, which dug the grave of the October Revolution.

The Fight for a Revolutionary Leadership

One of the recent issues of the KKE’s theoretical journal contains a polemic against the Workers Struggle (EA) and New Seed (NS) groupings that dishonestly associates the Trotskyist Fourth International’s 1938 founding document, popularly known as the Transitional Program, with its distortion by reformists. The KKE argues: “All the Transitional Programs are based on the direct or indirect acceptance of the position that the workers movement can—under conditions—to a decisive degree enforce its will on capitalist rule in the framework of capitalism, without the overthrow of the bourgeois state and without the power of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (Communist Review No. 1). In fact, the Transitional Program clearly states: “The strategic task of the Fourth International lies not in reforming capitalism, but in its overthrow. Its political aim is the conquest of power by the proletariat for the purpose of expropriating the bourgeoisie.” It is a cheap trick to smear Trotsky, who led the October Revolution together with Lenin, by citing the reformist politics of groups like EA, NS and Antarsya. The Transitional Program was formulated during the Great Depression and on the eve of WWII, and laid out “transitional demands, stemming 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.” This was in opposition to both the social-democratic illusions in a peaceful reform of capitalism and to the Stalinists’ popular-front alliances with bourgeois parties. The KKE rejects transitional demands because its program is reformist and it therefore does not need a “bridge” between its minimal demands like “restoring legally the minimum wage to at least 751 euros for all” and the fight for socialist revolution.

What is urgently needed today is not just to restore wages and conditions to pre-Memorandum levels but transitional demands which by their very nature cannot be met by a bourgeois society in crisis. In response to massive unemployment, especially among the youth, we demand jobs for all through a shorter workweek with no loss in pay! In a society where the minimum wage leaves the working poor to burn firewood for heat and send their children hungry to school we demand a sliding scale of wages to keep up with the actual cost of living. If these demands are “unrealistic” for the bourgeoisie, then it shows to the masses that the whole system of capitalist slavery should be overthrown.

In the struggle to defend all those ruined by the capitalist crisis, the working class must fight to organize the many unorganized workers into the unions and to defend immigrant workers, who are a vital component of the urban and rural proletariat. In opposition to Syriza’s begging for crumbs from the imperialists, we say: Repudiate the debt! Expropriate the banks! These demands provide the basis for the systematic mobilization of the masses for proletarian revolution.

The main obstacle to bringing the working class to revolutionary consciousness is not the “objective” conditions, but the opportunist character of the existing leadership of the workers movement, and in particular the KKE. What is needed is a revolutionary party like Lenin’s and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks. Such a party will lead the working class based on an understanding of who the real class enemy is and will act as a Leninist tribune of the people, reacting against any manifestation of exploitation and oppression. It will be forged through the struggle against capitalist ruin and fascist reaction. Such a party cannot be a “national” party, but must form part of one international revolutionary party, with sections in each country. As our Trotskyist forebears wrote in 1934: “As yesterday, so today, we shall continue to work with all our strength for all the fundamental theories of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, which have been tested through and through and confirmed a thousand times over and from every angle” (“For the Fourth International!” New International). It is the perspective of the TGG to fight for such a party as part of a reforged Fourth International.

Mumia Still Gravely Ill-Free Mumia Now!

Mumia Still Gravely Ill

 

The life of class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is in imminent danger. On March 30, verging on a diabetic coma, Mumia was rushed to an intensive care unit. His health has continued to deteriorate and prison officials have cruelly withheld needed medical treatment and adequate nutrition. Weeks ago, a CT scan showed abnormal lymph nodes which could indicate lymphoma.

As the Partisan Defense Committee noted in its 13 April statement (reprinted in WV No. 1066, 17 April), “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 others to do the same. Readers who want to make contributions can go to: 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-Musicians’ 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 ….           

I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With Odetta In Mind

 

 

 

They say that the blues, you know, the quintessential black musical contribution to the American songbook along with first cousin jazz that breaks you out of your depression about whatever ails you or the world, was formed down in the Mississippi muds, down in some sweat-drenched bayou, down in some woody hollow all near Mister’s plantation, mill, or store. Well they might be right in a way about how it all started in America as a coded response to Mister’s, Master’s, Captain’s wicked perverse ways back in slavery times, later back in Mister James Crow times (now too but in a different code, but the same old Mister do this and not that, do that but not this just like when old James ran the code). I do believe however they are off by several maybe more generations and off by a few thousand miles from its origins in hell-bent Africa, hell-bent when Mister’s forbears took what he thought was the measure of some poor grimy “natives” and shipped them in death slave boats and brought them to the Mississippi muds, bayous and hollows (those who survived the horrendous middle passage without being swallowed up by the unfriendly. Took peoples, proud Nubians who had created very sharp civilizations when Mister’s forbears were wondering what the hell a spoon was for when placed in their dirty clenched fingers, still wondered later how the heck to use the damn thing, and why and uprooted them whole.          

Uprooted you hear but somehow that beat, that tah, tat, tah, tah, tat, tah played on some stretched string tightened against some cabin post by young black boys kept Africa home alive. Kept it alive while women, mothers, grandmothers and once in a while despite the hard conditions some great-grandmother who nursed and taught the little ones the old home beat, made them keep the thing alive. Kept alive too Mister’s forced on them religion strange as it was, kept the low branch spirituals that mixed with blues alive in plain wood churches but kept it alive. So a few generations back black men took all that sweat, anger, angst, humiliation, and among themselves “spoke” blues on juke joint no electricity Saturday nights and sang high collar blues come Sunday morning plain wood church time.  Son House, Charley Patton, Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt and a lot of guys who went to their graves undiscovered in the sweat sultry Delta night carried on, and some sisters too, some younger sisters who heard the beat and heard the high collar Sunday spirituals. Some sisters like Odetta, big-voiced, who made lots of funny duck searching for roots white college students mainly marvel that they had heard some ancient Nubian Queen, some deep-voiced Mother Africa calling them back to the cradle of civilization.           

 

Report: Boston-Park Street Station Weekly Vigil-May 30th-Five Years In Jail Is Enough, More Than Enough- President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!

 

 

Chelsea Manning’s Five Years Of Confinement

A spirited rally on behalf of freedom for the heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning was held in Boston at the historic protest spot, Park Street Station on the Common, on May 30^th to note the fifth anniversary of her incarceration by the United States government (three plus years pre-trial and almost two on the conviction). Member of Veterans for Peace and other organizations stood in solidarity with efforts to win freedom for Private Manning via the Amnesty International/Chelsea Manning Support Network on-line petition campaign to pressure President Obama to pardon her.       

 

 

Taken into Army MP custody on May 27, 2010 and later held for months under torturous conditions at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia Chelsea Manning was tried and sentenced in a military court-martial at Fort Meade in Maryland to 35 years in August 2013 for releasing many military documents through Wikileaks about U.S. crimes in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan among other revelations. If this sentence stands she will be out in 2045 (earlier for good time, etc.) We cannot let this happen. We will not leave our sister behind.  

 

It Don't Mean A Thing If You Ain't Got That Swing-The Women Of World War II Jazz In America-

Band Of Their Own

May 30, 2015 7:43 AM ET

David Ford

Listen to the Story

Weekend Edition Saturday

6:41

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Doris Funderburk directs The Darlinettes. Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, University Libraries, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro hide caption

itoggle caption Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, University Libraries, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Doris Funderburk directs The Darlinettes.

Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, University Libraries, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

In the 1940s, swing was king, and with World War II raging, many of the best male musicians in the States were sent off to combat. That left the door open for female jazz musicians to take the stage. By then there were already several well-known female jazz bands, including Ina Ray Hutton and her Melodears and the International Sweethearts of Rhythm.
The Darlinettes were a lesser-known band formed in central North Carolina whose path to the bandstand was not an easy one.

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Turning 90 this month, Doris Funderburk Morgan's still got it when it comes to the keys. Courtesy of David Ford hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of David Ford

Turning 90 this month, Doris Funderburk Morgan's still got it when it comes to the keys.

Courtesy of David Ford

Doris Funderburk Morgan lives in a quiet suburban neighborhood in Monroe, N.C., just about 40 minutes outside of Charlotte, and not far from where she grew up.
"I had played jazz all of my life," says Morgan. "Fats Waller was one of my favorites. Art Tatum was another one, and Duke Ellington's band."
Her shiny black Yamaha baby grand sits by a sunlit window in the living room. I'm wondering to myself if the 89-year-old still plays when Morgan sits down quietly at the keyboard and answers my question.
In 1942, she enrolled as a piano and voice major in Greensboro at the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina. But the idea of playing jazz was out of the question.
"I remember in a practice hall one time I was determined I was going to play 'Honeysuckle Rose' just like Hoagy Carmichael did," Morgan says. "And he had these big hands and could play these big chords, and here I am, 16 years old with the little hands, but I tried and I tried and I banged away for hours, and all of a sudden the door flew open, and this red-faced professor of organ says, 'What do you think you are doing?!'"
That kind of pushback against white women playing jazz was commonplace back then. Morgan says she never thought about the fact that most of the musicians she admired were African-American. "I simply was so carried away with their ability, their technique, and what they had been through to get where they are," she says.
She wasn't alone. The same year Morgan arrived in Greensboro, a 20-year-old transfer student from the Eastman School of Music decided to put together a band. Trumpeter Cherry Folger named the group the Darlinettes. All of the musicians in the band had to deal with old perceptions of jazz, gender and race — particularly in the South, says Sherrie Tucker, author of Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s.
"For white women to play music that was associated with African-Americans gets at the very taboos on which the black/white color line is based, and it's very threatening," Tucker says. "When you look at Greensboro [in the] 1940s, Woman's College — all white women — that is not the image that that college wants to foster."

So, two nights a week, the Darlinettes met in secret and rehearsed in a cramped basement practice room. Drummer Jo Singletary Barbre recalls the Woman's College administration never supported the musicians.
"The big drums and the cymbals were left in the music building downstairs," Barbre says. "I carried those heavy — I don't know how I did it — but I would carry the big drum when we took a bus to go out at places. Five feet two and struggling, and my dormitory was a very long way. It was on one end of the campus and the music building was on the very last end of it."
The band's first performance was for a small, informal campus dance, and according to the school paper, "The Darlinettes could put out some hot jive and rugged boogie-woogie."
The Darlinettes performed off-campus, too, at Elks Clubs and USO dances. They arranged their own bus transportation, and on a good gig they might make $120. Take out $50 or more for bus rental, gas and food and each musician received a couple of bucks. The rest went toward purchasing new charts for the band.

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"To a swell gal with best wishes" — Jo Singletary Barbre holds a snare drum signed by her fellow Darlinettes. Courtesy of David Ford hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of David Ford

"To a swell gal with best wishes" — Jo Singletary Barbre holds a snare drum signed by her fellow Darlinettes.

Courtesy of David Ford

The Darlinettes broke up in 1953. Ten years later, Woman's College began accepting male students and became the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The school's jazz studies program director, Steve Haines, says The Darlinettes did a lot more than just entertain audiences.
"For a long time jazz music was sort of considered the red-headed stepchild in music academia," Haines says, "and really now we're finally starting to see more women playing jazz, and the Darlinettes certainly helped pave the way for that. Because of the Darlinettes, we have an artist in residency program now that's dedicated to women coming and doing clinics at our school."
When asked about what she remembers most from her four years at Woman's College, Morgan closes her eyes and thinks about it for a moment.
"The arranging and everything that I studied — I loved it," Morgan says. "And I felt like that was preparing me for something, but at the same time, when I look back now, this experience with these girls in this band and our trips and our funny adventures, that's the thing that means the most to me right now."
Morgan went on to perform at the old Charlotte Coliseum. For 46 years she played organ to pump up crowds during professional ice hockey and college basketball games. She still gets together with her old bandmate Jo Barbre to reminisce about what they both say were some of the best times of their lives. 

On The 103rd Anniversary Of The Great IWW-led Lawrence Textile Strike Of 1912-Reflections In A Wobblie Wind

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

One night Bart Webber, the now retired master print shop operator in Carver who made his mark in the business by early on in the 1960s counter-cultural explosion hiring a silkscreen artist to take advantage of craze for emblazoned posters and tee-shirts, and Frank Jackman who provided Bart with plenty of such business after taking his first trip west with the late Peter Paul Markin from up the road in North Adamsville and telling Bart of the craze for such materials out in Golden Gate San Francisco when he came back were cutting up old touches at Jack Higgin’s Sunnyvale Grille in Plymouth. Since Bart and Frank had reconnected several years before via the “magic” of the Internet when they were both seeking information about an upcoming class reunion they periodically, sometimes just the two of them, sometimes with Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, or Johnny Callahan, would gather together and discuss old times, or if in a philosophical or political mood attempt to figure out what all that meant.

Back in the 1960s, the earlier part of that decade at least neither Bart nor Frank were all that political, were not ready to slay the dragon, and had both gravitated to the musical, sexual and dope end of what was going on at the time. It was only later in the decade after one of their hang around boys from high school, quiet Billy Badger, was killed during the Vietnam War in some jungle outpost whose name they still could not pronounce correctly that they began to go to the anti-war marches and take part in various acts of civil disobedience by sitting in at draft boards, including the hometown Carver one, blocking government buildings and stopping traffic to make political points, stuff like that. They had both been arrested and held for several days in a football stadium (then RFK Stadium) during the great if doomed May Day action in Washington, D.C. in 1971 when they tried, futilely tried, along with thousands of others to shut down the government, a government which had no intention of ending the war. That dramatic action was something of a last hurrah for the pair as they both agreed afterward that something more than a symbolic street action where they were easily defeated by the massed arms of the state was necessary to change the way the business of government was done in this country.

During this short few year activist period though they had also read a lot, been caught up in left-wing reader circles, had read significant labor and left-wing history including plenty of Marxist-tinged material that was something of the flavor of the month at one point once all the student-centered actions proved to come up empty and the pair had picked their villains and heroes accordingly. And although they both forsook political activism as the seventies brought quiet on the left-wing political fronts and they went back to Carver “normal”, Bart to amp up his commercial printing operation once the silk screen craze died down in order to provide for his growing family and Frank to editorial work with a small commercial publishing house, they separately had kept up an interest on what went right and wrong back then as the years went by. So it would not be out of character at one of their gatherings for anybody to comment on almost anything political whether they were going to do anything about the matter or not.

This one night in particular Bart had gotten on his “high horse” about the odd-ball commemoration craze that had kind of snuck up on everybody with the advent of 24/7/365 media coverage of events and the need to “fill in” the time on slow news days or periods with hype, bells and whistles and the appropriate “talking heads” to explain what it meant to a candid world, or better an indifferent world. What Bart had meant by this reference was that unlike in the old days when there was a certain order to anniversary dates like five, ten, twenty-five, fifty and so on observances now there were odd-ball ones like the thirtieth this or fortieth that. The reason that Bart had brought that subject up that particular night was that he had recently seen and heard a jumble of coverage about the fortieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon [now Ho Chi Minh City] and the thirty-fifth anniversary of the release of Dave Sargent’s masterful song, Don’t Rock The Boat. Frank, in response, challenged Bart on this point although he acknowledged that the craze existed, was something of a media and social networking contrived firestorm, and that far too many events were getting odd-ball year recognition. Frank, remembering as he had to in his later jobs on the editorial staffs of publishing houses, the Verve Left Publishing Co in particular, which inclined to publish left-wing book and academic studies and to republish classics of major works on their sometimes odd-ball years, that certain events fell outside of the normal anniversary cycles they had known from childhood. To make his point Frank mentioned that the recent 144^th anniversary of the establishment of the Paris Commune in 1871, the first working-class in power government, if short-lived, in history, the upcoming 98^th anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, although since 1991 a major world working-class defeat with the demise of the Soviet Union and the 103^rd anniversary of the great IWW-led (Industrial Workers of the World, Wobblies) “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 one of the great strikes of the pre-World War One world all fit into his exceptional category.                               

Now you have to know the long-time one-upsmanship characteristic that had been a part of the relationship between Frank and Bart since early high school which the years apart had not diminished to know that once Frank created the exceptions Bart would challenge him on such assertions. [And not just that pair, the whole hang-around Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street gang, Frankie Riley in particular who had made it an art-form, on lonely girl-less, car-less, dough-less weekend nights, and almost any night in summer almost made a “religion” of one-upping even if a guy said a color was brown and another guy would “correct” him and say beige.]  Bart had no quarrel with the commemoration of the Paris Commune which in his funny now very middle-class and prosperous way said could be celebrated yearly since the leadership of that government such as it was didn’t exclude anybody but known counter-revolutionaries, spies, and thieves from participation and he had been to Paris and had taken part in the annual commemoration in the late 1970s. Bart also said he could see why there would have been an annual commemoration of the Russian Revolution while the Soviet Union existed even if he personally was still in thrall to the red scare Cold War anti-Stalinist ethos of his, his family’s, his town’s and his country’s attitudes toward that event but he would be damned why anybody would do so once the whole Potemkin Village edifice fell apart at the first serious wind in 1991. [Frank less in thrall to that Cold War ethos did an end around on Bart and reminded him that in 1972 just as they were getting wary of the political they had both attended, both had wanted to attend the fifty-fifth anniversary commemoration of the revolution put on by the Soviet-American Friendship Association which in turn brought Bart back to the point that at least there had been an actual dysfunctional society to pay homage to.] What really befuddled Bart though was about the Lawrence strike of 1912 which while important in Wobblie history and left-wing trade union history didn’t seem to merit special odd-ball anniversary status any more than the great general strikes in 1934 in Toledo, Minneapolis and San Francisco which had a couple of years before been correctly honored on their seventy-fifth anniversaries.

Needless to say despite a few hours back and forth that night, despite a few too many high-shelf whiskies consumed too quickly as they got a little hot under their respective collars Frank later when he thought about what Bart had said decided to write a little something to argue for the great strike’s inclusion in the exception category. Here is what he had to say: 

 

“Every kid who has had wanderlust, even just a starry little, little bit on his or her way to the big bad world had said “bread and roses” under his or her breathe (and not just shop-worn shop girls drawing insufficient pay to buy bread let alone roses while waiting for some immigrant young man from their respective immigrant communities to sweep them off their feet and move them into married bliss in some cozy triple-decker close to the mighty Merrimac and from there who knew where in gilded golden age America). Meaning every half-starved (brought up on baloney sandwiches, grey clumpy oatmeal, and flatulent baked beans and franks), ill-clothed (older brother hand-me-down, too big, too long, too last year or the year before fashion, worse, Mother-selected at the local Bargain Center, home to all the train wreaks of 1950s fashions), hard-scrabble kid (hustling dough here and there collecting bottles, selling newspapers trying to out-hustle the crippled “newsie” down the block, a go at the Mayfair swells caddying at the country club, pearl-diving [washing dishes], and if worse came to worse, even later on the midnight creep, hit Ma’s  pocketbook for change), memory Carver kids too, reduced to life in walking paces (no automobile, no father automobile in trade in every three years prosperous America), footsore (those raggedy-assed Thom McAn’s bought for Easter time well-worn by summer’s end after walking what seemed like half the continent), time-lost sore (self-explanatory), endless bus waiting sore (walking half that half the continent rather than hoping against hope for that privately run solo Eastern Mass to come with its surly driver), and not the speed, the “boss” hi-blown ’57 gilded cherry red Chevy speed of the 20^th century go-go (and, hell, not even close in the 21^st century speedo Audi super go-go) itching, itching like crazy, like feverish night sweats crazy, to bust out of the small, no, tiny, four-square wall “the project” existence and have a room, a big room, of his or her own (shared dream with that shop-worn shop girl, and that crippled newsie too).

Meaning also every day-dream kid doodling his or her small-sized dream away looking out at forlorn white foam-flecked, grey-granite ocean expanses (the ocean trains catering to Mayfair swells and not to pensive walk tow-headed boys), crashing, crashing if that is the right word to tepid waiting shores),flat brown-yellow, hell, beyond brown-yellow to hate all such earthen colors to some evil muck prairie home expanses (and desires not to stay put in the center of nowhere), up ice cold, ice blue, beyond blue rocky mountain high expanses and stuck(winter stuck, light jacket against snow-bound white howls). Just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck in the 1950s (or name your very own generational signifier, hell, go back to that turn of the century, 20^th century and you will still not be far off, double hell go forward to the 21^st century and if you believe the “talking heads you most certainly will not be far off) red scare, cold war, maybe we won’t be here tomorrow, one size fits all, death to be-bop non-be-bop night. Yah, just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck. What other way is there to say it?

And every kid who dreamed the dream of the great jail break-out of dark, dank, deathic bourgeois family around the square, very square, table life and unnamed, maybe un-namable, teen hormonal craziness itching, just itching that’s all. Waiting, waiting infinity waiting, kid infinity waiting, for the echo rebound be-bop middle of the night sound of mad monk rock walking daddies from far away radio planets, and an occasional momma too, to ease the pain, to show the way, hell, to dance the way away. Down the road to break out of the large four-square wall suburban existence, complete with Spot dog, and have some breathe, some asphalt highway not traveled, some Jersey turnpike of the mind not traveled, of his or her own.

Meaning also, just in case it was not mentioned before, every day-dream kid, small roomed or large, doodling, silly doodling to tell the truth, his or her dream away looking out at fetid seashores next to ocean expanses, corn-fed fields next to prairie home expanses, blasted human-handed rocks up rocky mountain high expanses and stuck. Just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck in the 1950s (oh, yah, just name your generational signifier, okay) red scare, cold war, maybe we won’t be here tomorrow, one size fits all, death to be-bop non-be-bop night. Yah, just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck. What other way is there to say it?

And every guy or gal who has been down on their luck a little. Like maybe he or she just couldn’t jump out of that “the projects” rut, couldn’t jump that hoop when somebody just a little higher up in the food chain laughed at those ill-fitted clothes, those stripped cuffed pants one size too large when black chinos, uncuffed, were called for. Or when stuffed bologna sandwiches, no mustard, had to serve to still some hunger, some ever present hunger. Or just got caught holding some wrong thing, some non-descript bauble really, or just had to sell their thing for their daily bread and got tired, no, weary, weary-tired weary, of looking at those next to ocean, prairie, rocky mountain expanses. Or, maybe, came across some wrong gee, some bad-ass drifter, grifter or midnight sifter and had to flee. Yah, crap like that happens, happens all the time in “the projects” time. And split, split in two, maybe more, split west I hope.

And every guy or gal who has slept, newspaper, crushed hat, or folded hands for a pillow, all worldly possessions in some ground found Safeway shopping bag along some torrent running river, under some hide-away bridge, off some arroyo spill, hell, anywhere not noticed and safe, minute safe, from prying, greedy evil hands. Worst, the law. Or, half-dazed smelling of public toilet soap and urinals, half-dozing on some hard shell plastic seat avoiding maddened human this way and that traffic noises and law prodding keep movings and you can’t stay heres in some wayward Winnemucca, Roseburg, Gilroy, Paseo, El Paso, Neola, the names are legion, Greyhound, Continental, Trailways bus station. Or sitting by campfires, chicken scratch firewood, flame-flecked, shadow canyon boomer, eating slop stews, olio really, in some track-side hobo jungle waiting, day and day waiting, bindle ready, for some Southern Pacific or Denver and Rio Grande bull-free freight train smoke to move on.

Hell, everybody, not just lonely hard- luck project boys, wrong, dead wrong girls, wronged, badly wronged, girls, wise guy guys who got caught short, wrong gees on the run, right gees on the run from some shadow past, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters, society boys on a spree, debutantes out for a thrill, and just plain ordinary vanilla day-dreamers who just wanted to be free from the chains of the nine to five white picket fence work forty years and get your gold watch (if that) retirement capitalist system was (and, maybe, secretly is) an old Wobblie at heart. Yah, just like one-eyed Big Bill (Haywood who loved his Nevada Jane according to the lore), Jim Cannon, the Rebel Girl (Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, later that stalwart Stalinist that every red fearing young Carver boy crawled away from), Joe Hill (executed out in the Utahs, Frank Little (ditto private posse Montana), Vincent Saint John (the “Saint” who held it all together in those tough times around World War I when it counted, and me. Yah, all the one big union boys and girls from way back, just to name a few.

Except when you need to take on the big issues, the life and death struggle to keep our unions against the capitalist onslaught to reduce us to chattel, the anti-war wars giving the self-same imperialists not one penny nor one person for their infernal wars as they deface the world, the class wars where they take no prisoners, none, then you need something more. Something more that childish child’s dreams, hobo camp freedom fireside smoke, or Rio Grande train white flume smoke. That is when day dreaming gets you cut up. That is when you need to stay in one place and fight. That is when you need more than what our beloved old free-wheeling wobblie dream could provide. And that is a fact, a hard fact, sisters and brothers.

If that coming up short against the monster back in the day doesn’t deserve full yearly recognition from one Bartlett Webber then nothing more I can say to give him the spirit of the commemoration will do it.”