In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute- With Tom Rush’s No Regrets In Mind 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

No Regrets, narrated by Tom Rush and whoever else he could corral from the old Boston/Cambridge folk scene minute still around, 2014  

I know your leavin's too long over due
For far too long I've had nothing new to show to you
Goodbye dry eyes I watched your plane fade off west of the moon
It felt so strange to walk away alone

No regrets
No tears goodbye
Don't want you back
We'd only cry again
Say goodbye again

The hours that were yours echo like empty rooms
Thoughts we used to share I now keep alone
I woke last night and spoke to you
Not thinkin' you were gone
It felt so strange to lie awake alone

No regrets
No tears goodbye
Don't want you back
We'd only cry again
Say goodbye again

Our friends have tried to turn my nights to day
Strange faces in your place can't keep the ghosts away
Just beyond the darkest hour, just behind the dawn
It feels so strange to lead my life alone

No regrets
No tears goodbye
Don't want you back
We'd only cry again
Say goodbye again

A few years ago in an earlier 1960s folk minute nostalgia fit I, at the request of my old time friend, Bart Webber,  from Carver, a town about thirty miles south of Boston and close enough to have been washed by the folk minute, did some reviews of other male folk performers from that period. Bart had just seen a fragile seeming, froggy-voiced Bob Dylan in one of stages of his apparently never-ending concerts tours and had been shaken by the sight and had wondered about the fate of other such folk performers. That request turned into a series of reviews of male folk-singers entitled Not Bob Dylan (and after that, also at Bart’s  request, a series entitled Not Joan Baez based on some of the same premises and based as well on the mass media having back then declared that pair the “king and queen” of the burgeoning folk music minute scene).

That first series had asked two central questions-why did those male folk singers not challenge Dylan who as I noted the media of the day had crowned king of the folk minute for supremacy in the smoky (then, now the few remaining are mercifully smoke-free although then I smoked as heavily as any guy who though such behavior was, ah, manly) coffeehouse night and, if they had not passed on, were they still working the smoke-free church basement, homemade cookies and coffee circuit that constitutes the remnant of that folk minute even in the old hotbeds like Cambridge and Boston. Were they still singing and song-writing, that pairing of singer and writer having been becoming more prevalent, especially in the folk milieu in the wake of Bob Dylan’s word explosions back then. The days when the ground was shifting under the Tin Pan Alley kingdom.   

Here is the general format I used for asking and answering those two questions which still apply today if one is hell-bent on figuring out the characters who rose and fell during that time: 

“If I were to ask someone, in the year 2010 as I have done periodically both before and after, to name a male folk singer from the 1960s I would assume that if I were to get any answer to that question that the name would be Bob Dylan (that “getting any answer” prompted by the increasing non-recognition of the folk genre by anybody under say forty, those influenced by hip-hop, techno-music and just straight popular music). And that would be a good and appropriate choice. One can endlessly dispute whether or not Dylan was (or wanted to be since he clearly had tired of the role, or seemed to by about 1966 when he for all intents and purposes “retired” for a while prompted by a serious motorcycle accident) the voice of the Generation of ’68 (so named for the fateful events of that watershed year, especially the Democratic Convention in America in the summer of that year when the old-guard pulled the hammer down and in Paris where the smell of revolution was palpably in the air for the first time since about World War II, when those, including me, who tried to turn the world upside down to make it more livable began to feel that the movement was reaching some ebb tide) but in terms of longevity and productivity, the never-ending touring until this day and releasing of X amount of bootleg recordings, the copyrighting of every variation of every song, including traditional songs, he ever covered and the squelching of the part of the work that he has control over on YouTube he fits the bill as a known quality. However, there were a slew of other male folk singers who tried to find their niche in the folk milieu and who, like Dylan, today continue to produce work and to perform. The artist under review, Tom Rush, is one such singer/songwriter.

“The following is a question that I have been posing in reviewing the work of a number of male folk singers from the 1960s and it is certainly an appropriate question to ask of Tom Rush as well. Did they aspire to be the “king” of the genre? I do not know if Tom Rush, like his contemporary Bob Dylan, started out wanting to be the king of the hill among male folk singers but he certainly had some things going for him. A decent acoustic guitar but a very interesting (and strong baritone) voice to fit the lyrics of love, hope, and longing that he was singing about at the time, particularly the No Regrets/Rockport Sunday combination which along with Wasn’t That A Mighty Storm and Joshua Gone Barbados were staples early on. During much of this period along with his own songs he was covering other artists, particularly Joni Mitchell and her Urge For Going and The Circle Game, so it is not clear to me that he had that same Dylan drive by let’s say 1968.

As for the songs on this album I mentioned that he covered Joni Mitchell in this period. A very nice version of Urge For Going that captures the wintry, got to get out of here, imaginary that Joni was trying to evoke about things back in her Canadian homeland. And the timelessness and great lyrical sense of his No Regrets, as the Generation of ’68 sees another generational cycle starting, as is apparent now if it was not then. The covers of fellow Cambridge folk scene fixture Eric Von Schmidt on Joshua Gone Barbados and Galveston Flood are well done. As is the cover of Bukka White’s Panama Limited (although you really have to see or hear old Bukka flailing away on his old beat up National guitar to get the real thing on YouTube).”

Whether Tom Rush had the fire back then is a mute question now although in watching the documentary under review, No Regrets, in which he tells us about his life from childhood to the very recent past (2014) at some point he did lose the flaming burn down the building fire, just got tired of the road like many, many other performers and became a top-notch record producer, a “gentleman farmer,” and returned to the stage, most dramatically with his annual show Tom Rush-The Club 47 Tradition Continues held at Symphony Hall in Boston each winter. And in this documentary appropriately done under the sign of “no regrets” which tells Tom’s take on much that happened then he takes a turn, an important oral tradition turn, as folk historian. 

He takes us, even those of us who were in the whirl of some of it back then to those key moments when we were looking for something rooted, something that would make us pop in the red scare Cold War night of the early 1960s. Needless to say the legendary Club 47 in Cambridge gets plenty of attention as does his own fitful start in getting his material recorded, or rather starts, mainly walking around to every possible venue in town to get backing for record production the key to getting heard by a wider audience via the radio and to become part of the increasing number of folk music-oriented programs, the continuing struggle to this day from what he had to say once you are not a gold-studded fixture.

Other coffeehouses and other performers of the time, especially Eric Von Schmidt, another performer with a ton of talent and song-writing ability who had been on the scene very, very early on who eventually decided that his artistic career took first place, get a nod of recognition.  As does the role of key radio folk DJ Dick Summer in show-casing new work (and the folk show, picked up accidently one Sunday night when I was frustrated with the so-called rock and roll on the local AM rock station and flipped the dial of my transistor radio and heard a different sound, the sound of Dave Von Ronk, where I started to pick up my life-long folk “habit”). So if you want to remember those days when you sought refuse in the coffeehouses and church basements, sought a “cheap” date night (for the price of a couple of cups of coffee sipped slowly in front of you and your date, a shared pastry and maybe a few bucks admission or tossed into the passed-around “basket” you got away easy and if she liked the sound too, who knows what else) or, ouch, want to know why your parents are still playing Joshua’s Gone Barbados on the record player as you go out the door Saturday night to your own adventures watch this film.   

   

The Dawn Of The Bourgeois Age-The English Revolution, Warts and All

 
 

The Dawn Of The Bourgeois Age-The English Revolution, Warts and All

Today, in 2015, it may seem odd that a modern day radical would harken back to the mid-17th century to pay homage to one of those leaps in human progress that those who insist on an ever upward and onward spiral of history keep talking about, the English Revolution. However I have my own reasons, political reasons, for reflecting on that series of events this year since the English revolution (some call it under the name civil war, some deny any revolution occurred, others cringe at the thought that his or her royal highness would be subjected to the chopping block, literally and historically). One can reasonably although at a primitive level date the notion of the rise of the individual with rights and prerogatives from out of the undifferentiated subject mass of humanity in medieval times from that period. And that hard fact was progressive in itself now that we are deeply emerged in the age of the sainthood of the self. More importantly some of the basic notions about being a citizen rather than a subject date from that period although it would take a bloodier and more thorough-going revolution in France some one hundred and fifty years later to round those rights one more distinctly ( a process still going on today).      

That brings me to my main point which is that the period we live in today despite the incredible advances in science, industrial production, and mass technology in its ideas in many ways are going back to pre-English Revolution sensibilities. The late Professor Christopher Hill did yeoman’s work to inform us about this revolutionary period which saw a flourishing of science and a struggle to break from both religious superstition and flat out ignorance in everyday thought. Saw in poets like Milton and Marvell a flourishing of literature. Saw with what Weber called the rise of the capitalist ethic associated with the rise of individualistic protestant religion a struggle for new forms of social organization and productive work.

Oh sure there was plenty of push-back as always by those who had lost something in the fight but despite set-backs and ebbs a good foundation was set up. Today when we confront climate-change deniers, religious fundamentalists from yahoo born-again Christians, who will quote chapter and verse, to crazed Islamic jihadists ready to set us back to the 8^th century if they can, and those who have lost fate in some variation of the democratic principles of individual worth something has gone awry in the world body politic. So, yes, today I do not think that is odd to reflect back to the English Revolution, warts and all, for some inspiration.    

  
 
 

In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Haki Malik Abdullah, (s/n Michael Green)

 

http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html


Click on the link for more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

 

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)

 

In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck [now deceased], whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania [former] death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long -time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class- war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

 

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases here. Likewise any cases, internationally that may come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!

No Killer/No Spy Drones...

Ever since the early days of humankind's existence an argument has always been made by someone and not always by the gung-ho warriors, many times rather by some safely-ensconced desk-bound soul who was too busy to become a warrior but was more than glad to let some other mother's son do the bitch work, that with some new technology, some new strategic gee-gad, warfare, the killing on one of our own species, would become less deadly, would be more morally justified, would bring the long hoped for peace that lots of people have yacked about in the abstract until they get their war blood up. Don't believe that false bill of goods, don't believe the insane war lies from warriors, arm-chair warriors, or the merely fearful, its the same old killing machine that has gone on for eons. Killing from far way places like Nevada drawing a bee-line to the Middle East in war game rooms set up like video games except tell that to the "sorry, collateral damage, no foul because not intended" victims who got in the way. Enough said and enough of killer drones killing and spy drones spying too.  

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 ….           

In Boston Support The School Bus Drivers

Join The Struggle For Justice In Newark, New Jersey July 25th

 

Support The Boston School Bus Drivers!

 

Join The Struggle Against In New York City -Black Lives Matter

 

Stop The Killer/Spy Drones In Pennsylvania   

 

Meanwhile In Boston  

No Killer/No Spy Drones...

Ever since the early days of humankind's existence an argument has always been made by someone and not always by the gung-ho warriors, many times rather by some safely-ensconced desk-bound soul who was too busy to become a warrior but was more than glad to let some other mother's son do the bitch work, that with some new technology, some new strategic gee-gad, warfare, the killing on one of our own species, would become less deadly, would be more morally justified, would bring the long hoped for peace that lots of people have yacked about in the abstract until they get their war blood up. Don't believe that false bill of goods, don't believe the insane war lies from warriors, arm-chair warriors, or the merely fearful, its the same old killing machine that has gone on for eons. Killing from far way places like Nevada to the Middle East in war game rooms set up like video games except tell that to the "sorry, collateral damage, no foul because not intended" victims who got in the way. Enough said and enough of killer drones killing and spy drones spying too.  

 

 

Peace On The Jersey Shores-Get On Board    

 

A View From The Left-The Bombing of Black Tulsa (1921)

Workers Vanguard No. 1068 15 May 2015 TROTSKY LENIN The Bombing of Black Tulsa (Quote of the Week) On 31 May 1921, police obliterated the heart of black Tulsa, Oklahoma, dropping dynamite from airplanes that killed at least 75 people. This racist bombing, followed by the detention of thousands of black people, came after black residents had taken up arms to defend a teenager from a white lynch mob. In the face of anti-black pogroms sweeping American cities from East St. Louis to Washington, D.C., at the end of World War I, black radicals like those in the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) advocated race pride and armed self-defense against racist terror. Leaders of the ABB, which was mainly composed of West Indian immigrants, joined the early Communist Party, drawn by the liberating promise of the October 1917 proletarian revolution in Russia. Accused of inciting a “race riot” in Tulsa, the ABB replied with a defiant editorial excerpted below.   As at Washington, D.C., so at Tulsa, Okla. The entire power of the State, all of the forces of capitalist “law and order,” were turned upon the Negro in the process of “putting down” race riots that were started and most actively prosecuted by white mobs. All the deputies sworn in by the Tulsa authorities during the recent race riot were white. All the prisoners taken up and sent into concentration camps by these deputies, the Tulsa city police and the Oklahoma State militia were colored. That is the kind of justice the Negro gets in capitalist America! That is the kind of justice the Jew used to get in capitalist-Czarist Russia, until the workers of all races arose in their wrath and overthrew the capitalist-Czarist combination, and set up Soviets. Now the workers of all races get equal justice—in Russia. How long will the Negro in America continue to fall for capitalist bunk? How many more Tulsas will it take to line up the Negro where by all race interest he belongs—with the radical forces of the world that are working for the overthrow of capitalism and the dawn of a new day, a new heaven and a new earth? —“The Tulsa Outrage,” Crusader, July 1921

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.