From The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive Website- The Alba
Blog

 

 

 

 

Click below to link to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive blog page for all kinds of interesting information about that important historic grouping in the International Brigades that fought for our side, the side of the people in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39.

http://www.albavolunteer.org/category/blog/

 

 

As everybody probably knows by now who has following this blog for a time Ralph Morris and I, Sam Eaton, met down in Washington, D.C. on May Day 1971 on the football field at then RFK Stadium while being held by the D.C. police (although Ralph was picked off by a National Guard soldier who transferred him to D.C. hands as the division of labor played out that day) for having tried to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war, that war being the Vietnam War that tore our generation, our nation asunder. I had gone down to Washington that weekend before May Day with a group of radicals from Cambridge who were part of an larger affinity group which had planned to “capture” the White House and Ralph had joined a group of anti-war Vietnam veterans who had planned to surround the Pentagon, a less exciting but more possible task.

Inevitably we had been arrested well before achieving either of our objectives along with thousands of others who were outraged by that endless war and committed to shutting it down, shutting it down some damn way so don’t smirk when you read this (“endless war,” sound familiar?). Ralph had noticed me wearing a button on my shirt indicating that I was a supporter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and had asked me if I had served in Vietnam. Having been exempted from military service by a hardship deferment due to my being the sole surviving supporter of my mother and four much younger sisters after my father had died of a massive heart attack in 1965 I rather sheepishly told Ralph the story of how my best buddy, my closest “corner boy,” Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in some God forsaken village up in the Central Highlands of Vietnam and that had spurred me who had been really indifferent to the war before to get involved as an anti-war activist a couple of years before doing civil disobedience actions leading up to the big action in D.C. in 1971. Ralph that afternoon (and late into the night since we wound up being held for three days before we figured that some side exits were unguarded and scooted out of the place) had told me his story of how he had come out of the Army after serving eighteen months with a unit up in that same Central Highlands where Jeff had been blown away and had been so angry at the government for making him and his Army buddies what he called “animals” that on discharge he had lined up with VVAW (through a fellow soldier in him in whom he had kept in touch with while stationed at Fort Devens in Massachusetts before he time was up).

After many hours of talking and getting a feel for each other we thereafter joined forces, did a number of actions later over the next couple of years until the high tide of the 1960s ebbed and faded. We have remained friends throughout, although some years sporadically,   and up until 2003 with the big invasion of Iraq would “do our duty” when some anti-war or social justice issue hit us between the eyes. Since then we have been on a steady diet of fighting the endless wars the last two American governments have immersed the country in without being any closer to the end than when we started.    

After May Day 1971, and for a while after the high tide ebbed through about 1976 I think (and Ralph thinks that is about the right time frame as well) he and I would attend various study groups run by radicals and “reds” to find out about the earlier history of the left-wing movement in America and internationally to see if we could learn any lessons that might help us in our social struggles. The whole summer of 1972 was spent in one such group when I was living in a commune in Cambridge and invited Ralph to stay with me and get involved in one of the “red collective” study groups that were sprouting up then as people despaired over the old strategies and tactics that had ground us to a standstill.

One of the big events that we studied which held us in thrall, especially since neither of us were history buffs or knew much from our high school history classes was the fierce battle between the fascists and republicans in the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s. Particularly the exploits of the International Brigades and the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the 15^th Brigade that fought valiantly if forlornly on the Republican side. Many a night we would ask ourselves the question of whether we would have fought, fought honorably in Spain (assuming that the Stalinists who controlled entry, controlled the “politically reliable elements” that they vetted into the Abraham Lincoln would have let us in). We hoped we would have. As Ralph and I have been fighting the good fight against the endless wars this time around (everyone will agree that over a dozen years and counting with no end in sight qualifies for such a designation) we have taken advantage of the Internet to see what other organizations and individuals have been up to. One day when I was Googling I came up upon this Abraham Lincoln Brigade website and was intrigued by its offerings. I made some comments about it and about Spain in the 1930s on the site. Here is what I had to say (I wrote this but Ralph put in his fair share of ideas so it is a two person commentary):            

This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. Viva La Quince Brigada!  

*******

I have been interested, as a pro-Republican partisan, in the Spanish Civil War since I was in my twenties. What initially perked my interest, and remains of interest, is the passionate struggle of the Spanish working class to create its own political organization of society, its leadership of the struggle against Spanish fascism and the romance surrounding the entry of the International Brigades, particularly the American Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the 15th Brigade, into the struggle.

Underlying my interests has always been a nagging question of how that struggle could have been won by the working class. The Spanish proletariat (okay, okay working class) certainly was capable of both heroic action and the ability to create organizations that reflected its own class interests i.e. the worker militias and factory committees. Of all modern working class revolutions after the Russian revolution of 1917 Spain showed the most promise of success. Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky who had helped lead the successful October revolution and then led the military fight to defend the gains against the Whites arms in hands noted that the political class consciousness of the Spanish proletariat at that time was higher than that of the Russian proletariat in 1917. Yet it failed in Spain. Trotsky's writings on this period represent a provocative and thoughtful approach to an understanding of the causes of that failure. Moreover, with all proper historical proportions considered, his analysis has continuing value as the international working class struggles against the seemingly one-sided class war being waged by the international bourgeoisie today.

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 has been the subject of innumerable works from every possible political and military perspective possible. A fair number of such treatises, especially from those responsible for the military and political policies on the Republican side, are merely alibis for the disastrous policies that led to defeat. Trotsky's complication of articles, letters, pamphlets, etc. which were made into a volume for publication is an exception. Trotsky was actively trying to intervene in the unfolding events in order to present a program of socialist revolution that most of the active forces on the Republican side were fighting, or believed they were fighting for. Thus, Trotsky's analysis brings a breath of fresh air to the historical debate. That in the end Trotsky could not organize the necessary cadres to carry out his program or meaningfully impact the unfolding events in Spain is one of the ultimate tragedies of that revolution. Nevertheless, Trotsky had a damn good idea of what forces were acting as a roadblock to revolution. He also had a strategic conception of the road to victory. And that most definitely was not through the Popular Front.

The central question Trotsky addresses throughout the whole period under review here was the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletarian forces. That premise entailed, in short, a view that the objective conditions for the success of a socialist program for society had ripened. Nevertheless, until that time, despite several revolutionary upheavals elsewhere, the international working class had not been successful anywhere except in backward Russia. Trotsky thus argued that it was necessary to focus on the question of forging the missing element of revolutionary leadership that would assure victory or at least put up a fight to the finish.

This underlying premise was the continuation of an analysis that Trotsky developed in earnest in his struggle to fight the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the mid-1920's. The need to learn the lessons of the Russian Revolution and to extend that revolution internationally was thus not a merely a theoretical question for Trotsky. Spain, moreover, represented a struggle where the best of the various leftist forces were in confusion about how to move forward. Those forces could have profitably heeded Trotsky's advice. I further note that the question of the crisis of revolutionary leadership still remains to be resolved by the international working class.

Trotsky's polemics in that volume are highlighted by the article ‘The Lessons of Spain-Last Warning’, his definitive assessment of the Spanish situation in the wake of the defeat of the Barcelona uprising in May 1937. Those polemics center on the failure of the Party of Marxist Unification (hereafter, POUM) to provide revolutionary leadership. That party, partially created by cadre formerly associated with Trotsky in the Spanish Left Opposition, failed on virtually every count. Those conscious mistakes included, but were not limited to, the creation of an unprincipled bloc between the former Left Oppositionists and the former Right Oppositionists (Bukharinites) of Maurin to form the POUM an organization which almost consciously limited itself to organizing in vanguard Catalonia in 1935; political support to the Popular Front including entry into the government coalition by its leader; creation of its own small trade union federation instead of entry in the anarchist led-CNT; creation of its own militia units reflecting a hands-off attitude toward political struggle with other parties; and, fatally, an at best equivocal role in the Barcelona uprising of 1937.

Trotsky had no illusions about the roadblock to revolution of the policies carried out by the old-time Anarchist, Socialist and Communist Parties. Unfortunately the POUM did. Moreover, despite being the most honest revolutionary party in Spain it failed to keep up an intransigent struggle to push the revolution forward. The Trotsky - Andreas Nin (key leader of the POUM and former Left Oppositionist) correspondence in the Appendix makes that problem painfully clear.

The most compelling example of this failure - As a result of the failure of the Communist Party of Germany to oppose the rise of Hitler in 1933 and the subsequent decapitation and the defeat of the Austrian working class in 1934 the European workers, especially the younger workers, of the traditional Socialist Parties started to move left. Trotsky observed this situation and told his supporters to intersect that development by an entry, called the ‘French turn,’ into those parties. Nin and the Spanish Left Opposition, and later the POUM failed to do that. As a result the Socialist Party youth were recruited to the Communist Party en masse. This accretion formed the basis for its expansion as a party and the key cadre of its notorious security apparatus that would, after the Barcelona uprising, suppress the more left-wing organizations like the POUM, the left-anarchists around Durrutti and so on. For more such examples of the results of the crisis of leadership in the Spanish Revolution read this book which is available on-line at the Leon Trotsky Archives section of the Marxist Internet Archives for the year 1939.

"Viva La Quince Brigada"- The Abraham Lincoln Battalion In The Spanish Civil War (2006)

BOOK REVIEW

THE ODYSSEY OF THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE: AMERICANS IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, Peter N. Carroll, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1994.
I have been interested, as a pro-Republican partisan, in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 since I was in my twenties. My first paper for a study group presentation sponsored by one of the “red collectives” that were sprouting forth in the early 1970s as disoriented and disheartened radicals and “reds” were seriously and studiously searching for ways to fight the American monster government after years of failure was on this subject. What initially perked my interest, and remains of interest, is the passionate struggle of the Spanish working class to create its own political organization of society, its leadership of the struggle against Spanish fascism and the romance surrounding the entry of the International Brigades, particularly the American Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the 15th Brigade, into the struggle.

Underlying my interests has always been a nagging question of how that struggle could have been won by the working class. The Spanish proletariat certainly was capable of both heroic action and the ability to create organizations that reflected its own class interests i.e. the worker militias and factory committees. Of all modern working class uprisings after the Russian revolution Spain showed the most promise of success. Russian Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky noted in one of his writings on Spain that the Spanish proletariat at the start of its revolutionary period had a higher political consciousness than the Russian proletariat in 1917. That calls into question the strategies put forth by the parties of the Popular Front, including the Spanish Communist Party- defeat Franco first, and then make the social transformation of society. Mr. Carroll’s book while not directly addressing that issue nevertheless demonstrates through the story of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion how the foreign policy of the Soviet Union and through it the policy of the Communist International in calling for international brigades to fight in Spain aided in the defeat of that promising revolution.

Mr. Carroll chronicles anecdotally how individual militants were recruited, transported, fought and died as ‘premature anti-fascists’ in that struggle. No militant today, or ever, can deny the heroic qualities of the volunteers and their commitment to defeat fascism- the number one issue for militants of that generation-despite the fatal policy of the various party leaderships. Such individuals were desperately needed then, as now, if revolutionary struggle is to succeed. However, to truly honor their sacrifice we must learn the lessons of that defeat through mistaken strategy as we fight today. Interestingly, as chronicled here, and elsewhere in the memoirs of some veterans, many of the surviving militants of that struggle continued to believe that it was necessary to defeat Franco first, and then fight for socialism. This was most dramatically evoked by the Lincolns' negative response to the Barcelona uprising of 1937-the last time a flat out fight for leadership of the revolution could have galvanized the demoralized workers and peasants for a desperate struggle against Franco.

Probably the most important part of Mr. Carroll’s book is tracing the trials and tribulations of the volunteers after their withdrawal from Spain in late 1938. Their organization-the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade- was constantly harassed and monitored by the United States government for many years as a Communist “front” group. Individuals also faced prosecution and discrimination for their past association with the Brigades. He also traces the aging and death of that cadre. In short, this book is a labor of love for the subjects of his treatment. Whatever else this writer certainly does not disagree with that purpose. If you want to read about what a heroic part of the vanguard of the international working class looked like in the 1930’s, look here. Viva la Quince Brigada!!

Hey, I’m Just Killing The Blues-With Rolly Sally’s Killing The Blues In Mind

Hey, I’m Just Killing The Blues-With Rolly Sally’s Killing The Blues In Mind

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Sam Lowell never drew a break, never drew a blessed break with his woman relationships. Not flirtations; Christ, even in elementary school he had had his heart broken by some young thing in blonde hair and sun dress who asked him to kiss her, didn’t like it and with home to tell her mother and then she his mother that he had made an unwanted advance, took a beating for his mother another time when to impress some Mayfair swell new girl from the new all the rage ranch house development up the street at a school square dance he cut up his one of only two pairs of pants and afterward she laughed at him like some silly rube, he took the beating stoically though; not one-night-stands which usually cost him at least a hang-over and a lot of dough plying young women with liquor or dope or both before he or she snuck out the door, provide for free fear of a dose and if you don’t know what means then move, or more scarily one time pregnancy when the young woman didn’t like “rubbers” and though her cycle was okay and it had been a close thing and some sweated days; not flings, although started with light-hearted intentions neither party looking for anything but shelter from the storm and he became the fall guy when she decided that that temporary shelter should be permanent or he took the fall hard; and not upswing affairs (he liked to use that word “affair” since as a boy, a Catholic boy growing in the 1950s, around the house his mother rather than using the “s” word would said that so and so was having an “affair” and he thought it was just some boy and girl kissing thing, you know chaste, until he found out better when he entered the world of, well, affairs).

Certainly not in marriage or rather marriages, two, one of which had been something like a “shot-gun” wedding when he/she thought she was pregnant so he could avoid the Army as a father in the Vietnam War days at a time when they were not drafting fathers and she turned out to not be so (he got deferred on other grounds) but dear Catholic parents on her side insisted on the virginal ceremony but that one despite two kids, good kids too although he was always like his own father rather distant from both broods of children, was not made in heaven once she took up with the lawyer she worked for and the other had been a marriage of convenience which again despite two kids, ditto on the good and distant part, dissolved into the night when he had proven to be less a good provider than her high-roller dreams could handle. Two marriages and two divorces which he was still paying for.

So somebody, somebody like Jimmy Jenkins, who had grown up with Sam in the Acre section of Carver, the tough hard knocks section married to his high school sweetheart, Betsy, going on forty something years could not understand Sam’s tangled relationships with women, could not understand why he when they met occasionally for a few beers at Henning’s Bar and Grille in downtown Carver constantly said he was just “killing the blues.” (The Acre known by one and all locally as the place where the working poor, the “boggers” who worked in season in the cranberry bogs for which the town was famous met the dregs of society in the town “projects” and a place to be avoided at all costs by polite society, at least that is what Sam’s mother told him when he asked why his friends from school would not come to his house and he had to go to theirs to play)        

Maybe Sam was just born under an unlucky star but maybe a look at his most recent “affair” which ended up once again in the dumps might shed some light on why he lived under the star of that strange expression.

Jimmy and Sam, who now lived in an apartment in Plymouth the next town over from Carver and thus close-by (previously his second wife, Laura, the big high-roller dreamer gone bust had insisted that they live in high-end Cambridge away from the “boggers” as she sneeringly called them, she a daughter of a Andover cop for Christ sake) since his last divorce about three years before, had been getting together more frequently in the recent past since that had both been anticipating their fiftieth class reunion, the Carver High Class of 1963, coming up that fall. Bart, as a member in good standing of previous reunion committees and one of the few with Betsy standing who still resided in the town, was once again on the committee and having rekindled his relationship with Sam tried to recruit him to go to the reunion. Bart and Betsy were hardly new to such organizing operations since they met in ninth grade at the Freshman Mixer committee meeting which got that class acclimated to the big school after the shelter of junior high school and had fallen in love for eternity shortly thereafter. Somehow Bart and Betsy savored providing the party favors, mugs, nostalgia paraphernalia and oldies but goodies songs such greying class reunions entailed. He had succeeded since Sam, who had never gone to any previous reunions, was curious about the old crowd and what had happened to them. Previously, alienated and estranged from his own family for many years, he refused to go “back home” in case he ran into anybody from the clan but after a final brief reconciliation shortly before his parents died after the fortieth class reunion he was as ease on that question.

The night of the reunion Sam ran into Melinda Loring, whom Sam had been after all through high school with no success. See Melinda, smart, pretty (and long and slender with well-turned legs and auburn hair as was his preference in those days) and ambitious would not give the “boggers” from the other side of town the time of day then. That turned out to be wrong, or the wrong reason that he got nowhere. As it turned out once they talked that reunion night she would not have given him the time of day since her hard-bitten Protestant parents would not allow her to date a Catholic boy, and she followed her parents’ wishes and in fact had agreed with that discussion. She knew that Sam was a Catholic having seen him coming out of the Sacred Heart church one Sunday morning on her way to her own church service. Sam back then had asked around, asked her friend John “Ducky” Drake who was her neighbor specifically, as guys and gals did back in the 1960s and maybe they still do to get “intelligence,” on the school grapevine network that was so up-to-date it would put the CIA and NSA to shame to see if she was “going steady” or had somebody’s class ring on a chain around her neck which amounted to the same thing. Ducky told him flat out that “boggers” need not apply. Final. As he was to find out shortly later that evening that reason was not true when Melinda told him the unsavory real reason, although Ducky, RIP, was not responsible for that error, in reality that “ice queen” demeanor Melinda put on in public back then was just a defense against an awful home life, worse than Sam’s in lots of ways but that hardy did him any good back then.

That night though perhaps having been through a few of life’s travails herself since then (she twice married and divorced twice with no children by her preference  that number two as Sam mentioned to Jimmy later seemed to be the fate of their generation, what he called the Generation of ’68 after the turbulent year that had a deep effect on many in their generation in the love department) Melinda and Sam struck up an interesting conversation. The pair in the process of some AARP-ten tips for meeting new plus sixties flirting while sitting at the bar, after more conversation seemingly having beside the two divorces apiece a lot in common, she an owner of a small high tech company and he owner of the town’s last remaining independent print shop (since sold to a large print imaging company once Sam realized that he could no longer keep up with the rapid changes in the industry and he was ready to retire in any case). They also had common musical interest since both had been smitten by the folk music revival minute that washed through the early 1960s after their high school days (particularly jug band music so esoteric a common interest that seemed to portent some “written in the stars” expectations) and kept their interests even after it then ebbed with the subsequent British invasion and the day of acid-etched rock, reading (historical novels), and movies (black and white film noir classics like Out Of The Past and The Big Sleep).  Both liked to travel although not too far and were emphatically not interested in getting married again (under something like the principle of “three strikes and you are out”).

So naturally based on these slender reeds they began what was a stormy if short affair. An affair that had Sam reeling behind the idea in his mind that 16 or 66 he could not do anything but sing the blues with women when the affair, or his part, began to unravel a couple of months later. Who knows how things began to turn down, to get Sam thinking he was “killing the blues” (a feeling that could work two ways, one while in the relationship when things got dicey and he was waiting for the ax to fall and the other when it was over whether of his doing or not, or of both when he would feel something like ennui).  Maybe it was when Melinda, who seemed to have been grasping for something in the relationship earlier that Sam, had their futures all mapped out unto the nth degree when they had only just began their affair (she hated that word, gave him more than his share of grief when he used it innocently to define what they had even after he had told her his sense of the term going back to ancient now abandoned Catholic mother sensibilities). She had them retiring to California, (Florida, Puerto Rico and Cancun were also in the mix as possibilities complete with well-researched brochures by here including costs about all those locations), had them living in her house until then, had them sharing expenses from the get-go, had trips in the meantime all planned out, stuff like that, woman stuff and not bad in itself but Sam was not even sure that he even liked Melinda all that much at that point, or enough to break up his own personal household such as it was. He just wanted to go slow, let things take their proper course. And maybe they would have if she had let up a bit.

All Sam knew, after the first few weeks of something like a welcome calmness in his life, when he finally came under the gun of Melinda’s “wants”’ he began getting a feeling a feeling that he had gotten before so it was not something that took him by surprise that he was “happy” whenever he left her house after a couple of days (she “refused” to stay at his apartment calling it small and dingy), but mixed in with that “happy” was the seemingly inevitable feeling that he was marking time, just killing the blues after a couple of months of calm before the storm. So as such things go at some point thereafter, after he got the “moving on” feeling he began a campaign to break up the relationship. Sent Melinda an unwise e-mail to that effect stating that he was not sure how he felt about her, about her plans and about what he wanted to do in the future. That slight questioning got him the “door.” She summarily wrote him off, wrote him out of her life. They had met at a restaurant one evening in Hingham to discuss the matter and the scene had been stormy with her walking out after he took offense at some remark that she made. As he watched from the parking lot as he headed to his own the rear lights of her car go off into the night Sam though now the “killing the blues” phase after losing her would set in. Set in for a long time since he had begun to doubt whether he had done the right thing, whether he didn’t have more feelings for her than he had expressed. 

Yeah, Jimmy thought to himself after hearing Sam’s sad tale old Sam never drew a blessed break with women.        

'Cocaine Habit Blues' THE MEMPHIS JUG BAND (1929) Memphis Blues Legend

The Memphis Jug Band - K.C. Moan

No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power-The Struggle Continues

No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power-The Struggle Continues 
 

 

 
Late one night in 2014 Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton had been sitting at a bar in Boston, Jack Higgin’s Grille, down a few streets from the financial district toward Quincy Market talking about various experiences, political experiences in their lives as they were wont to do these days since they were both mostly retired. Ralph having turned over the day to day operation of his specialty electronics shop in Troy, New York to his youngest son as he in his turn had taken over from his father Ralph, Sr. when he had retired in 1991 (the eldest son, Ralph III, had opted for a career as a software engineer for General Electric still a force in the local economy although not nearly as powerful as when Ralph was young and it had been the largest private employer in the Tri-City area) and Sam had sold off his small print shop business in Carver down about thirty miles south of Boston to a large copying company when he had finally seen a few years before the writing on the wall that the day of the small specialty print shop specializing in silk-screening and other odd job methods of reproduction was done for in the computerized color world.

So they had time for remembrances back to the days in the early 1970s when they had first met and had caught the tail-end of the big splash 1960s political and social explosion that stirred significant elements of their generation, “the generation of ’68” so-called by Sam’s friend from New York City Fritz Jasper although neither of them had been involved in any of the cataclysmic events that had occurred in America (and the world) that year. Sam had that year fitfully been trying to start his own small printing business after working for a few years for Mr. Snyder the premier printer in town and he was knee-deep in trying to mop up on the silk-screen craze for posters and tee shirts and had even hired his old friend from high school Jack Callahan who had gone to the Massachusetts School of Art as his chief silk-screen designer, and later when he moved off the dime politically his acting manager as well. Ralph’s excuse was simpler, simplicity itself for he was knee-deep in the big muddy in the Central Highlands of Vietnam trying to keep body and soul together against that damn Charlie who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Occasionally over the years Ralph would come to Boston on trips at Sam’s invitation and they almost always would go have a few at Jack Higgin’s during his stay talking mainly family matters before Ralph would head back to Troy and his family but more frequently of late they would go back over the ground of their youth, would go over more that ground more than one time to see if something they could have done, or something they did not do, would have made a difference when the “counter-revolution,” when the conservative push-back reared its head, when the cultural wars began in earnest with the ebbing of that big good night 1960s explosion. Sam would return the favor by going out to Albany, or more frequently to Saratoga Springs where he, they could see who from the old days, Utah Phillips before he passed away, Rosalie Sorrels before she left the road, Ronnie Gilbert and Pete Seeger before they passed but you get the picture, the old folk minute of the early 1960s that Sam had been very interested in when he started to hang around Cambridge later in that decade, were still alive enough to be playing at the famous coffeehouse still going from the 1960s, the Café Lena, although minus founder Lena for quite a while now. Sam had never lost the bug, never lost that longing for the lost folk minute that in his mind connected in with him hanging around the Hayes-Bickford in Harvard Square on lonesome weekends nights seeing what was to be seen. Sam had dragged Ralph, who despite living on about less than an hour away had never heard of the Café Lena since he had been tuned to the AM stations playing the awful stuff that got air time after the classic period of rock went into decline and before rock became acid-tinged, along with him and he had developed a pretty fair appreciation for the music as well.         

The conversation that night in 2014 got going after the usual few whiskey and sodas used to fortify them for the night talkfest had begun to take effect had been pushed in the direction of what ever happened to that socialist vision that had driven some of their early radical political work together (in the old days both of them in these midnight gabfest would have fortified themselves with in succession grass, cocaine, speed and watch the sun come up and still be talking. These days about midnight would be the end point, maybe earlier.). The specific reason for that question coming up that night had been that Sam had asked Ralph a few weeks before to write up a little remembrance of when he had first heard the socialist-anarchist-communist-radical labor militant   international working class anthem, the Internationale, for Fritz Jasper’s blog, American Protest Music.

Sam had noted that Ralph had with a certain sorrow stated that he no longer had occasion to sing the song. Moreover one of the reasons for that absence was that  despite his and Sam’s continued “good old cause” left-wing political activism socialism as a solution to humankind’s impasses was deeply out of favor (that activism as Ralph mentioned to Sam on more than one occasion these days considerably shortened from the old frenzied 24/7 desperate struggles around trying unsuccessfully end the Vietnam War from the American side by getting the government to stop the damn thing although the Vietnamese liberation forces in the end and at great cost had had no trouble doing so).

People, intellectuals and working stiffs alike, no longer for the most part had that socialist vision goal that had driven several generations, or the best parts of those generations, since the mid-19^th century to put their efforts into, did not have that goal on their radar, didn’t see a way out of the malaise through that route. Had moreover backed off considerably from that prospective since the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites in the early 1990s if not before despite the obvious failure of capitalism to any longer put a dent in the vast inequalities and injustices, their suffered inequalities and injustices, in the world. Sam had had to agree to that sad statement, had had to agree that they, in effect, too had abandoned that goal in their own lives for all practical purposes even though they had been driven by that vision for a while once they got “religion” in the old days in the early 1970s, once they saw that the anti-war struggle that animated their first efforts was not going to get the war-makers to stop making war.

Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was growing older and more reflective, maybe it was that Ralph’s comments had stirred up some sense of guilt for losing the hard edge of their youthful dreams but that night Sam wanted to press the issue of what that socialist prospective meant, what they thought it was all about (both agreed in passing, almost as an afterthought that what had happened, what passed for socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was NOT what they were dreaming of although they gave third world liberation struggles against imperialism like in Vietnam dependent on Soviet aid plenty of wiggle room to make mistakes and still retain their support).       

Both men during the course of their conversation commented on the fact that no way, no way in hell, if it had not been for the explosive events of the 1960s, of the war and later a bunch of social issue questions, mainly third world liberation struggles internationally and the black liberation question at home they would not even be having the conversation they were having (both also chuckling a little at using the old time terms, especially the use of “struggle” and “question,” for example the  black, gay, woman question since lately they had noticed that younger activists no longer spoke in such terms but used more ephemeral “white privilege,” “patriarchy,”  “gender” terms reflecting the identity politics that have been in fashion for a long time, since the ebb flow of the 1960s). 

No, nothing in the sweet young lives of Samuel Eaton to the Carver cranberry bog capital of world in Carver (then) working-class born (his father a “bogger” himself when they needed extra help) and Ralph Morris, Junior to the Troy General Electric plants-dominated working- class born would have in say 1967, maybe later, projected that almost fifty years later they would be fitfully and regretfully speaking about the their visions of socialism and it demise as a world driving force for social change. 

Ralph and Sam had imbibed all the standard identifiable working-class prejudices against reds, some of those prejudices more widespread among the general population of the times, you know, like the big red scare Cold War “your mommy is a commie, turn her in,” “the Russians are coming get under the desk and hold onto your head,” anybody to the left of Grandpa Ike, maybe even him, communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy; against blacks (Ralph had stood there right next to his father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with his corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people, sometimes to their faces and Sam’s father was not much better, a southerner from hillbilly country down in Appalachia who had been stationed in Hingham at the end of World War II and stayed, who never could until his dying breathe call blacks anything but the “n” word); against gays and lesbians (Ralph and his boys mercilessly fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where those creeps spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other and Sam likewise down in Provincetown with his boys, he helping, beating up some poor guy in a back alley after one of them had made a fake pass at the guy, Jesus; against uppity woman, servile, domestic child-producing women like their good old mothers and sisters and wanna-bes were okay as were “easy” girls ready to toot their whistles, attitudes which they had only gotten beaten out of them when they ran into their respective future wives who had both been influenced by the women’s liberation movement although truth to tell they were not especially political, but rather artistic.  Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar, were written off in any case as fodder for cowboys and soldiers in blue. But mainly they had been red, white and blue American patriotic guys who really did have ice picks in their eyes for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around Ralph’s hometown way).      

See Ralph, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war movement for personal reasons at first which had to do a lot with ending the war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking world” (Ralph’s term). Certainly not creeping around the fringes of socialism before the 1960s ebbed and they had to look to the long haul to pursue their political dreams. Ralph’s story was a little bit amazing that way, see, he had served in the military, served in the Army, in Vietnam, had been drafted in early 1967 while he was working in his father’s electrical shop and to avoid being “cannon fodder” as anybody could see what was happening to every “drafted as infantry guy” he had enlisted (three years against the draft’s two) with the expectation of getting something in the electrical field as a job, something useful. But in 1967, 1968 what Uncle needed, desperately needed as General Westmoreland called for more troops, was more “grunts” to flush out Charlie and so Ralph wound up with a unit in the Central Highlands, up in the bush trying to kill every commie he could get his hands on just like the General wanted. He had extended his tour to eighteen months to get out a little early from his enlistment not so much that he was gung-ho but because he had become fed up with what the war had done to him, what he had had to do to survive, what his buddies had had to do to survive and what the American government had turned them all into, nothing but animals, nothing more, as he told everybody who would listen. When he was discharged in late 1969 he wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the main anti-war veterans group at the time. Such a move by Ralph and thousands of other soldiers who had served in ‘Nam a real indication even today of how unpopular that war was when the guys who had fought the damn thing arms in hand, mostly guys then, rose up against the slaughter, taking part in a lot of their actions around Albany and New York City mainly.

Here is the way Ralph told Sam in 1971 about how he came in contact with VVAW while they had plenty of time to talk when they were being detained in RFK Stadium after being arrested in a May Day demonstration. One day in 1970 Ralph was taking a high compression motor to Albany to a customer and had parked the shop truck on Van Dyke Street near Russell Sage College. Coming down the line, silent, silent as the grave he thought later, were a ragtag bunch of guys in mismatched (on purpose he found out later) military uniforms carrying individual signs but with a big banner in front calling for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and signing the banner with the name of the organization-Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). That was all, and all that was needed. Nobody on those still patriotic, mostly government worker, streets called them commies or anything like that but you could tell some guys in white collars who never came close to a gun, except maybe to kill animals or something defenseless really wanted to. One veteran as they came nearer to Ralph shouted out for any veterans to join them, to tell the world what they knew first-hand about what was going on in Vietnam. Yeah, that shout-out was all Ralph needed he said, all he needed to join his “band of brothers.”                               

Sam as he recalled how he and Ralph had met in Washington had remembered that Ralph had first noticed that he was wearing a VVAW supporter button and Ralph had asked if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little sheepishly, explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was the sole support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away of a massive heart attack in 1965. (He had gone to work in Mister Snyder’s print shop where he had learned enough about the printing business to later open his own shop which he kept afloat somehow during the late 1960s with Jack Callahan’s help and which became his career after he settled down when the 1960s ebbed and people started heading back to “normal.”) He then told Ralph the reason that he had joined the anti-war movement after years of relative indifference since he was not involved in the war effort had been that his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in the Central Highlands and that had made him question what was going on. Jeff, like them had been as red, white and blue as any guy, had written him when he was in Vietnam that he thought that the place, the situation that he found himself in was more than he bargained for, and that if he didn’t make it back for Sam to tell people, everybody he could what was really going on. Then with just a few months to go Jeff was blown away near some village that Sam could not spell or pronounce correctly even all these many years later. Jeff had not only been Sam’s best friend but was as straight a guy as you could meet, and had gotten Sam out of more than a few scrapes, a few illegal scrapes that could have got him before some judge. So that was how Sam got “religion,” not through some intellectual or rational argument about the theories of war, just wars or “your country right or wrong wars,” but because his friend had been blown away, blown away for no good reason as far as that went.  

At first Sam had worked with Quakers and other pacifist types because he knew they were in Cambridge where he found himself hanging out more and more trying to connect with the happenings that were splitting his generation to hell and back. They got him doing acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, including the Carver Draft Board on Allan Road the place where Jeff had been drafted from (and which created no little turmoil and threats among the Eaton’s neighbors who were still plenty patriotic at that point, his mother and sisters took some of the fire as well), military bases and recruiting stations to try to get the word out to kids who might get hoodwinked in joining up in the slaughter. As the war dragged on though he started going to Cambridge meetings where more radical elements were trying to figure out actions that might stop the damn war cold and that appealed to him more than the “assuming the government was rational and would listen to reason” protest actions of those “gentile little old ladies in tennis sneakers.”

1971 though, May Day 1971 to be exact is, where these two stories, two very different stories with the same theme joined together. Sam at that point in 1971 was like Ralph just trying to get the war ended, maybe help out the Panthers a little but before May Day had no grandiose ideas about changing the “whole freaking world.” Sam had gone down to Washington with a group of Cambridge radicals and “reds” to do what he could to shut down the war under the slogan-“if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government.” Ralph had come down with a contingent of ex-veterans and supporters from Albany for that same purpose. Sam and Ralph had as a result met on the bizarre football field at RFK Stadium which was the main holding area for the thousands of people arrested that day (and throughout the week)

So May Day was a watershed for both men, both men having before May Day sensed that more drastic action was necessary to “tame the American imperial monster” (Sam’s term picked up from The Real Paper, an alternative newspaper he had picked up at a street newsstand in Cambridge) and had come away from that experience, that disaster, with the understanding that even to end the war would take much more, and many more people, than they had previously expected. Ralph, in particular, had been carried away with the notion that what he and his fellow veterans who were going to try to symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as veterans would cause the government pause, would make them think twice about any retaliation to guys who had served and seen it all. Ralph got “smart” on that one fast when the National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it that day, treated them like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968, treated them like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and like anybody else who raised their voices against governmental policy in the streets.

Ralph told Sam while in captivity that he still worked in his father’s shop for a while but their relationship was icy (and would be for a long time after that although in 1991 when Ralph, Senior retired Ralph took over the business). He would take part in whatever actions he could around the area (and down in New York City a couple of times when they called for re-enforcements to make a big splash).

Ralph has like he said joined with a group of VVAW-ers and supporters for an action down in Washington, D.C. The idea, which would sound kind of strange today in a different time when there is very little overt anti-war activity against the current crop of endless wars but also shows how desperate they were to end that damn war, was to on May Day shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. Their task, as part of the bigger scheme, since they were to form up as a total veterans and supporters contingent was to symbolically shut down the Pentagon. Wild right, but see the figuring was that they, the government, would not dare to arrest vets and they figured (“they” meaning all those who planned the events and went along with the plan) the government would treat it somewhat like the big civilian action at the Pentagon in 1967 which Norman Mailer won a literary prize writing a book about, Armies of the Night. Silly them. 

They after the fall-out from that event were thus searching for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those few days of detention in D.C. that they had jointly suffered not only started what would be a lifelong personal friendship but an on-going conversation between them over the next several years about how to bring about the greater social change they sensed was needed before one could even think about stopping wars and stuff like that. (The story in short of how they got out of RFK after a few days was pretty straight forward. Since law enforcement was so strapped that week somebody had noticed and passed the word along that some of the side exits in the stadium were not guarded and so they had just walked out and got out of town fast, very fast, hitchhiking back north to Carver, and Ralph later to Troy). Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red collectives” that were sprouting up then peopled by others who had the same kind of questions which they would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few years before both men sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s had ebbed. 

Old time high school thoughts even with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back of his brain crossed his mind when Ralph thought of Marx, Lenin (he, they, were not familiar with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes. Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told Ralph one night after a class and they were tossing down a few at Jack’s in Cambridge before heading home to the commune where Sam was staying.

Ralph had gone out of his way to note in that blog entry for Fritz that before he got “religion” on the anti-war and later social justice issues he held as many anti-communist prejudices as anybody else in Troy, New York where he hailed from, not excluding his rabidly right-wing father who never really believed until his dying days in 2005 that the United States had lost the war in Vietnam. Ralph had realized that all the propaganda he had been fed was like the wind and his realization of that had made him  a very angry young man when he got out of the Army in late 1969. He tried to talk to his father about it but Ralph, Senior was hung up in a combination “good war, World War II, his war where America saved international civilization from the Nazis and Nips (his father’s term since he fought in the Pacific with the Marines) and “my country, right or wrong.” All Ralph, Senior really wanted Ralph to do was get back to the shop and help him fill those goddam GE defense contract orders. And he did it, for a while.

Ralph had also expressed his feelings of trepidation when after a lot of things went south on the social justice front with damn little to show for all the arrests, deaths, and social cataclysm he and Sam had gotten into a study group in Cambridge run by a “Red October Collective” which focused on studying “Che” Guevara and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky after an introduction to the Marxist classics. Sam who was living in that commune in Cambridge at the time, the summer of 1972, had invited Ralph to come over from Troy to spent the summer in the study group trying to find out what had gone wrong (and what they had gotten right too, as Sam told him not to forget), why they were spinning their wheels trying to change the world for the better just then and to think about new strategies and tactics for the next big break-out of social activism. At the end of each meeting they would sing the Internationale before the group broke up. At first Ralph had a hard time with the idea of singing a “commie” song (he didn’t put it that way but he might as well have according to Sam) unlike something like John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance, songs like that. As he, they got immersed in the group Ralph lightened up and would sing along if not with gusto then without a snicker.

That same apprehensive attitude had prevailed when after about three meetings they began to study what the group leader, Jeremy, called classic Marxism, the line from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. A couple of the early classes dealt with the American Civil War and its relationship to the class struggle in America, and Marx’s views on what was happening, why it was necessary for all progressives to side with the North and the end of slavery, and why despite his personal flaws and attitudes toward blacks Abraham Lincoln was a figure to admire all of which both men knew little about except the battles and military leaders in American History classes. What caused the most fears and consternation was the need for revolution worked out in practice during the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. They could see that it was necessary in Russia during those times but America in the 1970s was a different question, not to speak of the beating that they had taken for being “uppity” in the streets in Washington, D.C. in 1971 when they didn’t think about revolution (maybe others had such ideas but if so they kept them to themselves) and the state came crashing down on them.    

The biggest problem though was trying to decipher all the various tendencies in the socialist movement. Ralph, maybe Sam more so, though if everybody wanted the same thing, wanted a better and more peaceful system to live under then they should all get together in one organization, or some such form. The split between the Social Democrats and the Communists, later the split between Stalinists and Trotskyists, and still later the split between Stalinists and Maoists had their heads spinning, had then thankful that they did not have to fight those fights out.

All in all though they had the greatest respect for Trotsky, Trotsky the serious smart intellectual with a revolver in his hand. Had maybe a little sympathy for the doomed revolutionary tilling against the windmills and not bitching about it. Maybe feeling a little like that was the rolling the rock up the hill that they would be facing. That admiration of Trotsky did not extend to the twelve million sects, maybe that number is too low, who have endlessly split from a stillborn organization he started when he felt the Communist International had stopped being a revolutionary force, the Fourth International. Sam brought up a Catholic would make Ralph laugh when he compared those disputes to the old time religious disputes back in the Middle Ages about how many angels would fit on the tip of a needle. They, after spending the summer in study decided that for a while they would work with whoever still needed help but that as far as committing to joining an ongoing organization forget it. 

At the beginning in any case, and that might have affected his ultimate decision, some of Ralph’s old habits kind of held him back, you know the anti-red stuff, Cold War enemy stuff, just like at first he had had trouble despite all he knew about calling for victory to the Viet Cong (who in-country they called “Charlie” in derision although after Tet 1968 with much more respect when Charlie came at them and kept coming despite high losses). But Ralph got over it, got in the swing. 

The Marxism did not come easy, the theory part, maybe for Ralph a little more than Sam who had taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had built from nothing after Mister Snyder moved his operation to Quincy to be nearer his main client, State Street Bank and Trust (although for long periods his old Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his campaigns). They got that the working-class, their class, should rule and be done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind Marxism, that impossible to read Das Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with seven seals for them both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976 when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see they hung around with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation struggles and political prisoner defense work. Those were really the earnest “socialist years” although if you had asked them for a model of what their socialism looked like they probably would have pointed to Cuba which seemed fresher than the stodgy old Soviet Union with their Brezhnev bureaucrats.

After that time while they would periodically read the left press and participate any time somebody, some group needed bodies for a rally, demonstration, some street action they would be there in their respective hometowns that they both eventually filtered back to. Then 2002 came and the endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and seemingly a million other places drove them to drop their “armed truce” (Sam’s term picked up by Ralph) with society and return to the streets , return with an almost youthful vengeance. They would see young people at the rallies hocking their little Marxist papers, maybe buy one to read a home but that flame that had caused them to join study groups, to work with Marxist-oriented “red collectives,” to read books that were hard to fathom had passed, had passed just as socialism as a way to end humankind’s impasses had fallen out of favor once the Soviet Union and its satellites had gone up in a puff of smoke.

Then the endless wars came Iraq I (old man Bush’s claim to fame) although too short to get Ralph and Sam off their couches, Serbia, the big flare-ups in the Middle East name your country of the day or week where the bombs, United States bombs no matter the disguise of some voluntary coalition of the “willing.” The thing that galled Ralph though was the attempts to do war “on the cheap” with killer-drones in place of humans and war materials. The gall part coming from the fact that despite the new high-tech battlefield each succeeding President kept asking for “boots on the ground” to put paid to the notion that all the technology in the world would not secure, as he knew from painful experience in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, the ground which needed to be controlled. So the grunts would have to be rolled out and the drones, well, the drones would just keep like all bombs, manned or unmanned, would keep creating that damn collateral damage.    

So the wars drove them back to the streets as “elders” but then things like the Great Recession (really depression except for the rich who did not fallout of high office buildings this time like in 1929) and the quicksilver minute response of the Occupy movement where they spent much time for the short time the movement raised its head publically.

More troubling recently had been the spate of police brutality cases and murders of young black men for being black and alive it seemed. Ralph and Sam had cut their teeth in the movement facing the police and while they were not harassed as a matter of course except when they courted the confrontations they did know that the cops like a lot of people think, a lot of people in the movement too, were nobody’s friends, should be treated like rattlesnakes. Every fiber of their bones told them that from about high school corner boy days. Still how were a couple of old white guys with good hearts going to intersect a movement driven by young mostly black kids who were worried about surviving and who for the most part were not political. They both longed for the days when the Black Panthers could get a hearing from that crowd about self-defense but also about the dirty role of the cops in keeping the ghetto army of occupation in full force.  

Everywhere they went, to each demonstration, rally, vigil, speak-out they would see a new cohort of the young earnest Marxist-types hocking their newspapers and leaflets. Sam thought one time, maybe more than one time, that maybe those earnest kids with their wafer-thin newspapers will study the classics and make more sense out of them than Sam and Ralph could.

 

 

As for Sam and Ralph they would now just keep showing up to support the “good old cause.”              

Here is what Sam wrote about the recent rise of the Black Lives Matter movement that might just smite the dragon:

Listen up. No, I am not black but here is what I know. Know because my grandfather, son of old Irish immigrants before the turn of the 20^th century, the ethnic immigrant group which provided a hard core of police officers in the City of Boston and surrounding towns back then, and now too for that matter, told me some stuff (and you can get a good sense of although fictionalized in Dennis Lehane’s novel, The Given Day. The “surrounding towns” part as they left the Irish ghettoes in South Boston and Dorchester, the latter now very heavily filled with all kinds of people of color, and moved first to Quincy and Weymouth then for some to the Irish Rivera further south in Marshfield and places like that). Those Irish also provided their fair share of “militants” in the “so-called” Boston Police Strike of 1919.

Here is what he said when I was a kid and has been etched in my brain since my youth. Cops are not workers, cops are around to protect property, not yours but that of the rich, cops are not your friends because when the deal goes down they will pull the hammer down on you no matter how “nice” they are, no matter how many old ladies and old gentlemen they have escorted across the street (and no matter how friendly they seem when they are cadging donuts and… at so coffee shop on their beat).  And every time I forget that wisdom they, the police remind me, for example, when they raided the Occupy Boston encampment late one night in October 2011 arresting many, including a phalanx of Veterans   for Peace defenders, for no other reason that the “authorities” did not want the campsite extended beyond the original grounds and then unceremoniously razed the place in December 2011 when the restraining order was lifted without batting an eye.

Now this is pretty damn familiar to the audience I am trying to address, those who are raising holy hell in places like Ferguson, Missouri and Staten Island, New York (and as I write about North Charleston down in South Carolina) about police brutality, let’s get this right,  about police murder under the color of law. And those who support the, well, let’s call a thing by its right name, rebellion.

Here is what my grandfather, or my father for that matter, did not have to tell me. They, and I ask that you refer to the graphic above, DID NOT need when I came of age for such discussions that I had to be careful of the cops as I walked down the street minding my own business(unless of course I was in a demonstration rasing holy hell about some war or other social injustice but I had that figured already). Did not need to tell me that I was very likely to be pulled over while “walking while Irish.” Did not suggest, as the graphic wisely points out, that I would need to have more identification than an NSA agent to walk down my neighborhood streets. Did not need to tell me that I would suffer all kinds of indignities for breathing.                        

He, they, did not have to tell me a lot of things that every black adult has to tell every black child about the ways on the world in the United States. But remember what that old man, my grandfather, did tell me, cops are not workers, cops are not friends, cops are working the  other side of the street. That old man would also get a chuckle out of the slogan-“Fuck The Cops.” If more people, if more white people especially, would think that way maybe we could curb the bastards in a little.  

Αποκηρύξτε το Ξεπούλημα του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ στην ΕΕ!

17 Ιουλίου 2015

Αποκηρύξτε το Ξεπούλημα του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ στην ΕΕ!

ΑΡΚΕΤΑ!

 

Αποκηρύξτε το ξεπούλημα του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ στην ΕΕ και στις τράπεζες. Η ΕΕ και το νόμισμά της το ευρώ είναι παγίδα βασάνων για τη συντριπτική μάζα του ελληνικού λαού. Η ΕΕ και το ευρώ πρέπει να αποκηρυχθούν. Επιτροπές αποτελούμενες από εργάτες διαφορετικών τάσεων καθώς και τους συμμάχους τους – νέους, άνεργους, μετανάστες, συνταξιούχους – πρέπει να συσταθούν σε ολόκληρη τη χώρα για να παλέψουν για αυτό το σκοπό και για μία κυβέρνηση που θα δρα για τα συμφέροντα των εργαζόμενων και θα βρίσκεται υπό τον έλεγχό τους. Αυτή η μάχη δεν μπορεί να κερδηθεί μέσα στα κοινοβουλευτικά πλαίσια. Καλούμε επίσης όλους αυτούς τους ταξικά συνειδητούς εργαζόμενους που σκέφτονται με τον ίδιο τρόπο σε ολόκληρη την κακώς ονομαζόμενη Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση να μας υποστηρίξουν στους στόχους μας και να αναρωτηθούν τις επιπτώσεις για τις δικές τους χώρες. Σπάστε με τους Καπιταλιστές και τις Τράπεζές τους!

Χτίστε Εργατικές Επιτροπές Δράσης για να Παλέψουμε για:

•  Διαγραφή του χρέους! Κάτω το ευρώ και η ΕΕ! Σκίστε το Τρίτο Μνημόνιο!
•  Κοινή ταξική πάλη των Ελλήνων, των Γερμανών και των άλλων Ευρωπαίων εργατών ενάντια στους Σόιμπλε, Μέρκελ, Ολάντ και όλους τους εγκληματίες της ΕΕ!
•  Εργατικές αμυντικές φρουρές για να τσακίσουμε τη φασιστική απειλή! Υπερασπίστε τους μετανάστες ενάντια στις ρατσιστικές επιθέσεις!
•  Κατάργηση του ΦΠΑ και όλων των οπισθοδρομικών φόρων! Αξιοπρεπή στέγαση για όλους, όχι εξώσεις! Για εργατικό έλεγχο της διανομής τροφίμων και των τιμών!
•  Κατάργηση των μυστικών των επιχειρήσεων και των τραπεζών—Ανοίξτε τα βιβλία!
•  Απαλλοτρίωση των τραπεζών, των επιχειρήσεων κοινής ωφέλειας, των μεταφορών, των λιμανιών και της ναυτιλιακής βιομηχανίας! Εκβιομηχάνιση της Ελλάδας!
•  Αξιοπρεπείς συντάξεις για όλους τους συνταξιούχους τώρα, ανάλογα με το κόστος ζωής! Ποιοτικό σύστημα υγείας για όλους!
•  Πάλη ενάντια στην ανεργία—δουλειά για όλους μέσα από μία μικρότερη εργασιακή εβδομάδα χωρίς καμία μείωση μισθών!

Κινητοποιηθείτε Τώρα! Μοιράστε αυτό το φυλλάδιο στον χώρο εργασίας σας, στα πανεπιστήμια, στις γειτονιές κ.τ.λ.

17 Ιουλίου 2015

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Πρωτοβουλία της Τροτσκιστικής Ομάδας της Ελλάδας – ΤΟΕ
Τμήμα της Διεθνούς Κομμουνιστικής Ένωσης (Τεταρτοδιεθνιστικής)

Spartacist

Για περισσότερες πληροφορίες: Τροτσκιστική Ομάδα της Ελλάδας, Τ.Θ. 8274, Τ.Κ. 10210, Αθήνα
Spartacist@hotmail.com
τηλεφωνήστε στο: 6930694112
www.icl-fi.org

A View From The Left-Defend The Greek Working Class And Its Allies- Repudiate Syriza’s Sellout to the EU!-ENOUGH!

A View From The Left-Defend The Greek Working Class And Its Allies- Repudiate Syriza’s Sellout to the EU!-ENOUGH! 

The gross capitulation of the Syriza-led government in Greece to the let-them-starve dictates of the European Union (EU) imperialists is a slap in the face to the millions who voted resoundingly to reject the EU’s austerity blackmail. Our comrades in the Trotskyist Group of Greece have initiated the following call for the establishment of workers action committees around a program of proletarian struggle against the EU and its Syriza lackeys. Such struggle is in the class interests of the working people in all EU countries and internationally.

 

Repudiate Syriza’s Sellout to the EU!

ENOUGH!

 

Repudiate Syriza’s sellout to the EU and the banks. The EU and its currency the euro have been a tragic trap of suffering for the great bulk of the Greek people. The EU and euro must be repudiated. Committees composed of workers from different tendencies and their allies—youth, unemployed, immigrants, pensioners—must be set up throughout the country to struggle for this and toward a government which will act in the interests of the working people and be subordinated to them. This battle cannot be won within a parliamentary framework. We also call upon all like-minded and class-conscious working people throughout the mis-named European Union to support us in our aims and to consider the implications for their own countries.  Break with the Capitalists and their Banks!

Build workers action committees to fight for:

• Cancel the debt! Down with the euro and the EU! Rip up the Third Memorandum!
• For common class struggle of Greek, German and other European workers against Schäuble, Merkel, Hollande and all the EU criminals!
• Workers defense guards to smash the fascist threat! Defend immigrants against racist attacks!
• Abolish the VAT and all regressive taxes! Decent housing for all, no evictions! For workers control of food distribution and prices!
• Abolish business and bank secrets—Open the books!
• Expropriate the banks, utilities, transportation, ports and shipping industry! Industrialize Greece!
• For decent pensions for all retirees pegged to the cost of living, now! Quality health care for all!
• Fight unemployment—Jobs for all through a shorter workweek with no loss in pay!

Mobilize now! Hand this leaflet out at your workplace, campuses, neighborhoods, etc.

 

Initiated by the Trotskyist Group of Greece
section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
17 July 2015

 

'Wild About My Lovin' JIM JACKSON (1884-1937) Blues Legend

John Sebastian / J - Band / Wild About My Lovin'

Wild About My Lovin sung by Geoff Muldaur at Rhythm & Roots 2013

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Comes To A Close

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Comes To A Close... Some Remembrances

The events leading up to World War I (known as the Great War before the world got clogged up with expansive wars in need of other numbers and names and reflecting too in that period before World War II a certain sense of “pride” in having participated in such an adventure even if it did mow down the flower of European youth form all classes) from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources had all the earmarks of a bloodbath early on once the industrial-sized carnage set in with the stalemated fronts. Also clogged, or rather thrown in the nearest bin were the supposedly eternal pledges not honored by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those imperialist capitalist powers and their hangers-on in their tracks in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history. Other than isolated groups and individuals mostly in the weaker countries of Europe the blood lust got the better of most of the working class and its allies as young men rushed to the recruiting stations to “do their duty” and prove thir manhood.

Decisive as well as we head down the slope to the last month of the first year of war although shrouded in obscurity early in the war in exile was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a necessary nom de guerre in hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business, that nom de guerre not a bad idea in today’s NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the Second International under the sway of the powerful German party although not for long), architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many revolutionary experiences in Russia and Europe in the 19^th century), and author of an important, important to the future communist world perspective, study on the monopolizing tendencies of world imperialism, the ending of the age of “progressive” capitalism (in the Marxist sense of the term progressive in a historical materialist sense that capitalism was progressive against feudalism and other older economic models which turned into its opposite at this dividing point in history), and the hard fact that it was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by the establishment of the socialist order. But that is the wave of the future as 1914 turns to 1915 in the sinkhole trenches of Europe that are already a death trap for the flower of the European youth.  

The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way almost could not be avoided in the early 20^th century when the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last war on the fronts (that is how the generals saw it mainly having won their promotions in those earlier wars and so held captive to the past). However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas.

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

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’s  prisons) and Rosa Luxemburg ( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time as being on “the planet without a passport” was then as now, dangerous to the lives of left-wing revolutionaries), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America the Big Bill Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war), many of his IWW (Industrial Workers Of the World) comrades and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “club fed” for speaking the truth about American war aims in a famous Cleveland speech and, fittingly, ran for president in 1920 out of his Atlanta Penitentiary jail cell),  were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.

Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well when the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day.

So imagine in the hot summer of 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody trenches and death.                   

Over the next period as we continue the long night of the 100^th anniversary of the start of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.