From The A Dimmed Elegy For The Late Peter Paul Markin Series- A New Introduction

From The A Dimmed Elegy For The Late Peter Paul Markin Series- A New Introduction

 

Markin's favorite song in the early 1960s-RIP-Markin 

A New Introduction From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

A while back, a few months ago although the project had been percolating in his brain for the previous year or so after an incident reminded him how much he missed his old corner boy from the 1960s North Adamsville night, the late Peter Paul Markin, Bart Webber wrote up what he called, and rightly so I think, an elegy for him, A Dimmed Elegy For The Late Peter Paul Markin. That reminder had been triggered one night the year before when Bart took the visiting grandchildren of his son Lenny who now lived in New Haven, Connecticut and worked at Yale to Salducci’s ’ Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in North Adamsville for some pizza and soda (that “up the Downs” not some quirky thing Bart made up but the actual name of the shopping area known by  that name to one and all not far from the high school although nobody ever knew exactly how it got that moniker). Of course that Salducci’s Pizza Parlor had been the local corner boy hang-out for Bart, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Johnny Callahan, Fran Rizzo, Markin, me and a roving cast of sometime corner boys depending on who we picked up (or who had ditched or been ditched by some faithless girl and thus had time to hang rather than spent endless hours prepping for dates, or going through “the work-out” down at Adamsville Beach in some car) before Tonio who treated Frankie Riley like a son sold the place to moved back to Italy and the new owners did not see “no account” (their description) corner boys as an asset to their family-friendly pizza dreams. The corner boys subsequently “hung” at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys, the ones on Thornton Street near the beach not the ones in Adamsville Center which was strictly for people who actually bowled, liked to anyway although that latter information is strictly on the side since what got Bart Webber in a lather was from Salducci times.

Although Bart had not been in the place in years and it had changed hands several times since Tonio ran the place back in the early 1960 the décor, the pizza processing area complete with what looked like the same pizza ovens and most importantly the jukebox, the jukebox, man, were still intact (that jukebox selections composed of many “oldies but goodies” from that time not found on nostalgia compilations for the local clientele who bring their kids and grandkids in for pizza and soda, what else, although not three for a quarter like in the old days but a quarter a pop). That night a young guy, a high school kid really, was sitting with three guys and a couple of girls all also with the look of high school about them, was if not loudly then animatedly talking a mile a minute complete with about one thousand arcane facts to back him up about “a new breeze coming through the land,” about how he, they were going to save the planet, stop the wars, make the world a decent place to live in by people like him, them who had not made the mess but who had a chance now to clean things up (he, the kid didn’t say that “new breeze” thing but that is what he meant, meant in all sincerity). Like Markin he went on for the time that Bart and his grand-kids entered until they left (and he still might be taking if he was really the ghost of Markin). And of course that talk, that mile a minute talk complete with those ersatz facts reminded Bart of the night (make that nights) when Markin held forth about the “new breeze coming” (his actual term) based on the iceberg tip of events like the fight for nuclear disarmament, the fight for black civil rights down south, the fight against the big bad brewing war happening in Southeast Asia, and the first trappings of the counter-culture with the shift-up in music to a disbelieving group of fellow corner boys who were just trying finish high school without winding up in jail for the midnight capers they pulled off to keep themselves in dough(engineered by that same Markin and pulled off by Frankie Riley’s magic). Yeah, so as the kids today say Bart was “stoked” to do something to bring back Markin’s memory, warts and all.                 

Bart had thereafter approached me about doing the chore, about writing some big book memory thing  since we now live in the same town, the same suburban town which represents a small step up from our growing up in strictly working-class North Adamsville (and still is), Carver about thirty miles south of that town (and a town which had its own working-class history with its seasonal “boggers” who worked the cranberry bogs which originally made the town famous but is now a bedroom community for the high-tech firms on U.S. 495). Bart figured that since he had retired from the day to day operations of his print shop which was now being run by his oldest son, Jeff, and I was winding down my part in the law practice I had established long ago I would have plenty of time to write and he to “edit” and give suggestions. He said he was not a writer although he had plenty of ideas to contribute but that I who had spent a life-time writing as part of my job would have an easy time of it. Bart under the illusion that writing dry as dust legal briefs for some equally dry as dust judge to read is the same as nailing down a righteous piece about an old time corner boy mad man relic of a by-gone era, with his mad talk, his mad dreams, his mad visions, who was as crooked as they come, who was as righteously for the “little guy” as a man could be, who had some Zen under the gun magic which made our nights easier and who I would not trust (and did not have to trust since we had the truly larcenous Frankie Riley to lead the way) to open a door sainted bastard. I turned him down flat which I will explain in a moment.

The way Bart presented that proposal deserves a little mention since he made the case one night when the remnant of Markin’s old comrades still alive who still reside in the area, Frankie, Josh, Jack Callahan, Jimmy Jenkins, Bart and me were drinking now affordable high-shelf liquors at “Jack’s” in Cambridge near where Jimmy lives (that high-shelf liquor distinction important for old corner boys who survived and moved upa peg in the world who drank cheap Southern Comfort by the fistful pints and later rotgut maybe just processed whiskies from the very low-shelves). During the conversation, not for the first time, Bart mentioned that he was still haunted by the thought  he had had a few years before about the time that Markin had us in thrall one night out in Joshua Tree in 1972 when we were all high as kites on various drugs of choices and he, Markin, at first alone, and then with Josh began some strange Apache-like dance and they began to feel (at least according to Josh’s recollection) like those ancient warriors who tried to avenge their loses when white settlers had come to take their lands and we all for one moment that long ago night were able to sense what it was like to be warrior-avengers, righters of the world’s wrongs that Markin was always harping on. Markin had that effect on the rest of us, was always tweaking us on some idea from small scale larcenies to drug-induced flame-outs. Yeah, that miserable, beautiful, so crooked he could not get his legs in his pants, son of a bitch, sainted bastard still is missed, still has guys from the old days moaning to high heaven about that lost. Bart insisted there was a story there, a story if only for us and someone (all eyes on me) should write it up.             

I can say all of that and say at the same time that I can say I couldn’t write the piece. See while at times Markin was like a brother to me and we treated each other as such he also could have his “pure evil” moments which the other corner boys either didn’t see, or didn’t want to see. These may be small things now on reflection but he was the guy who almost got me locked up one night, one summer night in 1966 before our senior year when Frankie who usually was the “on-site” manager of our small larcenies was out of town with his girlfriend. Markin figured since he was the “brains” behind the various capers that he could do one on his own but he needed a look-out, me. The caper involved a small heist of a home in the Mayfair swells part of North Adamsville whose owners were “summering” somewhere in the Caribbean. Markin had “cased” or thought he had cased the place fully except he didn’t factor in that the owners had a house-sitter during that time, some college girl doing the task for a place to stay near Boston that summer from what we figured later. Markin startled her as he entered a side door, she screamed, Markin panicked, as she headed for the telephone to call the police and he fled out the door. But see Markin came running out that door toward me just when the cops were coming down the street in their squad car directly toward us where we met up. They stopped us, told to get in the car and headed back to that Mayfair house. As it turned out the house-sitter couldn’t identify either of us, couldn’t identify Markin and the cops had to let us go. No question Markin panicked and no question he made a serious mistake by heading my way knowing what he knew had happened with the sitter and her response to the invasion. I had, and have always had, the sneaking suspicion that he might have rolled me over as the B&E guy if it had been possible. I have a few other stories like that as well but that gives you a better insight into what Markin could turn into when cornered.

A couple of other incidents involved women, one my sister, the other an old flame or rather someone I wanted to be my flame. One of the reasons that I, unlike Markin who did serve in Vietnam which I think kind of turned him over the edge to the “dark side” once his dream about a “newer world” as he called it started to evaporate in the early 1970s, did not do military duty since I was the sole support, working almost full time after school during high school, of my mother and four very younger sisters after my old-fashioned Irish drunken half-dead-beat father died of a massive heart attack in 1965. My oldest sister, Clara, only thirteen at the time while we were in high school, was smitten by Markin from early on and I could see that he was willing to take advantage of her naiveté as well although I warned him off more than once. Now I could never prove it, and Clara would not say word one about it to me, but I believe he took her virginity from her. I do know during that period I found a carton of Trojans, you know “rubbers,” in her bureau drawer when I was looking for something I thought she had of mine and she was not around to ask. I didn’t confront him directly since among corner boys such things would have been “square” to discuss even about sisters but I continued to keep warning him off like I didn’t know anything had happened and before long I saw Clara had taken up with a boy her own age so I let it drop. (Clara, now a professor at a New York college and with a great husband and three great kids, a bright young woman even then except around Markin who had some spell on her, even later when she had a boyfriend and would come into Salducci’s trying to make him jealous from the way she acted, cried to high heaven when I told her the news of his fate.)    

The flame thing involved Laura Perkins who I was “hot” for from the ninth grade on and who I had several dates with in the tenth grade and it looked like things were going well when she threw me over for Markin. Now that situation has happened eight million times in life but corner boys were supposed to keep “hands off” of other corner boys’ girls although I was not naïve enough to believe that was honored more in the breech than the observance having done a couple of end-around maneuvers myself but this Laura thing strained our relationship for a while. Here is the funny part though after a few weeks she threw Markin over for the captain of the football team (she was a cheerleader as well as bright student, school newspaper writer, on the dance committee and a bunch of other resume-building things) who we all hated. Funnier still at our fortieth reunion a few years back Laura and I got back together (after her two marriages and my two marriages had flamed out something we laughed about at the time of the reunion) and we have been an “item” ever since. But you can see where I would, unlike say Bart, have a hard time not letting those things I just mentioned get in my way of writing something objective about that bastard saint.                   

So Bart wrote the piece himself, wrote the “dimmed” elegy (the “dimmed” being something I suggested as part of the title) and did a great job for a guy who said he couldn’t write. Frankly any other kind of elegy but dimmed would fail to truly honor that bastard saint madman who kept us going in that big night called the early 1960s and drove us mad at the same time with his larcenous schemes and over-the-top half-baked brain storm ideas and endless recital of the eight billion facts he kept in his twisted brain (estimates vary on the exact number but I am using the big bang number to cover my ass, as he would). I need not go into all of the particulars of Bart’s piece except to say that the consensus among the still surviving corner boys was that Bart was spot on, caught all of Markin’s terrible contradictions pretty well. Contradiction that led him from the bright but brittle star of the Jack Slack’s bowling alleys corner boy back then to a bad end, a mucho mal end murdered down in Sonora, Mexico in 1976 or 1977 when some drug deal (kilos of cocaine) he was brokering to help feed what Josh said was a serious “nose candy” habit went sour for reasons despite some investigation by Frankie Riley, myself and a private detective Frankie hired were never made clear. The private detective, not some cinema Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, but a good investigator from his scanty report was warned off the trail by everybody from the do-nothing Federales to the U.S. State Department consular officer in Sonora, and warned off very indirectly both down there and in Boston not to pursue the thing further, the implication being or else. What was clear was that he was found face down on some dusty back road of that town with two slugs in his head and is buried in the town’s forlorn potter’s field in some unmarked grave. That is about all we know for sure about his fate and that is all that is needed to be mentioned here.

That foul end might have been the end of it, might have been the end of the small legend of Markin. Even he would in his candid moments accept that “small” designation. Yes, been the end of the legend except the moaning to high heaven every time his name comes up. Except this too. Part of Bart’s elegy referenced the fact that in Markin’s sunnier days before the nose candy got the best of him, brought out those formerly under control outrageous “wanting habits,” in the early 1970s when he was still holding onto that “newer world” dream that he (and many others, including me and Bart for varying periods) did a series of articles about the old days and his old corner boys in North Adamsville. Markin before we lost contact, or rather I lost contact with him since Josh Breslin his friend from Maine (and eventually our friend as well whom we consider an honorary Jack Slack’s corner boy) met out in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967 knew his whereabouts outside of San Francisco in Daly City until about 1974 wrote some pretty good stuff, stuff up for awards, and short-listed for the Globe prize.

Pushed on by Bart’s desire to tell Markin’s story as best he could who must have been driven by some fierce ghost of Markin over his shoulder to do such yeoman’s work, he, Frankie (as you know our corner boy leader back then who had Markin as his scribe and who coined the moniker “the Scribe” for him that we used to bait or honor him depending on circumstances and now is a big time lawyer in Boston), Josh, and I agreed that a few of the articles were worth publishing if only for ourselves and the small circle of people whom Markin wrote for and about. (Markin’s oldest friend from back in third grade, Allan Johnson, who would have had plenty to say about the early days had passed away  after a long-term losing fight with cancer before this plan was hatched, RIP, brother.) So that is exactly what we did. We had a commemorative small book of articles and any old time photographs we could gather put together and had it printed up in the print shop that Bart’s oldest son, Jeff, is now running for him since his retirement from the day to day operations last year.

Since not all of us had everything that Markin wrote, as Bart said in his piece, what the hell they were newspaper or magazine articles to be used to wrap up the fish in or something after we were done reading them, we decided to print what was available. Bart was able to find copies of a bunch of sketches up in the attic of his parents’ home which he was cleaning up for them when they were putting their house up for sale since they were in the process of downsizing. Josh, apparently not using his copies for wrapping fish purposes, had plenty of the later magazine pieces. I had a few things, later things from when we went on the quest for the blue-pink Great American West hitchhike road night as Markin called it. Unfortunately, we could not find any copies of the long defunct East Bay Eye and so could not include anything from the important Going To The Jungle series about some of his fellow Vietnam veterans who could not adjust to the “real” world coming back from ‘Nam and wound up in the arroyos, canyons, railroad sidings and under the bridges of Southern California. He was their voice on that one then, if silent now when those aging vets desperately a voice.  So Markin can speak to us still. Yeah, like Bart said, that’s about right for that sorry ass blessed bastard saint with his eight billion words.  

Below is the short introduction that I wrote for that book which we all agreed should be put in here trying to put what Markin was about in content from a guy who knew him about as well as anybody from the old neighborhood, knew his dark side back like I mentioned  then and when that side came out later too:  

“The late Peter Paul Markin, also known as “the Scribe, ” so anointed by Frankie Riley the unchallenged self-designated king hell king of the schoolboy night among the corner boys who hung around the pizza parlors, pool halls, and bowling alleys of the town, in telling somebody else’s story in his own voice about life in the old days in the working class neighborhoods of North Adamsville where he grew up, or when others, threating murder and mayhem,  wanted him to tell their stories usually gave each and every one of that crew enough rope to hang themselves without additional comment. He would take down, just like he would do later with the hard-pressed Vietnam veterans trying to do the best they could out in the arroyos, crevices, railroad sidings and under the bridges when they couldn’t deal with the “real” world after Vietnam in the Going To The Jungle series that won a couple of awards and was short-listed for the Globe award, what they wanted the world to hear, spilled their guts out as he one time uncharitably termed their actions. Not the veterans, not his fellows who had their troubles down in L.A. and needed to righteously get it out and he was the conduit, their voice, but the zanies from our old town, and then lightly, very lightly if the guy was bigger, stronger than him, or in the case of girls if they were foxy, and mainly just clean up the language for a candid world to read.

Yeah Markin would bring out what they, we, couldn’t say, maybe didn’t want to say. That talent was what had made the stories he wrote about the now very old days growing up in North Adamsville in the 1960s when “the rose was on the bloom” as my fellow lawyer Frankie Riley used to say when Markin was ready to spout his stuff so interesting. Ready to make us laugh, cringe, get red in the face or head toward him to slap him down, to menace him, if he got too ungodly righteous. Here is the funny part though. In all the stories he mainly gave his “boys” the best of it. Yes, Bart is still belly-aching about a few slights, about his lack of social graces then that old Markin threw his way, and maybe he was a little off on the reasons why I gave up the hitchhike highway blue-pink Great American West night quest that he was pursuing (what he called sneeringly my getting “off the bus” which even he admitted was not for everyone) but mainly that crazy maniac with the heart of gold, the heart of lead, the heart that should have had a stake placed in its center long ago, that, ah, that’s enough I have said enough except I like Bart still miss and mourn the bastard.”

Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-In Honor Of The Frontline Fighters Of The International Working Class Today-

Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-In Honor Of The Frontline Fighters Of The International Working Class Today-The International Working Class Anthem The Internationale

 

A YouTube film clip of a performance of the classic international working class song of struggle, The Internationale.

 
 

Ralph Morris comment:

“Never in a million years” if you had asked me the question of whether I knew the words, melody or history of The Internationale before I linked up in 1971 with my old friend and comrade, Sam Eaton, asked me whether I had known how important such a song and protest music in general was to left-wing movements as a motivating force for struggle against whatever the American government is down on in the war or social front to squeeze the life out of average Joes and Joanne. To the contrary I would have looked at you with ice picks in my eyes wondering where you fit into the international communist conspiracy if you has asked me that question say in 1964, 1965 maybe later, as late as 1967. Then living in Troy, New York I imbibed all the working class prejudices against reds (you know communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy), against blacks (stood there right next to my father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with me and my corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people sometimes to their faces), against gays and lesbians (you know fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and I went to Saratoga Springs where they spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other), against uppity woman (servile, domestic women like my good old mother and wanna-bes were okay). Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar. But mainly I was a red, white and blue American patriotic guy who really did have ice picks for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around our way).

But things sometimes change in this wicked old world, change when some big events force everybody, or almost everybody since some people will go on about their business as if nothing had happened even come judgment day. That event for me was the Vietnam War, the war that tore this nation, my generation and a whole lot more asunder and has not really been put back together even now. And that Vietnam War was not an abstract thing like it was for a lot of guys who opposed it on principle, or were against the draft at least for themselves since once I got my draft notice in early 1967 I decided to enlist to avoid being cannon fodder for what looked to me a bloodbath going on over there. But I did that enlistment out of patriotic reasons since my idea also was to use some skills I had in the electrical field to aid the cause. When I got my draft notice I was working in my father’s high skill electrical shop where he did precision work for the big outfit in the area, General Electric (which was swamped with defense contract work at the time) and figured that is what I could do best. My recruiting sergeant in Albany led me to believe that as well. Silly boy (silly boy now but then he promised the stars and I taken in by his swagger bought the whole deal).

Pay attention to that year I got my draft notice, 1967. What Uncle was looking for that year (and in 1968 as well) were guys to go out in the bush in some desolate place and kill every commie they could find (and as I know from later experience if you didn’t have a commie to count just throw a red star on some poor son of a peasant who had just been mowed down in the crossfire and claim him, hell, claim her as an enemy kill, Jesus). So I wound up humping the hills of the Central Highlands of Vietnam not just for a year like most guys but I extended for six month to get out a little earlier when I got back to the “real” world. This is not the place to tell what I did, what my buddies did, and what the American government made us do, made us in nothing but animals but whatever you might have heard about atrocities and screw ups is close enough to the truth for now.

All of that made me a very angry young man when I got out of the Army in late 1969. I tried to talk to my father about it but he was hung up in a combination “good war, World War II, his war where America saved international civilization from the Nazis and Nips (my father’s term since he fought in the Pacific with the Marines) and “my country, right or wrong.” All he really wanted me to do was get back to the shop and help him fill those goddam GE defense contract orders. And I did it, for a while.

One day in1970 though I was taking a high compression motor to Albany and had parked the shop truck on Van Dyke Street near Russell Sage College. Coming down the line, silent, silent as the grave I thought later, were a ragtag bunch of guys in mismatched (on purpose I found out later) military uniforms carrying 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 and 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 me 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 I needed, all I needed to join my “band of brothers.”                                

I still worked in my father’s shop for a while but our relationship was icy (and would be for a long time after that although in 1991 when he retired I took over the business) and I would take part in whatever actions I 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). Then in the spring of 1971, the year that I met Sam Eaton, I joined with a group of VVAWers and supporters for an action down in Washington, D.C.

The idea, which will 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 you how desperate we were to end that damn war, was to on May Day shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. Our task, as part of the bigger scheme, since we 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 we figured (we 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 us. 

Naturally we were arrested well before we even got close to the place and got a first-hand lesson in what the government was willing to do to maintain itself at all costs. And in the RFK Stadium that day where we had been herded little cattle by the forces of order since we had thousands of people being arrested is where I met Sam who, for his own reasons which he has, I think, described elsewhere on his own hook, had come down from Boston with a group of radicals and reds whose target was to “capture” the White House. And so we met on that forlorn summertime football and formed our lifelong friendship. Sam, I know, if I know anything has already told you about all of that so I will skip past the events of those few days to what we figured out to do afterwards.      

No question we had been spinning our wheels for a long time in trying to oppose the war (and change other things as well as we were coming to realize needed changing as well) and May Day made that very clear. So for a time, for a couple of years after that say until about 1974, 1975 when we knew the high tide of the 1960s was seriously ebbing,  we joined study groups and associated with “red collectives” in Cambridge where Sam lived in a commune at the time. The most serious group “The Red October Collective,”  a group that was studying Marxism in general and “Che” Guevara and Leon Trotsky in particular, is where we learned the most in the summer of 1972 when Sam asked me to join him (my father was pissed off, went a little crazy but I wanted to do it and so I did). The thing was that at the end of each class, each action, each meeting the Internationale, or some version of it would be sung in unison to close the event and express solidarity with all the oppressed.

At the beginning some of my old habits kind of held me back, you know the anti-red stuff, Cold War enemy stuff, just like at first I had trouble despite all I knew about calling for victory to the Viet Cong (who in-country we called Charlie in derision although in Tet 1968 with much more respect when he came at us and kept coming despite high losses). But I got over it, got in the swing. Funny not long after that time and certainly since the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites when socialism took a big hit out of favor to solve world’s pressing problems I very seldom sing it anymore, in public anyway. 

Sam, who likes to write up stuff about the old days more than I do, writes for different blogs and websites on the Internet and he asked me to do this remembrance about my experience learning the Internationale as part of a protest music series that a guy he knows named Fritz Jasper has put together. So I have done my bit and here is what Sam and Fritz want to convey to you:                          

Fritz  Jasper comment:

 

In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our socialist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

The Struggle For The Labor Party In The United States-Workers' Action- Winter 1969-1970

I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
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Thanks to the Riazanov Library for their efforts in digitizing Workers Action. The works provided by the Riazanov Library are © copyrighted by the Riazanov Library in 2010 for the document formatting and editing as they appear here in their PDF format, on the ETOL. The actual content itself remains in the public domain pursuant to US and International copyright conventions.
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Additional Fritz Jasper comment on this series:

Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.

Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.

As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts runs a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
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Fritz Jasper comment on this issue:
Obviously a propagandistic left-wing, pro-labor newspaper from 1969, driven by current events, is going to contain a lot of material now of just historic interest like the struggle around the effects of containerization of shipping on the West Coast docks, a question that we now know costs many union jobs by the failure of longshoremen’ union to tie in technological improvement with unionized labor employment. And, of course, the union bureaucracy’s penchant for making “sweetheart” deals rather than a class struggle fight over the issue.

This issue does pose the question of questions centered on the labor movement and war that is currently very much with us with the Iraq, Afghan and whatever other hellish wars the American imperialists are raising around the world. For the anti-war movement, after trying everything but labor action in the previous period, 1969 represented a turning point where even the working class was getting fed up with the Vietnam War. No only by providing the mass base of “cannon fodder” but taking a beating on the economic front as well. The call for labor strikes against the war would later, in 1970, take on a more than propagandistic possibility when important sections of the working class began to take strike action over economic issues. While today, and maybe just today, the slogan has purely propaganda value it is always part of the arsenal of left-wing anti-war work.

The other section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the last article on, well, union caucus organizing. The point about standing on a left-wing militant program is the most important and dovetails with the struggle for the labor party to take state power when the time comes. Once again this says to me that we had better be getting a move on about the business of creating that revolutionary labor party-enough is enough. Break with the Democrats! Build a workers party that fights for our communist future.  

From Veterans For Peace In Massachusetts-Stop The Damn Endless Wars

From Veterans For Peace In Massachusetts-Stop The Damn Endless Wars

The Reasons Why- 

Some Numbers To Consider 

Chelsea Manning Defense Fund Flooded With Donations

"It's in our collective interest to ensure that whistleblowers are able to receive a full, vigorous defense of their rights."

Andrew HartFront Page Editor, The Huffington Post

Posted: 07/17/2015

U.S. Army / Associated Press

A legal defense fund for Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence worker sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking secret documents to WikiLeaks, has been flooded with donations, exceeding its goal with more than $125,000 in 48 hours.

“The level of grassroots support for this campaign has been truly impressive. Close to 1,100 donors in just 48 hours made their voices heard for Chelsea’s cause," Trevor Timm, executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in a statement. "It really shows how small donations can add up to something huge. Because of this success, we’re raising our goal to the full amount Chelsea Manning’s attorney has estimated will be needed to bring the case through oral arguments in the Army Court of Appeals. We’re confident, with your help, we can get there."

Nancy Hollander, Manning’s attorney, said contributions to the crowdsourced fund are “beyond our wildest dreams."

"We are grateful for this outpouring and continued support as we travel down this long road,” Hollander said.

Manning, 27, is imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas for giving hundreds of thousands of government files to WikiLeaks, including information on U.S. operations in Guantánamo Bay and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Formerly Pfc. Bradley Manning, she will be eligible for parole in about 2020.

Manning began the process of transitioning to a woman last year, and was approved for a gender-reassignment hormone therapy in February. It was the first time the Defense Department has authorized such a treatment for an active service member, and followed a lawsuit pressing the military to allow Manning's transition.

Manning and her legal team are pursuing an appeal of her conviction, with the hope of reducing her prison term. Prior to the fundraising campaign, Manning had collected about $40,000 in donations to cover legal fees.

First Look Media, the news organization created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, announced the campaign on Wednesday, and pledged to match $60,000 in donations. According to the statement, $10,000 of the match will come from First Look’s prominent investigative journalist, Glenn Greenwald, who has led coverage of former National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden's disclosures of government spying on ordinary citizens.

Greenwald explained the campaign in a post for First Look's investigative news outfit, The Intercept:

“Whatever else one thinks of Manning, she should not face limits in her ability to pursue her legal rights with full zeal, nor should her already difficult circumstances be exacerbated by worries over how to pay legal fees,” he wrote. “Her actions redounded to the benefit of all of us, and it’s incumbent on those who are able to do what they can to help her defend her legal rights. It’s in our collective interest to ensure that whistleblowers are able to receive a full, vigorous defense of their rights, and that the government’s pernicious anti-transparency theories be contested.”

 The campaign continues to accept donations, which can be made here.

MORE: chelsea manning, Bradley Manning, gender reassignment, Wikileaks, crowdsource

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.     

*** From The Archives-Honor The 79th Anniversary Of The Toledo Auto-Lite General Strike

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Newsreel Footage Of The 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite Strike

Commentary

This year marks the 79th Anniversary of three great labor struggles that ended in victory in heart of the Great Depression(the 1930s version of what we, at least partially, confront today); the great General Strike in San Francisco that was led by the dockers and sailor unions and brought victory on the key issue of the union hiring hall (since then greatly emasculated); the great Minneapolis Teamster strikes that led to the unionization of truck drivers and allied workers in that labor-hating town and later to the organizing of over-the-road drivers that created one of the strongest (if corrupt) unions in North America; and, the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike whose key component was leadership by the unemployed workers. Does all of this sound familiar? Yes and no. Yes, to labor militants who, looking to a way out of the impasse of the condition of today's quiescent labor movement, have studied these labor actions. No, to the vast majority of workers who are either not organized or are clueless about their history. In either case, though, these actions provide a thread to how we must struggle in the future. Although 75 years seems like a long time ago the issues posed then have not gone away. Far from it. Study this labor history now to be ready to struggle when we get our openings.

*****
Guest Commentary

Toledo Auto-Lite Strike

Below is a speech given by Ted Selander on June 3, 1984 at an anniversary celebration of the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike. Selander was a participant in the historic strike, the leadership of which shortly afterwards joined the Trotskyist movement. This article is reprinted from the March 1986 issue of Socialist Action newspaper. An expanded version appeared in the July 1984 issues.

Brothers and sisters, the key to an understanding of the magnificent Auto-Lite strike in 1934 is that it was a strike won on the picket line by a community uprising. I repeat: on the picket line by a community uprising.

Toledo was in the grip of a tremendous popular upsurge of anger at the greedy bosses who have to give their wage slaves a few cents more in their pay.

This was 1934 B.T. – B.T. meaning before television. As a matter of fact, it was before all the social gains when we fought for and won in the ‘30s – before unemployment pay, before food stamps, before social security, before the CIO, and before Medicare, etc.

After four years of depression, the Toledo workers were in an angry mood because of the bank failures, the idle factories, the over-stocked granaries, and the 15 million unemployed. For four years we had poverty in the midst of plenty. Even the establishment was losing confidence in themselves and their system.

Rank and file muzzled

I don’t think (as James P. Cannon once pointed out) there was any real difference between the Toledo Auto-Lite strikers and the workers involved in many of the lost strikes in the United States at that time. In practically every strike, the rank and file always displayed courage. The difference was in the leadership and their strategy and tactics. In nearly every strike the militancy of the rank and file was muzzled, many times snuffed out from the top.

The leaders are tricked by the courts, the labor boards, the mediators, the government, and the media to shift the fight from the picket line to the court and conference room. But all the while, the company keeps hiring scabs to take the strikers’ jobs.

In the Auto-Lite strike, the company was hiring scabs by the hundreds and claimed they now had 1800 workers. We understood what was happening. We knew that the strike was dying and doomed. Only some bold, dramatic action could revive it, and even then it would have to be followed up with plenty of action and support to give the company an all-out fight. And nothing short of an all-out fight would do.

As you probably know, we wrote a public letter to Judge Stuart telling him that we were going to violate his anti-labor injunction and call for mass picketing. By mass picketing we didn’t mean a few hundred, we meant thousands. Could we get thousands down to that picket line? Well, that was the $64 question.

We had spent the previous year organizing what some qualified observer said was the largest and most militant unemployed organization in the country – the Lucas County Unemployed League. We had held meetings and spoke in every section of the city and in the townships; organized countless marches, demonstrations, sit-ins; stopped evictions; won cash relief with a relief strike; and had held many, many other actions.

Because of this vast experience, we felt sure that we knew the temper of the Toledo workers. We felt we had a good chance to be the fuse that could ignite a spirit of solidarity with the Auto-Lite strikers to get union recognition and perhaps even win the first union contract in the auto plants of Toledo.

Workers violate injunction

On the first day that we violated the injunction, our mass picket line consisted of four individuals. That’s right – just four. We were arrested, jailed, convicted and let out on bail and warned not to return to the picket line. But we told the judge that we were going back. And we did – picking up some 50 pickets on the way.

After that, there were a series of arrests, each one with a greater amount of pickets – first 46, then 108, and in between many smaller numbers. Every time we went back from the courts and jail, the picket lines kept growing steadily until on May 23 there were 10,000 reported on the street in front of the plant.

Now when you have a mass picket line of thousands, it enables you to counter the company’s offensive moves. For example, they brought out a high-pressure hose and turned a stream of water on us. But it didn’t take very long for a couple of hundred pickets to take the hose away and turn the water on them.

Many times the police and deputies brutally clubbed the pickets; but before they could shove them into a patrol wagon enough pickets rushed in and grabbed the pickets away and often gave the cops a taste of their own clubs.

You know that every good union has two educational committees: one to arrange lectures of all kinds and the other to educate scabs who won’t attend classes.

Half the employees at the Auto-Lite were women who were among the very best strikers we had. A couple of days after the National Guard came in, the women grabbed a scab, took him into an alley, and stripped every bit of clothing off of him except his tie and shoes. Then they marched him, naked as a jaybird, up and down the downtown streets.

Next day the papers carried a large picture of him on the front page, but they had their artist broaden and lengthen the tie to hid the family jewels. You can bet that picture discouraged a lot of scabs, but it got a big round of applause from the unionists in Ohio.

Strikers fight National Guard

The Auto-Lite strikers battled first the police, then the company guards and deputies, and finally the National Guard. The first day the Guard came in they fired without warning at the unarmed strikers, killing two and wounding 25.

After those murders, the enraged strikers fought the guard for six days and nights – returning again and again to face tear gas and vomit gas, bayonet charges, and even rifle fire.

During the lulls in the battle, we stood on boxes educating the guardsmen about the issues in the strike and how they were being used against the workers. By the way, the casualties were not all one-sided. The hospitals were patching up not only strikers but police, deputies, and the National Guardsmen.

On June 4, the company surrendered and signed on the dotted line a union contract giving the strikers priority on jobs, a 5-percent wage increase, and other concessions; agreed to withdraw all court charges and to pay all court costs. The logjam in Toledo had finally been broken, and 19 auto plants were organized before the year ended. The road was cleared to make Toledo a union town.

As a participant in the Auto-Lite strike of 1934, I appreciate this opportunity to join with you in this 50th anniversary celebration. It is a credit to all of you who organized this anniversary to keep alive the memory of labor’s untapped strength as demonstrated in the Auto-Lite strike and all the other battles which prove that in unions we are strong.

Below is the letter that the Auto-Lite strikers sent to Judge R.R. Stuart to inform him of their intention to violate his injunctions against picketing.

May 5, 1934

His Honor Judge Stuart
County Court House
Toledo, Ohio

Honorable Judge Stuart:

On Monday morning May 7, at the Auto-Lite plant, the Lucas County Unemployed League, in protest of the injunction issued by your court, will deliberately and specifically violate the injunction enjoining us from sympathetically picketing peacefully in support of the striking Auto Workers Federal Union.

We sincerely believe that this court intervention, preventing us from picketing, is an abrogation of our democratic rights, contrary to our constitutional liberties and contravenes the spirit and the letter of Section 7a of the NRA.

Further, we believe that the spirit and intent of this arbitrary injunction is another specific example of an organized movement to curtail the rights of all workers to organize, strike and picket effectively.

Therefore, with full knowledge of the principles involved and the possible consequences, we openly and publicly violate an injunction which, in our opinion, is a suppressive and oppressive act against all workers.

Sincerely yours,

Lucas County Unemployed League
Anti-Injunction Committee
Sam Pollock, Sec'y

From The Marxist Archives - Fight Capitalist Misery!

Workers Vanguard No. 1071 10 July 2015 TROTSKY LENIN Fight Capitalist Misery! (Quote of the Week) In a June 1865 report to the General Council of the First International, Karl Marx laid out for the first time in public his theory of surplus value—the unpaid portion of workers’ labor that is the source of profit. In his conclusion, Marx emphasized that the working class must not only fight for higher wages and better conditions but also for the overthrow of the whole system of capitalist exploitation.   The very development of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour more or less to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation. I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is inherent in their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities. By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement.   At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never-ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wages system!”   —Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit (1865)

A View From The Left-Racist Terror and the Legacy of Slavery-Bloody Charleston

Workers Vanguard No. 1071	10 July 2015

Racist Terror and the Legacy of Slavery-Bloody Charleston

 

The coldblooded massacre of nine black people in Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church by a 21-year-old white supremacist is a searing manifestation of the racist terror and reaction at the heart of American capitalism. As Mumia Abu-Jamal, a black radical and former Black Panther who was framed up and sentenced to death for his defiance of this racist order, declared in a radio commentary from prison: “White supremacy is the mother’s milk of Charleston, of South Carolina, of the South, of America. For surely as slavery funded and built America, the underlying principle was the devaluation, exploitation and oppression of Black life. It’s the only thing that makes the church massacre in Charleston even remotely intelligible.”

Bourgeois politicians from across the political spectrum, from America’s first black president to the son of archsegregationist Strom Thurmond, have rushed to exploit the killings, cynically promoting “racial healing” and Christian charity and calling to “forgive your enemies.” For them, the bloodbath in Charleston was a chance to divert attention from the near-daily killings of unarmed black men at the hands of racist cops and to quell the protests against their gendarmes.

President Barack Obama promised that the FBI and the local police would “make sure that justice is served.” It was local police who just three months ago killed 50-year-old Walter Scott in North Charleston, shooting him five times in the back. Likewise, in the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre, South Carolina highway patrolmen gunned down students protesting segregation, killing three and injuring 27. Fascists like Dylann Roof and vigilantes like George Zimmerman, the killer of Trayvon Martin, are not exceptions to the rule of racist law and order but auxiliaries to the far more powerful murder apparatus of the capitalist state—the cops, the prisons and the military. These state forces are the main source of racist violence.

In the same statement, Obama seized on outrage over the massacre to push for more gun control, arguing: “Innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.” No! Innocent people were killed because they were unarmed and defenseless in the face of a fascist murderer who was emboldened by the racism that pervades every aspect and institution of American society.

Gun control laws are a means to enforce a monopoly of violence in the hands of the capitalist state. Throughout U.S. history, they have been used to prevent black people from being able to defend themselves against race terrorists. In 1961, Robert F. Williams, the head of the NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina, was hounded out of the country for organizing a defense squad against racist attacks. The Klan and other fascist killers never have any problem procuring their weapons. On the contrary, the racist murderers were often assisted in their bloody work by FBI agents, such as in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing.

It took a bloody Civil War, the Second American Revolution, to smash the chains of black chattel slavery. Two hundred thousand black troops, guns in hand, played a decisive role in crushing the Confederacy. But the promise of black freedom was betrayed by the Northern bourgeoisie, which allied with the Southern propertied classes against the aspirations of the black freedmen. It will take a third American Revolution—a proletarian socialist revolution that breaks the chains of capitalist wage slavery—to finish the Civil War.

“The Cradle of Secession”

The port of Charleston was the main entry point for black African slaves brought into the U.S. It was also in Charleston Harbor that the opening shots of the Civil War were fired against the Union garrison at Fort Sumter. Reverence for the heritage of slavery is still officially sanctioned in Charleston. A giant statue of John C. Calhoun, the infamous 19th-century apostle of slavery and white supremacy, looms less than a block from the Emanuel AME Church, which is located on the main thoroughfare—Calhoun Street. A June 23 article by Jon Schwarz on The Intercept website (“Five More Things South Carolina Can Do After Taking Down the Confederate Flag”) quoted the memoir of Charleston native and activist Mamie Garvin Fields: “Blacks took that statue personally. As you passed by, here was Calhoun looking you in the face and telling you, ‘N----r, you may not be a slave, but I am back to see you stay in your place’.”

The Confederate battle flag still flies at the South Carolina state capitol in Columbia. At the time of her election, Nikki Haley, the virulently labor-hating Republican governor, defended the flag of slavery as a “tradition that people feel proud of.” But with pictures of Roof displaying the flag flashed around the world, Governor Haley and other right-wing Republicans have joined a chorus calling for the Confederate flag to be removed from statehouses and other official displays across the South. This is pure hypocrisy aimed at trying to quell outrage over the church murders, which were carried out under the banner of the Confederacy.

The capitalist politicians might be whistling a different tune but it still is Dixie. Haley refused appeals from the family of the murdered Emanuel AME Church pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney (who was a State Senator and a prominent opponent of the Confederate flag), to take down the banner while his body lay in state at the capitol. In a final racist humiliation, the horse-drawn carriage transporting Pinckney’s coffin was forced to pass through the capitol grounds as the Confederate battle flag flew overhead.

While Haley and the South Carolina legislature talk about removing the flag some day, Bree Newsome, a 30-year-old black activist decided action could not wait. She heroically scaled the 30-foot pole on June 27 and pulled the flag down. Newsome, along with James Ian Tyson, who assisted her, was arrested, and the pair now face up to three years in prison while the Confederate flag was immediately put back up. We demand that all charges against Newsome and Tyson be dropped. Down with the flag of slavery!

There has been a racist backlash against calls to get rid of the racist flag. Charleston longshoremen told Workers Vanguard that a caravan of cars and trucks drove through North Charleston with Confederate flags flying. The race terrorists of the KKK have announced a rally at the Columbia statehouse on July 18. That provocation ought to be stopped by a mass mobilization centered on the power of the labor movement from the Charleston area and supporters nationally, acting in defense of black people and in their own self-defense.

Organized labor, especially the powerful Charleston International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) Local 1422, a bastion of labor/black power in the open shop South, was prominent in January 2000 when tens of thousands of people rallied in Columbia to demand that the Confederate flag be removed from atop the capitol. The reality of the racist terror which that flag stands for is all too well known to members of Local 1422. Close relatives of Local 1422 members were among those slain in Emanuel AME Church; other longshoremen’s relatives, including Walter Scott, Denzel Curnell and Asberry Wylder, have died at the hands of trigger-happy Charleston-area cops.

Local 1422 members themselves have been viciously attacked by forces of the racist capitalist state. Only days after the January 2000 protest against the Confederate flag, club-wielding cops brutally assaulted longshoremen who were picketing to defend their jobs against the use of non-union labor, arrested a number of workers and prosecuted five of them. The potential of Local 1422 to shut down the Port of Charleston, combined with an impressive campaign of solidarity from waterfront unions internationally, backed down the union-busters, and the Charleston Five were saved from the threat of years in prison.

There have been some recent protests in Columbia against the flag, including one on July 4 of some 1,500 people. However, despite the living links between the labor movement and the black community, there has been no significant labor mobilization to protest the church massacre and no sign of labor’s power being mobilized to stop the announced Klan rally. To date, the only statement by the South Carolina AFL-CIO encouraged “all AFL-CIO members to say a prayer.” This appeal to kneel down in the face of racist terror is an expression of the prostration of trade-union misleaders in the face of the one-sided class war that has ravaged the unions across the country and furthered the increasingly vicious oppression of black people, immigrants and the poor.

Honor Denmark Vesey!

The Emanuel AME Church was deliberately chosen as the site for Roof’s murderous rampage. It is the oldest black congregation in the South, established in 1816. Among its founders was Denmark Vesey, a skilled carpenter and former slave from the Caribbean who was deeply impressed by the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804—the largest and most successful slave revolt in the Western Hemisphere. In 1822, Vesey, along with 34 others, was hanged for planning a widespread slave revolt, and the church building was burned to the ground, in accordance with the laws of the slave South. A monument to Vesey was unveiled in February 2014 after 18 years of obstruction by apologists for the slavocracy. But the monument is tucked away out of sight in Hampton Park. It deserves pride of place in the center of town—the monument to the racist pig Calhoun should be knocked down to make room for it!

The heritage of militant black resistance expressed by the example of Denmark Vesey is the opposite of the black preachers and political leaders of today. Following the liberal-pacifist tradition of Martin Luther King Jr., what passes for black leadership today consists of keeping oppressed black people politically tied to the Democrats and docile before the forces of racist reaction. These leaders’ role is to keep a lid on the righteous anger of black workers and youth who are fed up with daily racist cop terror, unemployment and misery.

For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

Black slavery was smashed through the Civil War; legal Jim Crow segregation was overturned through the civil rights struggles. Yet racial oppression remains a central pillar of U.S. capitalist class rule, with the bulk of the black population forcibly segregated at the bottom of society. The slogan “Black Lives Matter” has become a rallying cry for young protesters against racist terror. In the eyes of the capitalist ruling class, black lives don’t matter a damn. Schools are as segregated as ever, and for black youth they are often little more than holding pens along a path into the system of mass incarceration which today ensnares fully one in three young black men. Public housing is either rotting away or has been demolished to make way for “gentrification” and other projects that line the pockets of construction magnates and property developers.

What jobs are available are more often than not temporary, part-time and pay only poverty wages. South Carolina’s rock-bottom wages and lack of unions have spurred manufacturers like Boeing, BMW and Volvo to set up shop there (as others have across the South) in search of maximum profits. Union manufacturing jobs have been destroyed in the North as companies moved to the open shop South, and now the South’s anti-union “right-to-work” model has spread north to former bastions of union power like Michigan and Wisconsin. Through all of this, workers’ pay, benefits and conditions have been driven down while capitalists’ profits have skyrocketed. Black workers, always the last hired and first fired, have been hit hardest in the war against labor.

Black rights and labor rights have always either gone forward together or fallen back separately. This fact is nowhere more sharply seen than in the open shop South. The last campaign by the labor tops to organize the South was the grotesquely named “Operation Dixie” following World War II. It was quickly shipwrecked on the rocks of Cold War red purges, racism and the union bureaucrats’ ties to the Democratic Party, which rendered them incapable of waging a fight against the white, Dixiecrat power structure.

Over recent decades, the trade-union misleaders’ class-collaborationism, including reliance on the capitalist Democratic Party, has led to one defeat after another. It is necessary to forge a new, class-struggle leadership of the unions. Such a leadership would not only fight to organize the unorganized, including in the South, but also seek to mobilize the power of the working class in the fight against racial oppression. Building that new union leadership requires political independence from the Democrats and all other parties of the capitalist class enemy.

The only path to black liberation is through uprooting the basis of black oppression—the whole capitalist system of exploitation and racial oppression. To bring about genuine equality for black people requires the destruction of the existing class relations and the conquest of state power by the multiracial working class. It is the industrial proletariat, with its heavy concentration of black workers providing a link to the anger of the ghettos, which has the social power to end the rule of racist capitalism through socialist revolution. The crucial task is to build the revolutionary workers party that can lead the proletariat to victory. In recognition of the intimate links between racist oppression and all-sided reaction throughout this country’s history, that party will emblazon on its banners: Finish the Civil War! For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!