An Archaeological Dig?- Remembrances Of Things Past-The Yearbook-For Carol C., Class Of 1965

An Archaeological Dig?- Remembrances Of Things Past-The Yearbook-For Carol C., Class Of 1965

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin: 

 

With an introduction by Sam Lowell

 

I first met Josh Breslin several months after my old corner boy high school friend, the late Peter Paul Markin, brought him around our hang-out, Jack Slack’s bowling alley, in the winter after the summer of love, 1967 (or is it Summer of Love, 1967 I have seen it both ways) out in San Francisco when Josh had gone up on to Russian Hill searching for dope, marijuana at the time the drug of choice among the newly liberated from uptight-ness about the evils of such pleasures, and ran into Markin asking him if he had a joint. Markin, freshly dropped out of college (Boston University) in order to “find himself” had been travelling on one of the ubiquitous psychedelically-painted converted yellow brick road school buses with Captain Crunch (road moniker which we would all take once we hit the road as some form of liberation from tired out old names) for a few months and had been staying in the park on the hill waiting, waiting for anything at all to happen told Josh “here light this one up, but ‘don’t bogart that joint’ when you are done because we save every twig to build up enough for the pipe.” And with that a 1960s-type friendship started, one that would have them travelling together over the next several years (minus Markin’s two years in the Army in Vietnam but that is a story for another time) until Josh lost touch with him before he took that last fatal trip to Mexico where he was murdered by parties unknown after a busted drug deal and is now resting in an unmarked grave in potter’s field in Sonora and moaned over to this day by his old friends, including Josh and me.

 

Markin often said, and it proved to be true, that despite a couple of years difference in age and despite the fact that Josh had grown up in Olde Saco in Maine, an old-time textile mill town, his life story, the things that drove him in his younger days were remarkably similar to ours down in North Adamsville, an old industrial town about twenty miles south of Boston. That was why they got along on the road out West and why we who took to the road with Markin later once we got the bug to move along got along with Josh as well. Josh is today an honorary North Adamsville corner boy when we, the remnants still living anyway, get together to speak of those times. (And always wind up with some mention of some madcap, maniacal thing Markin did which only gets us mistier about the bastard these days.)

 

Recently a bunch of us, Frankie Riley, the old corner boy leader now a big-time lawyer in Boston (“of counsel” these days whatever that means other than big dough for saying word one to a client), Jimmy Jenkins, Jack Callahan, Bart Webber, Lefty Malone, Josh and me got together at Jack’s Grille in Cambridge to have a few drinks and swap a few lies. Bart who still lives in growing up town North Adamsville mentioned that while looking up in his attic for something (something old one presumes since that is what attics are the catch basin for) he spotted his old dusty copy of our yearbook, the Magnet. Naturally that triggered many stories about what did or did happen not back in the day Josh, who is a writer of sorts, a music reviewer mostly these days from what he says, decided after viewing the contents of that fabled item with a little prompting, a little “inside dope” from us, and the memory of what the late Markin told him about the fate of his yearbook to write up something for us to chuckle over. Decided too to tempt the fates by putting the narration in Markin’s “voice.” I hope Josh did okay otherwise, moaning over our brother or not, Markin is liable to come after us from that forlorn unmarked grave and give us hell for touching a single word of the eight billion facts he had in his fallen head. 

 

Here is what he had to say which is pretty insightful for a “foreigner”:         





Quick, where is your North Adamsville High School yearbook, the Magnet? Yah, I knew I would catch some of you off-guard with that one. For some of you though it is merely a fast jump over from your easy chair to the bookshelf, a little dusting off of that treasure with a conveniently placed rag, and you are ready for duty, nostalgia duty. Or shuffle, creakily shuffle by the way if I am any judge of conditions these days, up to the old cobwebby attic, cursing the day (or night, for that matter) about how hard it is to get around and how it's not like it used to be, wondering, thoughtfully wondering, where in hell the box that you put that valued heirloom in is. Yah, I know that drill. Then, finally, finding the precious cargo under layers of later photo albums, albums showing your life’s work, your family outings, and your other righteous keepsake memories. And, yes, taking too out the rag to wipe a half century’s dust off, although not memories. Or trudging out to the garage/storage area/dump the final resting place for all ephemera, exotica and just plain “don’t know what to do with” items (except, well, of course not, throw the damn stuff away since you have not used those gee-gawks since about 1972). Yah, I know that drill too. In all cases though, shelf, attic, garage, ready, as if you were waiting, cosmic waiting patiently, for someone, some old reprobate classmate with an itchy finger on  the Internet in the year 2015 to ask you that very question. Well, okay we all have our little quirks.

 

Others though will have to answer AWOL (absent without leave, for those who did not do that military service of unblessed memory) and confess that item got tossed out, mistakenly or not, long ago on some vagabond move, or some other now long forgotten excursion. It wasn’t like you didn’t treasure the thing, really, but times moved on, you moved on and maybe the euphoria of high school pictures, of maybe five hundred plus people that you barely knew, or remembered, clubs you did not belong to, or sports that you did not participate in had passed by. Or, it wasn’t like you did not intend to keep the holy of holies but on those long ago hitchhike roads, those hitchhike roads west to start anew, maybe, just maybe, you had to leave it behind in some desolate motel room, or some godforsaken high mountain campsite. I understand your dilemma, believe me.

Or it was sold to the highest bidder at some flea market yard sale to pay off some untidy debt, some untidy small debt, I assume. The list of possibilities is endless, but at least those irresponsible renegade raider reds that simply lost or left theirs in some undisclosed place had enough spunk to leave the dust of high school traumas, dramas and bad karmas behind in some also now long forgotten way station.

 

As for myself, for those dying to know, or even those who are not because I have no story to tell otherwise, I know exactly where my previously un-coveted copy is, or at least where I threw it. Soon, very soon after graduation, in a fit of hubris, teen alienation, teen angst, teen rage against the dark I threw it, threw it unceremoniously, into the south fork of the Adamsville River not far from the old school, and my family’s house. Beyond that I take no responsible for where it landed, although I hope that it landed in some far off island where they have never heard of yearbooks, photographs, and pictures of people doing strange activities and would be clueless on such questions as why guys are running around in white shorts, why boys and girls are on separate bowling teams, why certain Greek vestigial Tri-Hi-Y girls take the three purities vows, and why guys were wearing non-fashionista white socks when posing for group activities. Things frankly that I wonder at now, wonder at intensely, myself. And maybe, just maybe, that Magnet is now an item of veneration, high holy veneration by some cargo cult-worshipping peoples who had no other use for the thing.

 

But that is more a fit task for an anthropologist’s analysis. Today I wish to speak of, as the headline indicates, archeology, of the search for ancient treasures, not of their meaning, well, not seriously of their meaning. And along that line I have a question, no, I have 1000 questions. I have just been on a “treasure hunt.” Was it in search of the Dead Sea Scrolls? No, that's kid's stuff. Did I venture to the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia, to dig up ancient sculptures? Boring, for my purposes here. Did I go on an Indiana Jones-style adventure in search of the lost Ark of the Covenant? Mere child’s play. No, I bravely went to the wilds of Winchester, Massachusetts to the lovely home of Frankie Riley, Francis Xavier Riley, the king hell king corner boy of the North Adamsville schoolboy be-bop night, from our class. And what treasure did I dig out? A rather pristine copy of the Magnet for the Class of 1965. This, my friends, is the find of the age.

 

Okay, now I have you exactly where I want you. Forget Botox and Hair Club for Men, from now on, guys and gals, no more trying to pass for fifty-something just because sixty is the new fifty. That include you Chrissie McNamara (maiden name). I have proof of age. In black and white glossies. And I do believe that I could find a good enough lawyer to have it hold up in court. Frankie, though, is already talking about hiring “hit men” to do me in if I so much as harm a hair on any classmate's head. You know Frankie; he was always one for the wild talk.

 

But enough of that wild noise for now. A couple of comments are in order, after an initial quick run through, before I do a more thorough scientific examination of this artifact. First, in the interest of scientific veracity I must confess an error. At one time or another when talking about “back in the days” I told one and all that Frankie and I spent (or misspent) many a summer evening on the front steps of North Adamsville High discussing our dreams, mainly small dreams and other getting through the day things, not big, cosmic mortality dreams like we would now. In describing the steps I mentioned that there were either stone lions or gargoyles that flanked either side of the steps. Well, in many pictures in the yearbook, especially of group activities, the front steps frame the shot. The items on the side of the steps were actually stone columns and globes. I was close though, right? That error is definitely either a result of the "mist of time" misting up big time or creeping senility. Your choice.

 

And now for some observations (and a posing of some those 1000 questions) on a first run through of the class pictures, individually and collectively. For most of the guys I would not want to meet you in a dark alley, even now. Unless I was heavily armed, or had the 82nd Airborne at my back. Actually make that the 82nd Airborne and at least one regiment from the 101st Airborne. Especially looking at those football players. I won't even speak of basketball and baseball players because they were mainly football guys after the season was over anyway. Were they on steroids in those days? Or some less exotic tobacco-like drug down in the locker room after the coaches called it a day? Is that why all the girls gathered round? I thought it was athletic prowess, but now I wonder. And wonder also what they look like now, now after all those years of youthful punishment on those hips, knees, and ankles. Come to think of it I don't think I will need that extra 101st regiment after all.

 

While we are on the subject of girls, the eternal subject then (and let's face it now too) and who they were and were not hanging around with, it is totally understandable that they would flock to the gridiron goliaths who carried our hopes and dreams on their broad shoulders on those brisk, yellow-leafed, gathering ice grey clouds autumn afternoons. Fair is fair. What is not fair, after looking at the picture of the billiards team, is why all the girls flocked to them. Many an afternoon I would drift (nice word use, right?) over casually to Joe's Billiard Parlor (although everybody knew it was nothing but a glorified pool hall, and Joe was nothing but a "connected", connected meaning you know connected do I have to spell it out, bookie using the place as a front) to check out the girls, the very lively, interesting girls, that seemed to be hanging off the rafters watching the boys (and it was always boys in those days) "shoot pools." Fifty years later and I am still burned up about it. Christ those guys were nothing but rough-hewed corner boys (although that may have been the attraction for those bouncy, tight sweater-wearing frails).

 

And continuing on with the sports teams, the track guys, christ, they look like they just came out of the wheat fields of Kansas with those uniforms that were issued in about 1926. And those squinty eyes like this was the first time they had seen a camera. One guy definitely looked like he was posing to be some jut-jawed Old West guy, cowboy guy, that made me think of a poor man's version of the actor/playwright Sam Shepard. Maybe my cargo cult reference above applies here too, except for cameras not yearbooks. Although I don’t know much about what goes on in Kansas, except don’t bury me there. No wonder people honked horns, caroomed their cars close to them, and yelled profanities as they passed when those guys ran in the road, the mad-hatter running road.

The tennis guys and gymnasts looked okay, normal as far as I could see, no dopey look in their eyes, mercifully. I swear though that I didn't know we had a tennis team but there it is in black and white so we must have. I know this for sure though some of those golf guys have that shifty look, you know, that look like they know the ball moved and they didn't take a penalty in that last match against Adamsville High. That's okay guys, it was only Adamsville. I won’t even speak about the treachery oozing out of the eyes of guys on the boys’ bowling team (or the girls’ for that matter). I thought bowling was a genteel sport. Why does everyone, male or female, look like, maybe, they cheated when adding up their scores. Strange, strange indeed.

And moving away from sports and clubs did we (guys) really wear our hair that way (and wear it that short, with those pseudo-sideburns)? And did we really wear those dweeby sports jackets with those white socks (with loafers it looks like) that seem to be sticking out endlessly of every sports team photograph?

 

For most of the gals, and call me a "dirty old man" but please, please do not tell my "significant other" I would not mind meeting you in the dark. No armed escorts necessary. Especially those gals on pages 78, 100, 106, 126, and 130. Yah, you know who you are. And I know you haven’t changed a bit since 1964, right?

 

Here is what I don’t get though. Well, maybe I better start off with what I do get. The cheerleaders did their cheer-leading thing and I swear no football game would have been the same without their rah, rah, rahs on those previously mentioned brisk, granite grey autumn days. The majorettes, well, the majorettes did their twirling, and especially one twirler that caught my eye, knew how to flip that thing. Be still my heart. And the band members played their tubas, trombones, and trumpets to perfection, although I heard some disturbing, if unsubstantiated, information about what went on in the band practice room, or really during the after practice hours. But I do not get this, and am desperately seeking enlightenment. Why did perfectly normal (at least from their photos they appear normal, 1960s beehive hair, cashmere sweater, whimsical smile normal) girls (a.k.a. young women, now) submit to the ridiculous three purities (no bad thoughts, words, or actions, christ) required, no demanded, for entry into Tri-Hi-Y. Something very unsettling was underfoot there, especially as we were on the threshold of the sexual revolution. I will investigate that matter further. Count on it.

An Archaeological Dig?- Remembrances Of Things Past-The Yearbook-For Carol C., Class Of 1965

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin: 

 

With an introduction by Sam Lowell

 

I first met Josh Breslin several months after my old corner boy high school friend, the late Peter Paul Markin, brought him around our hang-out, Jack Slack’s bowling alley, in the winter after the summer of love, 1967 (or is it Summer of Love, 1967 I have seen it both ways) out in San Francisco when Josh had gone up on to Russian Hill searching for dope, marijuana at the time the drug of choice among the newly liberated from uptight-ness about the evils of such pleasures, and ran into Markin asking him if he had a joint. Markin, freshly dropped out of college (Boston University) in order to “find himself” had been travelling on one of the ubiquitous psychedelically-painted converted yellow brick road school buses with Captain Crunch (road moniker which we would all take once we hit the road as some form of liberation from tired out old names) for a few months and had been staying in the park on the hill waiting, waiting for anything at all to happen told Josh “here light this one up, but ‘don’t bogart that joint’ when you are done because we save every twig to build up enough for the pipe.” And with that a 1960s-type friendship started, one that would have them travelling together over the next several years (minus Markin’s two years in the Army in Vietnam but that is a story for another time) until Josh lost touch with him before he took that last fatal trip to Mexico where he was murdered by parties unknown after a busted drug deal and is now resting in an unmarked grave in potter’s field in Sonora and moaned over to this day by his old friends, including Josh and me.

 

Markin often said, and it proved to be true, that despite a couple of years difference in age and despite the fact that Josh had grown up in Olde Saco in Maine, an old-time textile mill town, his life story, the things that drove him in his younger days were remarkably similar to ours down in North Adamsville, an old industrial town about twenty miles south of Boston. That was why they got along on the road out West and why we who took to the road with Markin later once we got the bug to move along got along with Josh as well. Josh is today an honorary North Adamsville corner boy when we, the remnants still living anyway, get together to speak of those times. (And always wind up with some mention of some madcap, maniacal thing Markin did which only gets us mistier about the bastard these days.)

 

Recently a bunch of us, Frankie Riley, the old corner boy leader now a big-time lawyer in Boston (“of counsel” these days whatever that means other than big dough for saying word one to a client), Jimmy Jenkins, Jack Callahan, Bart Webber, Lefty Malone, Josh and me got together at Jack’s Grille in Cambridge to have a few drinks and swap a few lies. Bart who still lives in growing up town North Adamsville mentioned that while looking up in his attic for something (something old one presumes since that is what attics are the catch basin for) he spotted his old dusty copy of our yearbook, the Magnet. Naturally that triggered many stories about what did or did happen not back in the day Josh, who is a writer of sorts, a music reviewer mostly these days from what he says, decided after viewing the contents of that fabled item with a little prompting, a little “inside dope” from us, and the memory of what the late Markin told him about the fate of his yearbook to write up something for us to chuckle over. Decided too to tempt the fates by putting the narration in Markin’s “voice.” I hope Josh did okay otherwise, moaning over our brother or not, Markin is liable to come after us from that forlorn unmarked grave and give us hell for touching a single word of the eight billion facts he had in his fallen head. 

 

Here is what he had to say which is pretty insightful for a “foreigner”:         





Quick, where is your North Adamsville High School yearbook, the Magnet? Yah, I knew I would catch some of you off-guard with that one. For some of you though it is merely a fast jump over from your easy chair to the bookshelf, a little dusting off of that treasure with a conveniently placed rag, and you are ready for duty, nostalgia duty. Or shuffle, creakily shuffle by the way if I am any judge of conditions these days, up to the old cobwebby attic, cursing the day (or night, for that matter) about how hard it is to get around and how it's not like it used to be, wondering, thoughtfully wondering, where in hell the box that you put that valued heirloom in is. Yah, I know that drill. Then, finally, finding the precious cargo under layers of later photo albums, albums showing your life’s work, your family outings, and your other righteous keepsake memories. And, yes, taking too out the rag to wipe a half century’s dust off, although not memories. Or trudging out to the garage/storage area/dump the final resting place for all ephemera, exotica and just plain “don’t know what to do with” items (except, well, of course not, throw the damn stuff away since you have not used those gee-gawks since about 1972). Yah, I know that drill too. In all cases though, shelf, attic, garage, ready, as if you were waiting, cosmic waiting patiently, for someone, some old reprobate classmate with an itchy finger on  the Internet in the year 2015 to ask you that very question. Well, okay we all have our little quirks.

 

Others though will have to answer AWOL (absent without leave, for those who did not do that military service of unblessed memory) and confess that item got tossed out, mistakenly or not, long ago on some vagabond move, or some other now long forgotten excursion. It wasn’t like you didn’t treasure the thing, really, but times moved on, you moved on and maybe the euphoria of high school pictures, of maybe five hundred plus people that you barely knew, or remembered, clubs you did not belong to, or sports that you did not participate in had passed by. Or, it wasn’t like you did not intend to keep the holy of holies but on those long ago hitchhike roads, those hitchhike roads west to start anew, maybe, just maybe, you had to leave it behind in some desolate motel room, or some godforsaken high mountain campsite. I understand your dilemma, believe me.

Or it was sold to the highest bidder at some flea market yard sale to pay off some untidy debt, some untidy small debt, I assume. The list of possibilities is endless, but at least those irresponsible renegade raider reds that simply lost or left theirs in some undisclosed place had enough spunk to leave the dust of high school traumas, dramas and bad karmas behind in some also now long forgotten way station.

 

As for myself, for those dying to know, or even those who are not because I have no story to tell otherwise, I know exactly where my previously un-coveted copy is, or at least where I threw it. Soon, very soon after graduation, in a fit of hubris, teen alienation, teen angst, teen rage against the dark I threw it, threw it unceremoniously, into the south fork of the Adamsville River not far from the old school, and my family’s house. Beyond that I take no responsible for where it landed, although I hope that it landed in some far off island where they have never heard of yearbooks, photographs, and pictures of people doing strange activities and would be clueless on such questions as why guys are running around in white shorts, why boys and girls are on separate bowling teams, why certain Greek vestigial Tri-Hi-Y girls take the three purities vows, and why guys were wearing non-fashionista white socks when posing for group activities. Things frankly that I wonder at now, wonder at intensely, myself. And maybe, just maybe, that Magnet is now an item of veneration, high holy veneration by some cargo cult-worshipping peoples who had no other use for the thing.

 

But that is more a fit task for an anthropologist’s analysis. Today I wish to speak of, as the headline indicates, archeology, of the search for ancient treasures, not of their meaning, well, not seriously of their meaning. And along that line I have a question, no, I have 1000 questions. I have just been on a “treasure hunt.” Was it in search of the Dead Sea Scrolls? No, that's kid's stuff. Did I venture to the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia, to dig up ancient sculptures? Boring, for my purposes here. Did I go on an Indiana Jones-style adventure in search of the lost Ark of the Covenant? Mere child’s play. No, I bravely went to the wilds of Winchester, Massachusetts to the lovely home of Frankie Riley, Francis Xavier Riley, the king hell king corner boy of the North Adamsville schoolboy be-bop night, from our class. And what treasure did I dig out? A rather pristine copy of the Magnet for the Class of 1965. This, my friends, is the find of the age.

 

Okay, now I have you exactly where I want you. Forget Botox and Hair Club for Men, from now on, guys and gals, no more trying to pass for fifty-something just because sixty is the new fifty. That include you Chrissie McNamara (maiden name). I have proof of age. In black and white glossies. And I do believe that I could find a good enough lawyer to have it hold up in court. Frankie, though, is already talking about hiring “hit men” to do me in if I so much as harm a hair on any classmate's head. You know Frankie; he was always one for the wild talk.

 

But enough of that wild noise for now. A couple of comments are in order, after an initial quick run through, before I do a more thorough scientific examination of this artifact. First, in the interest of scientific veracity I must confess an error. At one time or another when talking about “back in the days” I told one and all that Frankie and I spent (or misspent) many a summer evening on the front steps of North Adamsville High discussing our dreams, mainly small dreams and other getting through the day things, not big, cosmic mortality dreams like we would now. In describing the steps I mentioned that there were either stone lions or gargoyles that flanked either side of the steps. Well, in many pictures in the yearbook, especially of group activities, the front steps frame the shot. The items on the side of the steps were actually stone columns and globes. I was close though, right? That error is definitely either a result of the "mist of time" misting up big time or creeping senility. Your choice.

 

And now for some observations (and a posing of some those 1000 questions) on a first run through of the class pictures, individually and collectively. For most of the guys I would not want to meet you in a dark alley, even now. Unless I was heavily armed, or had the 82nd Airborne at my back. Actually make that the 82nd Airborne and at least one regiment from the 101st Airborne. Especially looking at those football players. I won't even speak of basketball and baseball players because they were mainly football guys after the season was over anyway. Were they on steroids in those days? Or some less exotic tobacco-like drug down in the locker room after the coaches called it a day? Is that why all the girls gathered round? I thought it was athletic prowess, but now I wonder. And wonder also what they look like now, now after all those years of youthful punishment on those hips, knees, and ankles. Come to think of it I don't think I will need that extra 101st regiment after all.

 

While we are on the subject of girls, the eternal subject then (and let's face it now too) and who they were and were not hanging around with, it is totally understandable that they would flock to the gridiron goliaths who carried our hopes and dreams on their broad shoulders on those brisk, yellow-leafed, gathering ice grey clouds autumn afternoons. Fair is fair. What is not fair, after looking at the picture of the billiards team, is why all the girls flocked to them. Many an afternoon I would drift (nice word use, right?) over casually to Joe's Billiard Parlor (although everybody knew it was nothing but a glorified pool hall, and Joe was nothing but a "connected", connected meaning you know connected do I have to spell it out, bookie using the place as a front) to check out the girls, the very lively, interesting girls, that seemed to be hanging off the rafters watching the boys (and it was always boys in those days) "shoot pools." Fifty years later and I am still burned up about it. Christ those guys were nothing but rough-hewed corner boys (although that may have been the attraction for those bouncy, tight sweater-wearing frails).

 

And continuing on with the sports teams, the track guys, christ, they look like they just came out of the wheat fields of Kansas with those uniforms that were issued in about 1926. And those squinty eyes like this was the first time they had seen a camera. One guy definitely looked like he was posing to be some jut-jawed Old West guy, cowboy guy, that made me think of a poor man's version of the actor/playwright Sam Shepard. Maybe my cargo cult reference above applies here too, except for cameras not yearbooks. Although I don’t know much about what goes on in Kansas, except don’t bury me there. No wonder people honked horns, caroomed their cars close to them, and yelled profanities as they passed when those guys ran in the road, the mad-hatter running road.

The tennis guys and gymnasts looked okay, normal as far as I could see, no dopey look in their eyes, mercifully. I swear though that I didn't know we had a tennis team but there it is in black and white so we must have. I know this for sure though some of those golf guys have that shifty look, you know, that look like they know the ball moved and they didn't take a penalty in that last match against Adamsville High. That's okay guys, it was only Adamsville. I won’t even speak about the treachery oozing out of the eyes of guys on the boys’ bowling team (or the girls’ for that matter). I thought bowling was a genteel sport. Why does everyone, male or female, look like, maybe, they cheated when adding up their scores. Strange, strange indeed.

And moving away from sports and clubs did we (guys) really wear our hair that way (and wear it that short, with those pseudo-sideburns)? And did we really wear those dweeby sports jackets with those white socks (with loafers it looks like) that seem to be sticking out endlessly of every sports team photograph?

 

For most of the gals, and call me a "dirty old man" but please, please do not tell my "significant other" I would not mind meeting you in the dark. No armed escorts necessary. Especially those gals on pages 78, 100, 106, 126, and 130. Yah, you know who you are. And I know you haven’t changed a bit since 1964, right?

 

Here is what I don’t get though. Well, maybe I better start off with what I do get. The cheerleaders did their cheer-leading thing and I swear no football game would have been the same without their rah, rah, rahs on those previously mentioned brisk, granite grey autumn days. The majorettes, well, the majorettes did their twirling, and especially one twirler that caught my eye, knew how to flip that thing. Be still my heart. And the band members played their tubas, trombones, and trumpets to perfection, although I heard some disturbing, if unsubstantiated, information about what went on in the band practice room, or really during the after practice hours. But I do not get this, and am desperately seeking enlightenment. Why did perfectly normal (at least from their photos they appear normal, 1960s beehive hair, cashmere sweater, whimsical smile normal) girls (a.k.a. young women, now) submit to the ridiculous three purities (no bad thoughts, words, or actions, christ) required, no demanded, for entry into Tri-Hi-Y. Something very unsettling was underfoot there, especially as we were on the threshold of the sexual revolution. I will investigate that matter further. Count on it.

On The Fiftieth Anniversary Of The Jefferson Airplane's First Album -From The ArchivesThe Heart Of The San Francisco Fillmore Night, Circa 1967

On The Fiftieth Anniversary Of The Jefferson Airplane's First Album -From The Archives

 

 

 

Scene: Brought to mind by one of the songs in this compilation, The Jefferson Airplane’s Fillmore West-driven classic wa-wa song, Someone To Love.

It wasn’t my idea, not the way I was feeling then although I had “married” them under the stars one night, one late June night, in this year of our summer of love 1967. Married Prince Love (a.k.a. Joshua Breslin, late of Olde Saco High School Class of 1967, that’s up in Maine) and Butterfly Swirl (a.k.a. Kathleen Clarke, Carlsbad High School Class of 1968, that’s down south here in California), my “family” as such things went on the merry prankster yellow brick road bus that brought us north to ‘Frisco. I had only “adopted” the Prince here on Russian Hill one day when he was looking for dope. Before that I had traveled all through the great western blue-pink night, as my North Adamsville corner boy friend, Peter Paul Markin, would say from Ames, Iowa where I got “on the bus,” the Captain Crunch merry prankster bus).

I brought Butterfly and Lupe Matin (her Ames “road” name then although now she is going under the name Lance Peters. No, don’t get the idea she has gone male, no way, no way in freaking hell and I have the scars on my back to prove it. It’s just her, well, thing, the name-changing thing, and her real name anyway is Sandra Sharp from Vassar, that’s a high–end New York college for women, okay) up here for a serious investigation of the summer of love we kept hearing about down in Carlsbad where we camped out (actually we looked out for the estate of a friend, or maybe better an associate, of our “leader,” Captain Crunch, as care-takers). Yes, the “old man,” me, Far-Out Phil (a. k. a. Phil Markin, North Adamsville Class of 1964, that’s in Massachusetts, okay) married them but I was not happy about it because I was still not done with Butterfly myself. Only the residual hard-knocks North Adamsville corner boy in me accepted, wise to the ways of the world, that Butterfly had flown from me.

It was all Captain Crunch’s idea, although Mustang Sally (a. k. a. Susan Stein), if she was talking to the Captain (a. k. a Samuel Jackman) just then, which was always a sometime thing lately since she had taken up with a drummer from one of the myriad up-and-coming “acid rock” bands that had sprouted out of the Golden Gate night, The Magic Mushrooms, and the Captain was not pleased, not pleased at all, probably was the real force behind the idea. The idea? Simple enough, Now that they, the they being the thousands of young people who had fled, fled a millions ways, west, were about creating a merry prankster yellow bus world on the hills of San Francisco the notion that Prince Love and Butterfly Swirl were “married” under the sign of “Far-Out Phil and would have now have a proper bourgeois “wedding reception” was impossible. Celebrate yes, no question. Celebrate high and hard, no question. But the times demanded, demanded high and hard, some other form of celebration. And that is where the Captain (or, as seemed more and more likely once more facts came out, Mustang Sally) hit his stride.

Here is the “skinny.” The Captain knew somebody, hell the Captain always knew somebody for whatever project he had in mind, connected to the Jefferson Airplane, a hot band that was going to be playing at the Fillmore that next Saturday night. And that somebody could get the Captain twenty prime tickets to the concert. [Everybody suspected that the deal was more nuanced than that, probably the tickets for a batch of Captain-produced acid, or in a two-fisted barter, a big pile of dope, mary jane most likely, from somebody else for something else and then a trade over for the tickets. That high finance stuff was never very clear but while nobody worried much about money, except a few hungry times out in some god-forsaken desert town or something, there usually was plenty of Captain dough around for family needs.] So the Captain’s idea was that this concert would be an electric kool-aid acid test trip that was now almost inevitably part of any 1967 event, in lieu of that bourgeois (the Captain’s word, okay) wedding reception. And, see, the Prince and Butterfly, were not to know because this was going to be their first time taking some of that stuff, the acid (LSD, for the squares, okay). And once the acid hit the Captain said, and the rest of us agreed, there would be no sorrow, no sorrow at all, that they had not had some bogus old bourgeois wedding reception.

Saturday night came, and everybody was dressed to the nines. (Ya, that’s an old Frankie Riley, North Adamsville corner boy leader, thing that I held onto, still do, to say hot, edgy, be-hop.) Let’s just concentrate on the “bride” and “groom” attire and that will give an idea of what nines looked like that night. Butterfly, a genuine West Coast young blonde beauty anyway, formerly hung-up on the surfer scene (or a perfect-wave surfer guy anyway), all tanned, and young sultry, dressed in a thin, almost see-through, peasant blouse. According to Benny Buzz, a kind of connoisseur on the subject, it wasn’t really see-through but he lied, or close to it, because every guy in the party or later, at the concert, craned his neck to look at the outline of her beautiful breasts that were clearly visible for all to see. And while she may have been “seek a new world” Butterfly Swirl she was also an old-fashioned “tease,” and made no apologies for being so. She also wore a short mini-skirt that was de rigueur just then that highlighted her long well-turned legs (long flowing skirts were to come in a little later) and had her hair done up in an utterly complicated braid that seemed impossible to have accomplished piled high on her head, garlands of flowers flowing out everywhere, and silvery, sparkling, starry mascara eyes and ruby-red, really ruby red lips giving a total effect that even had the Captain going, and the Captain usually only had his eyes, all six of them, fixed on Mustang Sally.

And the “groom”? Going back to Olde Saco roots he wore along with his now longer flowing hair and less wispy beard an old time sea captain’s hat, long flared boatswain's whites, a sailor’s shirt from out of old English Navy times and a magical mystery tour cape in lieu of the usual rough crewman's jacket. A strange sight that had more than one girl turning around and maybe scratching her head to figure out his “statement.” That didn’t however stop them from looking and maybe making a mental note to “try him out” sometime. (By the way, I told the Captain later that the Prince had no idea of making a statement and, being more than a little stoned on some leftover hash that he found around he just grabbed what was at hand).

Now back to the action. In order to “fortify” everyone for the adventure the Captain proposed a “toast” to the happy couple before we left the merry prankster yellow bus to make the one mile trip to the Fillmore. So everybody, including the bride and groom toasted with Dixie cups of kool-aid. The Prince and Butterfly were bemused that, with all the liquor available around the bus, the Captain proposed to use kool-aid for the toast. Well, we shall see. And they shall see.

And they “saw,” or rather saw once the acid (LSD) kicked in about an hour later, more or less. Now what you “see” on an acid trip is a very individual thing, moreover other than that powerful rush existential moment that you find yourself living in it defies description, literary niceness description, especially from a couple of kids on their “wedding night.” So what is left? Well, some observations by “father” Far-Out Phil, now a veteran acid-eater, as I hovered over my new-found “family” to insured that they made a safe landing.

The first thing I noticed was that Butterfly Swirl was gyrating like crazy when the female singer in front of Jefferson Airplane, Grace Slick, started up on their acid rock anthem, White Rabbit. Some of Butterfly’s moves had half the guys in the place kind of male hippie “leering” at her (mainly giving her a sly nod of approval, and making a mental note to check her out later when the dope hit her at the high point in another couple of hours or so). (Remember she had on that diaphanous peasant blouse, and also remember that sexual thoughts, leering sexual thoughts or not, did not fade away when under the influence of LSD. In many cases the sexual arousal effect was heightened, particularly when a little high- grade herb was thrown into the mix.) I thought nothing in particular of her actions just then, many guys and girls were gyrating, were being checked-out and were making mental notes of one kind or another. It is only when Butterfly started to “believe” that she was Alice, the Alice of the song and of wonderland, and repeated “I am Alice, I am alive,” about thirteen times that I moved over to her quickly and gave her a battle-scarred veteran’s calming down, a couple of hits off the Columbia Red that I had just coped from some freak.

And where was Prince Love during the trial by fire honeymoon night? Gyrating with none other than Lance Peters, who you may know as Luscious Lois or seven other names, by who was my main honey now that Butterfly has flown my coop. But don’t call her Lance Peters this night because after a tab of acid (beyond her congratulations kool-aid cup earlier) she is now Laura Opal in her constant name-game change run through the alphabet. Prince Love had finally “seen” the virtues of being with older woman like I had learned back in Ames Iowa time, an older voluptuous woman and although she was wearing no Butterfly diaphanous blouse Prince felt electricity running through his veins as they encircled each other on the dance floor. Encircled each other and then, slyly, very slyly, I thought when I heard the story the next day, backed out of the Fillmore to wander the streets of Haight-Ashbury until the dawn. Then to find shelter in some magic bus they thought was the Captain’s but when they were awoken by some tom-toms drumming out to eternity around noontime found out that they were in the “Majestic Moon” tribe’s bus. No hassle, no problem, guest always welcome. Ya, that is the way it was then. When I cornered, although corned may be too strong a word, the Prince later all that he would commit to was that he had been devoured by Mother Earth and had come out on the other side. That, and that he had seen god, god close up. Laura Quirk, if she is still running under that name now, merely stated that she was god. Oh ya, and had seen the now de rigueur stairway to heaven paved with brilliant lights. She certainly knew how to get around her Phil when the deal went down, no question.

And how did the evening end with Butterfly and me, after I “consoled” her with my ready-teddy herbal remedy? After a search for Prince and Lance, a pissed off search for me, we went over into a corner and started staring at one of the strobe lights off the walls putting ourselves into something of a trance-like mood. A short time later, I, formerly nothing but a hard-luck, hard-nosed, world-wide North Adamsville corner boy in good standing started involuntarily yelling, “I am Alice, I am alive,” about ten times. Butterfly though that was the funniest thing she had ever heard and came over to me and handed me a joint, a joint filled with some of that same Columbia Red that settled her down earlier. And I, like Butterfly before me, did calm down. Calmed down enough to see our way “home” to Captain Crunch’s Crash-Pad where we, just for old time’s sake, spend the hours until dawn making love. (I send my apologies to those two thousand guys at the Fillmore who had made notes to check on Butterfly later. Hey, I was not a king hell corner boy back in the North Adamsville be-bop night for nothing. You have to move fast sometimes in this wicked old world, even when the point was to slow the circles down.) Asked later what her “trip” had felt like all Butterfly could utter was her delight in my antics. That, the usual color dream descriptions, and that she had climbed some huge himalaya mountain and once on top climbed a spiraling pole forever and ever. I just chuckled my old corner boy chuckle.

And what of Butterfly and Prince’s comments on their maiden voyage as newlyweds? They pronounced themselves very satisfied with their Fillmore honeymoon night. They then went off for what was suppose to be a few days down to Big Sur where Captain Crunch had some friends, Captain had friends everywhere, everywhere that mattered, who lent them their cabin along the ocean rocks and they had a “real” honeymoon. A few weeks later Prince Love, now a solo prince, came back to the bus. It seems that Butterfly had had her fill of being “on the bus,” although she told the Prince to say thanks to everybody for the dope, sex, and everything but that at heart her heart belonged to her golden-haired surfer boy and his search for the perfect wave.

Well, we all knew not everybody was build for the rigors of being “on the bus” so farewell Kathleen Clarke, farewell. And just then, after hearing this story, I thought that Prince had better keep his Olde Saco eyes off Lannie Rose (yes she has changed her name again) or I might just remember, seriously remember, some of those less savory North Adamsville be-bop corner boy nights. Be forewarned, sweet prince.
 

And You Don’t Believe We Are On The Eve Of Destruction-With “The Bomb” In Mind

And You Don’t Believe We Are On The Eve Of Destruction-With “The Bomb” In Mind 

 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

Sometimes it takes a “nut case” or something that reads like a far-out off-the-wall statement like the one up above under the headline to provoke some real thought about the nightmares that haunted our youthful dreams but which since the demise of the Soviet Union and the serious lessening of the nuclear threat of war have fallen into the background. (Of course the Doctor Strangeloves of the planet have kept themselves in high dudgeon seeing and seeking imminent nuclear war behind every action of every untoward event by some “enemy” that occurs. And of course this optical illusion of power is spoon-fed by the very real danger that the number one nuclear threat to the peoples of the war, the United States, poses.) So one can discount the doomsday message presented above as just another false alarm raised to spur the beguiled troops who follow the messenger on. Especially once one sees the name Lyndon LaRouche who must be truly ancient by now and perhaps not even alive but who name only need be merely evoked to spur his supporters on. That man has been associated with more whacky doomsday political operations, left and right, than one could shake a stick at. A true menace when he was a man of the left and who knows what once he flipped out on whatever medication he was presumably taking at the time and became a right-wing fool.

 

But one should not combine the LaRouche screwball politics and doomsday predictions with the very real threat of nuclear war posed by the increasingly bellicose actions of the American government as we have just recently been painfully reminded by in the 70^th anniversary commemorations of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

 

And that is exactly the way that Frankie Riley thought about the question after perusing the leaflet that had been passed on to him by a guy standing in Harvard Square one recent Saturday afternoon. The gist of the leaflet made him think about the days back in the early 1960s and about how his old time corner boy friend, the late Pete Markin, used to harangue the crowd in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys sophomore year in high school when he was all hot to trot to save the world from the nuclear threat. Markin, also dubbed “The Scribe” by Frankie after he spent what appeared to be half his youth paying homage to Frankie’s corner boy leadership at Jack Slack’s and the other half giving out his own doomsday warnings about the perils of nuclear war, was a funny dude that way.

 

Get this example to show his serious contradictions (and give a flavor for why when things went sour in his life he came to a bad end). One week you could see Markin passing out “missile gap” Jack Kennedy literature in front of the little shack that was Kennedy headquarters on Main Street in North Adamsville in order to help insure his election in 1960. Of course that “missile gap” point made by Kennedy was that in the very real Cold War dark night the Soviets had somehow nefariously gotten a jump on the old USA in the number of nuclear-armed missiles which could blow the world up a million times over. The implication being that doddering Grandfather Ike and his hatchet man Nixon, Kennedy’s opponent, had left the door open. But see the next week, and Frankie had to hold back a laugh and a tear on this one you could find Markin walking with a bunch of little old ladies in tennis shoes for a world without nuclear weapons.  

 

Frankie had had to laugh when he thought about that “little old ladies in tennis sneakers” Markin was always yakking about when he was in high pacifist mode. Those little old ladies (and guys too but Markin didn’t mention their footwear) were the do-gooders of the world, you know, the Quakers, the Unitarians, the Universalist (before those two organizations patched up whatever doctrinal differences they had and merged a while back), the wooly-headed college professors with their corduroy jackets with elbow-saving patches and stinking pipes jutting out of their mouths who thought spending a Saturday afternoon spreading the good word of peace to a pagan red-scare crowd would turn the swords into plowshares. At least that was Frankie’s take on the matter. Yeah, Markin was something back in the day when he got on his high horse.

 

All of a sudden Frankie said, “damn it” when he realized that Markin had costed him five dollars over his foolishness with the do-gooders. Back in October 1960 just before the elections, scheduled maybe to embarrass blessed Jack Kennedy, blessed one of our own sweet boy Irish brethren even if he was “chandelier” Irish as Frankie liked to think about the matter, Doctor Spock who every other mother in the post-World War II era sought for advise on child-rearing except maybe his and Markin’s and a bunch of other do-gooders and commies in an organization called SANE had called for nation-wide rallies to stop the nuclear proliferation of the times-by both sides. Markin had found out about the demonstration scheduled for Boston on a Saturday afternoon at Park Street Station on the Boston Common, the historic site for various protests in the downtown area, from a copy of The Catholic Worker that his sainted Irish grandmother subscribed to and had around the house.

 

Markin was on fire to go attend the event but expressed fears to Frankie and the other corner boys that he would be arrested by the cops as a disorderly person, be beaten up by anti-communist thugs, or would be laughed at by the little old ladies for being a wet-behind-the-ears kid of fourteen in an adult world. Frankie who loved to bait Markin (and the others) about their manhood told Markin that he would bet him five dollars that he would not go to that rally downtown, especially since North Adamsville was playing a big football game against Carver High that day and all the corner boys were expected to be there to root on the home team. Now when one guy proposed a bet the usual course was to take the bet, or be considered chicken. Markin said “bet” but Frankie knew he was in a quandary about it. Frankie figured when the deal went down Markin would cry uncle and that five bucks would be like finding money on the ground.

 

Well as you know since Frankie fifty some years later said “damn it” that he lost the bet but it was a close thing. This is the way Markin told the story after the event as he met up with Frankie to collect his filthy lucre. First Markin was fearful that he would be waylaid when he went through Old Harbor, a rough section of another town which you had to pass through to get to the Yellow Line of the subway that would take you to the Park Street Station. Markin had been menaced there before but that day the gods were with him and he got downtown alright. Once he got there he saw about twenty or so people, mostly those little old ladies in tennis sneakers that he would later call them, walking in a circle carrying signs like “Ban The Bomb,” “Stop The Madness,” and “Nuclear Disarmament Now” and being menaced by a bunch of pug-uglies who looked like they might be from Southie a place where they hated anybody who protested anything anytime that threatened their views of king-pin America. He almost decided to turn around and go home but something about the way those people were holding their ground, were handling themselves with some dignity  while the coppers turned a blind eye made him turn back to the small demonstration and begin to walk in the circle. Somebody passed him a “Ban The Bomb” sign and he accepted it. As the afternoon wore on Markin began to feel better because the participants now grown to about fifty in number had begun to treat him, by far the youngest marcher, as their “mascot,” as a sign that the future was not altogether hopeless. Yeah, a good day for Markin and five dollars richer in this wicked old world.                

 

Frankie had to laugh again although at the time he was really pissed off about it but Markin took that five dollars and sent it to the Catholic Worker as a donation to be used for nuclear disarmament. Yeah, Frankie thought with a sigh over his lost brother, pure Markin.  

A View From The Left -Europe: Racist Clampdown on Immigration

Frank Jackman comment: Usually when I post something from some other source, mostly articles and other materials that may be of interest to the radical public that I am trying to address I place the words “ A View From The Left” in the headline and let the subject of the article speak for itself, or the let the writer speak for him or herself without further comment whether I agree with the gist of what is said or not. After all I can write my own piece if some pressing issue is at hand. Occasionally, and the sentiments expressed in this article is one of them, I can stand in solidarity with the remarks made. I do so here.        Workers Vanguard No. 1071

10 July 2015

Europe: Racist Clampdown on Immigration

 

The following article originally appeared in Workers Hammer No. 231 (Summer 2015), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain.

 

When some 1,200 people drowned in the Mediterranean in a matter of days in April, the horrendous plight of those trying to secure a future for themselves and their children evoked widespread public sympathy across Europe. But for the scoundrels who head the capitalist governments of the European Union (EU), the mass drownings provided a “humanitarian” pretext for launching military action.

 

Screaming about “slave-traffickers,” Europe’s capitalist rulers are seeking to justify a military operation to search and destroy boats, fuel dumps and other facilities used by refugees and immigrants; Britain and France are drafting a resolution for UN backing. At the same time, the EU member states have given the green light to yet another round of tighter immigration controls. From the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the North African coast to the Greek-Turkish border, entry points into the EU are already closed off with walls and razor-wire fences. Now warships from Britain, Germany and other EU states are deployed in the Mediterranean. Any such intervention raises the prospect of renewed imperialist military intervention against Libya.

 

Arguably the most piggish of the lot are the rulers of imperialist Britain. Last October the government announced it would cease paying contributions towards the rescue of immigrants at sea. With all the haughtiness due her rank, Baroness Anelay, the Tory Foreign Office minister, declaimed: “We do not support planned search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean. We believe that they create an unintended ‘pull factor’” (theguardian.com, 28 October 2014). Now the Tory government has ruled out any idea of taking in a token quota of asylum-seekers. The EU imperialists’ message to the desperate masses fleeing imperialist-induced war and starvation in Asia, Africa and the Near East is: Drop dead!

The thousands of immigrants who have died in the attempt to reach the gates of “Fortress Europe” were murdered by the imperialist governments that have militarily devastated their countries, ravaged their economies, robbed them of their livelihoods and then callously left them to die. The collapse of the Soviet degenerated workers state in the early 1990s removed a historic obstacle to imperialist free-booting. The first Iraq war of 1990-91 was quickly followed by U.S. military intervention in Somalia and a host of other imperialist military adventures. Over the past decade, the U.S. and Britain have been involved in wars and/or occupations from Afghanistan and Iraq to Syria and Libya, while France has repeatedly sent troops to protect its economic interests in Ivory Coast, Mali and the Central African Republic.

 

The existence of the Soviet Union had allowed manoeuvring room for “Third World” capitalist rulers, who garnered economic and military aid by offering themselves as clients to Moscow or Washington. Following capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR the various imperialist powers have increasingly fomented, stoked or manipulated inter-ethnic conflicts and civil wars in order to remove, install or buy off local tyrants and ensure access to valuable natural resources such as oil and diamonds. Meanwhile, countless people are slaughtered, displaced or left to die of man-made famines or scourges like AIDS, which were allowed to rage unchecked.

 

The 2011 bombing of Libya by the U.S., Britain and France led to the toppling of the bonapartist Qaddafi government and a state of utter collapse and anarchy. With various military strongmen, imperialist puppets, Islamist reactionaries and tribal forces fighting each other, the unguarded Libyan coast became a destination for many of those from Asia, Africa and the Near East seeking to gain entry into Europe. While the “people smugglers” who extort thousands of pounds to place people on rickety boats are parasites, the big-time criminals are the imperialist rulers. Those people who do manage to make it into Europe are often thrown into brutal detention centres, like Britain’s Yarl’s Wood, whose inmates have protested against being treated “like animals or less than animals.” Such are the normal workings of the global capitalist system.

 

We say: Those who make it here should have the right to stay here—Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! No deportations! Shut down the detention camps! All imperialist military forces out of Africa and the Near East!

 

The Apostles of “Humanitarian” Imperialism

 

Various groups on the reformist left are promoting fatuous illusions that the rapacious imperialists who are responsible for what has been labelled a “humanitarian catastrophe” will “do something” to help their victims. ControCorrente, the Italian group affiliated to the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), represented in Britain by the Socialist Party [and in the U.S. by Socialist Alternative], demands that “an international maritime assistance plan must be re-established in international waters and, if necessary, in Libyan national waters. Assistance must be guaranteed to every human being” (socialistworld.net, 27 April).

The CWI holds up as a model of “success” the Italian government’s Mare Nostrum programme, describing it as a “military and humanitarian mission whose principal objective was maritime assistance and the rescue of migrants.” In fact, the declared objective of the now defunct Mare Nostrum search-and-rescue programme was to provide a “deterrent effect” against immigration. And the handfuls that “humanitarian” Italian imperialism does rescue are liable to be thrown into overcrowded camps—as were the 27 people who survived the mass drowning in April.

 

The British Workers Power group is a typical example of reformist cheerleading for “human rights” imperialism. Lecturing Cameron & Co. that the “highest priority should surely be placed on saving the lives of people driven to desperate measures by consequences beyond their control,” Workers Power demands: “We need to open the borders of the EU to all who seek asylum or work within it.” They continue: “We need to tear down the walls and transform Fortress Europe into Refuge Europe” (www.workerspower.co.uk, 22 April). Who is “we,” one asks—perhaps that Labour government that Workers Power urged people to elect in May, to no avail?

 

The Workers Power statement acknowledges that the exploitation and wars carried out by the imperialists “are the underlying causes of the humanitarian disaster.” What they do not acknowledge, not surprisingly, is their own role. Workers Power, among others on the left including the Socialist Workers Party, helped prepare the ideological ground for the imperialist bombing of Libya by hailing the anti-Qaddafi “revolutionaries” who would later act as spotters for the British and French bombers. Even after the country was overrun by reactionary tribal leaders and Islamic fundamentalists Workers Power continued to claim that these imperialist-backed “rebels” provided an opening for “a struggle for consistent democracy and internationalism” (fifthinternational.org, 22 August 2011).

 

The call to “open the borders” is both utopian and reactionary. To call on the capitalists to open their borders is to call on them to eliminate the capitalist system. The modern nation-state (or multinational state dominated by one nation) arose as a vehicle for the development of capitalism and will remain the foundation of capitalism until the whole system is overthrown through a series of workers revolutions. Every capitalist corporation, no matter how far flung its international operations, is ultimately reliant on the armed forces of its home country. No capitalist ruling class will voluntarily relinquish control over its territory.

 

For revolutionary Marxists, it is axiomatic that the capitalist nation-state, together with private ownership of the means of production, are fetters on the further development of the forces of production, which are social and international in character. Only with the advent of a global, classless communist society and the withering away of the state will there be no borders. To argue otherwise is to deny the iron necessity of socialist revolution for the further advance of humanity and serves only to fuel illusions in the reformability of a potentially “humane” capitalist system.

If promoted as a general principle, the demand for open borders under capitalism is reactionary. As the history of Zionist Israel amply demonstrates, unlimited mass immigration is a threat to the right of national self-determination. The major powers have the means to throttle the flow of refugees and immigrants into their countries when they need to; not so smaller and weaker peoples. While the imperialist states (at the behest of the Zionists) closed their borders to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and to the survivors of the death camps, they compelled hundreds of thousands of European Jews to go to Palestine, where they ended up displacing and expelling much of the Arab population.

 

As the entire history of the British empire shows, insofar as a great power can force a weaker, economically backward state to open its borders, this allows for increased penetration by imperialist capital, effectively eliminating any degree of national sovereignty of the weaker country. The EU capitalist club is committed to the free movement of capital. Immigrant workers from poorer EU states are used as a pool of low-wage labour, and the capitalists seek to manipulate immigration to suit the needs of the labour market in their own countries. In 2004, when the EU expanded into Eastern Europe, citizens of new member states were given the right to work in Britain to fill gaps in the labour market; today Cameron is intent on gutting the legal rights of those immigrants, causing friction with Germany and other EU countries, not least Poland. Meanwhile Italy, France and Britain are at each other’s throats, and are reinforcing their borders with each other, while deploying police to attack immigrants trying to cross the frontiers.

 

Originating as an economic adjunct to the U.S.-dominated anti-Soviet NATO alliance, the EU has always been a mechanism for the capitalist rulers to maximise the rate of exploitation of the working class of the region. The EU is an inherently unstable bloc aimed at improving the competitive edge of its dominant members, chiefly Germany, vis-à-vis their imperialist rivals, centrally Japan and the U.S. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 1992 Maastricht Treaty set the framework for the EU of today. It laid down the conditions for joining the single currency. Member states signed up, agreeing to limits on their budget deficits in exchange for cheaper loans, larger inflows of capital and freer trade within Europe. The euro is an instrument for economic domination, chiefly by Germany, over the poorer EU states. Moreover, as the current EU crisis shows, a single currency shared by different countries is unviable in the long term.

 

At bottom, the call to “transform Fortress Europe into Refuge Europe” reveals Workers Power’s faith that this imperialist-dominated conglomerate can be turned into a progressive “social Europe,” as propagated by social-democratic leftists and trade-union bureaucrats. In explaining why they refused to call for a no vote in the referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, these reformists argued that it could be “a basis for extending rights and gains from states where the working class never won these gains, or where it has lost them,” and that “to some extent European workers will be better armed to fight back on a continental scale after the implementation of the terms of Maastricht” (LRCI Resolution, Workers Power No. 156, June 1992).

 

The notion that the European capitalists would help “arm” those whom they exploit to fight more effectively to ameliorate the terms of their exploitation truly requires a religious leap of faith! The International Communist League has opposed the EU since its inception, from the standpoint of proletarian internationalism. To see how our sharp opposition to the EU and the single currency has been vindicated, one need only look at the economic devastation visited upon Greece, or at the fate of the poorer countries of Eastern Europe, which have been turned into vast reservoirs of exploitation by (mainly) German and French capital.

 

With most of the liberal and reformist left peddling illusions in this reactionary imperialist alliance, the main beneficiaries of growing opposition to the EU have been ultrareactionary to outright fascist parties, from UKIP in Britain and Italy’s Northern League to the National Front in France and Greece’s Golden Dawn. These racist forces have aggressively tried to scapegoat immigrants for the recurrent economic crises that are endemic to the capitalist mode of production.

 

For International Socialist Revolutions!

 

If nothing else, the current crisis in the EU exposes the myth that Europe can be peacefully integrated under capitalism. In his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution V.I. Lenin ridiculed a version of the same argument then proffered by Karl Kautsky, describing it as Kautsky’s “silly little fable about ‘peaceful’ ultra-imperialism.” As Lenin explained, imperialism represents the final stage of capitalism, when the world has already been divided up by the major powers and the export of capital predominates over the export of goods. Imperialism is marked by huge financial monopolies extending their grip over the world economy and the subjugation of weaker peoples while the stronger powers fight each other for control of markets and resources. The system itself necessarily leads to wars of neocolonial aggrandisement and, ultimately, interimperialist wars. Imperialist domination prevents any substantial economic growth of the countries of belated capitalist development, miring most of them in destitution.

In the semicolonial countries, whose rulers are tied by a thousand threads to the dominant world powers, the only way to overthrow the imperialist yoke is the seizure of power by the proletariat leading the oppressed masses. This task is inseparably linked to the need for proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries, which will open the road to the development of socialism. In contrast to the liberal plea for “open borders,” which reduces workers in the semicolonial world to passive victims, we fight for the Trotskyist programme of permanent revolution. Within this internationalist perspective, immigrant workers have a central role to play, by acting as a human bridge to link the European proletariat to their class brothers and sisters in Africa, Asia and the Near East.

 

Mass migration is an integral feature of imperialist capitalism. British capitalism has long exploited immigrant labour, from the time of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution when it drew in masses of Irish immigrants, to the post-World War II period when British employers actively recruited labour from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent. As we wrote in the ICL Declaration of Principles (1998):

 

“Modern capitalism, i.e., imperialism, reaching into all areas of the planet, in the course of the class struggle and as economic need demands, brings into the proletariat at its bottom new sources of cheaper labor, principally immigrants from poorer and less-developed regions of the world—workers with few rights who are deemed more disposable in times of economic contraction.”

To be sure, the imperialists are not now actively encouraging a mass influx of downtrodden and impoverished masses of semicolonial people. Yet those who do manage to get into EU countries—often as asylum-seekers, as that is the common legal avenue of admission for many—serve precisely the purpose outlined above. With the aid of the trade-union bureaucracy, the capitalists constantly seek to set the most backward layers of the indigenous working class against immigrants, threatening to replace native-born workers with lower-paid foreign workers. In this way, the bourgeoisie seeks to depress wage levels for the working class as a whole. As a central component of the proletariat of Europe, immigrant and minority workers are bound to play a key role in the fight for socialist revolution.

 

What is needed is joint struggle by all workers against the wage-slashing, union-bashing capitalists: to fight for the unionization of all immigrant workers, who are often compelled to work for non-union contractors, and for equal pay for equal work; to fight to divide all existing jobs amongst all the available workforce, with no reduction in pay but with a significant reduction in working hours. Against protectionist, anti-immigrant chauvinism, workers must be won to the understanding that they share a common class interest with the workers of all countries and all nationalities against the capitalist class enemy.

 

The international character of the working class gives it potentially enormous superiority over the bourgeoisie, whose system of production for profit works by anarchistic methods that fuel national conflicts and constantly create social inequality and economic crisis. To realise its revolutionary potential, the proletariat needs an international party to unite the class across national and other divisions and to co-ordinate the interdependent struggles of workers of every country. It is for this purpose that the ICL fights to reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.

 

Following the example of the Bolshevik party that led the Russian Revolution in 1917, we aim to act, in the words of Lenin, as a “tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression” and “to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat” (What Is To Be Done? [1902]).

 

Our programme is for proletarian revolutions to expropriate the capitalist exploiters and establish a Socialist United States of Europe. The economic unification of Europe under workers rule has been an urgent need for more than a century. Together with proletarian revolutions in the U.S. and Japan and in the more backward countries that today suffer imperialist subjugation, the creation of a socialist Europe would lead to a vast expansion of the productive forces in an international planned economy. Workers governments in the advanced countries would devote enormous resources to the development of Asia, Africa and Latin America, helping pave the way to an egalitarian world order in which people will choose to move around the world for pleasure and enlightenment, not out of fear of physical and economic insecurity.

From #Un-Occupied Boston-This Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Working Class!

From #Un-Occupied Boston-This Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Working Class! Take The Offensive! - A Five Point Program For Discussion

 

LeonTrotsky -Lessons Of The Paris Commune-Listen Up

Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!

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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

Ralph Morris and Sam Lowell a couple of old-time radicals, old-time now not being the Great Depression labor radicals who had been their models after a fashion and who helped built the now seemingly moribund unions but anti-war radicals from the hell-bent street in-your-face 1960s confrontations with the American beast during the Vietnam War reign of hell were beside themselves when the powder-puff uprising of the Occupy movement brought a fresh breeze to the tiny American left-wing landscape in the latter part of 2011.  (That term “powder puff” not expressing the heft of the movement but the fact that it disappeared almost before it got started giving up the huge long-term fight it was expected to wage to break the banks, break the corporate grip on the world and, try to seek “newer world”). Although Ralph and Sam were not members in good standing of any labor unions, both having after their furtive anti-war street fights and the ebbing of the movement by about the mid-1970s returned to “normalcy,” Ralph having taken over his father’s electrical shop in Troy, New York when he retired and Sam had gone back to Carver to expand a print shop that he had started in the late 1960, but having come from respectable working-class backgrounds in strictly working-class towns, Carver about thirty miles from Boston and the cranberry bog capital of the world and Ralph in Troy near where General Electric ruled the roost, and had taken to heart the advice of their respective grandfathers about not forgetting those left behind, that an injury to one of their own in this wicked old world was an injury to all as the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) motto had it. Moreover despite their backing away from the street confrontations of their youth when that proved futile after a time as the Vietnam War finally wound down and yesterday’s big name radicals left for parts unknown they had always kept an inner longing for the “newer world,” the more equitable world where the people who actually made stuff and kept the wheels of society running and their down-pressed allies ruled.    

So Ralph and Sam would during most of the falloff 2011   travel down to the Wall Street plaza which was the center of the movement on weekends, long weekends usually, to take part in the action after the long drought of such activity both for them personally and for their kind of politics. They were crestfallen to say the least when the thing exploded after the then reigning mayor and the NYPD the police pulled down the hammer and forcibly disbanded the place (and other city administrations across the country and across the world and police departments doing likewise). Of more concern since they had already known about what the government could do when it decided to pull down the hammer was thereafter when the movement imploded from its own contradictions, caught up not wanting to step on toes, to let everybody do their own thing, do their own identity politics which did much to defang the old movements, refusing out of hand cohering a collective leadership that might give some direction to the damn thing but also earnestly wanting to bring the monster down.

Ralph and Sam in the aftermath, after things had settled down and they had time to think decided to put together a proposal, a program if you like, outlining some of the basic political tasks ahead to be led by somebody. Certainly not by them since radical politics, street politics is a young person’s game and they admittedly had gotten rather long in the tooth. Besides they had learned long ago, had talked about it even over drinks at Jack Higgin’s Grille more than once, how each generation will face its tasks in its own way so they would be content to be “elder” tribal leaders and provide whatever wisdom they could, if asked. Here working under the drumbeat of Bob Marley’s Get Up, Stand Up something of a “national anthem” for what went on among the better elements of Occupy are some points that any movement for social change has to address these days and fight for and about as well.       

 

A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

***Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, those who have just plain quit looking for work and critically those who are working jobs beneath their skill levels was this high in the American labor force, although it is admittedly down from the Great Recession of 2008-09 highs. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around to all who want and need it. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.

The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions when the union-run hiring hall ruled supreme in manning the jobs is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling, where, and at what skill level,  and equitably divide up current work.

Here is the beauty of the scheme, what makes it such a powerful propaganda tool-without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” –with the no reduction in pay proviso, although many low –end employers are even now under the “cover” of the flawed Obamacare reducing hours WITH loss of pay-so that to establish this work system as a norm it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.

 

Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce and less in the formerly pivotal private industries like auto production.  Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. (Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, the North American auto industry employed almost a million workers but only a third or less are unionized whereas in the old days the industry was union tight.)

The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American service-oriented  economy. Everyone should support the recent militant efforts, including the old tactic of civil disobedience, by service unions and groups of fast-food workers to increase the minimum socially acceptable wage in their Fight For $15.

Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Hey, nobody said it was going to be easy.

 

Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of company-owned trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. The key here is to organize the truckers and distribution center workers, the place where the whole thing comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of individual retail stores and victimizations of local union organizers. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone, probably Bart Webber in his more thoughtful moments,  once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant mainstay of the run to the bottom capitalist ethos. Well, as to the latter point that’s a thought.

 

Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more defeats like in Wisconsin in 2011, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. Defeat all “right to work” legislation. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.

*** Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray, the very stray   Republican) candidates. In 2008 and 2012 labor, organized labor, spent over 450 million dollars respectively trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The “no show, no go” results speak for themselves as the gap between the rich, make that the very rich but don’t forgot to include them on the fringes of the one percent and poor has risen even more in this period. For those bogus fruitless efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea presented, an old idea going back to the initial formation of the working class in America, in those elections was that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor” and the Republicans are the 666 beasts but the Obama administration does not take a back seat to the elephants on this one. The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the-back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement. They always have their hands out.

The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. One egregious example from the recent past from around the time of the Occupy movement where some of tried to link up the labor movement with the political uprising- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks in the summer of 2011 when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down when the deal goes down.

This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections against individual reactionaries, like Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle when some form of general strike was required to break the anti-union backs (and which was overwhelmingly unsuccessful to boot-while the number of unionized public workers has dwindled to a precious few).  

 

***End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reached its final stages back in 2011, the draw- down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we argued, Sam more than I did since he had been closer to the initial stage if the opposition that we must recognize that we anti-warriors had failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006).As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other proxy wars) continue now with a new stage against ISIS (common moniker for the Islamic State) in Iraq we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the U.S. troop escalation we know is coming before that fight is over. Not Another War In Iraq! Stop The Bombings In Syria, Iraq, Yemen! Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East Especially To Israel and Saudi Arabia! Defend The Palestinian People-End The Blockade of Gaza-Israel Out Of The Occupied Territories. And as always since 2001 Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of Every Single U.S./Allied Troops (And The Mercenaries) From Afghanistan!  

U.S. Hands Off Iran! Hands Off Syria!- Despite a certain respite recently during the Iran nuclear arms talks  American (and world) imperialists have periodically ratcheted up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner on this issue, Israel) in Iran and Syria is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe us we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran in our own way in our own time.

U.S. Hands Off The World! And Keep Them Off!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, like Saudi Arabia and France over the recent period have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.

 

Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that in 1915 in the heat of war and paid the price unlike other party leaders who were pledged to stop the war budgets by going to prison. The only play for an honest representative of the working class under those conditions. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now no new funding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get the drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.

***Fight for a social agenda for working people! Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states whatever political disagreements we may have with the Cuban leadership like Cuba, and whatever their other internal political problems caused in no small part the fifty plus year U.S. blockade, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs. Be clear Obamacare is not our program and has already been shown to be totally inadequate and wasteful however we will defend that program against those who wish to dismantle it and leave millions once again uninsured and denied basic health benefits.  

Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!

This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle-class as well.

Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students from broken homes and minority homes in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take a big chuck from the bloated military budget and the bank bail-out money, things like that, if you want to find the money quickly to do the job right), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.

Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while low-cost aid has not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast into some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!

Stop housing foreclosures and aid underwater mortgages now! Although the worst of the crunch has abated there are still plenty of problems and so this demand is still timely if not desperately timely like in the recent past. Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.

***We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.

Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.

Build a workers’ party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.

As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):

“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.” 

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

Markin comment October 1, 2011:

There is a lot of naive expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naive, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call themselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
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Markin comment October 9, 2011:

Word comes, via National Public Radio (NPR), that Mayor Menino believes that the time to shut down the Occupy Boston site at Dewey Square is nearing. That despite the hard facts that there have been no problems, no trouble caused, and nothing but good-will on the part of the occupation forces. We must all tell, loudly tell, Mayor Menino- Hands Off The Occupy Boston Site! Hands Off The Occupiers!
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Markin comment October 11, 2011:

Around two o’clock in the morning Boston Police swooped in on a second occupation site established to handle the growing number of people who waned to camp out. The city, Mayor Menino, decided to draw the line at that second site. The Occupy Boston movement decided, after meeting in a democratic General Assembly, to defend the right to use that new space. As a result the police came and arrested about one hundred defenders. Today’s headline in this space says it all. Defend The Occupation Sites And The Occupiers! Drop All The Charges Against The Occupation Defenders!