This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
The Dawn Of The Bourgeois Age-The English Revolution, Warts and All
The World Turned Upside Down-The Digger's Song
The Dawn Of The Bourgeois Age-The English Revolution, Warts and All
Today, in 2015, it may seem odd that a modern day radical would harken back to the mid-17th century to pay homage to one of those leaps in human progress that those who insist on an ever upward and onward spiral of history keep talking about, the English Revolution. However I have my own reasons, political reasons, for reflecting on that series of events this year since the English revolution (some call it under the name civil war, some deny any revolution occurred, others cringe at the thought that his or her royal highness would be subjected to the chopping block, literally and historically). One can reasonably although at a primitive level date the notion of the rise of the individual with rights and prerogatives from out of the undifferentiated subject mass of humanity in medieval times from that period. And that hard fact was progressive in itself now that we are deeply emerged in the age of the sainthood of the self. More importantly some of the basic notions about being a citizen rather than a subject date from that period although it would take a bloodier and more thorough-going revolution in France some one hundred and fifty years later to round those rights one more distinctly ( a process still going on today).
That brings me to my main point which is that the period we live in today despite the incredible advances in science, industrial production, and mass technology in its ideas in many ways are going back to pre-English Revolution sensibilities. The late Professor Christopher Hill did yeoman’s work to inform us about this revolutionary period which saw a flourishing of science and a struggle to break from both religious superstition and flat out ignorance in everyday thought. Saw in poets like Milton and Marvell a flourishing of literature. Saw with what Weber called the rise of the capitalist ethic associated with the rise of individualistic protestant religion a struggle for new forms of social organization and productive work.
Oh sure there was plenty of push-back as always by those who had lost something in the fight but despite set-backs and ebbs a good foundation was set up. Today when we confront climate-change deniers, religious fundamentalists from yahoo born-again Christians, who will quote chapter and verse, to crazed Islamic jihadists ready to set us back to the 8th century if they can, and those who have lost fate in some variation of the democratic principles of individual worth something has gone awry in the world body politic. So, yes, today I do not think that is odd to reflect back to the English Revolution, warts and all, for some inspiration.
Got Them Down-Hearted Blues-With The Empress Of The Blues Bessie Smith In Mind
Sure guys, black guys, on Mister’s 28,000 acres of the best bottomland in Mississippi or some such number, had plenty to have the blues about, especially how Mister and his Mister James Crow laws fitted him and his just fine at the expense of those black guys, their women and their righteous children (righteous when they and their children smote the dragon come freedom summer times but that is a story for their generations to tell I want to talk about the great-grand pa’s and ma’s andtheir doings). Working all day for chump change in Mister’s fields or worse share-cropper and having Mister take the better portion and leaving the rest. Yeah, so there is no way that black guys could not have the blues back then (now too but that in dealt with by the step-child of the blues, via hip-hop nations) and add to Mister’s miseries, woman trouble, trouble with Sheriff Law, and trouble with Long Skinny Jones if you mess with his woman, get your own. Plenty of stuff to sing about come Saturday night after dark at Smilin’ Billy’s juke joint complete with his home-made brew which insured that everybody would be at Preacher Jack’sSunday service to have their sins from the night before (or maybe just minutes before) washed clean under the threat of damnation and worse, worse for listening to the devil’s music by a guy like Charley Patton, Son House (who had the worst of both worlds being a sinner and a preacher man), Lucky Quick, Sleepy John, Robert J, and lots of hungry boys who wanted to get the hell out from under Mister and his Mister laws by singing the blues and making them go away.
That’s the guys, black guys and they had a moment, a country blues moment back in the 1920s and early 1930s when guys, white guys usually as far as I know, from record companies like RCA, the radio company. They were agents who were parlaying two ideas together getting black people, black people with enough money (and maybe a few white hipsters if they were around and if they were called that before the big 1950s “beat” thing), buy, in this case, race records, that they might have heard on that self-same radio, nice economics, scoured the South looking for talent and found plenty in the Delta (and on the white side of that same coin plenty in the Southern hill-billy mountains too). But those black blues brothers were not what drove the race label action back then since the rural poor had no money for radios or records for the most part and it was the black women singers who got the better play, although they if you look at individual cases suffered under the same Mister James Crow ethos that the black guys did. There they were though singing barrelhouse was what it was called mostly, stuff with plenty of double meanings about sex and about come hither availability and too about the code that all Southern blacks lived under. And the subjects. Well, the subjects reflected those of the black guys in reverse, two-timing guys, guys who would cut their women up as soon as look at them, down-hearted stuff when some Jimmy took off with his other best girl leaving her flat-footed, the sins of alcohol and drugs (listen to Victoria Spivey sometime on sister cocaine and any number of Smiths on gin), losing your man to you best friend, some sound advice too like Sippy Wallace’s don’t advertise your man, and some bad advice about cutting up your no good man and taking the big step-off that awaited you, it is all there to be listened to.
And the queen, the self-anointed queen, no, better you stay with the flow of her moniker, the empress, of barrelhouse blues was Bessie Smith, who sold more records than anybody else if nothing else. But there is more since she left a treasure trove of songs, well over two hundred before her untimely early death in the mid-1930s. Guys, sophisticated guys, city guys, black guys mainly, guys like Fletcher Henderson, would write stuff for her, big sax and trombone players would back here up and that was that. Sure Memphis Minnie could wag the dogs tail with her lyrics about every kind of working guy taking care of her need, and a quick listen to any of a dozen such songs will tell you what that need was or you can figure it out and if you can’t you had better move on, the various other Smiths could talk about down-hearted stuff, about the devil’s music get the best of them, Sippy Wallace could talk about no good men, Ivy Stone could speak about being turned out in the streets to “work” the streets when some guy left town, address unknown, and Victoria Spivey could speak to the addictions that brought a good girl down but Bessie could run it all. From down-hearted blues, killing her sorrows with that flask of gin, working down to bed-bug flop houses, thoughts of killing that no good bastard who left her high and dry, seeing a good Hustlin’ Dan man off to the great yonder, blowing high and heavy in the thick of the Jazz Age with the prince of wails, looking for a little sugar in her bowl, and every conceivable way to speak of personal sorrows.
Let me leave it like this for now with two big ideas. First if you have a chance go on YouTube and listen and watch while she struts her stuff on Saint Louis Woman allpain, pathos and indignity as he good man throws her over for, well, the next best thing. That will tell you why in her day she was the Empress. The other is this-if you have deep down sorrows, some man or woman left you high and dry, maybe you need a fixer man for what ails you, you have deep-dyed blues that won’t quite unless you have your medicine then you have to dust off your Billie Holiday records and get well. But if the world just has you by the tail for a moment, or things just went awry but maybe you can see the like of day then grab the old Bessie Vanguard Record or later Columbia Record multiple albums and just start playing you won’t want to turn the thing off once Bessie gets under your skin.
Here is an article on the Sacco-Vanzetti case that should be of interest to the radical public. Of particular note, for those of us today who call for working class-centered defense actions, is the work of the International Labor Defense in building the united fronts around the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Additionally, note the description of the role played by the by that time reformist Socialist Party in catering to the liberals around a 'retrial' defense for the two rather than a call for freedom. Some things just never change. I would only add that in my experience in labor and civil rights defense cases those liberal 'masses' the reformists are always trying not to offend in order to keep the movement 'growing' would come around the cases on a 'freedom' slogan just as easily as a 'retrial' slogan. As for the rest I ask this question- Is the quest for prominent signatures on a petition, by itself, really going to get anyone out of jail? And the Sacco and Vanzetti defense is really the proof of that. The real problem is catering to the fickle and threadbare 'professional liberals' and their hangers-on. That is when the trouble really begins. Learn that lesson well.
Here is an article on the Sacco-Vanzetti case that should be of interest to the radical public. Of particular note, for those of us today who call for working class-centered defense actions, is the work of the International Labor Defense in building the united fronts around the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Additionally, note the description of the role played by the by that time reformist Socialist Party in catering to the liberals around a 'retrial' defense for the two rather than a call for freedom. Some things just never change. I would only add that in my experience in labor and civil rights defense cases those liberal 'masses' the reformists are always trying not to offend in order to keep the movement 'growing' would come around the cases on a 'freedom' slogan just as easily as a 'retrial' slogan. As for the rest I ask this question- Is the quest for prominent signatures on a petition, by itself, really going to get anyone out of jail? And the Sacco and Vanzetti defense is really the proof of that. The real problem is catering to the fickle and threadbare 'professional liberals' and their hangers-on. That is when the trouble really begins. Learn that lesson well.
Present At The Creation Of Rock And
Roll-The Moonglows’ Sincerely (1955)
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
Deep in the dark red scare Cold War
night, still brewing then even after Uncle Joe fell down in his Red Square
drunken stupor one night and never came back, so yeah still brewing after he
kissed off in his vast red earth, still brewing as a child remembered in dark
back of school dreams about Soviet nightmares under Uncle Joe wondering how the
kids got through it, and still brewing too when Miss Winot in her pristine
glory told each and every one of her fourth grade charges, us, that come that
Russkie madness, come the Apocalypse, come the big bad ass mega-bombs (of
course being pristine and proper she did not dig down to such terms as “big bad
ass” but let’s face it that is what she meant) that each and every one of her
charges shall come that thundering god-awful air raid siren call duck, quickly
and quietly, under his or her desk and then place his or his hands, also
quickly and quietly, one over the other on the top of his or her head, a small
breeze was coming to the land.
Maybe nobody saw it coming although the
more I think about the matter somebody, some bodies knew something, not those
supposedly in the know about such times, those who are supposed to catch the
breezes before they move beyond their power to curtain them. Take guys like my
older brother Franklin and his friends, Benny and Jimmy, who were playing some
be-bop stuff up in his room. (Ma refused to let him play his songs on the
family record player down center stage in the living room or flip the dial on
the kitchen radio away from her tunes of the roaring 1940s, her and my father’s
coming of age time, so up his room like some mad monk doing who knows what
because I was busy worrying about riding bicycles or something). Here’s the
real tip-off though he and his boys would go out Friday nights to Jack Slack’s
bowling alleys not to bowl, although that was the cover story to questioning
mothers, but to hang around Freddie O’Toole’s car complete with turned on amped
up radio (station unknown then but later found to be WMEX) and dance, dance
with girls, get it, to stuff like Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 (a great song tribute to a great automobile which nobody
in our neighborhood could come close to affording so reduced to cheapjack Fords
and Plymouths), and guys who even today I don’t know the names of despite YouTube
archival vaults giving everybody with every kind of musical inclination a blast
to the past ticket. Or, how about the times we, the family would go up to
Boston for some Catholic thing in the South End at Holy Cross Cathedral and
smack across from the church was the later famous Red Hat Club where guys were
blasting away at pianos, on guitars and on big ass sexy saxes and it was not
the big band sound my folks listened to or cool, cool be-bop jazz either but
music from jump street, etched in the back of my brain because remember I’m
still fussing over bikes and stuff like that. Or how about every time we went
down Massachusetts Avenue in Boston as the sun went down, the “Negro” part
before Huntington Avenue (an area that Malcolm X knew well a decade before) and
we stopped at the ten billion lights and all you would hear is this bouncing
beat coming from taverns, from the old time townhouse apartments and black guys
dressed “to the nines,” all flash dancing on the streets with dressed “to the
nines” good-looking black girls. Memory bank.
So some guys knew, gals too don’t
forget after all they had to dig the beat, dig the guys who dug the beat, the
beat of out of some Africa breeze mixed
with forbidden sweated Southern lusts if the thing was going to work out. And
it wasn’t all dead-ass “white negro” hipsters either eulogized by Norman Mailer
(or maybe mocked you never knew with him but he sensed something was in the
breeze even if he was tied more closely to an earlier sensibility) or break-out
“beats” tired of the cool cold jazz that was turning in on itself, getting too
technical and losing the search for the high white note or lumpens of all
descriptions who whiled away the nights searching their radio dials for
something that they while away the nights searching their radio dials for
something that they could swing to while reefer high or codeine low. If you,
via hail YouTube, look at the Jacks and Jills dancing they mostly look like
very proper well-dressed middle class kids who are trying to break out of the
cookie-cutter existence they found themselves but they still lookedpretty well-fed and well-heeled so yeah,
some guys and gals and it wasn’t always who you might suspect that got hip, got
that back-beat and those piano riffs etched into their brains.
Maybe though the guys in the White
House were too busy worrying about what Uncle Joe’s progeny were doing out in
the missile silos of Minsk, maybe the professional television talkers on Meet The Press wanted to discuss the
latest turn in national and international politics for a candid world to hear
and missed what was happening out in the cookie-cutter neighborhoods, and maybe
the academic sociologists and professional criminologists were too wrapped up
in figuring out why Marlon Brando was sulking in his corner boy kingdom (and
wreaking havoc on a fearful small town world when he and the boys broke out),
whyJohnny Spain had that “shiv” ready
to do murder and mayhem to the next midnight passer-by, and why well-groomed
and fed James Dean was brooding in the “golden age” land of plenty but the
breeze was coming.
(And you could add in the same brother
Franklin who as I was worrying about bikes, the two pedal two kind getting
“from hunger” to get a Brando bike, a varoom bike, so this girl, Wendy, from
school, would take his bait, a girl that my mother fretted was from the wrong
side of town, her way of saying a tramp but she was smart as hell once I found
out about her a few years later after she, they had left town on some big ass
Norton but that is after the creation so I will let it go for now.)
And then it came, came to us in our
turn, came like some Kansas whirlwind, came like the ocean churning up the big
waves crashing to a defenseless shoreline, came if the truth be known like the
“second coming” long predicted and the brethren, us, were waiting, waiting like we had been waiting
all our short spell lives. Came in a funny form, or rather ironically funny
forms, as it turned out.
Came one time, came big as 1954 turned
to 1955 and a guy, get this, dressed not in sackcloth or hair-shirt but in a
sport’s jacket, a Robert Hall sport’s jacket from the off the rack look of it
when he and the boys were “from hunger,” playing for coffee and crullers before
on the low life circuit, a little on the heavy side with a little boy’s regular
curl in his hair and blasted the whole blessed world to smithereens. Blasted
every living breathing teenager, boy or girl, out of his or her lethargy, got
the blood flowing. The guy Bill Haley, goddam an old lounge lizard band guy who
decided to move the beat forward from cool ass be-bop jazz and sweet romance
popular music and make everybody, every kid jump, yeah Big Bill Haley and his
Comets, the song Rock Around The Clock.
Came a little more hep cat too, came
all duck walk and sex moves, feet moving faster than Robert Hall-clad Bill
could ever do, came out of Saint Loo, came out with a crazy beat. Came out in
suit and tie all swagger. Came out with a big baby girl guitar that twisted up
the chords something fierce and declared to the candid world, us, that
Maybelline was his woman. But get this, because what did we know of “color”
back then when we lived in an all-white Irish Catholic neighborhoods and since
we heard what we heard of rock and rock mostly on the radio we were shocked
when we found out the first time that he was a “Negro” to use the parlance of
the times, a black man making us go to “jump street.” And we bought into it,
bought into the beat, and joined him in saying Mister Beethoven you and your
brethren best move over.
Came sometimes in slo-mo, hey remember
this rock and roll was an ice-breaker with a beat you didn’t have to dance close to with your partner and
get all tied up in knots forgetting when to twirl, when to whirl, when to do a
split but kind of free form for the guys (or gals but mainly guys) with two
left feet like me could survive, maybe not survive the big one if the Russkies
decided to go over the top with the bomb, but that school dance and for your
free-form efforts maybe that she your eyeballs were getting sore over would
consent to the last chancelast dance
that you waited around for in case she was so impressed she might want to go
with you some place later. But before that “some place later” you had to
negotiate and the only way to do was to bust up a slow one, a dreamy one to get
her in the mood and hence people have been singing songs from time immemorial
to get people in the mood, this time Earth
Angel would do the trick. Do the trick as long as you navigated those toes
of hers, left her with two feet and standing. Dance slow, very slow brother.
Came sometimes in very slo-mo if you
could believe my older brother Franklin and the stories that he would tell us
younger guys, not in 1955 remember we were worried about two-wheel bikes then but
later when we came of age and were salaciously curious about the girl scene,
what made them tick, about how he scored with this or that girl, put the moves
on this way or that on some other one and some girl’s panties came tumbling
down as if by magic. Although I should have been a little suspicion of Franklin’s
big sky talk because when my time came the problem of garter belts and girdles
would make that quick panties coming down a little suspect, no, very suspect when
I had a hard enough and cumbersome enough time unhooking some silly training
bra. Jesus.
But here is the big truth, the skinny. See
Franklin was not, most guys were not including me, very honest about sex and
about sexual conquests when guys got together on the corners at Jack Slack’s or
Doc’s Drugstore or in the guy’s gym locker room or in the school’s boys’ lav
Monday morning. No guy wanted to seem to be “light on his feet” one of the
kinder expressions we used for gay guys in the days when “fag-baiting” was
something of a rite of passage so guys would lie like hell about this or that
score. Later when you would find yourself doing the very same thing you would
find that about sixty to seventy percent, maybe more, of what guys said about
conquests was b.s.
In any case one time Franklin was hot
after this girl, Betsy Sanders, who even when I wasn’t that into girls (before
I came of age, not that “light on my feet” if that is what you are thinking)
was “hot,” definitely pretty and smart and just plain nice. She had a
reputation, according to Franklin, of being an “ice queen,” no go, but he said
that only made him want to go after her more. One high school dance night,
maybe the Spring Frolic of 1955, Franklin went stag, although stag with six or
seven other guys, as did a lot of guys because that kind of dance was set up by
the school to have everybody mix and mingle unlike the prom let’s say which was
strictly couples or stay home and wait by the midnight phone for some lost Janey
or Jack. Of course Betsy was there, with a few of whatever they call a cohort
of single girls, looking at hot as hell, all flouncy full length dress and some
smell to drive a man wild, jasmine Franklin thought.
These school dance things like I said were
held occasionally by the school to keep an eye on what was happening to their charges
with this rock and roll craze beginning to stir up concerns (the churches also
held them for the same reason). Basically a “containment” policy of “if you can’t
fight them, keep two eyes on each and every one of them” copied I presume from
the Cold War foreign policy wonks like George Kennan who ran the anti-Soviet
establishment in Washington. So the thing was chaperoned unto death, had some
frilly crèche paper decorations to spice up the woe begotten gym which didn’t really
work, some refreshments to cool out the tranced dancers periodically, and a
lame DJ, a young goof teacher recruited because he could “relate” to the kids
who “spun” the platters (records for the unknowing) on a dinky turntable with
an equally woeful sound system. None of that meant a thing because all that mattered
was that there were boys and girls there, maybe somebody for you and music, music
to dance to. Yeah.
Now as Franklin weaved his story it
seems that the usually reserved Betsy was in high form (according to Franklin
she looked like maybe she had had a couple of drinks before the dance not
unheard of but usually that was guys but we will let that pass), dancing to
every fast dance with lots of guys, not hanging with any one in particular, getting
more and more into the dancing as the night went on. Franklin approached her after
intermission to dance Bill Haley’s latest big one, Rock Around The Clock, the one that everybody went to the Strand Theater
up the Square to see that really lame movie about J.D.s, Blackboard Jungle, just to see him and the Comets blast away and
she accepted. Danced very provocatively from what Franklin said, gave moves only
the “fast” girls, the known school tramps threw into the mix and that was that
until the end of the night when last chance last dance time came.
This last chance last dance as I know
from personal experience is a very dicey thing, especially if you have been
eying a girl all night and she says “no”-end of evening. See this was a slow
one so you could maybe make a last minute pitch or negotiate what was what
after the dance. Franklin said he went up to Betsy and asked her for that dance
when Mister Miles, that lame DJ I told you about already, announced that the
Moonglows’ Sincerely a song he really
liked. Here’s her answer-“Yes.” And
so they danced and while dancing she allegedly wondered out loud why he had not
asked her to dance other dances that night, she expected him to do since she had
heard through the super-reliable “grapevine” that he was interested in her.
Bingo. The rest of the dance consisted of negotiations about her getting her
cloak, about giving the guys and gals they respectively came with the heave-ho and
heading toward old Adamsville Beach in Franklin’s Hudson, really our father’s car
borrowed for the evening. Down there while he did not go into all the juicy
details about what they did, or didn’t do, she let him have his way with her
(that “panties came tumbling down” business). Of course that kind of stuff happened
all the time with good boys and girls, and bad but when Franklin asked Betsy
what stirred her up she said the music and dancing got her going, made her all
loose and everything she couldn’t explain it all but she got all warm. Enough,
okay.
Enough except what always bothered me
about what parents, the authorities, hell, even older guys on the street,
thought about rock and roll as the devil’s music came to mind. Some communist
plot to “brainwash” the youth of America and make them Kremlin stooges was hard
to figure when a girl like Betsy, an All-American girl if there ever was one, who
later in life ran for Congress, unsuccessfully, as a Republican, got all warm
when the drums started rolling the intro and the guitars built up that
back-beat. Hard to make sense of the idea that maybe the Moonglows should have
been brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee of the times or
something for singing a doo wop classic like Sincerely, a last chance last dance song. Yeah, that has always
bothered me.
Here is the funny thing, funny since we
were present at the creation, present in spite of every command uttered by Miss
Winot against it, declaring the music worse than that Russkie threat if you
believed her (a few kids, girls mainly, did whether to suck up to her since she
would take their entreaties although boys were strictly “no go” and I know
having spent many a missed sunny afternoon doing some silly “punishment” for
her). We were just too young to deeply imbibe the full measure of what we were
hearing. See this music, music we started calling rock and roll once somebody
gave it a name (super DJ impresario Alan Freed as we found out later after we
had already become “children of rock and roll”) was meant, was blessedly meant
to be danced to which meant in that boy-girl age we who didn’t even like the
opposite sex as things stood then were just hanging by our thumbs.
Yeah, was meant to be danced to at
“petting parties” in dank family room basements by barely teenage boys and
girls. Was meant to be danced to at teenage dance clubs where everybody was
getting caught up on learning the newest dance moves and the latest “cool”
outfits to go along with that new freedom. Was meant to serve as a backdrop at
Doc’s Drugstore’s soda fountain where Doc had installed a jukebox complete with
all the latest tunes as boys and girls shared a Coke sipping slowly with two
straws hanging out in one frosted glass. Was meant to be listened to by corner
boys at Jack Slack’s bowling alley where Jack eventually had set up a small
dance floor so kids could dance while waiting for lanes to open (otherwise
everybody would be still dancing out in front of O’Toole’s “boss” car complete
with amped-up radio not to Jack’s profit). Was meant to be listened to as the
sun went down in the west at the local drive-in while the hamburgers and fries
were cooking and everybody was waiting for darkness to fall so the real night
could begin, the night of dancing in dark corner and exploring the mysteries of
the universe, or at least of Miss Sarah Brown. Was even meant to be listened to on fugitive
transistor radios in the that secluded off-limits to adults and little kids
(us) where teens, boys and girls, mixed and matched in the drive-in movie night
(and would stutter some nonsense to questioning parents who wanted to know the
plot of the movies, what movies,Ma).
Yeah, we were just a little too young
even if we can legitimately claim to have been present at the creation. But we
will catch up, catch up with a vengeance.
Sam Eaton, once he got “religion” on the questions of war and peace after a close high school friend in Carver was killed in the jungles of Vietnam in 1968, and Ralph Morris, once he had served in Vietnam after having become totally disenchanted with the war effort and had been discharged back to Troy, New York in 1970 were both very interested in left-wing anti-war politics, in studying about how previous generations fought against the highly-charged war blood lust currents that periodically burned over the American landscape. Sam, exempt from the military draft since he was the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away suddenly of a heart attack in 1965, who had been prior to his friend Jeff Mullin’s death been very political in a conventional way but somewhat indifferent to the war blazing all around him in this country as well as in Vietnam and Ralph who was as gung-ho as any naïve young soldier before the “shit hit the fan” (his expression) when he went into Vietnam had met down in Washington, D.C.
Had met under frankly odd circumstances, circumstances which kind of came with the times when people who ordinarily would not run into each other did so as they came to oppose the war in Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, home of the Washington Redskins football team after they had been arrested in different incidents during the May Day 1971 actions. The idea behind those actions by those like Sam and Ralph who were enraged by the continuation of the war was to attempt to close down the government if it did not close down the war. For their efforts, Sam trying to help close down Massachusetts Avenue a main thoroughfare and Ralph at an action at the White House (which his group never got close to), along with thousands of others were placed in the bastinado for several days without much food or shelter and without the quick release demanded by law for such minor infractions (they had actually just walked out of a side exit one day and nobody stopped them). They had met in some forlorn line when Ralph noticed that Sam had a Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) button on his lapel and had asked him whether he was a member. Sam told him why he was a supporter of VVAW after Ralph told him he was a member and had taken part in a couple of actions on the streets that made people freeze in their tracks when they saw the long lines of anti-war veterans, some on crutches and others in wheelchairs silently marching as was a tactic of the time. That meeting in any case formed a lifelong friendship as Ralph recently had mentioned to Sam when they met for one of their periodic Boston meetings when Ralph came to town.
That May Day event more than any other of the actions which they had participated in during those years was pivotal in bringing them to an understanding that if you were going to take on the government then you had better have more than a few thousand committed souls with you and better be better prepared, damn better, when the “shit hits the fan” (again Ralph’s expression). So they both started to hit the books, to read old time left-wing Socialist and Communist literature to get a fix on things that went wrong with May Day (although Ralph admitted he was not much of a reader of such materials he did plod through the stuff and still remembered a fair amount of it). They would talk about what they had read between themselves and even began to attend study classes provided by a collective in Cambridge (the Red Book collective if anybody is asking) where both young men were staying for the summer of 1972.
Sam and Ralph were especially intrigued by the work that left-wing political organizations did in recruiting young people to the cause, a task that would have made it far easier for them to get involved if such organizations had existed in their respective growing up towns of Carver, Massachusetts and Troy, New York. So for a while they were all abuzz with thoughts of the Socialist and Communist youth organizations, especially when they read about Spain the 1930s and the key role left-wing youth played there and on the battle fronts. Although both would slide away from 24/7 type politics that had driven them early in the decade later in the decade as the aura of 1960s confrontation faded back into “normalcy” and they began careers and families they for a time considered themselves “left-wing youth,” maybe even communist youth although that designation was a tough dollar to swallow given their backgrounds. During that period Sam, more of a writer than Ralph, wrote up some materials about their experiences. He more recently in the age of the Internet got involved with a blog, American Socialist History, which was accumulating stories about anything related to socialist youth in the 1960s and Sam had written another short piece for that publication. Here is what he had to say:
“One of the declared purposes of this blog is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past, spotty and incomplete as they may be, here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-socialist and communist wing. And particularly how to draw the young into the struggle. Historically these lessons would be centrally derived from the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, especially in France, the Paris Commune of 1871, and most vividly under the impact of the Lenin and Trotsky-led Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, a world historic achievement for the international working class whose subsequent demise was of necessity a world-historic defeat for that same class. To that end I have made commentaries and provided some archival works in this space in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over.
More importantly, for the long haul, and unfortunately given that same spotty and incomplete past the long haul is what appears to be the time frame that this old militant will have to concede that we need to think about, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common socialist future. An education that masses of previous generations of youth undertook gladly but which now is reduced to a precious few. That is beside the question of numbers in any case no small or easy task given the differences of generations (the missing transmission generation problem between the generation of ’68 who tried unsuccessfully to turn the world upside down and failed, the missing “in between” generation raised on Reagan rations and today’s desperate youth in need of all kinds of help; differences of political milieus worked in (another missing link situation with the attenuation of the links to the old mass socialist and communist organizations decimated by the red scare Cold War 1950s night of the long knives through the new old New Left of the 1960s and little notable organizational connections since); differences of social structure to work around (the serious erosion of the industrial working class in America, the rise of the white collar service sector, the now organically chronically unemployed, and the rise of the technocrats); and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses (today’s computer, cellphone, and social networking savvy youth using those assets as tools for organizing).
There is no question that back in my youth in the 1960s I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available on-line at the press of a button today. When I developed political consciousness very early on in my youth, albeit a liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view.
As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically worrying more about a possible cushy career on the backstairs of politics. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I vaguely knew they were around from my readings but not in my area. In any case the aura of the red scare was still around so it is a toss-up if I had known about those that I would have contacted them.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me on-line and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a left-wing youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become radicals with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Third Congress of the Communist International
The Communist International and the Communist Youth Movement
Source: Theses Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congress of the Third International, translated by Alix Holt and Barbara Holland. Ink Links 1980;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
12 July 1921
1 The young socialist movement came into existence as a result of the steadily increasing capitalist exploitation of young workers and also of the growth of bourgeois militarism. The movement was a reaction against attempts to poison the minds of young workers with bourgeois nationalist ideology and against the tendency of most of the social-democratic parties and the trade unions to neglect the economic, political and cultural demands of young workers.
In most countries the social-democratic parties and the unions, which were growing increasingly opportunist and revisionist, took no part in establishing young socialist organisations, and in certain countries they even opposed the creation of a youth movement. The reformist social-democratic parties and trade unions saw the independent revolutionary socialist youth organisations as a serious threat to their opportunist policies. They sought to introduce a bureaucratic control over the youth organisations and destroy their independence, thus stifling the movement, changing its character and adapting it to social-democratic politics.
2 As a result of the imperialist war and the positions taken towards it by social democracy almost everywhere, the contradictions between the social-democratic parties and the international revolutionary organisations inevitably grew and eventually led to open conflict. The living conditions of young workers sharply deteriorated; there was mobilisation and military service on the one hand, and, on the other, the increasing exploitation in the munitions industries and militarisation of civilian life. The most class-conscious young socialists opposed the war and the nationalist propaganda. They dissociated themselves from the social-democratic parties and undertook independent political activity (the International Youth Conferences at Berne in 1915 and Jena in 1916).
In their struggle against the war, the young socialist organisations were supported by the most dedicated revolutionary groups and became an important focus for the revolutionary forces. In most countries no revolutionary parties existed and the youth organisations took over their role; they became independent political organisations and acted as the vanguard in the revolutionary struggle.
3 With the establishment of the Communist International and, in some countries, of Communist Parties, the role of the revolutionary youth organisations changes. Young workers, because of their economic position and because of their psychological make-up, are more easily won to Communist ideas and are quicker to show enthusiasm for revolutionary struggle than adult workers. Nevertheless, the youth movement relinquishes to the Communist Parties its vanguard role of organising independent activity and providing political leadership. The further existence of Young Communist organisations as politically independent and leading organisations would mean that two Communist Parties existed, in competition with one another and differing only in the age of their membership.
4 At the present time the role of the Young Communist movement is to organise the mass of young workers, educate them in the ideas of Communism, and draw them into the struggle for the Communist revolution.
The Communist youth organisations can no longer limit themselves to working in small propaganda circles. They must win the broad masses of workers by conducting a permanent campaign of agitation, using the newest methods. In conjunction with the Communist Parties and the trade unions, they must organise the economic struggle.
The new tasks of the Communist youth organisations require that their educational work be extended and intensified. The members of the youth movement receive their Communist education on the one hand through active participation in all revolutionary struggles and on the other through a study of Marxist theory.
Another important task facing the Young Communist organisations in the immediate future is to break the hold of centrist and social-patriotic ideas on young workers and free the movement from the influences of the social-democratic officials and youth leaders. At the same time, the Young Communist organisations must do everything they can to ‘rejuvenate’ the Communist Parties by parting with their older members, who then join the adult Parties.
The Young Communist organisations participate in the discussion of all political questions, help build the Communist Parties and take part in all revolutionary activity and struggle. This is the main difference between them and the youth sections of the centrist and socialist unions.
5 The relations between the Young Communist organisations and the Communist Party are fundamentally different from those between the revolutionary young socialist organisations and the social-democratic parties. In the common struggle to hasten the proletarian revolution, the greatest unity and strictest centralisation are essential. Political leadership at the international level must belong to the Communist International and at the national level to the respective national sections.
It is the duty of the Young Communist organisations to follow this political leadership (its programme, tactics and political directives) and merge with the general revolutionary front. The Communist Parties are at different stages of development and therefore the Executive Committee of the Communist International and the Executive Committee of the Communist Youth International should apply this principle in accordance with the circumstances obtaining in each particular case.
The Young Communist movement has begun to organise its members according to the principle of strict centralisation and in its relations with the Communist International – the leader and bearer of the proletarian revolution – it will be governed by an iron discipline. All political and tactical questions are discussed in the ranks of the Communist youth organisation, which then takes a position and works in the Communist Party of its country in accordance with the resolutions passed by the Party, in no circumstance working against them.
If the Communist youth organisation has serious differences with the Communist Party, it has the right to appeal to the Executive Committee of the Communist International.
Loss of political independence in no way implies loss of the organisational independence which is so essential for political education.
Strong centralisation and effective unity are essential for the successful advancement of the revolutionary struggle, and therefore, in those countries where historical development has left the youth dependent upon the Party, the dependence should be preserved; differences between the two bodies are decided by the EC of the Communist International and the Executive Committee of the Communist Youth International.
6 One of the most immediate and most important tasks of the Young Communist organisations is to fight the belief in political independence inherited from the period when the youth organisations enjoyed absolute autonomy, and which is still subscribed to by some members. The press and organisational apparatus of the Young Communist movement must be used to educate young workers to be responsible and active members of a united Communist Party.
At the present time the Communist youth organisations are beginning to attract increasing numbers of young workers and are developing into mass organisations; it is therefore important that they give the greatest possible time and effort to education.
7 Close co-operation between the Young Communist organisations and the Communist Parties in political work must be reflected in close organisational links. It is essential that each organisation should at all times be represented at all levels of the other organisation (from the central Party organs and district, regional and local organisations down to the cells of Communist groups and the trade unions) and particularly at all conferences and congresses.
In this way the Communist Parties will be able to exert a permanent influence on the movement and encourage political activity, while the youth organisations, in their turn, can influence the Party.
8 The relations established between the Communist Youth International and the Communist International are even closer than those between the individual Parties and their youth organisations. The Communist Youth International has to provide the Communist youth movement with a centralised leadership, offer moral and material support to individual unions, form Young Communist organisations where none has existed and publicise the Communist youth movement and its programme. The Communist Youth International is a section of the Communist International and, as such, is bound by the decisions of its congresses and its Central Committee. The Communist Youth International conducts its work within the framework of these decisions and thus passes on the political line of the Communist International to all its sections. A well-developed system of reciprocal representation and close and constant co-operation guarantees that the Communist Youth International will make gains in all the spheres of its activity (leadership, agitation, organisation and the work of strengthening and supporting the Communist youth organisations).
When The Bourgeoisie Was In Full Flower- With The French Painter Caillebotte In Mind
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
Yeah, the Baron, Baron Haussmann if you need a name to go with the damage, the social damage done, had done a good job, a damn good job of breaking up beloved Paris with his squeaky clean street lines and wide boulevards. Yeah, changed the face of Paris, the Paris of squalid throw your leavings out the window and heaven help who is below, and heaven help what awful thing was thrown down to the trash-filled streets. The Paris of funny crooked cul de sac streets, which reflected the add-ons over centuries to make a great city from the piss-pot small town back in the Middle Ages when the university was the center of attraction and the good bourgeois in embryo were trying to hold off the barbarians, the wayward no account peasant drifters who snuck off the land, or tried to in order to sulk and menace in the shadows down by the Seine, the river of life and of intrigue. The Paris of the small craftsman working his trade in some lonely workshop, maybe an indentured apprentice by his side if the craft was skilled enough to warrant such service, his “home” and hearth in the back rooms where the dutiful wife and undutiful screaming children scratched out their pitiful existence. Said craftsman working furiously always brow-beaten worrying about being edged out by Monsieur So and So with plenty of capital and fifty men in his employ underselling him by virtue of economy of scale (or just plain greed at having anybody even a single slave craftsman in his “invisible hand” market place). The Paris too of the jack-roller, the pick-pocket, the wharf rats, the tavern-dwellers, the drifters, the grifters, and the midnight sifters along the shallow shadows of that same beloved Seine
He, Jean Villon, was called Jean-bon out of respect for his courage under fire in the hell-hole barricade days of 1848when he and his neighbors, all working-men, held out to the last when the vicious petty-bourgeois who would have benefited most from victory deserted the barricades and he and his took to their fallen losses and jail cells with equanimity (he and his comrades ever after called ‘48ers and no further explanation was necessary, none what-so-ever in any street or boulevard in the town). And for his general good humor when he was not talking politics or scheming the next plot that would bring on the newer world that he and his brethren were seeking. This morning he had had to laugh about the changes in the Rue Madeleine, the urine-laned street where he grew up, about the smell to high heaven of tanning chemicals, rough blacksmith coals, clothe dyes, slaughtered cattles and poultries. Laughed too that in those days, the days before the Baron got the itch (Baron dreams prodded on by ’89 dreams of san-culottes crowds demanding his head on a platter, or maybe just his head any way they could get it preferably via the people’s justice of the guillotine and more recent close calls in ‘48) none of the government’s men dared to enter those quarters even to look for the treasonous or seditious whoever was in power was always nervously pacing the floor about (it did not matter-king-premier-emperor-they all nervously paced their respective floors).
Yeah, back then nothing but crooked little streets leading to harmless little cafes, where he, workingman Villon held “court” with the riff-raff so-called of the old society. Calmly and cautiously quartered when no king’s men would bother to penetrate for they might not come back. Villon descended in some cousin-age degree never quite figured out back to the 15th century from the outlaw poet mad monk bastard saint Francois Villon who wrote longing exile in his own country verse with one hand and stole whatever was not nailed down with the other a fact which Jean never tired of pointing out when back in the day, back in ‘48 on the barricades when it counted comrades would wonder whether his revolutionary energies were flagging and he would drag out his pedigree to small-mouthed scoffs and tittles.
Yeah, the Baron was a slick one tearing down the old quarters to let the rising petty-bourgeois have their elegant apartments tucked away from the steamy stinking markets, the riff-raff cafes, the shadow men of the Seine. Let the bourgeoisie laugh in their clubs about how the riff-raff, meaning their working-men, those who slaved for them, those they had fired for being what some wag called “master-less men” for their habit of robbing said masters whenever the shadows fell, and the once innocent peasant girls who followed in their train and cast their fate with the lot, would get a belly-full of lead from the phalanx encircling infantry the next time they tried to pull up brick number one in order to build a barricade.
Although for a while when Thiers, that wizened troll who never uttered anything but treacherous remarks and never stopped for one minute to give the orders tosend whatever troops against the barricades which remained loyal to keep him in power. Rammed those troops against the brave Paris communards of blessed memory back in 1871 when the frightened bourgeoisie realized that the barricades could still be constructed when the working-men rose up in righteous anger at the betrayals put upon them. (Those communards like their earlier brethren of ’48 called communards and no further explanation was necessary, none what-so-ever in any street or boulevard in the town.)
But those days were long gone now. The Baron had won, had won his victory over the riff-raff and Jean-bon Villon knew it would be a long time before the blood of the communards dried.
