The Latest From The "Jobs With Justice Blog"-The Seemingly One-Sided Struggle Continues-It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 Is The Slogan Of The Day.

The Latest From The "Jobs With Justice Blog"-The Seemingly One-Sided Struggle Continues-It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 Is The Slogan Of The Day.

Click below to link to the Jobs With Justice Blog for the latest national and international labor news, and of the efforts to counteract the massively one-sided class struggle against the international working class movement.

http://www.jwjblog.org/

Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton a couple of old-time radicals, old-time now in the early 2000s unlike in their youth not being the Great Depression labor radicals who had been their models after a fashion and who helped built the now seemingly moribund unions, (or unions now rather consciously led by union leaders who have no or only attenuated links to past militant labor actions like strikes, plant sit-downs, hot-cargoeing struck goods, general strikes and such and would go into a dead faint if such actions were forced upon them and are so weakened as to be merely dues paying organizations forwarding monies to the Democratic “friends of labor” Party). They had come of political age as anti-war radicals from the hell-bent street in-your-face 1960s confrontations with the American beast during the Vietnam War reign of hell. Ralph from the hard-shell experience of having fought for the beast in the Central Highlands in that benighted country and who became disgusted with what he had done, his buddies had done, and his government had done to make animals out of them destroying simple peasants catch in a vicious cross-fire and Sam, having lost his closest high school hang around guy, Jeff Mullin, blown away in some unnamed field near some hamlet that he could not pronounce or spell correctly. The glue that brought them together, brought them together for a lifetime friendship and political comity (with some periods of statutory neglect to bring up families in Carver, Massachusetts and Troy, New York respectively) the ill-fated actions on May Day 1971 In Washington when they attempted along with several thousand others to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. All those efforts got them a few days detention in RFK stadium where they had met almost accidently and steel-strong bonds of brotherhood from then on.      

They had seen high times and ebbs, mostly ebbs once the 1960s waves receded before the dramatic events of 9/11 and more particularly the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 called off what they had termed the “armed truce” with the United States government over the previous couple of decades. So Ralph and Sam 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 which was not inconsiderable for a couple of months especially in hotbeds like New York, Boston, L.A. and above all the flagship home away from home of radical politics, San Francisco 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”). 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 when his father retired and Sam had gone back to Carver to expand a print shop that he had started in the late 1960s that had been run by a hometown friend in his many absences. However 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, 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 fall of 2011   travel down to the Wall Street “private” plaza (and site of many conflicts and stand-offs between the Occupy forces on the ground and then Mayor Blumberg and his itchy cops) 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 Mayor Blumberg 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 acting in some concert as it turned out once the dust settled and “freedom of information” acts were invoked to see what the bastards were up to).

Of more concern since they had already known about what the government could do when it decided to pull down the hammer having learned a painfully hard lesson on May Day 1971 and on a number of other occasions later when Ralph and Sam and their comrades decided to get “uppity” and been slapped down more than once although they at least had gone into those actions with their eyes wide open had been the reaction of the “leadership” in folding up the tents (literally and figuratively). Thereafter the movement had 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 as they also painfully knew had done   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 over drinks at Jack Higgins’ Grille in Boston more than once in their periodic reunions when Ralph came to town, how each generation had to 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.  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. Sam, more interested in writing than Ralph who liked to think more than write but who contributed his fair share of ideas to the “program,” wrote the material up and had it posted on various site which elicited a respectable amount of comment at the time:      

Originally posted on the American Politics Today  blog-Wednesday, June 17, 2012

 

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, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force, although it is admittedly down from the Great Recession highs. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. 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, 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 when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.

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. 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. 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 economy. 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 workers the place where the whole thing comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of retail stores. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, 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. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.

* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the 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 and poor has risen even more in this period. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea in those elections was that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” 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.

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. The most egregious recent example that I can recall- 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.

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 in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle (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, I argued 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 (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! No Intervention In Syria! Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East! Stop The Bombing Campaign! Defend The Palestinian People-End The Blockade of Gaza. And as always since 2001 Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan!  

U.S. Hands Off Iran! Hands Off Syria!- 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 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 me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist 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, 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 my 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 like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, 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 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 from the military budget and the bank bail-out money 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 in 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!

The Hills And Hollas Of Home- In Honor Of The Late Hazel Dickens

The Hills And Hollas Of Home- In Honor Of The Late Hazel Dickens

 

The Hills And Hollas Of Home- In Honor Of “Our Lady Of The Mountain” The Late Hazel Dickens



 

From The Pen Of Josh Breslin

Kenny Jackman, the well-known classic rock and roll and early 1960s folk music minute blogger and website contributor Frank Jackman’s younger brother, had heard the late “First Lady Of The Mountains” Hazel Dickens (d. 2011) for the very first time on her CD album It’s Hard To Tell The Singer From The Song some years back, maybe in 2005. At that time he was in thrall to mountain music after being hit hard by Reese Witherspoon’s role as June Carter in the film Walk The Line (and Kenny maybe a little too had been under the spell of the film The Song Catcher whose soundtrack also had many classic mountain tunes including Iris Dement, the “Arky Angel,” Frank’s Arky Angel anyway performing Pretty Saro , a traditional mountain song probably going back to the old country, the British Isles old country, and Child ballads collected in Cambridge and distilled among the folk who put their own oral tradition take on the material speaking of forlorn love, decked out in poor mountain woman clothing, practical calico brought down at Miller’s General Store and brought to life by primitive seamstress hands, a little ill-fitting, a smudge on her cheek reflecting her dirt-poor work on the played out truck farm keeping the rabbits from devouring the family winter-surviving turnips and eking out whatever nutrient the worked-out land would yield for those who did not move west a couple of generations before when the writing was on the wall for all to see but from their hubris or sloth remained in place and miss the end of Professor Turner’s frontier thesis, sitting on the front porch of a broken down old mountain cabin that had seen better days, the typical dwelling with things scattered all over, old time farm equipment, maybe John Deere when new and prospects seemed reasonable that couple of generations before that they would not have to constantly move west like some forbear parents, but who could tell by the rusted paint peeled off condition, the inevitable 1949 Hudson scavenged for spare parts for the still running 1951 Hudson sitting there looking forlorn like some museum piece dinosaur skeleton gone out of style. A scene replicated all along the ridges of the Appalachian and Ozark ranges).

At that time Kenny got into all things Carter Family, at first June’s mother Maybelle and June’s sisters who constituted the second wave of the Carter Family experience then reaching back to the first Clinch Mountain threesome (her, A.P., his wife sister Ruth) once he heard Maybelle performing Blue-Eyed Boy accompanied by her on the mountain harp (that blue-eyed boy so legend had it was a guy whom had had an affair with Ruth, had been scared off, threatened by the rabid A.P., or had just left like so many others drifting west after the land played out, after the romance had nowhere to go, and so the song sung by all three since as rabid as A.P. was he was no fool when it came to staking his claims to songs that were already in the loose public domain, or just ripped some placid no account melody off and threw a variation of the words on the thing and recorded it for the dough).

So Kenny knew the Carter mountain roots unto the nth generation. A friend, a Vermont mountain boy, a regular Ethan Allan swamp Yankee from out around Marbury a tiny hamlet in the hills and a place where a sizable migration of New Yorkers and Bostonians would wind up when the struggle against the “monster” government in the early got too intense and they retreated, strategically retreated to hear them tell the tale to “work the land,” and worked the land no more successfully than that primitive mountain woman Iris Dement was portraying but stayed anyway, Jeffrey Salem, a transfer from Norwich College, who had been a classmate of his at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst back in the early 1970s, and a man whose knowledge of mountain music was sincere and deep although in school that knowledge had gone over Kenny’s head anytime Jeffrey mentioned it had “hipped” him to Hazel during his frenzy. He remembered the name if not the work she had done to keep the vanishing mountain traditions alive, keep them alive on the female side almost single-handedly as Norman Blake would do on the male side. Kenny had picked up the CD second-hand in a Harvard Square record shop, really outside of Harvard Square heading toward Central Square on Massachusetts Avenue, one of the few places around before the advent of Amazon.com where one could get an off the mainstream, second-hand recording of anything folk or its derivatives. The shop, really Sandy’s located in case you forgot between Harvard and Central Squares, a folk institution around that town where until recently Sandy had been holding forth since the early 1960s folk minute when everybody was desperately looking for roots music and that was the place to look first. Hazel’s You’ll Get No More Of Me, A Few Old Memories and the classic Hills of Home from that CD had knocked him out.

All of this mountain dew business you understand came out of left field for Kenny since he was if anything more of a man of the rock and roll era than Frank who at least had been bitten by that early 1960s folk minute that Kenny was too young for, and which he had winced at every time Frank put on some obscure folk song by guys like Buell Kazee and Hobart Smith on the record player in their shared bedroom (these guys would become living gods when hip urban New Yorkers and dour Boston puritans, kin of Francis Child in their academic appreciation of the ballads headed south, or sent emissaries like the ghosts of the Lomaxes, father and son, to mine the lore and regaled to all things mountain for a minute in that folk minute but for our purposes Kenny would grind his teeth). Later where older brothers Lawrence and Phillip in their turns moved out of the family house and Frank moved up the food chain Kenny as the youngest boy had no one below him in the food chain and in solitude would finally not have to hear the stuff and considered himself lucky, foolish him.)   

 

One of the latter mentioned songs on the CD, Hills Of Home, after repeated playing, seemed kind of familiar and later, a couple of months later, he finally figured out why. He had really first heard Hazel back in 1970 when he was down in the those very hills and hollows that are a constant theme in her work, and that of the mountain mist winds music coming down the crevices. What was going on though? Was it 2005 when he first heard Hazel or back in that 1970 time? Let me go back and tell that 1970 story and you can figure it out for yourselves:

Kenny Jackman like many of his generation who were just brushed by the counter-cultural events of the 1960s like older brother Frank had been just brushed by the “beat” uprising of the late 1950s, was feeling foot loose and fancy free, especially after he had been mercifully declared unlike brother Frank, 4-F, medically unfit for military duty a classification lots of  draft age youth in the holy hell high wire days of the inferno Vietnam War would go to the gates of hell for once the news started seeping back from the mounting body-bag count or from guys who made it back to the “real” world and called the thing by its right name, a horror, by his friendly neighbors at the local draft board in old hometown Carver (declared 4-F in those high draft days because he had a seriously abnormal foot problem which precluded walking very far, a few hundred yards at a time without some aid. Walking a skill, just ask Frank, that the army likes its soldiers to be able to do. This classification system had been the one in place before the lottery, and the last recruitment system in place before the draft was ended, which would presumably have still placed him outside the clutches of the military, unlike Frank’s fate, Frank who had serious problems adjusting to the “real” world before he got sober, and that of Frank’s friend, the late Benjamin Smith who laid down his head in Vietnam for no got purpose no good Benny purpose, except as an added name down on that mirror glass black granite down in D.C.).

So Kenny, every now and again, took to the hitchhike road, not like his mad man brother Frank would do a little later with some heavy message purpose a la Jack Kerouac and his “beat” brothers (and a few sisters) after a reading of On The Road whacked everybody who read the damn thing, including me, with the “get away from home and the nine to five routine bug but just to see the country while he, and it, were still in one piece no pun intended but that Kenny soberly told me since the country was in about fifteen pieces then.

On one of these trips he found himself stranded just outside Norfolk, Virginia hard by the Chesapeake Bay, the place where the U.S. Navy has a big installation and they built big ass war ships although those facts are not part of the story but just to give you a sense of what was what then, at a road-side campsite just outside of town. (Like a lot of military towns, with constant transfers in and out, and migrant labor at harvest farm towns such places are common enough to replace the vagrant real housing which is over-crowded or non-existent.) Feeling kind of hungry one afternoon, and tired, tired unto death of camp-side gruel and stews he stopped at a diner, Billy Bob McGee’s, an old-time truck stop diner a few hundred yards up the road from his camp for some real food, maybe meatloaf or some pot roast like grandma used to make or that was how it was advertised on the makeshift blackboard menu written in chalk on the wall as he entered the place. When Kenny entered the mid-afternoon half-empty diner he sat down at one of the single stool counter seats, usually red-topped, that always accompany the red vinyl-covered side booths in such places. But all of this was so much descriptive noise that could describe a million, maybe more, such eateries. You know the chalkboard menu listing the daily specials, which turned out to be the same as the items listed on the plastic embossed menu in front of each paper placemat complete with napkin-folded silverware, coffee cup at the ready to answer the inevitable “coffee” call from the professional waitress behind the counter whose seniority gave her that spot which as any professional waitress will tell you is the goldmine in the diner business since those counter stools are usually the preserve of single truckers, or single guys, who for a kind smile or at least no surliness will leave a larger tip than any hard-pressed father with wife and four kids in one of the booths will leave despite a much larger bill. You know too the menu contained “breakfast all day” in honor of the eighteen hours a day on the road truckers who frequent such places (don’t tell the ICC, about the eighteen hours, or the menu for that matter, please), the meatloaf dinner, the turkey dinner, the grandmother-like pot roast diner, and of course no self-respecting diner worthy of the name would leave you without bread pudding, and that settling the nerves second cup of coffee.      

What really caught his attention though was a waitress serving them “off the arm” that he knew immediately he had to “hit on” (although that is not the word used in those days but “hit on” conveys what he was up to in the universal boy meets girl world attractions). As it turned out she, sweetly named Fiona Fay, and, well let’s just call her fetching, Kenny weary-eyed fetching, was young, footloose and fancy free herself, had decided like half of those under about thirty to spent her summer break travelling east from her hometown of Valparaiso, Indiana since she had never seen the ocean, had drawn a bead on him as he entered the place. Had drawn that bead knowing with some kind of female knowing that he was not a family man and definitely not a trucker and dressed in his semi-hippie garb (emulating older brother Frank as to dress, flannel shirt despite the horrible humidity saved only by the well-soaked tee-shirt underneath which never got dry down south but always had a slightly musky smell, and damp to the touch, blue jeans not bell-bottomed though, sturdy work boots though clunky lasted longest on those hard asphalt and concrete highways where half the time was spent walking between rides to keep moving, and to keep any nosy coppers from “vagging” you, although with no long hair done up in a ponytail for hitch hike road purposes and no long biblical prophet beard, no way) struck her fancy since he had never talked to a hippie guy before. (Jesus, in 1970, was she kidding.) And as they eyed each other and Fiona came over to his stool disregarding her other family customers in the booths and the evil eye of that inevitable professional waitress with her pencil in her hair, her too tight steam stained uniform who was about to approach Kenny’s spot she asked “coffee.” And, …well this story is about Hazel, so let us just leave it as one thing led to another and let it go at that.

Well, not quite let’s let it go at that because when Kenny left Norfolk a few days later one ex-waitress Fiona Fay was standing by his side on the road south. And the road south was leading nowhere, nowhere at all except to Podunk, really Prestonsburg, Kentucky, and really, really a dink town named Pottsville, just down the road from big town Prestonsburg, down in the hills and hollows of Appalachia, wind-swept green, green, mountain mist, time forgotten. And the reason two footloose and fancy free young people were heading to Podunk is that a close cousin of Fiona’s lived there with her husband and child and wanted Fiona to come visit (visit “for a spell” is how she put it but I will spare the reader the localisms). So they were on that hell-bend road but Kenny, Kenny was dreading this trip and only doing it because, well because Fiona was the kind of young woman, footloose and fancy free or not, that you followed, at least you followed if you were eye-weary Kenny Jackson and hoped things would work out okay.

What Kenny dreaded that day was that he was afraid to confront his past, his no hard luck past but his past in any case. And that past just then entailed having to go to his father’s home territory just up the road in Hazard. See Kenny saw himself as strictly a Yankee, a hard “we fought to free the slaves and incidentally save the union” Yankee for one and all to see back in old Carver, a pose that he had learned from Frank who was about fifty times more political than him, lived for it after “Nam” or rather after he settled down and adjusted to the “real” world enough to want to change the thing instead of grouse about it when he was using sweet sister morphine to face that  world (the older brothers and indeed their father never got beyond calling those “stinking” blacks they worked with “n-----s”). And Kenny denied, denied to the high heavens, that he had any connection with the south, especially the hillbilly south that everybody was making a fuse about trying to bring into the 20th century around that time what with Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. (Frank had had it worse since during his high school time Michael Harrington’s The Other America came out, a  shocking expose of Appalachian poverty, including mention of his father’s birthplace had everybody trying to help out with various book, clothes, and food drives right in Carver High School announced each day for a while over the loud speaker by Mister Thomas, the principal.) And here he was with a father with Hazard, Kentucky, the poorest of the poor hillbillies, right on his birth certificate although Kenny had never been there before. Yeah, Fiona had better be worth it.

Kenny had to admit, as they picked up one lonely truck driver ride after another (it did not hurt in those days to have a comely lass standing on the road with you in the back road South, or anywhere else, especially if you had what was short hair in the north but longish hair down there and a wisp of a beard from not shaving for few days), that the country was beautiful. As they entered coal country though and the shacks got crummier and crummier he got caught up in that 1960s Michael Harrington Other America no running water, outhouse, open door, one window and a million kids and dogs running around half-naked, the kids that is, vision. But they got to Pottsville okay and Fiona’s cousin and husband (Laura and Stu) turned out to be good hosts. So good that they made sure that Kenny and Fiona stayed in town long enough to attend the weekly dance at the old town barn (red of course, run down and in need of paint to keep red of course) that had seen such dances going back to the 1920s when the Carter Family had actually come through Pottsville on their way back to Clinch Mountain from visiting legendary yodeler Jimmy Rodger down in Texas some place. (The first Carter Family combination and Jimmy had been “discovered” at the same Bristol, Tennessee 1920s record sessions by an RCA agent who had conducted these demonstration to expand the audience for records and radios.)  

Kenny buckled at the thought, the mere thought, of going to some Podunk Saturday night “hoe-down” and tried to convince Fiona that they should leave before Saturday. Fiona would have none of it and so Kenny was stuck. Actually the dance started out pretty well, helped tremendously by some local “white lightning” illegal corn liquor that Stu provided and which he failed to mention should be sipped, sipped sparingly by guys who were not practically breast-fed on the stuff. Not only that but the several fiddles, mandolins, guitars, washboards and whatnot made pretty good music. Music like Anchored in Love and Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies, stuff that Frank had heard in the folk clubs in Harvard Square when he used to hang out there in the early 1960s and which had driven Kenny up the wall before liberation day when Philip had moved out. And music that even Kenny, old two left-feet, one way out of whack, draft-free out of whack, Kenny, could dance to with Fiona.

So Kenny was sipping, well more than sipping, and dancing and all until maybe about midnight when this woman, this local woman came out of nowhere and began to sing, sing like some quick, rushing wind sound coming down from the hills and hollas (hollows for Yankees, okay, please). Kenny began to toss and turn a little, not from the liquor but from some strange feeling, some strange womb-like feeling that this woman’s voice was a call from up on top of these deep green hills, now mist-filled awaiting day. And then she started into a long, mournful version of Hills of Home, and he sensed, sensed strongly if not anything he could articulate that he was home.

A twangy plainsong plain folk voice brushed by the mountain streams, grabbing that mist between gasps of her breath that spoke of leaving the old country, mostly the British Isles, mostly from the countryside when the fens were hedged in, the common land got sold for grazing, and men, if they were men drifted toward the cities, “drifted” the operative word, just keep moving, keep one jump ahead of whoever was following, leaving  a bunch of generations before, maybe just before the law was ready to set the gallows high, set the noose upon some forbear’s neck for stealing Mister’s pigs, Sir somebody’s wood, the Duke’s deer, poachers all and no respecters of property, maybe a highwayman or con man but in need of quick exit of the clamp would come down and so, desperate, the desperate are always the fodder for leaving when the old home chances ran out of luck headed to the indentured ships, the transport vessels and headed to the new land, the, what did Fitzgerald call it, yeah, the fresh green breast of the new world, where it seemed nobody lived and so the possibilities were endless. But see in that voice there was also this knowledge, not spoken, how could it be too many generations had passed but maybe it was embedded in the DNA by now, that some men, some folk were meant to move, to rumble, tumble, grab this, grab that and then move on, move in that fresh green breast land westward since the harsh seas lay eastward and that noose still held its charms. And so they moved, moved out of East Coast cities (or were forced out, maybe by the same king’s writ that scattered them in the old country) and into the wilderness like some ancient adventurers, some kept pushing west, became rolling stones and some stayed put, some had lost the energy to move west and so stayed put, stayed in ramshackle cabins and shacks letting the farm equipment rust, scavenging for the refuse, stripping the slender leavings, and waited for better times, waited and waited and watched any progeny with any energy head out of the hills to find their own new world, guys like Kenny and Frank’s father who could not get out fast enough whatever sorrows were ahead, and there were sorrows.             

Yes, Kenny Jackson, Yankee, city boy, corner boy-bred was “home,” hillbilly home. So see Kenny really did hear Hazel Dickens for first time in 1970.

[As for Fiona Fay she stayed on the road with Kenny until they headed toward the Midwest where she veered off to head home to Valparaiso in Indiana, her hometown, back to the local business school she was attending and had taken time off from to “find herself” just as Kenny and ten million other generational wanderers were trying like hell to do. Kenny headed west via Denver and the Utahs to California, to Big Sur and a different mountain ethos, splashed by the sea, splashed by the Japan seas, splashed by everything that in his everlasting life needed to be washed clean. They were supposed to meet out there a few months later after she finished up the semester and attended to some family business. They never did, a not so unusual occurrence of the time when people met and faded along the way, but Kenny thought about her, about that red barn dance night, about that lady of the mountains and that wind-swept mountain coming down the hollows night for a long time after that.]    

  

***Once Again On The Causes Of The English Revolution- Professor Lawrence Stone’s View

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for English historian, Professor Lawrence Stone.

Book Review

The Causes Of The English Revolution, 1529-164, Lawrence Stone, Harper Torchbooks, New York 1972

The last time that the name of Professor Lawrence Stone came up in this space was a review of his magisterial study of the rise and triumph of bourgeois family structure and its mores in England, The Family, Sex And Marriage In England 1500-1800(the study centered on English changes, which as the vanguard of capitalism made a study of the bourgeois family structure quite sensible) from 1500 to 1800 so the good professor is certainly familiar with the period under discussion in this book. The bourgeois family study, some 500 pages, abridged, is contrasted here by a much shorter work of less than two hundred pages. But don’t be thrown off by the shortness of this work, given the expansiveness of the subject, because this is a serious concise work that lays out for the beginner and the more knowledgeable a very nice grab bag of causes for the 17th century English revolution that gives one a jumping off point for further investigation. For the more advanced devotees of the study of the English revolution there are plenty of footnotes and a bibliography at the end that will provide helpful for that further study.

Of course any speculation on the cause or, more correctly, the causes of the English revolution (like any revolution, or other world historic event) is, for the most part, a matter of hindsight, and therefore ready material for an historian’s “cherry-picking” to suit his or her predilections. And also a cause, as in the English case described here by Professor Stone in the first section of the book, for all sorts of “flare-ups” back in the 1950s and 1960s in British academic circles. From such questions as whether the 1640-60 events were even a revolution ( a question pretty much now resolved in favor of revolution) to which class lead and benefited from it to more esoteric questions about whether the gentry (the big landowners, for the most part) benefited from the revolution or not there was something of a field day on this period and Professor Stone seems to have been right in the middle of it along with such English revolution luminaries as Professors Tawney and Trevor-Roper. And as long as it is kept to the academic milieu ( as is the usual situation) such infighting can, and in this case did, produce some useful insights.

After the academic “fireworks” settle down from the first section Professor Stone, in the second and third sections, gets to his laundry list of causes for the revolution, some worth further investigation, some that seem more speculative (like the question of the rise and fall of the gentry, or parts of it, in the rush to revolution). He breaks down the period from 1529 to 1642 into smaller segments in order to separate longer term causes from shorter and more direct causes. Obviously any study of long term trends toward revolution in England in this period has to include changes in agricultural production toward more capitalist methods of growing for the market, the role of demographic spreads and population growth (especially London’s growth) and, probably most importantly, the fall out from the Protestant Reformation as it played out in there. Shorter term reasons include the rise of Puritanism in the wake of the religious and political policies the James I and Charles I regimes, the vast increase in literacy, education, and lay authority in church matters, changes in the legal and state church structure, particularly by Charles I promoting a more authoritarian regime in the face of more democratic church movements, and, as always, the personal factor, of Charles I’s eagerness to shoot himself in the foot every time some controversy came up so that in the end he alienated, and made indifferent or hostile , the elements of society that stool closest to him, especially the merchants and nobility. This is hardly exhaustive of Professor Stone’s presentation but should be enough to whet the appetite.

Of course for revolutionaries, as well as thoughtful historians, the causes of revolution and the pre-revolutionary period are important in their own right. Just as today we can see, even if we cannot right this minute do anything about it, that conditions in America and Europe are ripe for revolution, a socialist revolution, and we can point to unemployment, the gaps between the rich and poor, extensive deindustrialization, cuts in public social welfare budgets and the like as the precursors we can look at the English, French Russian and Chinese revolutions for some insights. The English revolution, as the first great Western one, is particularly important to study because of the links to America and because something in the English-American psyche (at least in the past) has acted almost as a barrier to further revolutions among English-speaking Anglo-American people.

On The 96th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (1919) -Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Now, And Then

On The 96th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (1919) -Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Now, And Then

Click below to link to the Communist International Internet Archives"

http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/index.htm

From The Pen Of Josh Breslin

Back in the early 1970s after they had worked out between themselves, as best they could given their previous distain and/or ignorance of the history of the American left, of the international workers movement in particular which some elements in the anti-Vietnam movement were fitfully beginning to investigate, the rudiments of what had gone wrong with the May Day 1971 actions in Washington, D.C. Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris began some serious study of leftist literature from an earlier time, from back earlier in the century. Those May Day anti-Vietnam War actions which they had originally enthusiastically participated in (especially Ralph since this had been his first big anti-war action in Washington in which he had been in an affinity group with some fellow ex-veterans), ill-conceived as they in the end turned out to be, centered on the proposition that if the American government would not close down the damn blood-sucking war then they, those thousands that participated in the actions, would close down the government. All Sam, Ralph and those thousands of others got for their efforts was a round-up into the bastinado, picked off like ducks in a shooting gallery even before they could get close to the targets they were attempting to shut down.

Sam had been picked off early in the round-up on Pennsylvania Avenue as his group, mainly college students from Boston University and George Washington University and an array of young radicals from the streets of Cambridge and New York (his “affinity group” for the action) had been on their way to “capture” the White House (the cops and soldiers had blocked the way about five blocks before and were rounding up anybody who looked like they might be a protestor, or want to be under the old military principle of “shot first and let God separate out the guilty from the innocent”). Sam, no novice at civil disobedience or street actions had been appalled at the ease with which they were rounded even though at the last affinity group meeting he had voiced a mild criticism about the plan to “capture” the citadel of American imperialism without some kind of massed armed army but his reasoning was dismissed out of hand by some of the more itchy street kids. Ralph and his affinity group of ex-veterans and their supporters were rounded-up on Massachusetts Avenues heading toward the Pentagon (they had had no plans to capture that five-sided building, at least they were unlike Sam’s group not that naïve, just surround the place like had occurred in an anti-war action in 1967 which has been detailed in Norman Mailer’s prize-winning book Armies Of The Night). Ralph new to the anti-war action scene in Washington thought nothing of the merits of lack of merits of the planned and “occupation” since it had been made clear at the last affinity meeting the night before that the march to the lion’s den of American military might by returned wounded and angry soldiers had its own symbolic value. Still the cops and National Guard soldiers rounded them up just like all the other hippies, street radicals, Quakers, shakers and midnight fakirs. (Ralph had sneered at the National Guard soldiers as “weekend warriors” who desperately clung to their status of having enough pull to avoid being drafted or enlisting in the real Army)

For a time RFK (Robert F. Kennedy) Stadium, the home of the Washington Redskins football team) was the main holding area for those arrested and detained before the numbers detained overwhelmed the facility. The irony of being held in a stadium named after the martyred late President’s younger brother and lightening rod for almost all anti-war and “newer world” political dissent before he was assassinated in the bloody summer of 1968 and in a place where football, a sport associated in many radical minds with all that was wrong with the American system was lost on Sam and Ralph at the time and it was only later, many decades later, as they were sitting in a bar in Boston across from the JFK Federal Building on one of their periodic reunions when Ralph was in town that Sam had picked up that connection. The cops and soldiers probably never saw the irony, never. 

Sam, from Carver in Massachusetts, who had been a late convert to the anti-war movement in 1969 after his closest high school friend, the guy who he hung around the corner at Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street with, Jeff Mullin, had been blown away in some jungle town in the Central Highlands (a town that he to this day could not properly spell or say)  was like many late converts to a cause a “true believer,” had taken part in many acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, including the one in hometown Carver, federal buildings, military recruitment stations and military bases. From an indifference, no that’s not right, from a mildly patriotic average young American citizen that you could find by the score hanging around Mom and Pop variety stores, pizza parlors, diners, and bowling alleys in the early 1960s, he had become a long-haired bearded “hippie anti-warrior.” Not too long in either hair or beard though by the standards of “youth nation” of the day since he was running a small print shop in Carver in order to support his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away suddenly of a massive heart attack in 1965 which exempted him from military service. (At first he was self-conscious about sitting at draft boards and recruiting stations as a result of that exemption until one austere Quaker lady told him every body counted in the struggle against war and to not let that other stuff bother him.) Not too short either since those “squares” were either poor bastards who got tagged by the military and had to wear their hair short an appearance which stuck out in towns like Cambridge, Ann Arbor, Berkeley and L.A. when the anti-war movement started embracing the increasingly frustrated and anti-war soldiers that  they were beginning to run across or, worse, cops before they got “hip” to the idea that guys wearing short hair, no beard, looked like they had just taken a bath, and wore plaid short-sleeved shirts and chinos might as well have a bulls-eye target on their backs surveilling the counter-cultural crowd.

Ralph, from Troy, New York, had been working in his father’s highly specialized skilled electrical shop which had major orders from General Electric the big employer in the area when he got his draft notice and had decided to enlist in the Army in order to avoid being an 11B, an infantryman, a grunt, “cannon fodder,” although he would not have known to call it that at the time, that would come later. He had expected to go into something which he knew something about in the electrical field at least that is what the recruiting sergeant in Albany had “promised” him. (He would not forget that “promise” lesson for later, much later, in the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2002 he would stand at recruiting stations trying to tell young prospects not to believe the lies the well-paid and well-versed recruiters told them.) But in the year 1967 (and 1968 too since he had extended his tour six months to get out of the service a little early) what the military needed in Vietnam whatever else they might have needed was “cannon fodder,” guys to go out into the bushes and kill commies. Simple as that. And that was what Ralph Morris, a mildly patriotic average young American citizen, no that is not right, a very patriotic average young American citizen that you could also find by the score hanging around Mom and Pop variety stores, pizza parlors, diners, and bowling alleys in the early 1960s, did. But see he got “religion” up there in Pleiku, up there in the Central Highlands, up there in the stinking sweating bush and so when he had been discharged from the Army in late 1969 he was in a rage against the machine. Sure he had gone almost immediately back to the grind of his father’s electrical shop but he was out of place just then, out of sorts, needed to find an outlet for his anger at what he had done, what had happened to buddies very close to him, what buddies had done to the peasants who had done nothing to them but be “in the wrong place at the wrong time in their own fucking country” (Ralph’s term), and how the military had made them animals, nothing less. (Ralph after his father retired would take over the electric shop business on his own in 1991 and would thereafter give it to his son, Ralph III to take over after he retired in 2011.)

One day in 1970, maybe 1971 he had gone to Albany on a job for his father and while on State Street he had seen a group of guys in deliberately mismatched military garb marching in the streets without talking, silent which was amazing in itself from what he had previously seen of such anti-war marches and just carrying a big sign-Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and nobody stopped them, no cops, nobody, nobody yelled “commie” either or a lot of other macho stuff that he and his hang out guys used to do in Troy when some peaceniks held peace vigils in the square around 1965 or so. The civilian on-lookers held their tongues that day although Ralph knew that the whole area, including most of his family, still retained a lot of residual pro-war feeling just because America was fighting somewhere for something. He parked his father’s truck and walked over to the march just to watch at first. Some guy in a tattered Marine mismatched uniform wearing Chuck Taylor sneakers in the march called out to the crowd for anybody who had served in Vietnam, served in the military to join them, to help send a message to the brass, to their ex-bosses, that the madness must stop, shouting out their military affiliation as they did so. Ralph almost automatically blurred out-“First Air Cav” and walked right into the street. There were other First Air Cav guys there that day so he was among kindred. So yeah, Ralph after that “baptism” did a lot of actions with VVAW and with “civilian” collectives who were planning more dramatic actions in the Albany area. Ralph always would say later that if it hadn’t been for getting “religion” on the war issue and doing all those political actions then he would have gone crazy, would have wound up like a lot of guys he would see later at the VA, would see out in the cardboard box for a home streets, and would not until this day have supported in any way he could, although lately not physically since his knee replacement, those who had the audacity to still march for the “good old cause” against the war-mongers when the reared their bastardly heads.                           

This is the back story of a relationship that has lasted until this day, an unlikely relationship in normal times and places but in that cauldron of the early 1970s when the young, even the not so very young, were trying to make heads or tails out of what was happening in a world they did not crate, and were not asked about there were plenty of such stories, although most did not outlast that search for the newer world when the high tide of the 1960s ebbed in the mid-1970s. Sam and Ralph’s story had started when Ralph had noticed while milling around the football field waiting for something to happen, waiting to be released, that Sam had a VVAW button on his shirt and since he did not recognize Sam from any previous VVAW action had asked if he was a member of the organization and where. Sam told him the story of his friend Jeff Mullin and of his change of heart about the war, and about doing something about ending the damn thing.

That strange introduction while in “jail” got them talking, talking well into the first night of their captivity when they found they had many things in common coming from deeply entrenched working-class cultures. (You already know about Troy and the GE effect. Carver is something like the cranberry bog capital of the world even today although the large producers dominate the market unlike when Sam was a kid and the small Finnish growers dominated the market and town life. The town moreover has turned into something of a bedroom community for the high-tech industry that dots U.S. 495.)

After a couple of days in the bastinado waiting for the in- no-hurry cops to do some paperwork Sam and Ralph hungry, thirsty, needing a shower after suffering through the Washington humidity heard that people were finding ways of getting out to the streets through some unguarded side exits. They decided to surreptitiously attempt an “escape” which proved successful and they immediately headed through a bunch of the letter, number and state streets on the Washington city grid toward Connecticut Avenue heading toward Silver Springs trying to hitchhike out of the city. A couple of days later having obtained a ride through from Trenton, New Jersey to Providence, Rhode Island they headed to Sam’s mother’s place in Carver. Ralph stayed there a few days before heading back home to Troy. They had agreed that they would keep in contact and try to figure out what the hell went wrong in Washington that week. After making some connections through some radicals he knew in Cambridge to live in a commune over by Inman Square (cheap rent, cheap living and doable since the last of Sam’s sisters had finished high school and he had another friend from the Jimmy Jack’s Diner corner boys days, Johnnie Callahan, running the print shop, a print shop business that he would return to seriously once the high tide of the 1960s ebbed, after he started a family, and which he sold to a third party after he retired in 2012). Sam asked Ralph to come stay with him for the summer and try to figure out that gnarly problem of the way forward to a more effective way to stop the goddam wars. Ralph did, although his father was furious since he needed his help on a big GE contract for the Defense Department but Ralph was having none of that. (Ralph and his father eventually reconciled but that was a long process over several years and much argument but need not detain us here except to say that the damn war blew many household apart, for good or evil.)      

So in the summer of 1971 Sam and Ralph began to read that old time literature, although Ralph admitted he was not much of a reader and some of the stuff was way over his head, Sam’s too. Mostly they read socialist and communist literature, a little of the old IWW (Wobblie) stuff since they both were enthrall to the exploits of the likes of Big Bill Haywood out West during the heyday of the miner’s union struggles which seemed to dominate the politics of that earlier time. They had even for a time joined a loose study group sponsored by one of the myriad “red collectives” that had sprung up like weeds in the Cambridge area. Both thought it ironic at the time, and others who were questioning the direction the “movement” was heading in stated the same thing when they were in the study groups, that before that time in the heyday of their anti-war activity everybody dismissed the old white guys (a term not in common use then like now) like Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and their progeny as irrelevant. Now everybody was glued to the books.

It was from that time that Sam and Ralph got a better appreciation of a lot of the events, places, and personalities from the old time radicals. Events like the start of May Day in 1886 as an international working class holiday which they had been clueless about despite the   May Day actions, the Russian Revolutions, the Paris Commune, the Chinese Revolutions, August 1914 as a watershed against war, the Communist International, those aforementioned radicals Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, adding in Mao, Che, Fidel, Ho whose names were on everybody’s tongue (and on posters in every bedroom) even if the reason for that was not known. Most surprising of all were the American radicals like Haywood, Browder, Cannon, Foster, and others who nobody then, or almost nobody cared to know about at all.

As they learned more information about past American movements Sam, the more interested writer of such pieces began to write appreciations of past events, places and personalities. His first effort was to write something about the commemoration of the 3 Ls (Lenin, Luxemburg, and Liebknecht) started by the Communist International back in the 1920s in January 1972, the first two names that he knew from a history class in junior college and the third not at all. After that he wrote various pieces like the one below about the early days of the Communist International which intrigued him no end although he could not picture such an organization working in 1972 not with the political climate and not with the question of what Leon Trotsky, one of the founders, called the degeneration of that organization (leftists have seemingly always posed their positions as questions; the women question, the black question, the party question, the Russian question, the Comintern question, and so on so Sam decided to stick with the old time usage.) Here is what he had to say then which he had recently freshly updated to include comments after reading a then recently published book by Trotsky about the early days of the Communist International. Sam told Ralph after he had read and asked if he was still a “true believer” said a lot of piece he would still stand by today:      

Sam Eaton comment:

BOOK REVIEW

‘LEFT-WING’ COMMUNISM-AN INFANTILE DISORDER, V.I. LENIN, UNIVERSITY PRESS OF THE PACIFIC, CALIFORNIA, 2001

An underlying premise of the Lenin-led Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 was that success there would be the first episode in a world-wide socialist revolution. While a specific timetable was not placed on the order of the day the early Bolshevik leaders, principally Lenin and Trotsky, both assumed that those events would occur in the immediate post-World War I period, or shortly thereafter. Alas, such was not the case, although not from lack of trying on the part of an internationalist-minded section of the Bolshevik leadership.

Another underlying premise, developed by the Leninists as part of their opposition to the imperialist First World War, was the need for a new revolutionary labor international to replace the compromised and moribund Socialist International (also known as the Second International) which had turned out to be useless as an instrument for revolution or even of opposition to the European war. The Bolsheviks took that step after seizing power and established the Communist International (also known as the Comintern or Third International) in 1919. As part of the process of arming that international with a revolutionary strategy (and practice) Lenin produced this polemic to address certain confusions, some willful, that had arisen in the European left and also attempted to instill some of the hard-learned lessons of the Russian revolutionary experience in them.

The Russian Revolution, and after it the Comintern in the early heroic days, for the most part, drew the best and most militant layers of the working-class and radical intellectuals to their defense. However, that is not the same as drawing experienced Bolsheviks to that defense. Many militants were anti-parliamentarian or anti-electoral in principle after the sorry experiences with the European social democracy. Others wanted to emulate the old heroic days of the Bolshevik underground party or create a minority, exclusive conspiratorial party.

Still others wanted to abandon the reformist bureaucratically-led trade unions to their then current leaderships, and so on. Lenin’s polemic, and it nothing but a flat-out polemic against all kinds of misconceptions of the Bolshevik experience, cut across these erroneous ideas like a knife. His literary style may not appeal to today’s audience but the political message still has considerable application today. At the time that it was written no less a figure than James P. Cannon, a central leader of the American Communist Party, credited the pamphlet with straightening out that badly confused movement (Indeed, it seems every possible political problem Lenin argued against in that pamphlet had some following in the American Party-in triplicate!). That alone makes it worth a look at.

I would like to highlight one point made by Lenin that has currency for leftists today, particularly American leftists. At the time it was written many (most) of the communist organizations adhering to the Comintern were little more than propaganda groups (including the American party). Lenin suggested one of the ways to break out of that isolation was a tactic of critical support to the still large and influential social-democratic organizations at election time. In his apt expression- to support those organizations "like a rope supports a hanging man".

However, as part of my political experiences in America around election time I have run into any number of ‘socialists’ and ‘communists’ who have turned Lenin’s concept on its head. How? By arguing that militants needed to ‘critically support’ the Democratic Party (who else, right?) as an application of the Leninist criterion for critical support. No, a thousand times no. Lenin’s specific example was the reformist British Labor Party, a party at that time (and to a lesser extent today) solidly based on the trade unions- organizations of the working class and no other. The Democratic Party in America was then, is now, and will always be a capitalist party. Yes, the labor bureaucrats and ordinary workers support it, finance it, drool over it but in no way is it a labor party. That is the class difference which even sincere militants have broken their teeth on for at least the last seventy years. And that, dear reader, is another reason why it worthwhile to take a peek at this book.

Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Now, And Then

Commentary

No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon the founder of The Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined.

The conclusion that I drew from that observation was that the revolutionary socialist movement was not as desperately in need of theoreticians and intellectuals as previously (although having them is always a good thing). It needed leaders steeped in those theories and with a capacity to lead revolutions. We needed a few good day-to-day practical leaders to lead the fight for state power.

In that regard I have always held up, for the early part of the 20th century, the name Karl Liebknecht the martyred German Communist co-leader (along with Rosa Luxemburg) of the aborted Spartacist uprising of 1919 as such an example. In contrast the subsequent leadership of the German Communists in the 1920’s Paul Levi, Henrich Brandler and Ernest Thaelmann did not meet those qualifications. For later periods I have held up the name James P. Cannon, founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (to name only the organization that he was most closely associated with), as a model. That basically carries us to somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Since I have spend a fair amount of time lately going back to try to draw the lessons of our movement I have also had occasion to think, or rather to rethink my original argument on the need for revolutionary intellectuals. That position stands in need of some amendment now.

Let’s be clear here about our needs. The traditional Marxist idea that in order to break the logjam impeding humankind’s development the international working class must rule is still on the historic agenda. The Leninist notions that, since the early part of the 20th century, we have been in the imperialist era and that a ‘hard’ cadre revolutionary party is necessary to take state power are also in play. Moreover, the Trotskyist understanding that in countries of belated development the working class is the only agency objectively capable of leading those societies to the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois revolution continues to hold true. That said, we are seriously in need of revolutionary intellectuals who can bring these understandings into the 21st century.


It is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory mentioned above hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working class specific questions play in world politics (the national question, religion, special racial and gender oppressions) and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.

Since the mid- 20th century we have had no lack of practical revolutionary leaders of one sort or another - one thinks of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and even Mao in his less rabid moments. We have witnessed any number of national liberation struggles, a few attempts at political revolution against Stalinism, a few military victories against imperialism, notably the Vietnamese struggle. But mainly this has been an epoch of defeats for the international working class. Moreover, we have not even come close to developing theoretical leaders of the statue of Lenin or Trotsky.

As a case in point, recently I made some commentary about the theory of student power in the 1960’s and its eventual refutation by the May 1968 General Strike lead by the working class in France. One of the leading lights for the idea that students were the ‘new’ working class or a ‘new’ vanguard was one Ernest Mandel. Mandel held himself out to be an orthodox Marxist (and Trotskyist, to boot) but that did not stop him from, periodically, perhaps daily, changing the focus of his work away from the idea of the centrality of the working class in social struggle an ideas that goes back to the days of Marx himself.

And Mandel, a brilliant well-spoken erudite scholar probably was not the worst of the lot. The problem is that he was the problem with his impressionistic theories based on , frankly, opportunistic impulses. Another example, from that same period, was the idea of Professor Regis Debray ( in the service of Fidel at the time ) that guerrilla foci out in the hills were the way forward ( a codification of the experience of the Cuban Revolution for which many subjective revolutionary paid dearly with their lives). Or the anti-Marxist Maoist notion that the countryside would defeat the cities that flamed the imagination of many Western radicals in the late 1960’s. I could go on with more examples but they only lead to one conclusion- we are, among other things, in a theoretical trough. This, my friends, is why today I have my Help Wanted sign out. Any takers?