*****Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind

*****Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind  

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

 

You know sometimes what goes around comes around as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco Bay Area Town and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, looked like difference from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence. Oh sure, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood and have it count has tried to march to its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of the decade, maybe the first part of the next. But what Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed. 

The way Sam told it one night at his bi-weekly book club where the topic selected for that meeting had been the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook was that he had been looking for roots as a kid. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of his generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree. Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So his generation had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.

Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different. That transistor radio for those not in the know was “heaven sent” for a whole generation of kids in the 1950s who could care less, who hated the music that was being piped into the family living room big ass floor model radio which their parents grew up with since it was small, portable and could be held to the ear and the world could go by without bothering you while you were in thrall to the music. That was the start. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week.

Sam’s lucky station had been a small station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too, thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like roots music.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music, well, cheaply alone or on a date. Basically as he related to his listeners for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs).

He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Muddy River Boys, and some bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.

This is where it all got jumbled up for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high school and had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement of Jimmy Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.                                 

As Sam warmed up to his subject he told his audience two things that might help explain his interest when he started to delve into the reasons why fifty years later the sound of that finely-tuned fiddle still beckons him home. The first was that when he had begun his freshman year at Boston University he befriended a guy, Everett Lally, the first day of orientation since he seemed to be a little uncomfortable with what was going on. See Everett was from a small town outside of Wheeling, West Virginia and this Boston trip was only the second time, the first time being when he came up for an interview, he had been to a city larger than Wheeling. So they became friends, not close, not roommate type friends, but they had some shared classes and lived in the same dorm on Bay State Road.

One night they had been studying together for an Western History exam and Everett asked Sam whether he knew anything about bluegrass music, about mountain music (Sam’s term for it Everett was Bill Monroe-like committed to calling it bluegrass). Sam said sure, and ran off the litany of his experiences at Harvard Square, the Village, listening on the radio. Everett, still a little shy, asked if Sam had ever heard of the Lally Brothers and of course Sam said yes, that he had heard them on the radio playing the Orange Blossom Express, Rocky Mountain Shakedown as well as their classic instrumentation version of The Hills of Home.  Everett perked up and admitted that he was one of the Lally Brothers, the mandolin player.

Sam was flabbergasted. After he got over his shock Everett told him that his brothers were coming up to play at the New England Bluegrass Festival to be held at Brandeis on the first weekend of October. Everett invited Sam as his guest. He accepted and when the event occurred he was not disappointed as the Lally Brothers brought the house down. For the rest of that school year Sam and Everett on occasion hung out together in Harvard Square and other haunts where folk music was played since Everett was interested in hearing other kinds of songs in the genre. After freshman year Everett did not return to BU, said his brothers needed him on the road while people were paying to hear their stuff and that he could finish school later when things died down and they lost touch, but Sam always considered that experience especially having access to Everett’s huge mountain music record collection as the lynchpin to his interest.             

Of course once the word got out that Everett Lally was in a bluegrass group, played great mando, could play a fair fiddle and the guitar the Freshman girls at BU drew a bee-line for him, some of them anyway. BU, which later in the decade would be one of the hotbeds of the anti-war movement locally and nationally but then was home to all kinds of different trends just like at campuses around the country, was filled with girls (guys too but for my purposes her the girls are what counts) from New York City, from Manhattan, from Long Island who knew a few things about folk music from forays into the Village. Once they heard Everett was a “mountain man,” or had been at Brandeis and had seen him with his brothers, they were very interested in adding this exotic plant to their collections. Everett, who really was pretty shy although he was as interested in girls as the rest of the guys at school were, told Sam that he was uncomfortable around these New York women because they really did treat him like he was from another world, and he felt that he wasn’t. Felt he was just a guy. But for a while whenever they hung out together girls would be around. Needless to say as a friend of Everett’s when there were two interested girls Sam got the overflow. Not bad, not bad at all.        

But there is something deeper at play in the Sam mountain music story as he also told the gathering that night. It was in his genes, his DNA he said. This was something that he had only found out a few years before. On his father’s side, his grandfather, Homer, whom he had never met since after his wife, Sam’s grandmother, Sara died he had left his family, all grown in any case, without leaving a forwarding address, had actually been born and lived his childhood down in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, down near the fabled Hazard of song and labor legend before moving to the North after World War I. Here is the funny part though when his father and mother Laura were young after World War II and at wits end about where his grandfather might be they travelled down to Prestonsburg in search of him. While they stayed there for a few months looking Sam had been conceived although they left after getting no results on their search, money was getting low, and there were no father jobs around so he had been born in the South Shore Hospital in Massachusetts. So yes, that mountain music just did not happen one fine night but was etched in his body, the whirlwind sounds on Saturday night down amount the hills and hollows with that sad fiddle playing one last waltz to end the evening.                  

 

 

 

 

Support The Partisan Defense Committee's Holiday Appeal -Free All Class-War Prisoners!

Support The Partisan Defense Committee's Holiday Appeal -Free All Class-War Prisoners!  

 

Click below to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website

http://www.partisandefense.org/

Leonard Peltier 1972





My yearly comment on behalf of the Holiday Appeal-Frank Jackman  

I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley).

Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, anti-fascist street fighters like the Tingsley Five to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Of course this year we lost Hugo Pinell, George Jackson’s comrade-in-arms from the San Quentin Six to a murderous vendetta. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. One year though, and it now bears repeating each year, after I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson’s present class-war prisoner the late Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven,  as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. Many, too many for most of that time. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. The class-war prisoners must not stand alone. 

                                                                                                

PDC    

Box 99 Canal Street Station                        

New York, N.Y. 10013

*Not Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle- "Black Dahlia' -A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of the movie trailer for "Black Dahlia".

DVD Review

Black Dalhia, Josh Harnett, Hilary Swank, Scarlett Johansson, directed by Brian DePalma, 2006

Take Raymond Chandler's noir "slumming streets" of 1940s Los Angeles, a few tough cops who may, or may not, be "on the take", more "dishy" dames than you can take a stick at all trying to make their way to Hollywood's big time, big screen any way they can. Throw in money, sexual desire, sexual perversion, some stolen scenes from other noir films and you have "Black Dahlia". No, not Chandler's "Blue Dahlia" there is too much visual, up-front violence, too little worthy dialogue, and too little character development for that but all the other elements are there to produce a somewhat entertaining mystery that will keep you guessing a little, if you can keep your eyes off those "dishy" dames, Hilary Swank and Scarlett Johansson, (or, depending on your preference, those "dishy" guys, Josh Harnett and Aaron Eckhart ). That in the end is probably the reason to see this thing. It does have that great `40s background music to set the mood, though. You know, if you are a noir fan what I mean.

A View From The Left-The Beat Goes On

The mercenary class ...the predators in Washington are only this far from monopoly control of our government.
They bought the system lock, stock, and pork barrel -- making change from within impossible."
~Bill Moyers  [it has been thus so for eons Mr Moyers]   youtube video

 

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*Blood Simple, Natch- Dashiell Hammett's "Red Harvest"

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Dashiell Hammett's early Continental Op detective novel, Red Harvest.

Book Review

Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett, 1929

Dashiell Hammett, along with Raymond Chandler, reinvented the detective genre in the 1930's and 1940's. They moved the genre away from the amateurish and simple parlor detectives that had previously dominated the genre to hard-boiled action characters who knew what was what and didn't mind taking a beating to get the bad guys. And along the way they produced some very memorable literary characters as well. Nick and Nora Charles, Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe are well known exemplars of the action detective. However, on the way to creating these literary works of art Hammett did journeyman's work at the detective genre in various pulp detective magazines. Moreover, in the beginning he hid his detectives behind the anonymous, although not faceless or without personality, average,somewhat realistic detectives of a national detective agency (shades of his own past).

The unnamed universal Continental Operative (Op) who is the central character of here is the is the prototype for Hammett's later named detectives. He has all the characteristics that mark a noir detective-tough, resourceful, undaunted, and incorruptible with a sense of honor to friend and foe alike that sets him apart from earlier, fumbling, detectives. The plot line here requires all the resourcefulness of the Op as he tries to cleanup a new Western boom town tied together by many a criminal enterprise and the greed (and complicity) of the local bourgeois big shot who let things get out of hand, when profits dictated the action. The twist and turns as Op tries to mix and match with the various interests at play drive the drama of the book. Along the way, of course, just like in the Old West, there is plenty of shoot-‘em-up action before the town, Personville (aka, Poisonville ) is fit for respectable folks to make an honest dollar in. If you want a well-thought out story, although not as memorable as The Maltese Falcon or the The Thin Man, that is also well-written, although without the numerous unforgettable lines of the above-mentioned novels, from a member of the second echelon of the American literary pantheon, this one is for you.

****
This note is being placed with all reviews of Dashiell Hammett's classic noir detective novels.

Note: It is not altogether clear to me what Hammett’s political sympathies (or rather more to the point, organization connections) were in the period of his great detection-writing period, the early 1930s, although one can speculate they were at least progressive. I should note for those who are only familiar with the detective novels and crime short stories that Hammet was a make-no-bones-about-it supporter of the Communist Party during the hard, don’t turn eye from your neighbor, see reds under every bed, your Mommy is a commie turn her in, prison house, American night of the red scare, Cold War, post World War II period (and earlier as well, during the Popular Front all the way with FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), Joe Stalin, our father can do no wrong, Moscow Trials liquidate the Old Bolsheviks, the makers of the revolution, time but this post-war period is what concerns me here).

This was period when anything to the left of Herbert Hoover, including probably red tablecloths on restaurant tables, was suspect. This is also the period of the unlamented Joe McCarthy, the equally unlamented Richard Nixon, the deep, fatal, anti-communist purges in the labor unions from which we still suffer today (and anti-red purges in many other political and cultural institutions as well), and of the time of “the naming of names.” The high watermark time of the “fink” and of the “blacklist.” I have vilified, rightly so, no, righteously so, the likes of movie director Elia Kazan (Viva Zapata, On The Waterfront) for their “stool pigeon” scab actions before the "committees".

Kazan was, unfortunately, not alone in that dark, witch-hunt, keep your eyes down, keep walking straight ahead with blinkers on, tell them what they want to know although they already know it, night. I have also heaped tons of well-deserved praise on the heroic Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, for holding their ground under intense pressure and under penalty of paying the ultimate price, their lives, for their steadfastness. For defending the Soviet Union, not in our Trotskyist way, but in their own honorable way, and didn’t complain about it when they were called on it, unjustly, by the American imperial state.

Dashiell Hammett was called, tooth brush in hand, before the “red scare” committees and just said no. Hats off. Now there is no need to get mushy about it, and one should not forget that in the end Hammett’s Stalinist politics (and vilification of leftist political opponents like our Trotskyist forbears) made us not less political opponents, but isn’t there something in old Hammett’s actions, that sense of “tilting to the windmills,” that leads right back to Sam Spade. Yes, I thought you would think so.

Massachusetts AFL-CIO comes to defense of five Teamsters charged in extortion case

Massachusetts AFL-CIO comes to defense of five Teamsters charged in extortion case

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Globe Staff Photo/Jim Davis

Mark Harrington, (left) a member of The Teamsters Local 25, walked out of the Moakley Courthouse in September following his arraignment on extortion charges stemming from an alleged incident concerning the “Top Chef” television program.

By Milton J. Valencia Globe Staff  December 17, 2015

The Massachusetts AFL-CIO, one of the largest labor unions in the state, has come to the defense of five local Teamsters union members charged in federal court with extortion after they were accused of threatening violence during a picket to demand jobs with a television crew.

The AFL-CIO argued in a court filing attached to the case this week that the acts are typical of union picketing and that the criminalization of them under a federal extortion law would have a “chilling effect” on union members who would be dissuaded from their own picketing, out of fear they would be prosecuted in a federal court.

“The government in this case has taken misbehavior on a recognitional picket line and sought to make it a federal felony,” the union argued.

The union added: “If the government succeeds, it will change the structural foundation on which federal labor law rests and it will chill organizational activity and recognition efforts through the United States.”

The union’s court filing, as well as a previous motion to dismiss the case that was filed by lawyers for the Teamsters defendants, acknowledged that the members’ actions may have been in poor taste. But they argued that any actions that allegedly crossed the line into criminal behavior should be charged as assault or intimidation in a state court, not in a federal court, where punishments are more severe. The charge of extortion in federal court, known as Hobbs Act extortion, carries a punishment of up to 20 years in prison.

Teamsters members face extortion charges

Several members of a Teamsters local were indicted Wednesday on federal extortion charges, the latest legal troubles for the politically powerfully union.

• 'Top Chef' indictment triggers City Hall review

“The Hobbs Act is intended to cover cases of extortion. Picketing is not extortion,” Steven A. Tolman, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, said in a statement, adding, “(Picketing) is a primary and protected way that workers legally exercise their rights in a democracy.”

It is not unusual for a separate, third party to file a brief expressing an interest in a certain outcome in a court matter, but such actions are typically at the appeals court level, not in advance of a criminal trial.

US District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock must decide whether to accept the filing, known as an amicus curiae brief, or a “friend of the court” filing. A spokeswoman said the union “periodically files amicus briefs when an injustice has been brought to our attention.”

Daniel Medwed, a Northeastern University law professor who lectures about criminal prosecutions, said third-party filings are typically made before appeals courts or before states’ and the nation’s highest court because the “stakes are higher” and the decisions have wider implications. But, he said, the union’s decision to intervene in the case now before a trial could be a strategic attempt to “stop the case in its tracks” before a jury could decide.

“They’re worried, and understandably, about a chilling effect on unions, on strikes, and picketing, and if there’s a chilling effect on strikes and picketing, that’s an impact on the labor movement,” he said.

The filing comes as federal prosecutors have increasingly targeted rogue union members for crimes such as extortion.

Last month, James Deamicis, a former member of the Teamsters Local 82 chapter – which has been merged with Local 25 – was convicted by a jury of three counts of extorting jobs from local businesses, for threatening to picket companies that did not create jobs for union workers.

Two other Teamsters members, John Perry and Joseph Burhoe, were convicted last year of the same extortion charges and for conspiring to rig elections so that Perry would be appointed to a leadership position within the union.

The Globe also reported last month that federal prosecutors are investigating whether Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria strong-armed a developer to use union workers in the conversion of an old factory into an apartment complex.

In the recent Teamsters case, the five members – including Mark Harrington, the local’s secretary treasurer – allegedly harassed and intimidated a production crew for “Top Chef’’ that hired nonunion workers in spring 2014. Union members are accused of threatening to picket the show’s filming at local restaurants and hotels, resulting in the business owners cancelling their participation in the show.

When the production crew set up at the Steel & Rye restaurant in Milton, the five Teamsters members allegedly intimidated crew members by using racial and homophobic slurs and by “chest-bumping” and “stomach-bumping” crew members who were trying to do their work. Authorities alleged the Teamsters also slashed the tires of at least nine cars.

At issue is whether the actions were part of a picket that constituted a crime of assault or harassment that should be prosecuted in a state court or whether they are part of a broader extortion scheme. Prosecutors allege the members were not negotiating on behalf of their union but were using threats of violence and intimidation in demanding superfluous jobs that the company had already filled with workers from out of state.

But lawyers for the members – and the AFL-CIO – argued that the members were carrying out their constitutionally protected right to picket and that their actions fall within that right. Under that definition, an assault on a crew member could be considered assault – and could be charged as assault in state court – but it could not be part of a broader federal extortion scheme.

“The severity of the chest-bumping, stomach-bumping, and the name-calling allegations in this case simply do not warrant subjecting the defendants to severe federal penalties,” Robert Goldstein, an attorney for one of the Teamsters members, argued in court records.

Milton J. Valencia can be reached at mvalencia@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @miltonvalencia.

Divest From The Pentagon-Sounds Good To Me

Sun, Dec 27, 2015 12:24 PM 1 attachment

 Repeat it Often Enough Repeat it often enough easy to do with corporate dominated media say it over and over again drum it into thick skulls turned to mush by endless info-tainment poor schools consumerism Pentagon says America's role under corporate globalization is 'security export' endless war watch the movie previews see our future here at home the message to the kids war it's 'all you can be' keep repeating it Captain America to Star Wars Throw in some nationalism exceptionalism we are #1 the big lie Sell the wars lie to recruit the jobless A Global Force For Good Army Strong The Few, The Proud Above all Aim High über alles all lies Our minds are occupied by Madison Avenue Madmen fill our brains with the big lies My Sunday prayer: Wake up take back our souls decolonize our minds they belong to us not to the devil or his congressional agents     Bruce K. Gagnon Coordinator Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space PO Box 652 Brunswick, ME 04011 (207) 443-9502 globalnet@mindspring.com www.space4peace.org http://space4peace.blogspot.com/  (blog)

Okinawa: A Unique Joint US-Japanese Colony

Okinawa: A Unique Joint US-Japanese Colony

To the Courts! To the Streets!

By Gavan McCormack

Onaga vs. Abe

The confrontation pits the Prime Minister and Cabinet of Japan against the Governor and people of Okinawa. Since assuming office (for his second term) in December 2012, Abe has pursued a radical agenda, not only oriented towards enforcing his will over Okinawa but towards transforming the national polity: reinterpreting the constitution, committing Japan to global military support for the US, and joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Yet for none of these things did he have a mandate, and it is salutary to remember that the political dominance (holding 61.3 per cent of seats in the lower house) that allows Abe such concentration of power rests on an electoral victory in December 2012 in which his coalition secured just 33.4 per cent of the votes in the proportional system. That is, since only 52.4 per cent of people voted, Abe’s team gained the support of just 17.4 per cent of eligible voters.

Within Okinawa the margin of opposition to the base project stands in successive surveys at above 70 per cent, on occasion even as high as 80, while even nationwide he faces growing opposition, i.e., support for the Okinawan stance.² “All Okinawa” is one of the most recent, representative, and determined of the civic organizations challenging the Abe agenda.

When Abe Shinzo at the end of 2012 formed government for the second time (following his 2006-2007 administration), virtually the entire prefecture, including the Governor and the Okinawan branch of his own party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), opposed the Henoko project. He therefore concentrated on weakening, dividing and neutralizing that opposition. In 2013, he achieved his first success by persuading two prominent Okinawan LDP politicians to reverse themselves and drop their opposition to the Henoko base in April, and in December they were followed by the Okinawa chapter of the LDP itself and eventually by the Governor. The first defector, Shimajiri Aiko played a key role in leading and helping orchestrate the shift and was rewarded by being made parliamentary secretary to the cabinet (naikaku seimukan) and later (October 2015) given a seat in the third Abe cabinet. Her task was plain: to steer Okinawa’s polity and society from resistance to compliance, as she had helped do earlier with the LDP.

In July 2014, relying as warrant on the formal consent to reclamation/construction extracted from Governor Nakaima in December 2013, the Abe government began preparatory works on Oura Bay. By late 2015 it was moving towards the actual reclamation – readying to scour the coastal hills and beaches of much of Western Japan to provide two and a half million tons of soil and sand to dump into it.

Having taken office as Governor in December 2014 committed to “do everything in my power” to stop the Henoko construction project,

Onaga Takeshi became the figurehead of Okinawan resistance. Once in office, Onaga referred the Nakaima decision process to a Third Party (Experts) Committee of environmentalists and lawyers. When they in due course concluded from their meticulous examination that the process had indeed been marked by fundamental flaws, Onaga on October 13 formally cancelled the reclamation license. The national government, its warrant for works removed, temporarily suspended them, but it was determined to evade and negate the governor’s ruling. The Minister for Lands and Infrastructure (Ishii Keiichi) issued an order cancelling the Governor’s order on grounds that otherwise it would be “impossible to continue the relocation” and because in that event “the US-Japan alliance would be adversely affected.” ³ He proceeded to issue first an “advice,” and then, three days later, an “instruction” to Governor Onaga to withdraw the cancellation order. Onaga summarily rejected both.

On October 27, the Abe cabinet met and decided to step up its pressure. It declared (through the Minister for Defense) that there had been no “flaw” in the license Nakaima had granted, suspended ongoing (if mostly in effect stalled) negotiations with the prefecture, launched judicial proceedings in the Naha branch of the Fukuoka High Court to compel the prefecture’s compliance, and ordered the resumption of works at the site. It also ordered an additional 100-plus riot police from Tokyo (units with names such as “Demon” and “Hurricane”), to reinforce the mostly local Okinawan forces who till then had been imposing the state’s will at the construction site. Overall, it amounted to a constitutional coup: stripping the Governor and prefectural government of powers vested in them by the constitution and the Local Government Act.

Okinawa for its part refused the direction to withdraw the cancellation order, prepared to launch a vigorous judicial defense, and launched a formal complaint under the little-used “Council for Resolving Disputes between Central Government and Local Governments”⁴

That same late-October session of cabinet also decided to abandon the plan to shift some units of Marine Corps MV 22 “Osprey” VTOL aircraft training to facilities in Saga prefecture (i.e. in Kyushu, mainland Japan), since local municipal and prefectural authorities there were resolutely opposed. In other words, local opposition was respected in the case of Saga, but over-ruled in the case of Okinawa. Throughout Okinawa, this was seen as decisive evidence of the national government’s discrimination against it.

Information

Both the Abe state and the Onaga prefecture strive to represent their case in terms of a “story” that would be persuasive in Okinawa itself, Japan, and in international fora. While Abe and his ministers insist that there is no alternative to the Henoko project, that it amounts to a “burden reduction” for Okinawa, and that the project has now entered the irreversible phase of “main works” (hontai koji), Governor Onaga presents the totally different story of an inequitable and increasing burden, building upon the initial illegal seizure of Okinawan land and in defiance of the clearly and often expressed wishes of the Okinawan people; of a struggle for justice and democracy and for the protection of Oura Bay’s extraordinary natural biodiversity, worthy, as the prefecture saw it, of World Heritage ranking. Increasingly, Okinawa carries that message to international fora, including the the Governor’s mission to the US in May and the UN (Human Rights Committee) in Geneva in September 2015. The All Okinawa mission of November 2015 is part of that process.

The visit to Okinawa by the Greenpeace vessel, Rainbow Warrior in early November 2015 was another expression of this gradual internationalizing of the dispute. Though Greenpeace had several times in the past (2000 and 2005) visited Okinawa, including Oura Bay, this time the vessel was allowed to dock only in in Naha and Nago harbours, its crew forbidden even to go ashore at Naha for four days, and refused permission to visit Oura Bay. It signified the Abe government’s determination to contain the Okinawa story and stop it from gaining wider international publicity.

Another measure of the Abe government’s intent to control the “Okinawa story” is the view, several times articulated, by Abe’s close friend, the novelist Hyakuta Naoki, that the two Okinawan newspapers (Ryukyu shimpo and Okinawa Times) should be closed down because they express “traitorous” views. Hyakuta is an Abe appointee (2013) to the board of governors of Japan’s public broadcasting corporation, NHK. Though such views amounted to “hate speech,” they attracted little attention in mainland Japan.⁵

The Abe government steadily strives to sway local Okinawan opinion, finding and encouraging supporters for the government’s design and countering elected officials who oppose it. In the cabinet reshuffle of October 2015, Shimajiri Aiko, the original “turncoat” of 2013 was promoted to cabinet as Minister for Okinawa, with responsibilities that included also the Northern Territories, science and technology, space, oceans, territorial problems, IT, and “cool Japan.” She was much appreciated in Abe circles, not only for her role in 2013 but for the views she expressed in 2014-5: calling for the Riot Police and Coastguard to be mobilized to curb the “illegal, obstructionist activities” of the anti-base movement (February 2014), denouncing Nago mayor Inamine for “abusing his power (April 2015), and referring contemptuously to the “irresponsible citizens’ movement” (October 2015). As Okinawa minister, she could be expected to use her considerable powers of patronage and influence to try to sway Okinawan society towards submission to the Abe design.

Since Nago City had from 2010 twice returned a mayor and local assembly majority that resisted all attempts at suasion, and refused to accept any monies linked to it, Abe, Shimajiri, and other members of government paid close attention to trying to divide and weaken the city’s anti-base movement. Late in October, the heads of three of the city’s 55 sub-districts (ku) – Henoko, Kushi and Toyohara (population respectively 2014, 621, and 427) – were invited to the Prime Minister’s office in Tokyo. They set out their wish-list, asking for repairs to the local community halls, purchase of lawnmowers, and provision of one (or perhaps several) “azumaya” (a kind of summer-house or gazebo).⁶ They were told they were to be allocated the sum of 13 million yen each in the 2016 budget, a subsidy that would bypass the representative institutions of the city and prefecture. It was to be (as Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga later put it), “compensation” for the noise and nuisance caused them by the protest movement.

It was a trifling enough sum (less than half a million dollars in all), but it was without precedent, it defied the principles of parliamentary sovereignty and local self-government, and was a most likely illegal attempt to evade democratic will and constitutional procedure. ⁷ Public funds were appropriated, with no accountability, to encourage a cooperative, base-tolerating spirit in a few corners of a stubbornly anti-base city.⁸

The ku in rural Japan and Okinawa are the very smallest administrative units, commonly based on traditional and family networks. No head of a ku had ever been invited to the Prime Minister’s residence, seated at the table with top state officials like a head of state, and offered direct subsidy from state coffer

​.​

Suga declared that the local ku districts “agreed” to the Henoko construction albeit with some strings attached, and suggested it was only natural that they be given every encouragement. However, within weeks, the heads of all three contradicted him, saying he had misunderstood them. The head of Kushi insisted that that district had not changed its opposition to Henoko base construction since taking that position in 1997, and the head of Toyohara that “absolutely no-one in Toyohara” wanted a base.⁹

The extraordinary appropriation for the three districts was in the same vein as the LDP Secretary-General’s 50 billion yen offer of funds for Nago City’s development on the eve of the crucial mayoral election of January 2014 (decisively rejected by the city which returned instead its anti-base incumbent). Citizens of Nago are familiar with such crude interventions, and might even take heart from this most recent one because there was something pitiful about the spectacle of the national government hosting local bigwigs and trying to seduce them with lawn-mowers to its base construction cause. It was, as Ryukyu shimpo put it, an “unprecedented politics of division”¹⁰.

However, although such extraordinary, unaccountable disbursements (almost certainly illegal and probably unconstitutional) were intended to show how cooperativeness would be rewarded, Shimajiri’s position late in 2015 was fragile. A civic ombudsman organization launched a criminal complaint against her alleging breaches of the Public Election Law and the Political Funds Regulation Law,¹¹ precisely the offences for which two female ministers of the Abe cabinet had been forced to resign in September 2014.

Law

In a democratic polity, when different units of the polity are in dispute, resort to the law would normally be seen as the necessary path to resolution. But as the Henoko problem is referred to the judiciary, there is a question as to whether Japan, especially Abe’s Japan, enjoys the division of powers and independence of the judiciary that are the hallmark of modern, constitutional states. As the Abe government in July 2014 had effectively amended the constitution by the simple device of adopting a new interpretation, so in 2015 it showed scant respect for the relevant laws in the way it addressed Henoko reclamation. On the one hand it pretended for purposes of its dispute with Okinawa to be just like a “private person” (ichishijin) seeking redress under the Administrative Appeals Law (a law specifically designed to allow aggrieved citizens to seek redress from a recalcitrant state, whose function he was thus reversing), while on the other it deployed the full powers and prerogatives of the state under the Local Self-Government Law to sweep aside prefectural self-government and to assume the right to proxy execution of an administrative act (gyosei daishikko). As constitutional lawyers had, overwhelmingly, condemned the 2014 de facto revision of the constitution, so in 2015 they criticized as manipulation or breach of several laws the way the Abe government was proceeding in the dispute with Okinawa prefecture.¹² In Okinawa such proceedings are seen as a mockery of any claim to fairness and objectivity.”¹³

The legal procedures, still at a relatively early stage, will play out in months ahead. However, the grim reality facing Okinawans is that the courts have, since the Sunagawa case of 1959, abandoned their theoretical, constitutional prerogatives to adjudicate on contests involving state rights on the grounds that “matters pertaining to the security treaty with the United States are “highly political” and concern Japan’s very existence.¹⁴ This means that in effect the security treaty is elevated above the constitution and immune from challenge at law. As former [1990-1998] Governor Ota Masahide, remarked,

“Despite the principle of separation of powers, the judiciary in Japan tends to subordinate itself to the administrative branch … I think it will be very difficult for the prefectural government to win the suit.” ¹⁵

Ota had himself been the target of heavy Tokyo pressure when in 1995 he refused to sign the proxy lease-agreement documents to allow the continued confiscation of private Okinawan land for base purposes. Arraigned before the High Court, he was issued in August 1996 with a peremptory order to obey. The fact that he then submitted makes this a worrying precedent for those who would place their faith in his successor.

In the meantime, however, there are many legal options open to

​ ​

Okinawa and to Governor Onaga to delay and obstruct the government. The law had never envisaged the carrying out of a massive project in the teeth of local non-cooperation. The Governor of Okinawa and mayor of Nago City could, and undoubtedly would, block and delay each stage of the process. The Okinawan Prefectural Assembly in 2015 adopted a law empowering the prefecture to inspect soil or sand being imported from outside the prefecture (and at least in principle to forbid its entry) because of the fear that pathogens imported from elsewhere (including Argentine ants) could wreak devastating effects on the island’s environment.¹⁶ The Okinawan protest movement on this front was gradually stirring a response in the many districts throughout Western Japan targeted for the provision of sand and soil for the base project; in other words, opposition was spreading at the “supply” end as well as at the Okinawan reclamation site. Henoko was also found to be the location of important “natural monuments” such as hermit crabs, and of historically important “cultural relics” dating back to the pre-modern Ryukyu era such as “anchor stones.” Even as Abe readied his heavy machinery to step up the assault on the Bay, the discovery of 17 culturally significant earthen and stone-ware objects in the Oura Bay site vicinity was announced. It was thought almost certain to lead to legal measures to protect and further investigate the site.¹⁷

Physical Confrontation

The Abe government is different from previous LDP governments in the violence with which it treats the resolutely non-violent protest encampment at the Camp Schwab gate that opens to the Henoko construction site. The earlier design of a Henoko offshore base had been abandoned in 2005 because, as then Prime Minister Koizumi put it, of “a lot of opposition”¹⁸ and, as was later learned, because the Coastguard was reluctant to be involved in enforcing the removal of protesters from the site for fear of bloodshed.¹⁹ No such inhibitions appeared to affect Prime Minister Abe and his government in 2015.

Designated Land-fill Sources and Routes of Transport to Henoko/Oura Bay (Map showing, from top, Setouchi, Moji, Amakusa, Goto, Amakusa, Satamisaki, Amami oshima, Tokunoshima, with Henoko at far bottom left.)

Despite being relatively remote and difficult of access, especially in the early mornings, Henoko attracts steadily growing numbers of participants, exceeding 1,000 for the first time on the 500^th day of the sit-in, November 18, 2015. While the citizenry remains committed to non-violence and to the exercise of the right of civil disobedience only after exhausting all legal and constitutional steps to oppose the base project, the National Coastguard and Riot Police appear to be flaunting their violence more and more openly, dragging away protesters (quite a few of whom are in their 70s and 80s), dunking canoeists in the sea, pinning down one protest ship captain till he lost consciousness, and on a number of occasions causing injuries to protesters requiring hospital treatment.²⁰ The daily scenes from the Henoko site are shown on local television and in the two prefectural newspapers (i.e. the media that in Abe circles is seen as deserving to be shut down).

If the Abe government design had been to induce submission by the exercise of overwhelming force at the works site, and by wielding its authority in the judicial arena and executive arenas, it has not worked. If anything, it is counter-productive. Okinawan anger deepens. If the ongoing “Battle of Henoko” were to continue indefinitely on its current lines for the five years that the government reckons reclamation and construction would take, “unforeseen” events, with the real possibility of bloodshed, become more likely. In the supposed pursuance of “security,” insecurity spreads. The riot police reinforcements sent from Tokyo at the beginning of November 2015 were no doubt chosen in part because they could be expected to remain insensitive to this Okinawan pain and anger.²¹

Martin Niemoller (1892-1984), in his lament over the German people’s failure to contest the rise of Nazism till too late, wrote “First they came for the Communists” after which “they” came for the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, etc, but it did not concern “me” till it was too late. In today’s Japan, “they” is the Abe regime and “they” have come now for the Okinawans. If democracy is to survive, the Japanese people as a whole will have to realize that, like the sometime Germans, they today are “all Okinawans.” It is not just the fate of Oura Bay but the principles of a law-based constitutional state, committed t truth, justice, and democracy, that are under threat in Okinawa and must be defended there lest they be swept aside in Tokyo, Osaka and throughout Japan.

Gavan McCormack is an honorary professor of Australian National University, editor of the Asia-Pacific Journal, and author of many texts on aspects of modern and contemporary East Asian History, including Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States, Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012 (co-authored with Satoko Oka Norimatsu). His work is commonly published in Japanese, Korean and Chinese, as well as English. For some of his recent essays, “Okinawa as sacrificial victim,” Le Monde Diplomatique, October 2015, pp. 6-7, and “Chauvinist nationalism in Japan’s schizophrenic state,” in Leo Panitch and Greg Albo, eds, The Politics of the Right, Socialist Register 2016, London, The Merlin Press, 2015, pp. 231-249.

---

*In The Time Of The "Fixer"- Dashiell Hammet's "The Glass Key"

Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the American detective story writer extraordinaire, Dashiell Hammet.

DVD/BOOK REVIEW

The Glass Key, Dashiell Hammett, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1932

Dashiell Hammett, along with Raymond Chandler, reinvented the detective genre in the 1930's and 1940's. They moved the genre away from the amateurish and simple parlor detectives that had previously dominated the genre to hard-boiled action characters who knew what was what and didn't mind taking a beating to get the bad guys. And along the way they produced some very memorable literary characters as well. Nick Charles (and sidekick society wife, Nora), Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe are well known exemplars of the action detective.

In The Glass Key Hammett takes a little different run at that same idea. The protagonist this time is not the usual detective but an old fashioned political "fixer". No, not the "spin doctor" or "flak" of modern media-driven politics but the older handler of the retail politics that counted in the local urban scene with the added factor of a little off hand, old fashioned mob influence. Nevertheless, the "fixer" Ned Beaumont has all the resourcefulness, toughness, loyalty, and hard-boiled common sense that we have come to expect of Hammett's 'real' detectives.

The plot revolves around the familiar problem of electoral politics-getting elected. In this case getting a Senator with a beautiful daughter, Janet, and an errant son, Taylor, reelected. Add in some political factions, also mob-dominated, a fair share of corrupt officials, an off-hand murder and other crimes and misdemeanors and you would hardly know we are not dealing with a `normal' Hammett novel. Further add in a slowly evolving romance between Ned and the afore-mentioned Senator's daughter who is also the object of his political boss's affections and you have quite a mix. Frankly, I prefer Hammett's detectives but any time you can get your hands on one of his books do so.

In the film version of the novel that follows the script of the book pretty closely the part of Ned is played by a young Alan Ladd. The Senator's daughter, Janet, is played by Veronica Lake. Naturally in the film the romantic tension is given more play than in the book. Some of the scenes between them, especially that classic silky hair over one eye Lake look when she is being coy, are worth the price of admission. Brian Donlevy as Ned's political boss also has his moments. Nice.

*******

Note: It is not altogether clear to me what Hammett’s political sympathies (or rather more to the point, organization connections) were in the period of his great detection-writing period, the early 1930s, although one can speculate they were at least progressive. I should note for those who are only familiar with the detective novels and crime short stories that Hammett was a make-no-bones-about-it supporter of the Communist Party during the hard, don’t turn the other cheek on your neighbor, see reds under every bed, your mommie is a commie turn her in, prison house, American night of the red scare, Cold War, post World War II period (and earlier as well, during the Popular Front all the way with FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), Joe Stalin, our father can do no wrong, Moscow Trials liquidate the Old Bolsheviks, the makers of the revolution, time but this post-war period is what concerns me here).

This was period when anything to the left of Herbert Hoover, including probably red tablecloths on restaurant tables, was suspect. This is also the period of the unlamented Joe McCarthy, the equally unlamented Richard Nixon, the deep, fatal, anti-communist purges in the labor unions from which we still suffer today (and anti-red purges in many other political and cultural institutions as well), and of the time of “the naming of names.” The high watermark time of the “fink” and of the “blacklist.” I have vilified, rightly so, no, righteously so, the likes of movie director Elia Kazan (Viva Zapata, On The Waterfront) for their “stool pigeon” scab actions before the "committees".

Kazan was, unfortunately, not alone in that dark, witch-hunt, keep your eyes down, keep walking straight ahead with blinkers on, tell them what they want to know although they already know it, night. I have also heaped tons of well-deserved praise on the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, for holding their ground under intense pressure and under penalty of paying the ultimate price, their lives, for their steadfastness. For defending the Soviet Union, not in our Trotskyist way, but in their own honorable way, and didn’t complain about it when they were called on it, unjustly, by the American imperial state.

Dashiell Hammett was called, tooth brush in hand, before the “red scare” committees and just said no. Hats off. Now there is no need to get mushy about it, and one should not forget that in the end Hammett’s Stalinist politics (and vilification of leftist political opponents like our Trotskyist forbears) made us not less political opponents, but isn’t there something in old Hammett’s actions, that sense of “tilting to the windmills,” that leads right back to Sam Spade. Yes, I thought you would think so.

Support Courage To Resist-The Oraganization That Supports Chelsea Manning And Other Military Resisters-Buy Stuff

Everything 65% off + free shipping! https://orders.couragetoresist.org/shop/ Why we are closing the online shop of Courage to Resist and Chelsea Manning shirts, stickers, and other stuff Jeff Paterson, Courage to Resist January 1, 2016 In order to better focus our time and energies on our core mission of supporting war resisters (including Chelsea Manning), Courage to Resist is closing our online shop that has featured shirts, stickers, posters, buttons, and the like. We have come to the conclusion that offering up this stuff via a secure online retailing platform, producing each item, securing the items from various vendors, and then fulfilling each order, simply is not worth our limited staff time. We are currently well into the process of liquidating our inventory of materials. However, there is still a lot of stuff left. We hope you take advantage of this sale to pick up a shirt for a few bucks, or stock up on thousands of stickers! When the stuff is gone, that’s it. We have a lot of experience producing these materials, as well as the original artwork. We’ll be happy to assist any organizers, who in the future, might want to produce their own campaign shirts, posters, banners, etc. For example, if you’d like a few thousand Chelsea Manning info card and stickers down the road, we’ll be available to help you get them made and shipped directly to you. As an extra bonus to those folks that have read to the end of this post, you’re invited to take an additional 15% discount off any order by using discount code “resist15” during check out. https://orders.couragetoresist.org/shop/

*The Stuff Of Dreams- Dashiell Hammet's "The Maltese Falcon"

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for American detective fiction writer Dashiell Hammett.

Book Review

The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammet, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1930

Dashiell Hammett, along with Raymond Chandler, reinvented the detective genre in the 1930's and 1940's. They moved the genre away from the amateurish and simple parlor detectives that had previously dominated the genre to hard-boiled action characters who knew what was what and didn't mind taking a beating to get the bad guys. And along the way they produced some very memorable literary characters as well. Nick and Nora Charles, Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe are well known exemplars of the action detective.

Hammett and Chandler also speak to a different, more macho if you will, but also a more world-wary and world-weary style of detection than today’s hyper-extended and techno-detail-oriented detectives who rely on computers and gadgetry more than guts. Still, with few exceptions, it is hard now to find a better proto-type for the kind of detective that writers of detective fiction wished they had, in their long, smoke-filled, whiskey-soaked, staring at that blank white page, writer nights (and we will not even speak of the days), dreamed up than Sam Spade. Nor a better, sparse, functional language-filled story line than old Dashiell Hammett thought up.

A little summary of the plot line is in order. It’s the bird, stupid. Get it. Except this is a gem of bird, a stuff of dreams, stuff of wild, exotic, face the gates of hell for, bird that has more than one crew of thieves, well-groomed, well-spoken thieves, and in their way polite unless a crippled newsy or two get in their way, but thieves nevertheless looking to get their hands on the damn thing, and wealth, Great Depression get out from under wealth. Hey, anytime get out from under wealth. In any case you need a scorecard to sort out who, and who is not, on the level at any particular time, except maybe the kid hired gunsel who keeps shadowing old brother Spade.

Naturally, in a noir detective story, and Hammett is nothing if not a noir writer from word one, there has to be a femme fatale dame with a checkered, if vaguely sketched past, and a dubious present, a very dubious present. But she, Brigid O’ Shaughnessy, in this one, has that look, you know that look, that women’s look, that look that will set the boys walking, no racing, to run into walls, to take more than their fair of hits on the head, to go full tilt at those damn windmills, gladly. Enter ever so jaded Sam Spade (and partner, Miles Archer, but he is just in it for the sappy dupe-guy dressing). Sam has all the characteristics that mark a noir detective-tough, resourceful, undaunted, and incorruptible with a sense of honor to friend and foe alike that sets him apart from earlier detectives. And still he, been around the block many times and more, Sam Spade, is smitten when the femme fatale goes into her, well, femme fatale, act. Go figure. But those other traits will be hard-hearted Ms.Femme Fatale’s undoing in the end, as her version of the stuff of dreams goes awry. There, I have set up the mood for you. But this is one you should read and savor so I will leave it at that. If you want a well-thought out story that is also well-written from a member of the second echelon of the American literary pantheon, this one is for you.

Note: It is not altogether clear to me what Hammet’s political sympathies (or rather more to the point, organization connections) were in the period of his great detection-writing period, the early 1930s, although one can speculate they were at least progressive. I should note for those who are only familiar with the detective novels and crime short stories that Hammet was a make-no-bones-about-it supporter of the Communist Party during the hard, don’t turn that eye from your neighbor, see reds under every bed, your mommie is a commie turn her in, prison house, American night of the red scare, Cold War, post World War II period (and earlier as well, during the Popular Front all the way with FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), Joe Stalin, our father can do no wrong, Moscow Trials liquidate the Old Bolsheviks, the makers of the revolution, time but this post-war period is what concerns me here).

This was period when anything to the left of Herbert Hoover, including probably red tablecloths on restaurant tables, was suspect. This is also the period of the unlamented Joe McCarthy, the equally unlamented Richard Nixon, the deep, fatal, anti-communist purges in the labor unions from which we still suffer today (and anti-red purges in many other political and cultural institutions as well), and of the time of “the naming of names.” The high watermark time of the “fink” and of the “blacklist.” I have vilified, rightly so, no, righteously so, the likes of movie director Elia Kazan (Viva Zapata, On The Waterfront) for their “stool pigeon” scab actions before the "committees".

Kazan was, unfortunately, not alone in that dark, witch-hunt, keep your eyes down, keep walking straight ahead with blinkers on, tell them what they want to know although they already know it, night. I have also heaped tons of well-deserved praise on the heroic Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, for holding their ground under intense pressure and under penalty of paying the ultimate price, their lives, for their steadfastness. For defending the Soviet Union, not in our Trotskyist way, but in their own honorable way, and didn’t complain about it when they were called on it, unjustly, by the American imperial state.

Dashiell Hammett was called, tooth brush in hand, before the “red scare” committees and just said no. Hats off. Now there is no need to get mushy about it, and one should not forget that in the end Hammett’s Stalinist politics (and vilification of leftist political opponents like our Trotskyist forbears) made us not less political opponents, but isn’t there something in old Hammett’s actions, that sense of “tilting to the windmills,” that leads right back to Sam Spade. Yes, I thought you would think so.

*****Then and Now-A Pamphlet On The American Labor Struggles Of The 1930s

*****Then and Now-A Pamphlet On The American Labor Struggles Of The 1930s

 

Workers Vanguard No. 1072 7 August 2015 New Spartacist Pamphlet   Newly available for purchase is our publication Then and Now, which explains how class-struggle leadership made a key difference in three citywide strikes in 1934. We reprint below the pamphlet’s introduction describing its contents.   The “Then and Now” article in this pamphlet addresses the crucial political lessons of the 1934 strikes by Minneapolis truckers, maritime workers on the West Coast and Toledo auto parts workers. Waged amidst the all-sided destitution of the Great Depression, these strikes, like others that year, confronted the strikebreaking forces of the capitalist state. A key difference was that these strikes won. What made this outcome possible is that their leaders were, at the time, committed to a program of class struggle. Unlike other trade-union leaders of that day—and today—they did not buy into the notion that the workers had interests in common with the employers, their political parties or their state. Instead, these strikes were fought by mobilizing the mass strength and solidarity of the workers in opposition to the forces of the capitalist class enemy.   The review of Bryan Palmer’s book Revolutionary Teamsters provides a more in-depth study of the Minneapolis truckers’ strikes, which were led by the Trotskyists of the Communist League of America (CLA). Here they confronted the Farmer-Labor Party (FLP) governor of Minnesota, Floyd Olson, who commanded the allegiance of many workers with his often radical-sounding, friend-of-the-little-guy rhetoric. The FLP postured as a “third party” alternative to both the Democrats and Republicans, but it was no less a capitalist party.   This is effectively addressed in the 1930 article “The Minnesota F.L.P.” by Vincent Dunne, who went on to become a central leader of the truckers’ strikes. As Dunne makes clear, the two-class Farmer-Labor Party was based on the subordination of the workers’ struggles to farmers and other petty-bourgeois forces “whose political outlook is bounded by the illusion that it is possible to achieve security under the capitalist order.” After an on-again, off-again alliance with the Democratic Party, the FLP finally merged with the Democrats in 1944.   Dunne and other CLA leaders of the Minneapolis strikes had been armed for battle against farmer-labor populism by Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, who in the early 1920s had intervened to pull the young American communist movement back from giving political support to the capitalist “third party” candidacy of Robert La Follette, a maverick Republican Senator from Wisconsin. The excerpts from Trotsky’s introduction to his book, The First Five Years of the Communist International, summarize his opposition to this opportunist course which, if pursued, would have politically liquidated the fledgling Communist party.   Today, what remains of the gains that were won through the momentous class battles of the past continues to be ravaged in a one-sided class war enabled by trade-union misleaders, who have long forsaken the very means through which the unions were founded. The working class, the poor, black people, immigrants and countless others at the bottom of this society have paid the price in busted unions, broken lives and all-sided misery.   To be sure, it is not easy for the workers to win in the face of the forces arrayed against them. Many strikes, even very militant ones, will lose. But as was demonstrated in the three 1934 strikes addressed in this pamphlet, when important working-class battles are won it can dramatically alter the situation. These victories inspired a huge labor upsurge later in the 1930s that built the mass industrial unions in this country.   Hard-fought strikes can provide an important school of battle for the workers in which they learn the power of their collective strength and organization and begin to understand the class nature not only of the capitalist system but of the government, laws and political parties that defend its rule. But while able to strike important blows against the conditions of the workers’ exploitation, trade-union struggle on its own cannot end that exploitation. To win that war there must be a struggle for working-class power under the leadership of a revolutionary party that can arm the workers with the understanding and consciousness of their class interests in the fight to emancipate labor and all of the oppressed from the bondage of capitalist exploitation.

 

Spartacist League/U.S.

Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116, USA

Frank Jackman comment on the labor Struggles of the 1930s:

Everybody, everybody who has been around for the last generation or two and has been breathing knows that the rich have gotten richer exponentially in the one-sided class war that they have so far successfully been pursuing here in America (and internationally as well). We really do not need to have the hard fact of class thrown in our faces one more time by the dwindling band of brave pro-working class leftists who must be legitimately perplexed by the lack of push-back, lack of basic trade union consciousness that animated those of a couple of generations ago to at least fight back and win a few precious gains. Or to have those of the think tank crowd of craven sociologists and make-shift policy wonks who are always slightly behind whatever the current reality is and well behind on what the hell to do about it if they would dream of lowering themselves to such considerations tell us of their recent discovery that the working classes (and the vaunted middle too) are getting screwed to put in working class language. What we really do need to have is some kind of guidance about how to fight back, how to get some room to breathe and figure out a strategy to win some class battles, small, large, hell, any size if for no other reason than to get the capitalists, mostly finance capitalists these days to back off a bit in that relentless drive to push everybody else to the bottom.

So it is very good, and very necessary, that this informative and thought-provoking pamphlet, Then and Now, goes back to the 1930s, the last serious prolonged struggle by the American working class as a class. Goes back and discusses those three very important class battles of 1934 –Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco all led centrally by “reds,” by those who had some sense that they were joining  in episodes of the class struggle and were willing to take their lumps on that basis. It probably would have seemed crazy to those militants that over 75 years later that their battles would be touted as the last great struggles of the class and that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren would be looking over their exploits with a certain admiration (and maybe puzzlement too since they have not seem such uppity-ness, ever). It speaks volumes that today’s leadership of the organized working class in the trade unions is clueless, worse, consciously works to keep everybody under their thumbs clueless about the battles that gave them their jobs. But that should not stop the rest of us from picking up some pointers. Read this one-and act.