On Passing Left-Wing Political “Wisdom” To The Next Generation-With The Lessons Of The 1960s In Mind

On Passing Left-Wing Political “Wisdom” To The Next Generation-With The Lessons Of The 1960s In Mind

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

One of the worst excesses, and there were many although made mostly from ignorance and immaturity and were moreover minuscule compared to the conscious policies of those in power who we were opposing, that we who came of political age in the 1960s were culpable of was our sense that we had to reinvent the wheel of left-wing political struggle. Mostly a very conscious denial and rejection of those thinkers, cadre and organizations who had come before us and whom were disqualified from the discourse by having been worn out, old-timey, or just ideas and methods that we had not thought of and therefore irrelevant. The expression “throwing out the baby with the bath water” may seem a cliché but serves a purpose here. Most of the time back then until fairly late, maybe too late when the tide had begun to ebb toward the end of the 1960s and the then current and fashionable anticommunist theories proved to be ridiculously inadequate, we turned our noses up at Marxism, and at Marxist-Leninist ways of organizing the struggle against the American beast.

I can remember more than a few times when somebody identified him or herself as a Marxist that I and the others in the room would groan audibly. Occasionally, as well, taking part in some of the shouting down exercises when the political disputes became heated. Part of the problem was that those who organizationally claimed to be Marxists-the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party and to some extent the Progressive Labor Party were following political lines that were far to the right (right being relative here in the context of the left-wing movement in this country) of the politics of those who considered themselves radical and revolutionary youth. Those organizations far too eager to traffic with what we called respectable bourgeois forces who were part of the problem since they helped control the governmental apparatus. (I won’t even mention the moribund Socialist/Social Democratic organizations that only old laborites and “old ladies in tennis sneakers,” although that might be a slander against those nice do-gooder ladies, followed as the expression went at the time.) I know, and I know that many others at the time,  had no time for a look at the history books, had nothing but a conscious disregard for the lessons of history, good and bad, that we thought was irrelevant in seeking to build the “newer world.” (Strangely, later after all our empirical experiment proved futile and counter-productive, quoting, quoting loudly and vehemently  from this or that book, by this or that thinker, this or that revolutionary or radical became the rage. Ah, the excesses of youth.)                

Of course not everybody who came through the 1960s passed through any left-wing political school. Despite the nostalgia, despite the now puffed-up claims that we had this or that decisive effect on history, especially these days with the commemoration of the 40^th anniversary of the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the trotting out once again of the overblew claims that the American anti-war movement stopped the Vietnam War rather than the heroic struggles of the people of Vietnam, the number of the young who got catch up more than marginally was significantly smaller that the photographs, videos, and remembrances of the times would suggest. A case in point is my old friend Sam Lowell, from my growing in Carver times whose longtime political trajectory I want to highlight in this sketch. Highlight to provide something, I am not sure what, perhaps a cautionary tale, to what appears to be the makings of the next “fresh breeze” coming through the land that another Carver corner boy, the late Peter Paul Markin, would harangue us with on lonely Friday night was coming. The big turn in the environmental movement, the fight for better conditions for young workers (and old) epitomized by the “Fight for $15” movement and above all, the bedrock struggle of the “Black Lives Matter” movement portends some new awakening and we old-timers who have kept the political faith have something about that which may push those struggles forward. Here’s Sam’s story and see what you think:   

 

Sam Lowell when he was young, when he was coming of age in the 1960s along with his hang around guys at Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street in Carver, did not give a “tinker’s damn” (Sam’s term which he would endlessly utter especially when the late Peter Paul Markin would start talking about what was going on outside the Jimmy Jack corner world) about politics, about the fate of the world, about the burning and pressing issues of that day nuclear disarmament, black civil rights down South (he if anything had the Northern white working class prejudices inherited from his parents and relatives using the “n” word to refer to blacks for a very long time), and the exploding war in Vietnam. Sam’s world, like many guys of that time, like now too as far as anybody can see, was about girls or sex or name the gender combinations, above all about the music of the times, about what is now called the classic age of rock and roll (the folk music minute of that period which Bart Webber tried to get him interested in was, is, a book sealed with seven seals and he still grinds his teeth when any of us who hang with him still mention that genre).

Sam, declared by his local draft board exempt from military service as the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after he father had passed away suddenly of a massive heart attack in 1965, had pretty much kept his head in the sand about the war, probably supported the war against demon communism as much as anybody in town who was not directly involved in the escalation of the war. That is until one of his hang around guys, Freddie Callahan, Jack’s younger brother, had lain down his head in some rotted jungle in some unpronounceable hamlet in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in late 1967 and who would later have his name placed on that black marble down in Washington, D.C. which would bring a tear to Sam eye every time he visited it despite his complete change of heart about the war. The war, the hellish flare-up and destructiveness of the war had not been Freddie’s fault, it had not been Freddie’s war as Sam was at pains to explain when he did get active in the anti-war movement and people around town thought that he was being disrespectful of Freddie’s memory and of the flag, actually probably more the flag until very late, maybe about 1972 when even the American Legion types in town saw the writing on the wall, some of them anyway.

Bart Webber was the first to take his slightly head anti-war feelings to the holding up the wall in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner night but he was facing the draft himself in 1966 so Sam had not taken his plight to heart. It really had been Freddie’s death that got him thinking, Freddie whom he had known since fifth grade when his own family had moved to Carver from North Adamsville when the shipbuilding trade there bottomed out and his father sought work in the new electronics plant just built up the road from Carver. Got him thinking about lots of things that did not add up in the world, the world of people just trying to get by without being shot at, or shot up by friend or foe.

One day, maybe in early spring 1968 in any case sometime before summer of that year, Sam had gone to Boston about thirty miles up the road from Carver on some business when he was walking near the Park Street subway station and a young guy about his age in regulation long hair (Sam’s was short although long for Carver young adults just then and commented on at Jimmy Jack’s by the older crowd going in for the old-timers blue plate specials and gung-ho guys who had no truck with “fairies” and “hippies”), unkempt beard, blue jeans and sandals, a picture of heaven’s own high priest hippie who handed him a leaflet for an anti-war rally sponsored by Students for a Democratic Society that was going to take place on the Common later that afternoon. (That was the notorious SDS that every right-thinking American believed, including Sam a little before Freddie’s death, as he could not understand kids who seemed to have everything going for them including draft exemptions were so rebellious unless some unknown source was prodding them, as the agents, paid or unpaid, of Moscow or China or someplace antagonistic to the interests of the United States. Every time an SDS rally was broken up by the cops, or mass arrests occurred those believers breathed a short sigh of relief).      

The guy in hippie garb pressed the issue, something Sam thought was odd since in his experience these hippie types were too laid back doing dope and sex and listening to acid rock to ybother about politics usually saying that to get involved only “encouraged” those politicians who had depended on free-wheeling unpaid volunteer youth to campaign for them. That drug, sex and rock and roll were okay with him although he had not been into the dope scene then but rather the traditional Carver Friday and Saturday night down by the cranberry bogs drinking cheap whiskey scene, a scene that Carver guys had been doing since time immemorial at the bogs from what he had heard.

This dippy hippie started yelling at him that it that it was his “duty” to attend the rally and help “stop the fucking war.”  Something in that common language “speech” made Sam take notice and he asked the hippie where he was from. He answered from Lynn, a very working class town on the North Shore of Boston, and told Sam, who blushed a little at the information, that he had already been in the Army, had served in Vietnam and had had enough of seeing his buddies killed or otherwise “fucked up.” Sam then out of the blue mentioned the death of Freddie Callahan, something he had never talked about except with the guys at Jimmy Jack’s and the hippie told him that he had better get his ass to the rally before half their generation went up in smoke. Sam pleaded business but that afternoon and early evening as the sun went down in Boston Sam was no longer “not political.” And Lance Jones, the hippie who had “recruited” him was there that afternoon and many times later to make sure that he did not backslide, and to give him the “skinny” on what was really going on in Vietnam and whose interests that commitment was serving. Sam and Lance (and others) would do many things together, sit-in at draft boards (Sam uneasy about that given his own status as exempt but Lance said every body counted in the struggle), rallies, blocking highways and every other kind of civil protest against the damn war.

The defining moment, the moment Sam saw that the movement was ebbing, was becoming ineffective as a way to stop the “fucking war” as even he was prone to express his outrage at the constant bombings and constant lies about the situation, was down in Washington D.C. on May Day 1971 where there was a separation in the movement between those who wanted to endlessly built, presumably, larger mass rallies to show the people’s war weariness and those who decided it was time for more militant in-your-face tactics when the proposal was to “stop the government, if the government did not stop the war.” Sam had gone with the militants, a decision he has since never regretted although not for the outcome of the event itself which was an unmitigated failure but because of the enormity of that failure he had to think through things a bit more carefully, think more strategically. He had been manhandled and arrested by the cops the first day out as the governmental forces far outnumbered and were more effective in containing the mass than that mass of people had been in evading the waiting cops and troops. Sam had spent a week in detention in RFK Stadium, a goddam football field as he would always tell everybody afterward, for his troubles (although he tempered his remarks about the stadium after the coup in Chile in 1973 where those militants were not merely harassed and detained by jailed and shot death out of hand in many cases). 

Sam, Lance, Jack Callahan, Frankie Riley, me, maybe a couple of other guys did other things too, things like taking those continent-wide hitchhikes to the West Coast, the rock concerts, all of the stuff that those who had broken from the old expected cookie-cutter, if in Sam’s case only partially and slowly since he was not sure that the whole thing had not been a dream, and he had those family responsibilities although they lessened as his sisters came of age and his mother re-married to a good guy who ran a tool and die shop in town and had government contracts for high precision machine work. But it was funny thing about Sam, a thing that was not apparent when he hung around Carver in high school but once he was convinced that he needed to do something he stuck with it (he would later tell anybody who would listen that sticking with it included his two drawn out failed marriages beyond repair).

Sam, after that debacle in Washington, had settled in for the long haul, had listened to what Lance had to say about needing to organize better, get more substantial allies. Gave a glance at Marx and some other thinkers who knew what they were talking about if you wanted to  effect real change and not just play at the thing for kicks, or for something to do while you are in school or on the loose, had read some and while for a long time he had his misgivings about taking his political cues from around the edges of rational politics, politics that he and his family, his neighbors, his corner boys had dismissed or worse as “commie” talk which still hovered over his thinking. But Sam had been the first in the group to sense in the mid-1970s, particularly after the fall of Saigon and the close of the Vietnam era which had almost split the country in two, that the Garden of Eden was going to be postponed for a long time, that the tide had ebb just as Bart Webber had sensed the rising tide in the mid-1960s. But he stayed with the commitment to serious political change, to right some wrongs, to be a stand-up guy when some egregious governmental decision reared its ugly head. Stayed with it far longer that Lance who wound up going to school and becoming a CPA, longer than Bart who decided writing law briefs was easier than sitting around with about twelve people dedicated to changing the world and projecting when the next great mass upsurge would occur. Stayed with longer than Frankie Riley who also was drawn to writing legal briefs although he made a comeback in the lead-up to the first Iraq war in 1991. Longer than even the late Peter Paul Markin who had totally lost his moorings, let that “wanting habits” hunger that all the Jimmy Jack’s hang out guys had near the surface of their lives get the best of him and got caught up in the down side of the dope trade and wound up in a back alley face down under mysterious conditions in Sonora down in Mexico after a dope deal went bad. Yeah, those were not good years

So Sam faced the next few decades doing his best to keep up the good fight, working mainly with ad hoc committees that would rise and fall over specific issues like the effects of the “Reagan revolution” in this country, the struggles in Central America throughout the 1980s, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, that first Iraq war in 1991, and a laundry list of other causes great and small which filled his political life in hard times. But always kept his eyes open and ears to the ground to see if some new version of that 1960s experience would get some wind in its sails as new generations got caught up in the whirlwind of trying to right the world’s wrongs. He knew that the 1960s experience could never be exactly replicated, that each new generation would come to understandings in its own ways and forms, did not believe that a lot of 1960s stuff should be replicated but he did believe that another wave would come, believed in that vision for a long time. But when, damn it.

One of Sam’s worries as he got older and got more concerned about the future, especially in the post 9/11 world of the early 2000s, got much more concerned about the possibilities of a socialist future if not for him then for later generations as the American body politic took one of its prolonged turning in and against itself was that there would be no one to pass on whatever accumulated political wisdom he and his dwindling band of aging 1960s sisters and brothers had been through. No one to make sense of the political battles won and lost, no one to pick up the skills necessary to organize any effective opposition to the fierce predatory appetites of the American imperium, or maybe better any, opposition at all as the post-2003 anti-war landscape demonstrated. Most importantly no one to learn how to avoid the mistakes of the past, mistakes made, unlike the American government, mostly out of willful ignorance, foolhardiness and hubris but certainly avoidable. Avoidable since a great if fairly obvious lesson from his own experiences had been that uprisings against the government, against the social norms of the day are short and precious opportunities not to be squandered by willful ignorance, foolhardiness and hubris.       

Sam’s youthfully derived certitudes had taken a hammering in the process of the reactionary counter-offensive that erupting in the mid-1970s as the spirit of the 1960s rapidly dissipated, and took a decisive turn right under the auspices of the Reagan Revolution. The self-serving, self-promoting, social Darwinist view of society systematically laid out in that period has held a full head of steam since then as everyone almost daily has his or her nose rubbed in the hard fact that most people are not getting ahead while the bourgeoisie, the economic royalists, what did one wag call them, oh yeah, “the one-percent” with all the guns, prosper with no sweat.  That ethos had never really abated despite a couple of promising uprising blips around opposition to the second Iraq war in 2003 which evaporated after the hellish bombs began to fall in earnest in Baghdad and after the world financial meltdown in 2008 and the subsequent short-lived and anarchistic Occupy movement of late 2011. So Sam had more recently begun to feel that feeling in the extreme,   the fear that there would be nobody to pass the torch to, nobody in the American body politic to learn a couple of things about past left-wing struggles and organizational efforts to attempt to “tame the monster.” Began to wonder if what he believed had not been an idle thought or some kind of self-induced paranoia.

Over the previous several years he had given the immediate reasons some thought as he began to realize that the generation after his which was the logical place to have passed that information onto never in the aggregate cared much about his kind of politics, had turn tail and gotten caught up in the “Reagan revolution” or after witnessing what happened to the ‘60s crowd ducked their heads, seriously ducked their heads when the deal went down. He had also become pretty sanguine about prospects for the generation after that, the grandkids, who seemed preoccupied with “Me” and with looking down toward the ground with their technological gadgetry and their ethereal “social networking” tweeter. But of late he was not so sure he should have been ready to throw in the towel but a new gathering storm, or what old Bart Webber, who he had run into recently in town for the funeral of a brother,  had called “the fresh breeze” was still in its embryonic stage.

Sam had had to laugh at one point after a small demonstration of few hundred in Boston’s Park Street on the Common, the historic spot for such activities, against the escalation of the war in Afghanistan in the early days of the Obama administration  (one of the “surges” that was supposed secure “victory” and which in the final analysis led to more doors in more villages being kicked in and the United States’ action acting, once again,  as a “recruiting sergeant” for ISIS-type organizations). That demonstration drew a cohort young people, people who had not previously been out in the public square but who were bewildered by a “peace” American President, a Nobel Peace Prize winner to boot, sending more boots on the ground after he had told the nation that the best American course was to withdraw from that benighted country. Of course the usual dwindling crew of AARP-worthy older types, the ones that his old friend Pete Markin had called when they were young the “little old ladies in tennis sneakers, Quakers up-tights, and assorted harmless do-gooders” back in the Carver days when he didn’t give a damn about politics and now here he was a “little old man in tennis sneakers” carrying on their seemingly utopian struggle. An unusual combination indeed. The sly laugh part though was his realization that if there was any new action, any seeking of the “newer world” as that same Markin liked to called it comparable to the 1960s, that it would be the grandpas and grandmas and the grandkids linked up against the world. He was okay with that if that ever happened but after that initial burst of young energy faded he got increasingly more morose about that prospect, and the handing of that goddam torch.

Like with a lot of things in the world of politics, particularly left-wing politics where due to the smallness and isolation of those forces there is tendency to have to react to events not of your own making, the reaction by governments, particularly the United States, following 9/11 with its attempt to institutionalize the national security state and to seek vengeance at any target foreign or domestic that it considered dangerous. No question the scariest time of his political life, the only time he felt the full heat of physical threat from the average citizen whom he assumed usually view people demonstrating about anything as mere cranks and weirdoes was in the aftermath of the frenzied American bombing campaign and troop occupation in Afghanistan in 2001 right after 9/11 when he had with very few others had organized a small, a very small demonstration in opposition to the bombing campaign at Park Street and took more menacing guff from passers-by than he had ever encountered before. Those were dark days when some locally well-known committed peaceniks dependable in fair weather favored folding up the tent rather than face the hostile streets, and no question they were hostile, were suddenly not available to rally. Like Sam said he hoped the later Occupy movement which arose phoenix-like out of the ashes of the world financial crisis but that fizzled fairly quickly and that sent Sam into another bout with what the hell, no who the hell was going to lead the struggle, who among the young who of necessity with their energy and sense of wonder drive all the great movements, was going to step forward. He felt at that time that he would have no problem taking a back sit in the struggle if the new blood came along.   

Here is a funny thing, a quirk of politics. Everybody Sam talked to, young and old, understood that the social tinder underlying American society only needed a little push to go wild. Knew that as a result of the vast increase in income inequality, knew the weight of the endless wars on the budget and human resources   was at a breaking point, knew that people, a lot of people, did not feel they were getting ahead in life always something that will steadily enflame people. So Sam, and they, the ones he talked to and talked to him knew something had to flare up. But didn’t, for a long time didn’t. Then in a rather quick succession the environment, the fight for a living wage and the fight against police brutality and the fight against the hard racism against black people were taken up by the young, or rather sections of the young from say late 2013 to now.

Not everything that has been proposed, not every action has made political sense but there is some motion toward upping the struggle, getting back into the street politics that Sam had been pushing for some time in various committee meetings since the portals of government seemed to be tone-deaf to what was going on down at the base of society. Here is the kicker though. The kicker for now as things are still in flux, still have a way to go before they are sifted out. Things may be in flux and need sifting out but Sam is starting to get and uneasy feeling already. Sam went to a meeting of those who wanted to respond to the various egregious police shootings of the past year around the country and tried to make some points, give some perspectives. He was rather unceremoniously dismissed by the young leaders there, both the young black and white leaders, as an old-timey too talkative guy. The young, like in his generation, appear ready to seek to reinvent the wheel. Appear too as well to be as naïve about the enemies they are facing as they were in his generation. But what bothered Sam most of late has been that the young in their identity political way are “ageist” if such a term makes sense, are disrespectful of his right to have his say since when the deal goes down he will be on the barricades right beside them. Sam thought though that even with the slights he could say-Ah, to young was very heaven though as old Wordsworth said in his sunnier days.    

 

*****Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind

*****Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind

 

A while back, a few months ago now I think I mentioned in a sketch about how I came to learn about the music of Woody Guthrie I noted that it was hard to pin just exactly when I first heard his music since it pre-dated my coming to the folk minute of the 1960s where the name Woody Guthrie had been imprinted on lots of work by the then “new breed” protest/social commentary troubadour folk singers like Bob Dylan (who actually spent time in Woody’s hospital room with him when he first came East from Hibbing out of Dinktown in Minneapolis and wrote an early paean called Song To Woody on his first or second album), Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (who made a very nice career out of being a true Woody acolyte and had expected Dylan who had subsequently moved on, moved very far on to more lyrical work to do the same), and Stubby Tatum, probably the truest acolyte since he was instrumental in putting a lot of Woody’s unpublished poems and art work out for public inspection and specialized in Woody songs, first around Harvard Square and then wherever he could get a gig, which to say the least were not among the most well know or well thought out of Woody’s works. After some thought I pinpointed the first time I heard a Woody song to a seventh grade music class, Mr. Dasher’s class whom we innocently then called Dasher the Flasher just for rhyming purposes but which with today’s sensibilities about the young would not play very well and would probably have him up before some board of inquiry just because a bunch of moody, alienated hormonally-crazed seventh graders were into a rhyming fad that lasted until the next fad a few weeks or months later, when he in an effort to have us appreciate various genre of the world music songbook made us learn Woody’s This Land Is Your Land. Little did we know until a few years later when some former student confronted him about why we were made to learn all those silly songs he made us memorize and he told that student that he had done so in order to, fruitlessly as it turned out, break us from our undying devotion to rock and roll, you know, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Wanda, Brenda, Bo, Buddy, the Big Bopper and every single doo wop group, male or female. If anybody wants to create a board of inquiry over that Mister Dasher indiscretion complete with a jury of still irate "rock and roll will never die" aficionados you have my support.   

In thinking about Woody the obvious subsequent question of when I first heard the late Pete Seeger sing, a man who acted as the transmission belt between generations, I came up against that same quandary since I know I didn’t associate him with the first time, the first wave of performers, I heard as I connected with the emerging folk minute of the early 1960s. That folk minute start which I do clearly remember the details of got going one Sunday night when tired of the vanilla rock and roll music that was being play in the fall of 1962 on the Boston stations I began flipping the small dial on my transistor radio settling in on this startling gravelly voice which sounded like some old-time mountain man, some old time Jehovah cometh Calvinist avenging angel, singing Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies (who turned out to be folk historian and seminal folk revival figure Dave Von Ronk, who as far as I know later from his politics had no particular religious bent,if any, but who sure sounded like he was heralding the second coming). I listened to a few more songs on what turned out to be a folk music program put on every Sunday evening between seven and nine at the request of some college kids in the area who were going crazy for roots music according to the DJ.          

After thinking about it for a while I realized that I had heard Pete not in solo performance but when he was with The Weavers and they made a hit out of the old Lead Belly tune, Good Night, Irene (a song that in the true oral tradition has many versions and depending on the pedigree fewer or more verses, Lead Belly’s being comparatively short). In those days, in the early 1950s I think, the Weavers were trying to break into the popular music sphere and were proceeding very well until the Cold War night descended upon them and they, or individual members including Pete were tarred with the red scare brush.

Still you cannot keep a good man down, a man with a flame-throwing banjo, with folk music DNA in his blood since he was the son of the well-known folk musicologist Charles Seeger who along with the father and son Lomaxes  did so much to record the old time roots music out on location in the hills and hollows of the South, and with something to say to those who were interested in looking back into the roots of American music before it got commercialized (although now much of that early commercial music makes up the key folk anthology put together by Harry Smith and which every self-respecting folkie performer in the early 1960s treated like a bible). Pete put a lot of it together, a lot of interests. Got the young interested in going back to the time when old cowboys would sing themselves to sleep around the camp fire out in the prairies, when sweat hard-working black share-croppers and plantation workers down South would get out a Saturday jug and head to the juke joint to chase the blues away, and when the people of the hills and hollows down in Appalachia would Saturday night get out the jug and run over to Bill Preston’s old seen better days red-painted barn and dance that last dance waltz to that weeping mountain fiddle.

Stuff like that, lots of stuff like that to fill out the American songbook. But Pete also put his pen to paper to write some searing contemporary lyrics just like those “new breed” protest folk singers he helped nurture and probably the most famous to come out of that period, asking a very good question then, a question still be asked now if more desperately than even then, Where Have All The Flowers Gone.  Now a new generation looks like it too is ready to pick up the torch after the long “night of the long knives” we have faced since those days. The music is there to greet them in their new titanic struggles. 

The Big Haul-With Frank Sinatra’s Ocean’s Eleven In Mind

The Big Haul-With Frank Sinatra’s Ocean’s Eleven In Mind

 

 

 

DVD Review

By Zack James  

Ocean’s Eleven, starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and the rest of Frank’s Vegas “Rat Pack” cronies, 1960  

 

Sam Eaton had recently now that he was retired from the day to day operation of his print shop which his youngest son, Joseph was managing, gotten into the habit of spending his spare time watching some of the old films via Netflix that he had watched as a kid at the Majestic Theater in Carver on errant Saturday afternoons. In those days the matinee featured two films (with intermission to restock that dwindling supply of worn-out over-buttered and salted popcorn so he had a fair amount of catching up to do. The theater also played a number of re-runs of early films from the 1940s and early 1950s in retrospectives so he had a lot of material to re-watch. Although he had not been systematic about his revival archival searches he had tried to start from the earlier period and work his way forward. Recently he had hit on the early 1960s period, the period when he was watching such films as first runs and came across the original version of Ocean’s Eleven a film which was later remake (with sequels) with George Clooney in the lead. This film, perhaps above all others, was of personal interest to him since his father Eli had known Danny Ocean, had been in the 82^nd Airborne with him and the other guys portrayed in the film. So he watched the film with a rekindled interest, not all of it without sorrow.       

Sam had had to admit once again that Danny, Danny Ocean, was a piece of work, a guy with big ideas, big brain ideas anyway, although in deference to Sam’s father, Eli, who like I said had served with Danny in the 82^nd Airborne in the big one, in World War II if anybody was asking, he would not mention those attributes in his presence. See whenever Sam mentioned Danny and his big ideas previously the old man would turn red, would see red, knowing first of all that all that trudging through Europe trying to take the night-takers down with Danny, his platoon leader, didn’t rate him word one when Danny had his biggest idea ever, the big Vega heist, the big knock-over as he called it, the one that was to set every humping working-class guy who took part in the caper up for life, for big dough. So sure old Eli was sore, sore as hell, that a guy whom he had to carry back to the aid station on some gritty French back roads under heavy shell fire more than once, a guy who swore he would make it to the top, and take his buddies, his war buddies with him had given him the back of his hand. 

Worse, if anything could be worse, they had, Hollywood had, the film people had, made a movie out of Danny’s big idea once Danny, or a friend Danny’s had pitched the story to a bunch of producers at some Hollywood benefit and Sid Segal had expressed a lot of interest in producing the thing. To add insult to injury they called the film Ocean’s Eleven where all Danny’s war buddies got to take a bow, all except one Eli Eaton. Needless to say old Eli refused to see the film, refused to talk about the “damn thing” (his expression) to Sam after he had seen it and began to build in his mind that “piece of work” designation to add to the to the talk the few times he remembered Danny coming to the Eaton to Sam thought now feel Eli out home before he left for Vegas and fame. Sam knew his father had been very pensive after the last time Danny had shown up.

Yeah, Hollywood played it big, spent big money to get guys like Frank Sinatra who played Danny (although Sam though the casting was all wrong because not only was the real Danny a long tall guy with a bush full of blonde hair unlike Frank but he had a habit of looking you in the eye when he talked to you unlike Frank who had that side glance, side of the mouth way of talking every wise guy he had ever run into from his corner boys at Jack Slack’s bowling alley to the guys he had to pay “protection” money to in order to keep his bar from being leveled for non-payment of the “vig” as Fast Eddy, the collector like to call his weekly shakedown” which seemed to mean something shady was happening). The studio had brought in pal Dean Martin to play Little John ( a guy who Eli never liked, a guy who drank more booze than there were oceans, a guy who took a couple of bows for saving Danny’s bacon when some German Panzer was breathing down hell-fire on their position and he, rum brave, went swaddling through the lines to put it out of commission), Peter Lawford to play Pretty Boy, the platoon leader but everybody including, and maybe especially Pretty Boy, knew Danny was the real leader, Joey Bishop to play Big Omar the wheelman, Sammy Davis, Jr.  to play Diamond Ace, the demolition guy, the only Negro, today black guy, in the unit since that unit of the 82^nd was an Special Ops unit and bravery and cunning, not color was what cut the mustard although Eli, never having been around Negros in lily-white Caver where he hailed from (and where Sam had grown to manhood) never really got to know the guy, know him well. The rest of Danny’s eleven on that caper were played by other cronies of Sinatra’s from his then famous “Rat Pack” that he hung around with.       

They spent the money, brought in the stars, big stars back in those days. Juiced up the story line some too to show just how big an idea Danny had that time. Sam had thought after seeing the film that if half of the big idea was true then he had been niggardly in his calling Danny a piece of work and should have called him a master criminal.

The caper was simplicity itself once Danny thought it through. Why not use the well-honed skills that they had picked up from that Special Ops unit and apply in to the task at hand, taking down the big Vegas casinos all in one swoop. No big bang, bang shoot them up getting your people killed and ordinary Vegas gambling patrons caught in the cross-fire. Take the operation and put it on a war footing with a plan and timing worked out just like in the old days when they were fighting against the night-takers except this time the big pay-out instead of that sixty bucks a month and cold rations that carried them through the war. Yeah, brilliant idea, hit the five big ones, the five big casinos on New Year’s Eve and roll off with millions from their banking rooms. (Sam had to laugh, would every time he thought about it in later years, that millions were big dough then but strictly walking around money these days and guys would probably not even bother to sign up for such chump change now).

Of course in the film there was certain snafus, a certain amount of resistance from the guys Danny hand-picked for the job. The caper needed guys on the inside to get access to the doors that led to the banking rooms, needed guys to put a check on security and needed guys, guy like Diamond Ace and Bronco to blow the transmission wires and put the neon glitter in the dark while the heist was on. But you know fifteen years out of uniform for most guys had made them a little soft, had atrophied their skills and so Danny, and through him Little John and Pretty Boy, had to put the squeeze on, especially for Electric Eddie who had to blow the electric boxes to get through the final doors to the streets of gold. Eddie had just gotten out stir, had finished up a nickel for a blown caper and so at first had nixed the deal, said no, said no too since his health was none too good. Big Omar tough showed him the error of his way, showed him a couple of ways and Eddie got on board. 

As everybody who saw the film knows, and everybody should keep in mind too Sam thought the caper succeeded like clockwork, like a military operation. What happened later after the dust settled should not take away from the glory of the idea and of its execution. Diamond Ace and Bronco blow the transmission wires, check, Eddie blew the fuse boxes, check, the inside guys got the doors to the banking rooms open, check, the money grabbers grabbed the dough and put it in satchels, check, put the dough in trash barrels, check, the trash collector, Diamond Ace doing double duty empties the trash cans into the dump truck, check, the dump truck goes to the dump where the trash is dumped and satchels retrieved, check. Beautiful.

Remember that all went like clock-work. Then Big Dom showed up to gum up works, Pretty Boy’s mother’s boyfriend and a “connected” guy who discovered how the heist got pulled off, and who did the pulling. Danny and the boys, and Sam thought rightfully so, did the heavy lifting and Big Dom did nada except figure out who pulled the caper. Still he had those connection, something to consider. So a battle of wits went on for a while between Danny and Big Dom. And Danny won, well, kind of won. Electric Eddie having been in stir for too long was a lunger, was a goner really, and died during the job (which is half of how Big Dom copped to guys behind the caper) and since he was to be buried in back wherever he came from Danny decided to place all the dough in Eddie’s casket to get it out of town. Get it away from Big Dom’s greedy hands Another brilliant idea, brilliant. Only it turned out that to save money Eddie somebody persuaded Eddie’s widow to have him go to ground was going in Vegas, actually to save even more money he was to be cremated. And he was. Yeah, that Danny was a piece of work though, a real piece of work.

Sam always thought about that film when he thought about Danny that last afternoon at the house, and when he thought about his father being so pensive too (and bitter forever after). He finally knew why Danny had passed on bringing Eli in, although Sam never mentioned it while his father was alive, but Eli had lost his nerve, would have been a liability on that big a caper for a guy who returned to his job as a booger, a guy who worked in the cranberry bogs when he was discharged from the service. Sam thought too when George Clooney did the remake of the Danny legend (and sequels) several years back that even with more bells and whistle and big blast technology his father still would not have made the cut.                  

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-HONOR ROSA LUXEMBURG-THE ROSE OF THE REVOLUTION

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-HONOR ROSA LUXEMBURG-THE ROSE OF THE REVOLUTION


HONOR ROSA LUXEMBURG-THE ROSE OF THE REVOLUTION

 

 Every January leftists honor three revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in 1924, Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin. Lenin needs no special commendation.  I will make my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in this space tomorrow so I would like to make some points here about the life of Rosa Luxemburg. These comments come at a time when the question of a woman President is the buzz in the political atmosphere in the United States in the lead up to the upcoming 2016 elections. Rosa, who died almost a century ago, puts all such pretenders to so-called ‘progressive’ political leadership in the shade.   

The early Marxist movement, like virtually all progressive political movements in the past, was heavily dominated by men. I say this as a statement of fact and not as something that was necessarily intentional or good. It is only fairly late in the 20^th century that the political emancipation of women, mainly through the granting of the vote earlier in the century, led to mass participation of women in politics as voters or politicians. Although, socialists, particularly revolutionary socialists, have placed the social, political and economic emancipation of women at the center of their various programs from the early days that fact had been honored more in the breech than the observance.

 

All of this is by way of saying that the political career of the physically frail but intellectually robust Rosa Luxemburg was all the more remarkable because she had the capacity to hold her own politically and theoretically with the male leadership of the international social democratic movement in the pre-World War I period. While the writings of the likes of then leading German Social Democratic theoretician Karl Kautsky are safely left in the basket Rosa’s writings today still retain a freshness, insightfulness and vigor that anti-imperialist militants can benefit from by reading. Her book Accumulation of Capital , whatever its shortfalls alone would place her in the select company of important Marxist thinkers.

But Rosa Luxemburg was more than a Marxist thinker. She was also deeply involved in the daily political struggles pushing for left-wing solutions. Yes, the more bureaucratic types, comfortable in their party and trade union niches, hated her for it (and she, in turn, hated them) but she fought hard for her positions on an anti-class collaborationist, anti-militarist and anti-imperialist left-wing of the International of the social democratic movement throughout this period. And she did this not merely as an adjunct leader of a women’s section of a social democratic party but as a fully established leader of left-wing men and women, as a fully socialist leader. One of the interesting facts about her life is how little she wrote on the women question as a separate issue from the broader socialist question of the emancipation of women. Militant leftist, socialist and feminist women today take note.

 

One of the easy ways for leftists, particularly later leftists influenced by Stalinist ideology, to denigrate the importance of Rosa Luxemburg’s thought and theoretical contributions to Marxism was to write her off as too soft on the question of the necessity of a hard vanguard revolutionary organization to lead the socialist revolution. Underpinning that theme was the accusation that she relied too much on the spontaneous upsurge of the masses as a corrective to the lack of hard organization or the impediments that  reformist socialist elements threw up to derail the revolutionary process. A close examination of her own organization, The Socialist Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, shows that this was not the case; this was a small replica of a Bolshevik-type organization. That organization, moreover, made several important political blocs with the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the defeat of the Russian revolution of 1905. Yes, there were political differences between the organizations, particularly over the critical question for both the Polish and Russian parties of the correct approach to the right of national self-determination, but the need for a hard organization does not appear to be one of them.

 

Furthermore, no less a stalwart Bolshevik revolutionary than Leon Trotsky, writing in her defense in the 1930’s, dismissed charges of Rosa’s supposed ‘spontaneous uprising’ fetish as so much hot air. Her tragic fate, murdered with the complicity of her former Social Democratic comrades, after the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919 (at the same time as her comrade, Karl Liebknecht), had causes related to the smallness of the group, its  political immaturity and indecisiveness than in its spontaneousness. If one is to accuse Rosa Luxemburg of any political mistake it is in not pulling the Spartacist group out of Kautsky’s Independent Social Democrats (itself a split from the main Social Democratic party during the war, over the war issue) sooner than late 1918. However, as the future history of the communist movement would painfully demonstrate revolutionaries have to take advantage of the revolutionary opportunities that come their way, even if not the most opportune or of their own making.

All of the above controversies aside, let me be clear, Rosa Luxemburg did not then need nor does she now need a certificate of revolutionary good conduct from today’s leftists, from any  reader of this space or from this writer. For her revolutionary opposition to World War I when it counted, at a time when many supposed socialists had capitulated to their respective ruling classes including her comrades in the German Social Democratic Party, she holds a place of honor. Today, as we face the endless wars of imperialist intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere in Iraq we could use a few more Rosas, and a few less tepid, timid parliamentary opponents.  For this revolutionary opposition she went to jail like her comrade Karl Liebknecht. For revolutionaries it goes with the territory. And in jail she wrote, she always wrote, about the fight against the ongoing imperialist war (especially in the Junius pamphlets about the need for a Third International).  Yes, Rosa was at her post then. And she died at her post later in the Spartacist fight doing her internationalist duty trying to lead the German socialist revolution the success of which would have  gone a long way to saving the Russian Revolution. This is a woman leader I could follow who, moreover, places today’s bourgeois women parliamentary politicians in the shade. As the political atmosphere gets heated up over the next couple years, remember what a real fighting revolutionary woman politician looked like. Remember Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the Revolution.      

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Workers Vanguard No. 1060	23 January 2015

From the Archives of Marxism

Honor Rosa Luxemburg!

From Lenin, Liebknecht, Luxemburg by Max Shachtman

 

“Today the bourgeoisie and the social-traitors are jubilating in Berlin—they have succeeded in murdering Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Ebert and Scheidemann, who for four years led the workers to the slaughter for the sake of depredation, have now assumed the role of butchers of the proletarian leaders. The example of the German revolution proves that ‘democracy’ is only a camouflage for bourgeois robbery and the most savage violence.

“Death to the butchers!”

— “Speech at a Protest Rally Following the Murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg,” 19 January 1919

This was Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin’s cry of rage after the assassination of two revered Marxist leaders of the German proletariat. They were murdered by the fascistic Freikorps at the behest of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) government of Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann as it moved to crush the unfolding workers revolution in that country. German Social Democracy had proved its rottenness on 4 August 1914, when SPD deputies in parliament voted to fund the German military in World War I. Against the social-traitors Ebert & Co., Liebknecht and Luxemburg fought for revolutionary proletarian internationalism. In the tradition of the early Communist International, every January we honor the memory of these revolutionary fighters, the “Three Ls”—Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Lenin himself, who died on 21 January 1924.

The appreciation of Luxemburg reprinted below comes from the undated pamphlet Lenin, Liebknecht, Luxemburg published by the Young Workers (Communist) League of America sometime between 1924 and 1928. The pamphlet’s author, Max Shachtman, was expelled in 1928 from the U.S. Communist Party for supporting the Left Opposition led internationally by Leon Trotsky. The Trotskyists fought down the line against the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet workers state and the Communist International. Although Shachtman would break from Trotskyism during World War II and eventually become an open supporter of U.S. imperialism, he was for a time a revolutionary leader and talented proponent of Marxism.

The excerpt below erroneously states that Berlin police chief Emil Eichhorn was removed from office a year after the founding of the German Communist Party. In fact, it was only a few days later, as the article on the facing page lays out in greater detail.

---

August 4, 1914. The world was astounded by the social democratic vote on war credits. But Rosa wasted not a moment. Declaring the social democracy a whited sepulchre, a foul corpse, she grouped around herself the cream of the revolutionary wing of the old party. With her came Karl Liebknecht, Leo Jogiches, Franz Mehring, Wilhelm Pieck, Clara Zetkin, [Ernst] Meyer and others. A small band they were, but immediately they proceeded to their task. Illegal literature was spread at every opportunity. Flaming appeals against the imperialist war were the order of the day. Rosa Luxemburg, who had written her famous open letter to [French social democrat] Jean Jaures six years before, arguing against his declaration that the alliance between France, England and Russia was a step towards peace, was being confronted by the truth of her own prophetic words.

The workers were beginning to come out of the stupor resulting from the first shock at the socialist betrayal. Within six months the small handful of revolutionists had grown to greater proportions despite its illegality and the hindrances in its way. In February of the year following the declaration of war, representatives from many cities gathered to found the group of “The International.” To combine legal with illegal work they proposed to issue a magazine with the name of their group at its head and with Red Rosa as its editor. This brilliant organ was declared illegal after the publication of the first number.

And now the sentence against Rosa for her Frankfurt speech [in 1914 against the imperialist war] was confirmed and she was once more imprisoned for a year. Surrounded by stone and iron she continued to carry on her agitation as though she were free. With the cooperation of the faithful Leo Tyszka [Jogiches], her oldest friend and co-worker, she issued numbers of Die Internationale, which stands today as the official theoretical organ of the party she founded, the German Communist Party, a monument to her work. From prison, also, she wrote her famous pamphlet, “The Crisis in the German Social Democracy,” which became known far and wide as the Junius brochure, since she was unable to sign her own name to it and was therefore obliged to use the pseudonym Junius.

“Shamed, dishonored, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands. Not as we usually see it, playing the roles of peace and righteousness, of order, of philosophy, of ethics—as a roaring beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilential breath, devastating culture and humanity—so it appears in all its hideous nakedness. And in the midst of this orgy a world tragedy has occured: the capitulation of the social democracy.... It forgot all its principles, its pledges, the decision of international congresses, just at the moment when they should have found their application.”

Bitterly did she scourge the social democratic traitors; scornfully she lashed to tatters their false arguments of national defense; and skilfully she exposed the imperialist roots of the war. Yet here also she relied too greatly upon the spontaneous action of the masses. Unlike Lenin she did not raise the inspiring slogan: Turn the imperialist war into a civil war of the proletariat against its oppressors! And Lenin, while greeting joyously this noble revolutionary voice crying in the sterile desert of shameless betrayal, did not fail to criticize this omission in his own book, “Against the Stream,” which he collected together with other articles written by Zinoviev.

Against the stream! “It is never easy to swim against the current, and when the stream rushes on with the rapidity and the power of a Niagara it does not become easier!” said the older Liebknecht [Karl’s father Wilhelm]. And yet Rosa swam bravely with her comrades against the streams of blood which were being shed in the imperialist slaughter. Released from prison just before Liebknecht’s arrest [for speaking against the war in 1916] at the famous May Day demonstration, she was soon rearrested to be released only by the first revolution in Germany [in November 1918]. Again there flowed from prison a constant stream of propaganda from her fertile pen. From her prison cell were written the famous Spartacus Letters. There also she replied to the critics of her “Accumulation of Capital” which had been published before the war, in which she attempted to set forth a Marxist theory of imperialist political economy. From that cell, too, came the letters to the wife of Karl Liebknecht which portrayed the sensitive and lovable soul of this uncompromising rebel, her love for life and struggle. There also her pamphlet on the Russian revolution, unfortunately composed on the basis of misinformation, the errors of which she later partially corrected, and which was triumphantly published by the renegade Paul Levi [after his departure from the Communist Party] who attempted to use it to justify his own cowardice and to attack the first working class republic.

“This madness will not stop, and this bloody nightmare of hell will not cease until the workers of Germany, of France, of Russia and of England will wake up out of their drunken sleep; will clasp each other’s hands in brotherhood and will drown the bestial chorus of war agitators and the hoarse cry of capitalist hyenas with the mighty cry of labor, ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’”

Thus had she ended her Junius brochure. And when the German revolution followed the successful uprising in Russia she was freed, together with Liebknecht, again to take up her incessant struggle for the workers’ cause. With new hopes the two Spartacans renewed their labors to build up a Communist Party in Germany. Battle-scarred, undaunted, they proceeded to unite the revolutionary forces of Germany: the Spartakusbund and the revolutionary groups of Hamburg and Bremen which were led by Paul Frölich, [Johann] Knief, and Karl Radek. At the end of the year of 1918 the first congress of the Communist Party of Germany was completed. The party was as yet weak; it was dominated by leftist elements. Despite the opposition of Rosa and Karl, the congress voted to oppose participation in elections or parliaments of any kind, as well as for the boycotting of the trade unions and appeals to the workers to leave them. Rosa argued, with little avail. Yet, in the program she wrote and which was adopted by the congress, the aims of the young Communist movement are clearly stated:

“The proletarian revolution is the death-bed of slavery and oppression. For this reason all capitalists, Junkers [landed nobility], members of the petty middle class, officers, and all those who live on exploitation and class hegemony, will rise against it to a man in a struggle for life and death. It is madness to believe that the capitalist class will, with good will, subordinate itself to the verdict of a socialist majority in parliament; and that it will voluntarily renounce its proprietary rights and its privileges of exploitation. Every ruling class has, to the very end, fought for its privileges with the most stubborn energy. The class of capitalist imperialists exceeds all its predecessors in undisguised cynicism, brutality, and meanness.... Against the threatening danger of the counter-revolution must come the arming of the workers and the disarming of the hitherto ruling class. The fight for socialism is the most gigantic civil war in history, and the proletarian revolution must prepare the necessary defense for this war. It must learn to use it, to fight and to conquer. This defence of the compact masses of the workers, this arming of them with the full political power for the accomplishment of the revolution, is what is known as the dictatorship of the proletariat. This, and only this, is the true democracy.”

The young party was soon to receive its baptism in blood. The social democrats were placed at the head of the so-called revolutionary government to head off the real revolution which would place power actually into the hands of the working class. Traitorous, they quaked at the idea of a proletarian revolution. Growing up by their side, like the Soviets alongside of the decaying Russian Constituent Assembly, were the Workmen’s Councils and the Communist Party. The social democrats did not hesitate to choose between revolution and suppression of revolutionary forces. A year after the founding of the Communist Party, the Workmen’s Councils were maliciously provoked by the social democratic government which removed the popular police president of Berlin, Emil Eichhorn, a member of the Independent Socialist Party. Rosa knew that the situation was not yet developed for an uprising. She realized that the masses had not yet been rallied to the support of the Communist Party; that they had not, in the words of the program she had written, gained “the consent of the clear, unanimous will of the majority of the proletarian masses of Germany and...conscious agreement with the aims and methods of the Spartakusbund.” But less clear heads prevailed and instantly the battle was on.

Together with a group of independent socialists, the Communists seized the building of the social democratic Vorwärts [newspaper] and issued a manifesto deposing the national government. Barricades were thrown up overnight. Workers armed themselves and prepared to give battle. Red Rosa did not hesitate. Marx, before her, had disapproved of the action of the revolutionaries of Paris in proclaiming the Commune [in 1870]; but as soon as the revolt was on he placed himself in line with the rebels—uncompromisingly; and after their terrible defeat he wrote the most brilliant declaration in its defense that the world has yet seen. And Rosa, in the same dilemma of being obliged to take a position in favor of an action which had been taken against her best judgment, showed the same revolutionary spirit as Karl Marx.

Unhesitatingly, the young party threw itself into the battle. With historic heroism they fought the troops of the social democrat [Gustav] Noske. With sabers and machine guns their proletarian lives were cut down to the ground. Rosa led in the battles. Liebknecht was everywhere, in the front ranks, among the youth who defended buildings that were being held by the Spartacans, in the barricades, indefatigably working among the inexperienced troops, giving encouragement and good cheer to all.

A general strike is declared; the factories stand gaunt and silent. The Berliner Tageblatt [newspaper] is taken over by the Berlin youth; the paper rolls are used for barricades, the books of the concern to bolster up the windows; a Red Cross station is established and guards are placed. On a number of churches, machine guns are lashed to command the streets. In front of the Vorwärts building a huge bonfire of the social democratic leaflets which have insulted the working class. The Bötzow brewery is held by the armed workers.

The government marshalls its forces: social democratic workers who have been poisoned against the revolutionaries. Workers against workers.

Saturday sees the end of the brave battle. The Vorwärts building is surrounded and surrendered. Whoever is caught with arms is forthwith shot. A sixteen year old fighter is called upon to shout “Long live the republic!”; he shouts instead “Long live Liebknecht!”; he is killed. The historic January days are over. They have seen heroic sacrifice and base betrayal.

A short few days pass. Liebknecht and Luxemburg are discovered. They are taken to the Eden Hotel, the headquarters of the troopers. Karl is spirited away and murdered by these “heroes.” As Rosa is leaving the hotel entrance, the trooper Runge is standing at the door. Commander Petri has given the order that she is not to reach the prison alive. The obliging Runge strikes her heavily on the head twice, so heavily that the blows are heard in the lobby of the hotel. Rosa sinks to the ground. She is lifted and thrown into the vehicle, one man on each side of her and Lieutenant Vogel in the rear. As the truck drives off, a soldier springs up from behind and delivers another sharp blow to the unconscious martyr; Lieutenant Vogel levels his revolver and shoots her in the back of the head; the frail, broken body quivers for the last time. They drive between the Landwehr Canal and the Zoological Gardens. No one is in sight. At the exit of the gardens near the canal, a group of soldiers are standing. The auto halts and the corpse is heaved into the canal at the order of Lieutenant Vogel. A few days later the watersoaked body is recovered and interred by the side of Liebknecht. The assassinated Jogiches finds his resting place by their side a short time later.

The social democratic Vorwärts has very humorous writers of jingles. On the eve of the murders they publish a little song:

“Five hundred corpses in a row,

Liebknecht, Rosa, Radek & Co.:

Are they not there also?”

The workers mourn and plan their vengeance. The murderers walk the streets today: they are free men.

*   *   *

It is said that were Red Rosa living today she would be among the best leaders of the iron regiments of the powerful Communist Party of Germany. Of that there can be little doubt. The attempts of renegades and unscrupulous scoundrels to darken the sacred memory of Rosa Luxemburg by spreading the tale that she opposed the Russian revolution and the Russian Bolsheviks have already been brought to nought. Rosa had many shortcomings. Perhaps only in her last days did she begin to understand that her attitude towards the question of the peasantry was incorrect. In the question of the attitude of revolutionaries towards national independence and the right of self-determination to the point of separation she also held the wrong position. She erred in certain respects in her estimation of the Russian party conflicts, and later in her understanding of the Bolshevik revolution and its tactics. She was wrong in her book “The Accumulation of Capital” and unconsciously, in fighting so vigorously for the principles of Marxism against the opportunist revisionists, herself deviated from those basic economic principles. She had too much confidence in the spontaneous action of the masses irrespective of preparatory organizational work and of the leading role of the party.

And yet she will remain a cherished, beloved memory; yet her spirit will continue to be embodied in the world’s revolutionary movement; yet her name will continue to grow in the hearts of the masses for whom she fought when those who betrayed her will have cheated oblivion only by obloquy.

The Paul Levis who seek to capitalize her errors and forget her glorious history of revolutionary struggle have best been answered by Lenin, who often took issue with Red Rosa, but who appreciated her work as few men do:

“An eagle may descend lower than a chicken, but the chicken can never rise like an eagle. Rosa Luxemburg was mistaken on the question of the independence of Poland, she was mistaken in 1903 in her estimate of the Mensheviki; she was mistaken in her theory of the accumulation of capital; she was mistaken in defending the union of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1914 along with Plekhanov, Vandervelde, Kautsky and others; she was mistaken in her prison writings in 1918 (on coming out of prison, however, at the end of 1918, she corrected a large number of these mistakes herself). But notwithstanding all her mistakes she was and remains an eagle; and not only will her memory always be highly esteemed by the Communists of all the world, but her biography and the complete collection of her writings will be useful for the instruction of many generations of Communists in all countries. As for the German social democrats after the 4th of August, 1914,—‘a foul corpse’ is the appellation which Rosa Luxemburg gave them, and with which their name will go down in the history of the international labor movement. But in the backyard of the labor movement, among the manure piles, chickens like Paul Levi, Scheidemann, Kautsky and all that fraternity, will be especially enraptured by the mistakes of the great Communist.”

Rosa Luxemburg died like the bravest soldier of the revolution at his post. She died after the defeat of a revolution, after “order” had been established. The last words she is known to have written are her best epitaph:

“Order reigns in Berlin! You senseless thugs! Your ‘order’ is built on sand. The Revolution will rise tomorrow, bristling to the heights, and will to your terror sound forth the trumpet call: ‘I was, I am, I am to be!’”

These words are the muted song of the grim regiments of the proletariat who march in the final struggle and for the final victory.

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

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

 

 

Leon Trotsky -Lessons Of The Paris Commune-Listen Up

Defend The Working Class! Take The Offensive! - A Five Point Program For Discussion

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

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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

Ralph Morris and Sam Lowell a couple of old-time radicals, old-time now not being the Great Depression labor radicals who had been their models after a fashion and who helped built the now seemingly moribund unions but anti-war radicals from the hell-bent street in-your-face 1960s confrontations with the American beast during the Vietnam War reign of hell were beside themselves when the powder-puff uprising of the Occupy movement brought a fresh breeze to the tiny American left-wing landscape in the latter part of 2011.  (That term “powder puff” not expressing the heft of the movement but the fact that it disappeared almost before it got started giving up the huge long-term fight it was expected to wage to break the banks, break the corporate grip on the world and, try to seek “newer world”).

Although Ralph and Sam were not members in good standing of any labor unions, both having after their furtive anti-war street fights and the ebbing of the movement by about the mid-1970s returned to “normalcy.” Ralph having gone back to work in his father's electrical shop in Troy, New York and which he took over when Ralph, Senior retired and Sam had gone back to Carver to expand a print shop that he had started in the late 1960s after serving an apprenticeship with the main printer in town before he went out on his own. Having come from respectable working-class backgrounds in strictly working-class towns though, 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, they 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, especially after May Day 1971 where they first met in the bastinado at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium after being arrested  with their respective collectives and where they got a full dose what the American imperial state could when it pulled the hammer down on dissent, 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 meet in Springfield and travel down to the Wall Street plaza which was the center of the movement on weekends, long weekends usually, to take part in the action after the long drought of such activity for them personally and for their kind of eclectic left-wing politics (they had gotten more active in the wake of Bush-led Iraq invasion of 2003 when the seemingly endless wars first took hold of day to day American foreign policy but nowhere near the 24/7 efforts back in the Vietnam days when every minute seemed to desperately count against the monster).  They were crestfallen to say the least when the movement exploded (or maybe better imploded, turned in on itself and wound up after a couple of years being just another cheap vehicle for left Democratic Party politicians on the make) after the then reigning mayor and the NYPD  pulled down the hammer and forcibly disbanded the place (and other city administrations across the country and across the world and police departments did likewise in what was determined later when it was too late that had been coordinated efforts across the board to shut everything down, shut it down tight).

Of more concern at the time since unlike the good-hearted but naïve younger people since they had already known from too many uneven battles (remember that May Day 1971 baptism of fire) about what the government could do when it decided to pull down the hammer was in the aftermath when the movement imploded from its own contradictions, caught up not wanting to step on anybody's toes in the movement no matter how hare-brained the scheme or just plain recycled ideas that had not worked in the 1960s and had even less chance now that the state had even more weapons at its disposal, to let everybody do their own thing with or without some kind of coordinated plan that would make the thing more productive,  do their own identity politics, you know gays can only speak of gay oppression straights keep out, women can only speak of women's oppression men, gay or straight keep out, blacks can only speak of black oppression, white males and females, gay or straight keep out and so on, defending their particular turf as furiously as any old-time Tammany Hall political hack, which did much to defang the old movements, refusing out of hand cohering a collective leadership that might give some direction to the damn thing but also earnestly wanting to bring the monster down.

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

A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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