*****From Veterans For Peace In Massachusetts-Stop The Damn Endless Wars-Revelations

*****From Veterans For Peace In Massachusetts-Stop The Damn Endless Wars-Revelations

What VFP Stands For - 

 

 

 

 

 

Revelations-From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Ralph Morris had always considered himself a straight-up guy. Straight up when he dealt with customers in his high-precision electrical shop in Troy, New York inherited from his father after he retired before he himself recently retired and turned it over to his youngest son, James, who would bring the operation into the 21^st century with the high tech equipment precision electrical work needs nowadays. Straight up when he confronted the trials and tribulations of parenthood and told the kids that due to his political obligations (of which more in a minute) he would be away and perhaps seem somewhat pre-occupied at times he would answer any questions they had about anything as best he could (and the kids in turn when characterizing their father to me, told me that he was hard-working, distant but had been straight up with them although those sentiments said in a wistful, wondering, wishing more manner like there was something missing in the whole exchange and Ralph agreed when I mentioned that feeling to him that I was probably right but that he did the best he could). Straight up after sowing his wild oats along with Sam Eaton, Pete Markin, Frankie Riley and a bunch of other guys from the working class corners who dived into that 1960s counter-cultural moment and hit the roads, for a short time after the stress of eighteen months in the bush in Vietnam. Meaning sleeping with any young woman who would have him in those care-free days when we were all experimenting with new ways to deal with that fretting sexual issue and getting only slightly less confused that when we got all that god-awful and usually wrong information in the streets where most of us, for good or evil learned to separate our Ps and Qs. After which he promised his high school sweetheart, Lara Peters, who had waited for him to settle down to be her forever man. And straight up with what concerns us here his attitude toward his military service in the Army during the height of the Vietnam War where he did his time, did not cause waves while in the service but raised, and is still raising seven kinds of holy hell, once he became totally disillusioned with the war, with the military brass and with the American government (no “our government” his way of saying it not mine) who did nothing but make thoughtless animals out of him and his buddies.             

Giving this “straight up” character business is important here because Ralph several years ago along with Sam Eaton, a non-Vietnam veteran having been exempted from military duty due to being the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after his ne’er-do-well father died of a massive heart attack in 1965, joined a peace organization, Veterans For Peace (VFP), in order to work with others doing the same kind of work (Ralph as a  full member, Sam an associate member in the way membership works in that organization although both have full right to participate and discuss the aims and projects going forward) once they decided to push hard against the endless wars of the American government (both Ralph and Sam’s way of putting the matter). Without going into great detail Sam and Ralph had met down in Washington, D.C. on May Day 1971 when they with their respective groups (Sam with a radical collective from Cambridge and Ralph with Vietnam Veterans Against the War) attempted to as the slogan went-“shut down the government if it did not shut down the war.” Unfortunately they failed but the several days they spent together in detention in RFK Stadium then being used as the main detention area cemented a life-time friendship, and a life-time commitment to work for peace. (Sam’s impetus the loss of his best corner boy high school friend, Jeff Mullins, in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in 1968 who begged him to tell everybody what was really going on with war if he did not make it back to tell them himself.)        

That brings us to the Ralph straight up part. He and Sam had worked closely with or been member of for several years in the 1970s VVAW and other organizations to promote peace. But as the decade ended and the energy of the 1960s faded and ebbed they like many others went on with their lives, build up their businesses, had their families to consider and generally prospered. Oh sure, when warm bodies were needed for this or that good old cause they were there but until the fall of 2002 their actions were helter-skelter and of an ad hoc nature. Patch work they called it. Of course the hell-broth of the senseless, futile and about six other negative descriptions of that 2003 Iraq war disaster, disaster not so much for the American government (Sam and Ralph’s now familiar term) as for the Iraqi people and others under the cross-fires of the American military juggernaut (my term). So they, having fewer family and work responsibilities were getting the old time anti-war “religion” fires stoked in their brains once again to give one more big push against the machine before they passed on. They started working with VFP in various marches, vigils, civil disobedience actions and whatever other projects the organization was about (more recently the case of getting a presidential pardon and freedom for the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle –blower soldier Chelsea Manning sentenced to a thirty-five year sentence at Fort Leavenworth for telling the truth about American atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan). Did that for a couple of years before they joined. And here is really where that straight up business comes into play. See they both had been around peace organizations enough to know that membership means certain obligation beyond paying dues and reading whatever materials an organization puts out-they did not want to be, had never been mere “paper members” So after that couple of years of working with VFP in about 2008 they joined up, joined up and have been active members ever since.        

Now that would be neither here nor there but Ralph had recently been thinking about stepping up his commitment even further by running for the Executive Committee of his local Mohawk Valley  chapter, the Kenny Johnson Chapter. (Sam as an associate member of his local chapter, the James Jencks Brigade is precluded as a non-veterans from holding such offices the only distinction between the two types of membership.) He ran and won a seat on the committee. But straight up again since he was committed to helping lead the organization locally and perhaps take another step up at some point he decided this year to go to the National Convention in San Diego (the geographic location of that site a definitive draw) and learn more about the overall workings of the organization and those most dedicated to its success.

So Ralph went and immersed himself in the details of what is going on with the organization. More importantly he got to hear the details of how guys (and it is mostly guys reflecting the origins of the organization in 1985 a time when women were not encouraged to go into the service), mostly guys from his Vietnam War generation as the older World War II and Korea vets pass on and the Iraq and Afghan war vets are still finding their “voice” came to join the organization. What amazed him was how many of the stories centered on various objections that his fellow members had developed while in whatever branch of the military they were in. See Ralph had kept his “nose clean” despite his growing disenchantment with the war while serving his eighteen months in country. He had been by no means a gung-ho soldier although he had imbibed all the social and political attitudes of his working class background that he had been exposed to concerning doing service, fighting evil commies and crushing anything that got in the way of the American government. He certainly was not a model soldier either but he went along, got along by getting along. These other guys didn’t.

One story stood out not because it was all that unusual in the organization but because Ralph had never run up against anything like it during his time of service from 1967-1970. Not in basic training AIT, not in Vietnam although he had heard stuff about disaffected soldiers toward the end of his enlistment. This guy, Frank Jefferson, he had met at one of the workshops on military resisters had told Ralph when he asked that he had served a year in an Army stockade for refusing to wear the uniform, refusing to do Army work of any kind. At least voluntarily. The rough details of Frank’s story went like this. He had been drafted in late 1968 and was inducted into the Army in early 1969 having had no particular reason not to go in since while he was vaguely anti-war like most college students he was not a conscientious objector (and still doesn’t since he believes wars of national liberation and the like are just and supportable, especially those who are facing down the barrel of American imperialism, was not interested in going to jail like some guys, some draft resisters, from his generation who refused to be inducted an did not even think about the option of Canada or some such exile. Moreover the ethos of his town, his family, his whole social circle was not one that would have welcomed resistance, would not have been understood as a sincere if different way of looking at the world. Add to that two guys had been killed in Vietnam from his neighborhood and the social pressure to conform was too great to buck even if he had had stronger convictions then. 

Three days, maybe less after Frank was deposited at Fort Jackson in South Carolina in January, 1969 for basic training he knew he had made a great mistake, had had stronger anti-war feelings, maybe better anti-military feelings than he suspected and was heading for a fall. This was a period when draftees, those fewer and fewer men who were allowing themselves to be drafted, were being channeled toward the infantry, the “grunts,” the cannon-fodder (words he learned later but not known as he came in) and that was his fate. He was trained as an 11 Bravo, killer soldier. Eventually he got orders to report to Fort Lewis in Washington for transport to Vietnam. On a short leave before he was requested to report Frank went back to Cambridge where he grew up and checked in with the Quakers which somebody had told him to do if he was going to challenge his fate in any way. The counsellor there advised him to put in a CO application at Fort Devens nearby. He did so, was turned down because as a Catholic objector he did not qualify under the doctrine of that church. (And he still held to his “just war” position mentioned above). He tried to appeal that decision through military then civilian channels with help from a lawyer provided by the Quakers (really their American Friends Service Committee) although that was dicey at best. Then, despite some counsel against such actions Frank had an epiphany, a day of reckoning, a day when he decided that enough was enough and showed up at parade field for the Monday morning report in civilian clothes carrying a “Bring The Troops Home” sign. Pandemonium ensued, he was man-handled by two beefy lifer-sergeants and was thrown in the stockade. Eventually he was tried and sentenced to six month under a special court-martial for disobeying orders which he served. He got out after during that stretch and continued to refuse to wear the uniform or do work. So back to the stockade and re-trial getting another six months, again for disobeying lawful orders. Fortunately that civilian lawyer had brought the CO denial case to the Federal Court in Boston on a writ of habeas corpus and the judge ruled that the Army had acted wrongly in denying the application. A few weeks later he was released. Frank said otherwise he still might forty plus years later be doing yet another six month sentence. So that was his story and there were probably others like that during that turbulent time when the Army was near mutiny.

Ralph said to himself after hearing the Jefferson story, yeah, these are the brethren I can work with, guys like Jefferson really won’t fold under pressure. Yeah, that’s right.           

***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes- Jazzonia -

***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes-  Jazzonia 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

February is Black History Month

 

 Jazzonia 

 

Oh, silver tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.

Oh, singing tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

Were Eve's eyes
In the first garden
Just a bit too bold?
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
In a gown of gold?

Oh, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!

In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.

Langston Hughes

 

 

This was the limit. That exact thought and no other crossed Louise Crawford’s mind as she fumed, fumed for the third time over the past several weeks waiting, waiting for his lordship, his budding poet lordship, to show up sometime in the next decade. Waiting so that he could take her to the Red Hat where “the Earl” and the boys were playing some heavy-noted down and dirty black-assed jazz that week and for “beat” aficionados, or like her, looking to be seen at the latest happening thing around the city she just had to be present at the creation. Yeah, she was like that, had a talent, no, maybe better a wanting habit which constantly needed to be replenished.

Other times he had begged indulgence because he was in the throes of writing some inspired poem, calling her his muse which stopped her in her tracks, or some small press publisher was all agog to print a few hundred copies of a small collection of his work. Still no, no Crawford, no Crawford whose forbears practically came over on the Mayflower was ever on this great earth to be kept waiting, for anything under any circumstances, and she would make that abundantly clear to him, again, when he arrived, if he did arrive. (For those not in the know, yes, that Crawford of the Wall Street financiers Crawford who have been making money hand over fist since about the time of the Mayflower so waiting had been bred out of the clan she, Louise the youngest daughter, twenty-two, if anybody was asking.) 

Of course, Louise recognized the double-standard, although only recognized it and would not be enslaved to it any more than any other twenty-two year old woman would be, that she was more than willing to play her own fashionably late card when it suited her, especially among her old boarding school friends who made something of a science of the custom. She, moreover, did not care, did not care one whit, that he, Jesse to give him a name, was somebody’s protégé , some friend of Mabel Dodge’s granddaughter or something like that, and the greatest poet, the greatest black poet since, what was his name, oh yes, Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance back in the Jazz Age or something (not real jazz, not be-bop jazz, not from what she had heard on old records but more stuff to please the booze-swilling patrons, not like today with Earl, and walking daddies like Earl, and their cool, ultra-cool be-bop, be-bop sound).

She had had her full string of Greenwich Village hipsters, or want-to-be- hipsters, “beats” was the term of art ever since Jack Kerouac blew the lid off the straight world with his big book, On The Road, a few years back so every half-baked suburbanite joker was “beat,” beaten a better way to say it. Had had her fill of every variety that passed through Bleecker Street and she had had a veritable United Nations of lovers from the time she had turned sixteen and learned the karma sutra arts (and liked them) from poet prince Jesse back to Bob, the Jewish folksinger who wrote songs in honor of her pale blue eyes, his long legs and her natural blonde hair, and before him, Jim the jug band guy who made her laugh but had to go when he got into some serious drug stuff and got all devil cultish about it, and let’s see, Julio the painter who painted her in the nude, well, semi-nude and then took off with some senorita from Sonora , Michelangelo the sculptor who proclaimed his metal pieces the new wave( so no, not that old time one), Betty, the writer (just a crush and trying something new when some guy, a trumpet player so it figured, introduced her to sister and to some low-life sex stuff), Lothario the high-wire artist and juggler, and, well you know, a lot of very interesting people.

Of course Jesse was her first negro, oops, black lover. Jesus, she remembered one night when she called him that, negro, “the greatest Negro poet since Langston Hughes,” when she introduced him to friends at a party and later he yelled holy hell at her saying that he was a black man, a black son of Mother Africa and that his people were creating stuff, human progress stuff, when her people were figuring out how to use a spoon, and trying to figure out why anyone would use such a thing if they could figure out how to use it. He said if he was in Mexico or Spain and was called word that it would be okay, okay maybe, but in America he was black, a sable warrior, black. And had been black since Pharaoh times. Later that night he wrote his well-received In Pharaoh Times to blow off the madness steam he still felt toward her. ( A poem which when she read it later, really read it expressed all his pent up stuff about being black, about coming from slavery and what that remnant still left had done to the psyche, the black male psyche not being able to protect his own, and about Mister Whitey, read Pharaoh, read Crawfords, read Wall Street, read waiting blondes cultivating their first black lover always getting what they wanted when they wanted it and some stuff she could not understand, some references to specific black cultural events.) And being her first black lover she had given him some room knowing that he was an artist, and he really was good in bed but this standing up thing was just not done, not done to a Crawford and so she determined that she would give him his walking papers this very night.

Just then she remembered, remembered the last time, that second time he, Jesse, had kept her waiting and the next day, as an act of contrition, he had written his lovely poem Louise Love In Quiet Time for her that some Village poetry journal was all aflutter to publish (and that she had re-read constantly). So maybe tonight she would not give him his walking papers…

As The 150th Anniversary Of The American Civil War-Bruce Catton’s Terrible Swift Sword- A Book Review

As The 150^th Anniversary Of The American Civil War-Bruce Catton’s Terrible Swift Sword- A Book Review

 

 

 

 

Book Review

By Frank Jackman

Terrible Swift Sword, by Bruce Catton, Washington Square press, New York, 1963

Old time friends from the 1960s anti-Vietnam War struggles Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton had a common interest in the American Civil War since they were kids in the early 1960s and in their respective home towns got caught up in the centennial events celebrated back then. Sam who grew up in cranberry bog country down in Carver in Southeastern Massachusetts used to collect the stamps and first day covers of the series that the United State Post Office put out commemorating various battles, important events and personalities from that bloody conflict (first day covers were issued and cancelled on the day that the stamp was issued and from the place where it had been issued which represented in those less video-filled days a hobby which many kids got into as an inexpensive way to keep in time with the world around them-hell most of that time a stamp was only three or four cents). Ralph, not usually much of a reader, made an exception for Civil War history and literature since coming from Troy in upstate New York he had had many distant relatives who had some connection with that war and were commemorated on the huge Civil War Memorial in the downtown area.      

Of course Ralph and Sam did not know each other in the early 1960s but had met in 1971 down in Washington, D.C. on May Day when Ralph, a Vietnam veteran who had turned against the war with a vengeance along with his Albany area contingent of Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and Ralph, not a veteran but an anti-war convert after his best friend from high school had been killed in the Central Highlands of Vietnam and had urged him if he did not get back alive to tell anybody who would listen to stop the war, with a Cambridge radical collective had tried to stop the war by stopping the government, or some such idea. All the thousands who came out that day and a few days following got for their efforts were police sticks, tear gas, and a trip to the bastinado. The bastinado for the two of them was a football stadium, the home of the Washington Redskins, ironically Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, being used as a temporary holding pen for most of those arrested. Ralph had sought Sam out when he noticed as he walked along the football field that he was wearing a VVAW button and had asked if Sam was a veteran. Sam told him the story of his friend and over the next several days before they were released (and the next forty some years) they would talk incessantly about everything under the sun including their mutual interest in the American Civil War. Both had agreed that the war to preserve the Union (Ralph’s position then) and to abolition slavery (Sam’s) would have found them as soldiers in some Union army, probably some brigade of the Army of the Potomac the way troops from the North were distributed then from the levies their respective governors sent down.       

Although their personal perspectives are not germane to this book review even one hundred plus years later when discussion of the Civil War comes up Northern aficionados will gravitate toward one or the other reason, or in some cases both, for why they would have supported the Northern side in the bloody dispute. Ralph and Sam’s respective takes on their reasons for support are almost chemically pure examples of what drove our forebears toward support for the war.

Ralph born in upstate New York very close to many of the key battles of the American Revolution at Saratoga Springs and its environs was driven by the idea of the need to save the union intact in order for it as Lincoln so eloquently stated to remain the “last, best hope for democracy” on the planet. He was in those days, in his youth totally out of sympathy with the idea of emancipating the slaves as the main reason for fighting. Those early 1960s found Ralph standing side by side with his father in the fight against attempts by blacks from CORE to move into their section of Troy, the Tappan Street section, to live side by side with what Ralph, Senior called “nigras” just like Governor George Wallace down in Alabama was calling them. Ralph, later after having his “ass” saved more than once by a couple of “brothers” and after getting “religion” on the war issue and who was fighting the damn thing like him and those brothers had a sea-change in attitude and wound up doing plenty of defense work for the besieged Black Panthers (along with Sam and other VVAWers) when they were under frontal attack by every police agency in the country. But in the early 1960s he was strictly a “save the union” man.    

Sam on the other had come from a strain of Puritan stock on his mother’s side who had back in the 1850s when they first settled in Carver and its environs been rabid abolitionists, had been at Temple Church in Boston when all the great abolitionist orators would speak against the “abomination of slavery” and that background would be sprinkled generally and gently in the household although his father was nothing but a swamp Yankee cranberry bogger who didn’t give a rat’s ass (an expression used by Sam and his growing up corner boys when they, well, didn’t give a rat’s ass about something). Moreover when Sidney Stein and Ethel Rogers started putting together collections of books to be sent to the poor black kids down in Mississippi after being called on to do so by the NAACP in Boston he volunteered to help although it cost him a lot of grief from his corner boys and others who had about the same attitudes as Ralph and his father. As already mentioned as part of Sam’s radicalization after the death of his friend he also dived right in on the Black Panther defense work, especially the New Haven case where he (and Ralph) stayed for several weeks while the trial was going on.

Like I said Ralph and Sam, although both working class kids came at their interests from different perspectives. Moreover, when they began discussing their mutual interests back in the bastinado in 1971 there was also a difference in emphasis of interest, which has lasted until this day. Ralph was, is always much more interested in the various battles, the strategies, and the military personalities of both side and Sam was, is, more interested in the political conditions which Lincoln and the other Union leaders encountered which determined their strategy for preserving the union (clearly early in the war the sole aim of Lincoln and the great majority in the North) and ultimately by the logic of the fight the struggle for total emancipation of and citizen for the slaves.          

So it was no accident that once the 150^th anniversary of the war began being commemorated in 2011 that Sam and Ralph would take note, take to reconvening their arguments about military versus political strategy as they liked to call it. They were aware since Sam many years before had begun subscribing to the New York Review Of Books that there would be another onslaught of books covering every aspect of the war, from battles and personalities to sanitary conditions and firearms and everything in between. Sam had made Ralph laugh one time when he had read a review of a book, a whole book for Christ sake, about the role of “shoddy,” inferior clothing, shoes and supplies produce by unscrupulous manufacturers on the outcome of the war. This time out there would be the same, maybe more. Of course Sam and Ralph both had small collections of Civil War books gathered over time so they one night at Jack’s Grille in Cambridge, a town where Sam had been living with his wife Lana once the kids were out of the house they decided to “down-size” to a condo from their leafy suburban house in Avon, they decided to dust off some of the old books first and begin their old “wars” once again. Of course one of the great summaries of the military and political events driving the action on both sides in the Civil War was Bruce Catton’s prize-winning trilogy. The first volume concerning the events that led up to the war and the beginning of the bloodshed at that point somewhat amateurish and make-shift The Coming Fury has been reviewed (and disputed by them) elsewhere. The review here of Terrible Swift Sword, the middle years of the war where the fighting turned large-scale, turned furious, turned more merciless and began to clarify the issue of the initial objectives of the war for the preservation of the union (or preservation of the Confederacy) and the remorseless fight for the abolition of slavery is what Ralph and Sam continued their disputes about.            

On the union side once the rout of first Bull Run put the fear of God into the North, made certain forward looking elements on the Union side and not just the abolitionists, civilian and military, realize that a remorseless struggle lie ahead (and the same in the Confederacy particularly Jefferson Davis and once he took charge of the Army of Northern Virginia Robert E. Lee) the military build-up went full steam ahead. Military strategies to strangle the Confederacy, the Anaconda strategy and on the Southern side to decisively defeat the Union Armies and gain recognition as a separate state particularly by France and England mingled in with political objectives. Of course in a book of four hundred dense pages there were too many battles won and lost on both sides for Sam and Ralph to argue about separately not unless they planned to live at Jack’s Grille and drink the place dry. So they decided to concentrate one night on two of the great events of the middle years of the war on the Union side- to satisfy Ralph the role of General McClellan in unnecessarily lengthening the war and to satisfy Sam Lincoln’s decision, kicking and screaming at times, to call for emancipation of the slaves (in reality in stages depending on Union victories since it would take that to get freedom for the slaves in areas where there was no Union armed mandate for such action).           

Ralph although he had always been a partisan of General McClellan for his ability to put together a ragtag semi-army and make it a disciplined force which everybody in authority in the North knew had to be done if the advantage that the North in the mass production of war materials was to lead to victory. But his attitude shifted somewhat once he himself had become more interested in the fight for abolition as the motivating force necessary to spur the armies on once the he realized that the South had an overall military leadership advantage. His initial respect for McClellan had centered on his limited goals for the army, to shore up the Union positions, alleviate the threat to Washington and keep pressure on the Confederate armies getting them bottled up defending Richmond (in any case a mistake in choice for the capital so close to Washington and roaming Union armies).

When he had first met Sam he had argued (rather surreally since they had been in the bastinado for four days by that time and had gotten a little stir crazy) that McClellan represented just the right sense of what was to be done, essentially telegraphing by his sedentary position in front of Washington for great lengths of time, the South to “go in peace.” After re-reading the Catton material about McClellan’s fears of being swamped by non-existent overwhelming Confederate numbers and then allowing a cabal of his own design to form among his staff which threw about thoughts of some kind of military dictatorship for him (with the assumed proviso that he would indeed let the South go in peace) he got most agitated. What made Sam laugh at their recent Jack’s Grille meeting was how irate Ralph had become about McClellan’s “slows” in getting his ass out before the enemy. Here’s the kicker, Ralph blurted out “why didn’t that damn Lincoln boot his ass out after the failed Peninsula campaign.” Sam smirked.        

Ralph got his chance to smirk a bit when Sam started talking about all the new scholarship, or rather commentary since the facts have not changed much in the last hundred and fifty years, about Lincoln’s racial attitudes which colored his attitude toward emancipation as a military necessity rather than a political objective. Of course Lincoln was a man of his time, of his not inconsequential southern roots and of his societal racial attitudes. Many “political correct” commentators these days have cut their teeth on the idea that Lincoln should have had today’s more advanced sensibilities about race and supported the idea of total emancipation earlier on. Sam had been surprised on re-reading the parts about Lincoln’s conversion to partial emancipation as a military necessity since he had remembered differently back in the 1960s and though that Lincoln had been whole-heartedly for emancipation on its own merits. Ralph got to laugh when he said hell “Massa Lincoln” was no better on the race issue than Ralph, Senior was in the early 1960s, and him too.

But some people can change else history would be nothing but a jigsaw puzzle list of names and dates. There is plenty of this in Catton’s books but good solid analysis of the major issues as well. Particularly how the events unfolded militarily and politically so that that merciless struggle against slavery was placed on the historical agenda. Everybody should read the later stuff (maybe not that book on “shoddy” though) but for a great still relevant overview of the big issues Catton still speaks to the amateur and aficionado alike of the Civil War.          

Johnny Cash - We'll Meet Again

The Ink Spots - We'll Meet Again

*****In The Time Of The Second Mountain Music Revival- "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies"-Maybelle Carter-Style

*****In The Time Of The Second Mountain Music Revival- "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies"-Maybelle Carter-Style

From The Pen Of Josh Breslin 

 

 

 

Listen above to a YouTube film clip of a classic Song-Catcher-type song from deep in the mountains, Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. A song-catcher is an old devise, a mythological devise for taking the sound of nature, the wind coming down the mountains, the rustle of the tree, the crack a twig bent in the river, the river follow itself and making an elixir for the ears, simple stuff if you are brave enough to try your luck.  According to my sources Cecil Sharpe, a British musicologist looking for roots in the manner of Francis Child with his ballads in the 1850s, Charles Seeger, and maybe his son Peter too, in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Lomaxes, father and son, in the 1930s and 1940s)"discovered" the song in 1916 in the deep back hills and hollows of rural Kentucky. (I refuse to buy into that “hollas” business that folk-singers back in the early 1960s, guys and gals some of who went to Harvard and other elite schools and who would be hard-pressed to pin-point say legendary Harlan County down in Appalachia, down in the raw coal mining country of Eastern Kentucky far away from Derby dreams, mint juleps and ladies' broad-brimmed hats, of story and song insisted on pronouncing and writing the word hollows to show their one-ness with the roots, the root music of the desperately poor and uneducated. So hollows.)     

Of course my first connection to the song had nothing to do with the mountains, or mountain origins, certainly with not the wistful or sorrowful end of the love spectrum about false true lovers taking in the poor lass who now seeks revenge if only through the lament implied in the lyrics, although  even then I had been through that experience, more than once I am sorry to say. Or so I though at the time. I had heard the song the first time long ago in my ill-spent 1960s youth listening on my transistor radio up in my room in Olde Saco where I grew up to a late Sunday night folk radio show on WBZ from down in Boston that I could pick up at that hour hosted by Dick Summer (who is now featured on the Tom Rush documentary No Regrets about Tom’s life in the early 1960s Boston folk scene while at Harvard hustling around like mad trying to get a record produced to ride the folk minute wave just forming and who, by the way, was not a guy who said or wrote "hollas," okay ). That night I heard the gravelly-voiced late folksinger Dave Van Ronk singing his version of the old song like some latter-day Jehovah or Old Testament prophet something that I have mentioned elsewhere he probably secretly would have been proud to acknowledge. (Secretly since then he was some kind of high octane Marxist/Trotskyist/Socialist firebrand in his off-stage hours and hence a practicing atheist.) His version of the song quite a bit different from the Maybelle Carter effort here. I'll say.

All this as prelude to a question that had haunted me for a long time, the question of why I, a child of rock and roll, you know Bill Haley, La Verne Baker, Wanda Jackson, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and the like had been drawn to, and am still drawn to the music of the mountains, the music of the hills and hollows, mostly, of Appalachia. You know it took a long time for me to figure out why I was drawn, seemingly out of nowhere, to the mountain music most famously brought to public, Northern public, attention by the likes of the Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, The Seegers and the Lomaxes back a couple of generations ago.

The Carter Family hard out of Clinch Mountain down in Virginia someplace famously arrived on the mountain stage via a record contract in Bristol, Tennessee in the days when fledgling radio and record companies were looking for music, authentic American music, to fill the air and their catalogs. Fill in what amounted to niche music since the radio’s range back then was mostly local and if you wanted to sell soap, perfume, laundry detergent, coffee, flour on the air then you had to play what the audience would listen to and then go out and buy the advertiser’s products once they, the great unwashed mass audience, were filled into how wonderful they smelled, tasted, or felt after consuming the sponsors' products. The Seegers and Lomaxes and a host of others, mainly agents of the record companies looking to bring in new talent, went out into the sweated dusty fields sweaty handkerchiefs in hand to talk to some guy who they had heard played the Saturday night juke joints, went out to the Saturday night red barn dance with that lonesome fiddle player bringing on the mist before dawn sweeping down from the hills, went out to the Sunday morning praise Jehovah gathered church brethren to seek out that brother who jammed so well at that juke joint or red barn dance now repentant if not sober, went out to the juke joint themselves if they could stand Willie Jack’s freshly brewed liquor, un-bonded of course since about 1789, went down to the mountain general store to check with Mister Miller and grab whatever, or whoever was available who could rub two bones together or make the rosin fly, maybe sitting right there in front of the store. Some of it pretty remarkable filled with fiddles, banjos and mandolins.

But back to the answer to my haunting question. The thing was simplicity itself. See my father, Prescott, hailed (nice word, right) from Kentucky, Hazard, Kentucky, tucked down in the mountains near the Ohio River, long noted in song and legend as hard coal country. When World War II came along he left to join the Marines to get the hell out of there, get out of a short, nasty, brutish life as a coalminer, already having worked the coal from age thirteen, as had a few of his older brothers and his father and grandfather. During his tour of duty after having fought and bled a little in his share of the Pacific War against the Japanese before he was demobilized he had been stationed for a short while at the Portsmouth Naval Base. During that stay he attended like a lot of lonely soldiers, sailors and Marines who had been overseas a USO dance held in Portland where he met my mother who had grown up in deep French-Canadian Olde Saco. Needless to say he stayed in the North, for better or worse, working the mills in Olde Saco until they closed or headed south for cheaper labor in the late 1950s and then worked at whatever jobs he could find. (Ironically those moves south for cheaper labor were not that far from his growing up home although when asked by the bosses if he wanted move down there he gave them an emphatic “no,” and despite some very hard times later when there wasn't much work and hence much to eat he never regretted his decision at least in public to this wife and kids)

All during my childhood though along with that popular music, you know the big band sounds and the romantic and forlorn ballads that got many mothers and fathers through the war mountain music, although I would not have called it that then filtered in the background on the family living room record player and the mother’s helper kitchen radio.

But here is the real “discovery,” a discovery that could only be disclosed by my parents. Early on in their marriage they had tried to go back to Hazard to see if they could make a go of it there. This was after my older brother Prescott, Junior was born and while my mother was carrying me. Apparently they stayed for several months before they left to go back to Olde Saco before I was born since I was born in Portland General Hospital. So see that damn mountain music and those sainted hills and hollows were in my DNA, was just harking to me when I got the bug. Funny, isn’t it.            

[Sometimes life floors you though, comes at you not straight like the book, the good book everybody keeps touting and fairness dictates but through a third party, through some messenger for good or ill, and you might not even be aware of how you got that sings-song in your head. Wondering how you got that sings-song in your head and why a certain song or set of songs “speaks” to you despite every fiber of your being clamoring for you to go the other way. Some things, some cloud puff things maybe going back to before you think you could remember like your awestruck father in way over his head with three small close together boys, no serious job prospects, little education, maybe, maybe not getting some advantage from the G.I. Bill that was supposed lift all veteran boats, all veterans of the bloody atolls and islands, hell, one time savagely fighting over a coral reef against the Japanese occupiers if you can believe that, who dutifully and honorably served the flag singing some misbegotten melody. A melody learned in his childhood down among the hills and hollows, down where the threads of the old country, old country being British Isles and places like that. The stuff collected in Child ballads back then in the 1850s that got bastardized by ten thousand local players who added their own touches and who no longer used the song for its original purpose red barn dance singers when guys like Buell or Hobart added their take on what they thought the words meant and passed that on to kindred and the gens. The norm of the oral tradition of the folk so don’t get nervous unless there had been some infringement of the copyright laws, not likely.  

Passed on too that sorrowful sense of life of people who stayed sedentary too long, too long on Clinch Mountain or Black Mountain or Missionary Mountain long after the land ran out and he, that benighted father of us all, in his turn sang it as a lullaby to his boys. And the boys’ ears perked up to that song, that song of mountain sadness about lost blue-eyed boys, about forsaken loves when the next best thing came along, about spurned brides resting fretfully under the great oak, about love that had no place to go because the parties were too proud to step back for a moment, about the hills of home, lost innocence, you name it, and although he/they could not name it that sadness stuck.

Stuck there not to bear fruit for decades and then one night somebody told one of the boys a story, told it true as far as he knew about that father’s song, about how his father had worked the Ohio River singing and cavorting with the women, how he bore the title of “the Sheik” in remembrance of those black locks and those fierce charcoal black eyes that pierced a woman’s heart. So, yes, Buell and Hobart, and the great god Jehovah come Sunday morning preaching time did their work, did it just fine and the sons finally knew that that long ago song had a deeper meaning than they could ever have imagined.]         

   

COME ALL YE FAIR AND TENDER LADIES
(A.P. Carter)

The Carter Family - 1932

Come all ye fair and tender ladies

Take warning how you court young men

They're like a bright star on a cloudy morning

They will first appear and then they're gone

They'll tell to you some loving story

To make you think that they love you true

Straightway they'll go and court some other

Oh that's the love that they have for you

Do you remember our days of courting

When your head lay upon my breast

You could make me believe with the falling of your arm

That the sun rose in the West

I wish I were some little sparrow

And I had wings and I could fly

I would fly away to my false true lover

And while he'll talk I would sit and cry

But I am not some little sparrow

I have no wings nor can I fly

So I'll sit down here in grief and sorrow

And try to pass my troubles by

I wish I had known before I courted

That love had been so hard to gain

I'd of locked my heart in a box of golden

And fastened it down with a silver chain

Young men never cast your eye on beauty

For beauty is a thing that will decay

For the prettiest flowers that grow in the garden

How soon they'll wither, will wither and fade away

******

ALTERNATE VERSION:

Come all ye fair and tender ladies

Take warning how you court young men

They're like a star on summer morning

They first appear and then they're gone

They'll tell to you some loving story

And make you think they love you so well

Then away they'll go and court some other

And leave you there in grief to dwell

I wish I was on some tall mountain

Where the ivy rocks are black as ink

I'd write a letter to my lost true lover

Whose cheeks are like the morning pink

For love is handsome, love is charming

And love is pretty while it's new

But love grows cold as love grows old

And fades away like the mornin' dew

And fades away like the mornin' dew

A View From The International Left-Britain: Banana Monarchy-Defend Jeremy Corbyn’s Right to Run the Labour Party!

Workers Vanguard No. 1082	29 January 2016

Britain: Banana Monarchy-Defend Jeremy Corbyn’s Right to Run the Labour Party!

 

LONDON—The election of left-winger Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader has so upset the British establishment that the normal protocols of the “mother of parliaments” have been flouted in favour of public threats by military officers of the highest rank to depose him. Only days after Corbyn’s election came a statement from an unnamed “senior serving general” to the Sunday Times (20 September) forecasting that members of the armed forces would begin directly and publicly challenging Corbyn if he tries to scrap the Trident nuclear missile system, pull out of NATO or if he announces “any plans to emasculate and shrink the size of the armed forces.” According to the Sunday Times, the general said that “the army just wouldn’t stand for it. The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise the security of this country.” He went on to say that people in the military “would use whatever means possible, fair or foul to prevent that,” and that “you would face the very real prospect of an event which would effectively be a mutiny.”

Then, on 8 November, on the BBC’s flagship Andrew Marr show, the serving head of the armed forces, General Sir Nicholas Houghton, effectively declared Corbyn unfit to become prime minister. Aired amid the pomp of “Remembrance Sunday,” a day celebrating Britain’s imperialist wars, the show was a slickly orchestrated and carefully delivered warning from the British establishment that if a Corbyn-led Labour Party were voted into office, the election would be declared null and void. When Marr solicited the general’s opinion on Corbyn’s stated refusal to ever use nuclear weapons, Houghton replied: “Well, it would worry me if that thought was translated into power.” This diplomatic phrase, from a man whose reputation is that he does not “shoot from the lip” but chooses his words carefully, is nothing short of a coup threat. As he vented concern over what policies are acceptable in a government, in military dress uniform, on a day dedicated to the armed forces, the general could well have been declaring a military coup in a Central American “banana republic.” But in Britain—with its hereditary sovereign, who is head of state and head of the armed forces—“banana monarchy” would be more apt.

The general’s attack on Corbyn is part of a relentless campaign by the Tories, the capitalist press and the right wing of the Labour Party to oust him as party leader. Corbyn’s political platform goes beyond the parameters of what is acceptable to the British ruling class, who convinced themselves that, with the demise of the Soviet Union and apparent death of old Labour “socialism,” the class war had been resolved in favour of the capitalists. For the Tory establishment and the Blairite right wing of the Labour Party, Corbyn’s landslide election as Labour leader, based on talk of socialism, trade-union rights and immigrant rights, was a nasty shock. What really makes Corbyn unacceptable—the red lines he has crossed—is that his opposition to both NATO and Trident would undermine Britain’s prestige as an imperialist power and its “special relationship” with the U.S.

Not coincidentally, the same television programme that interviewed General Houghton also featured none other than Maria Eagle, then shadow defence secretary, who is seen as one of the prime candidates in the Parliamentary Labour Party to oust Corbyn. Eagle fully agreed with the general on Britain’s need for a nuclear deterrent to “defend our nation.” Moreover, she was “completely comfortable” with the Chief of the Defence Staff weighing in and “expressing himself in those terms.” The general was in fact issuing a warning against the leader of her own party who, incidentally, had been elected leader with the biggest mandate in the history of the Labour Party.

To his credit, Corbyn issued a formal complaint about Houghton’s breach of the “constitutional principle” that the military stays out of party politics. In his protest letter Corbyn argued that it “is essential in a democracy that the military remains politically neutral at all times.” But the capitalist state, with the armed forces at its core, is not neutral: it is the executive body of the capitalist ruling class.

The current favourite backed by the ruling class to oust Corbyn is the Labour shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn, whose speech in Parliament banging the war drums for the bombing of Syria drew a standing ovation from Prime Minister David Cameron’s Tories—as well as from some of the 66 Labour Members of Parliament (MPs) who voted for the bombing, against the wishes of the leader and the vast majority of the party membership. Benn’s speech caused the establishment to go weak at the knees in adoration. It was “one of the great orations in our Parliament” gushed Tim Collins, a retired army colonel (Telegraph, 3 December). Not a modest man, Collins rated Benn’s “call to arms” in Parliament as being comparable to his very own pre-battle speech to his troops on the eve of the 2003 Iraq invasion, which was reportedly displayed in George W. Bush’s Oval Office. “We go to liberate, not to conquer,” said Collins, but will “wipe them out if that is what they choose.” Both Collins and Houghton earned their stripes with the British Army in Northern Ireland, backing the murderous, sectarian Orange statelet and the Loyalist paramilitaries; later they both commanded troops in the bloody imperialist occupation of Iraq. Corbyn’s opposition to British military interventions in the Near East makes him a particular target for the brass.

In early January, Corbyn attempted to assert political control of his shadow cabinet in a reshuffle. Eagle was replaced as shadow defence secretary, and evidently a deal was struck with Hilary Benn, allowing him to keep his job as shadow foreign secretary as long as he doesn’t openly defy the leader. Corbyn recently raised the prospect that sitting MPs might be dropped from the next electoral slate by the party membership when he said that “policies will be developed through the democratic participation of our own hugely expanded party and supporters.” This put the Blairite MPs in a state of horror, which is delightful to see, over their political futures. “A growing number of us fear a bloodbath” is how one of them put it recently in regards to upcoming changes to constituency boundaries which mean up to ten prominent opponents of Corbyn (including Benn) will have to face membership selection for new seats.

Corbyn’s campaign for and election to the party leadership have set off a class battle within Labour. Corbyn and the tens of thousands who joined the party to support him (it quickly doubled in size) have set in motion a process to reforge the party’s historic links to its working-class base. This is a reversal of the direction the party had been heading, propelled by Tony Blair, towards becoming an overtly capitalist party. Any move that weakens the grip of the Blairites within the party is in the interests of the working class in its struggles against the capitalist class. As the Spartacist League/Britain has stated from the beginning, we have a side in the class war raging in the Labour Party. Against the right-wing attempts to oust him, we say: Defend Jeremy Corbyn’s right to run the Labour Party, and in his way!

The plots against Corbyn bring to mind the 1980s book and television show, A Very British Coup, in which a left-wing Labour government is destabilised by forces including MI5 and the CIA, aided and abetted by right-wingers in the Labour Party and trade-union leadership. You don’t have to go far back in history to find evidence of the British capitalist state plotting the overthrow of a democratically elected government. In 1975, the British monarchy used its “reserve powers” to depose the Australian government of Labor Party prime minister Gough Whitlam in a CIA-engineered “constitutional coup” (see “The CIA, the Queen’s Agent and the Man Who Got in the Way,” Workers Vanguard No. 1061, 6 February 2015).

There is convincing evidence of a plot involving military and intelligence personnel to overthrow Britain’s Labour prime minister Harold Wilson in the 1970s. Wilson was a one-time leftist who moved to the right. In office he provided support to U.S. imperialism in its dirty, losing war in Vietnam. Even so, Wilson was not trusted by the bourgeoisie to bring the combative trade unions to heel in the midst of an economic crisis. The former intelligence officer Peter Wright, in his memoirs, Spycatcher, confirmed allegations that Prime Minister Wilson had also been targeted by MI5 as a suspected KGB agent. In the 2006 BBC documentary The Plot Against Harold Wilson, Brian Crozier, another former intelligence officer, alleged that the army “seriously considered the possibility of a military takeover” against Wilson. Crozier should know. According to the Guardian (9 August 2012), he had “lectured army officers about the risks of a Marxist-Leninist takeover of the ruling Labour Party in the 1970s,” and on one occasion, after telling a group of officers about the potential need for a military coup, “the audience, in his words, ‘rose as one man, cheering and clapping for fully five minutes’.”

In the same documentary, retired major Alexander Greenwood claimed that he had been building up a private army and that a speech had been prepared for the Queen to deliver as part of a coup that would have placed Lord Mountbatten in charge of the country. These claims are given credence by troop manoeuvres at Heathrow Airport at the time, about which Wilson knew nothing. Shortly after the Heathrow manoeuvres, Wilson resigned “on the grounds of ill-health.”

A historic example of the officer corps threatening a coup is the March 1914 mutiny at the Curragh military camp in Ireland, then under British rule. The Liberal government of Herbert Asquith in England had struck a deal with the Irish Nationalist leaders John Redmond and Joseph Devlin for an Irish Home Rule bill, conceding a form of devolved administration. The Protestant Loyalists in the north, organised as the armed Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), rose up in opposition to the legislation, outraged at the prospect of the majority Catholic population being granted any autonomy—however restricted and tokenistic—from the British colonial rulers. When the government tried to send troops from the Curragh Camp in County Kildare to Ulster, the overwhelming majority of officers stated they would resign their commissions rather than move against the UVF. The mutinous officers had been encouraged by Director of Military Operations Major-General Sir Henry Wilson who had been conspiring with the Tories. Prime Minister Asquith had even been under pressure from the king, George V, to grant concessions on behalf of the Loyalists by threatening to withhold Royal Assent to Home Rule and even to dismiss the prime minister. Asquith backed down, and Ulster was excluded from the Home Rule bill—a prelude to the bloody partition of Ireland a few years down the road.

Lenin interpreted this episode as “an epoch-making turning-point, the day when the noble landowners of Britain tore the British constitution and British law to shreds.” He continued:

“All saw what the bourgeoisie and the Liberals have been hypocritically concealing (they are hypocrites everywhere, but nowhere, perhaps, such consummate hypocrites as in Britain). All saw that the conspiracy to break the will of Parliament had been prepared long ago. Real class rule lay and still lies outside of Parliament. The above-mentioned medieval institutions, which for long had been inoperative (or rather seemed to be inoperative), quickly came into operation and proved to be stronger than Parliament. And Britain’s petty-bourgeois Liberals, with their speeches about reforms and the might of Parliament designed to lull the workers, proved in fact to be straw men, dummies, put up to bamboozle the people. They were quickly ‘shut up’ by the aristocracy, the men in power.”

— V.I. Lenin, “Constitutional Crisis in Britain,” 10 April 1914

We Need Workers Republics!

While we defend Corbyn and his supporters against right-wing attacks, our Marxist worldview is counterposed to his parliamentarist programme. A fundamental difference is on the question of the state. Corbyn’s politics are a left-wing version of old Labour (or social democracy) which views the state as impartial. The function of the military, police, courts and prisons—the “special bodies of armed men,” as Lenin referred to them—is to defend the class rule of the tiny core of capitalists, who own the wealth and means of production, against the rest of the population. Parliament is a talk shop whose purpose is to provide a “democratic” cover for the class dictatorship of the capitalist exploiters and oppressors. Parliament is a facade behind which the real business of state is conducted—in the boardrooms of giant banks and corporations. The working class cannot simply take over the machinery of the capitalist state and adapt it for its own class rule. The state must be shattered in the course of a socialist revolution that places the working class in power based on workers councils.

In decisive class conflicts, the full might of the bourgeois state is arrayed against the working class and its allies without any pretence of neutrality, as was shown during the miners strike of 1984-85. Under Margaret Thatcher the capitalist rulers mobilised police-state occupation and civil war in the coalfields. The right wing of the Labour Party, then led by Neil Kinnock, and the Trades Union Congress stood in outright opposition to the embattled miners. The “lefts” in the Labour and trade-union bureaucracy expressed sympathy with the miners but refused to mobilise other unions to strike alongside them, a betrayal which ultimately led to the miners’ defeat.

Corbyn’s opposition to British imperialism’s wars amounts to a more “rational” strategy for British imperialism. In the row over Trident missiles, he has suggested that Britain could retain the submarines but without the nuclear warheads. The working class has no interest in maintaining capitalist Britain’s military capacity or its army. Invoking the slogan famously raised by German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht during World War I, Lenin summed up this principle in the words: “‘Not a penny, not a man,’ not only for a standing army, but even for a bourgeois militia” (“The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution,” September 1916). British imperialism today acts as a toady of the U.S. because the U.S. is the dominant world power and bestrides the world as Britain once did. The British rulers have accumulated enormous wealth over centuries and have a significant military capacity. The notion that “little England” could somehow opt out of the world system is a fantasy; moreover, it is based on a reactionary nationalist perspective. To fully meet the needs of the working people for jobs, decent healthcare, housing and education requires the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism in Britain, the rest of Europe and beyond, led by an internationalist revolutionary party.

Rare within the Parliamentary Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn is an avowed republican. In contrast, the leader of the GMB union, Sir Paul Kenny, is proving his worth as a recently appointed knight of the realm by condemning Corbyn for his opposition to Britain’s nuclear arsenal. Corbyn, as opposition leader, has been admitted to the Queen’s Privy Council, but by all reports did not kneel before “her majesty.”

When asked during his leadership campaign about his attitude to the monarchy, Corbyn said the issue could wait, as his focus was on social justice. While he obviously was trying to avoid being entangled by a media provocation, his answer does reveal a certain mindset—one that regards the monarchy as, although undemocratic, somewhat benign. The monarchy is meant to justify vast class inequality as the natural order of things, to inculcate servility and to celebrate the acceptance of one’s place in class society, free of tumultuous social struggle. The monarchy retains its power as a rallying point for reaction and, as a last resort, would likely provide a figurehead for a military takeover should the bourgeoisie be unable to contain the struggle of the working class by the traditional parliamentary means.

We say: Abolish the monarchy, the House of Lords and the established church. We are for the right of self-determination for Scotland and Wales as part of our programme for working-class power leading to a federation of workers republics in the British Isles.

Against the Labourite myth that socialism can be phased in gradually through bourgeois-democratic channels, Leon Trotsky stressed in his writings on Britain that the British working class needs to learn instead from the country’s revolutionary traditions. The bourgeoisie itself came to power through the Roundhead English Revolution, backed by the lower classes of the day, against the Royalist landed aristocracy. It was compelled to fight a civil war and to finish off feudal class rule with the execution of King Charles I. The republic that followed under the bourgeois revolutionary Oliver Cromwell lasted only a couple of years after his death.

But the restoration of the monarchy and the House of Lords did not restore the absolutist monarchy. The class rule of the bourgeoisie, based on a state that defended capitalist property relations, had been secured by the revolution and, as Trotsky explained, could not be liquidated by the reactionary legislation of the Restoration because “what has been written with the sword cannot be wiped out by the pen” (Where Is Britain Going? [1926]). Trotsky also pointed out that the “British bourgeoisie has erased the very memory of the seventeenth-century revolution by dissolving its past in ‘gradualness’,” all the better to prevent the working class from drawing any revolutionary lessons.

A Leninist-Trotskyist party must base itself on those lessons and on the understanding that the construction of a socialist society can only take its first step through the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state. The Spartacist League/Britain seeks to build a revolutionary workers party based on that programme, which saw its fulfilment in the overthrow of the capitalists and establishment of workers rule in the October 1917 Russian Revolution.