Victory to the Junior Doctors!-Britain’s National Health Service on the Chopping Block

Workers Vanguard No. 1084	26 February 2016

Victory to the Junior Doctors!-Britain’s National Health Service on the Chopping Block

Quality Health Care for All, Free at the Point of Service!

 

LONDON, February 18—Junior-ranking doctors at the National Health Service (NHS) in England are resisting government attacks on their wages and working conditions. The enormous popularity of their struggle speaks to the discontent and frustration among Britain’s working people and minorities. Fully two-thirds of those surveyed supported the 24-hour strikes staged by junior doctors in January and February. Millions lust to see that public schoolboy smirk wiped from the face of Conservative prime minister David Cameron. [Britain’s “public” schools are elite private schools.] Since the Tory [Conservative] government’s re-election last May, an incessant flood of attacks has targeted everything from elementary trade union rights to council [public] housing to education. Now the Cameron government is intent on smashing its boot into what remains of the nationalised health system. That most revered—and rightly so—of the gains of Britain’s working people in the past century has already been crippled by decades of attacks under both Labour and Tory governments.

Beginning in 2012, the previous Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government under Cameron moved to tear up the junior doctors’ contract under the pretext of improving weekend hospital coverage and providing 24/7 care. Under the new contract the government unveiled last summer, these doctors would no longer receive extra pay for working evenings and daytime Saturday shifts. With a miserly base salary beginning at less than £23,000 [$33,000] per year, these doctors—who may remain “junior” for a decade or more—rely on overtime for much of their income.

While the government has trumpeted its offer of an 11 per cent increase in base salary, it is estimated that the new contract would slash junior doctors’ overall pay by some 26 per cent. Moreover, the end to extra pay for most overtime work would encourage desperate NHS hospitals to impose even longer shifts. There are severe staff shortages across the NHS, and the government has no plans for more hiring. Instead, they propose to work doctors and other staff into the ground. “Tired Doctors Make Mistakes,” reads a common junior doctors’ placard that resonates with all those who rely on their care.

On 11 February, the morning after the second 24-hour walkout, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt detonated his “nuclear option,” unilaterally imposing the new contract. With the arrogance and ham-fistedness characteristic of this government, Hunt touted the “support” of 20 NHS executives, many of whom immediately denied any advance knowledge of or agreement with his move. An online petition demanding that Parliament consider a motion of no confidence in the health secretary garnered more than 100,000 signatures in one day. Even Tory MPs [Members of Parliament] voiced consternation over the government’s handling of the issue. Dr. Hannah Mitchell, the daughter of a sitting Tory MP, described Hunt as “either dishonest or stupid” in a letter to the Guardian (12 February).

Vowing to consider further strike action, a spokesman for the British Medical Association (BMA), which represents the doctors, declared of the government: “If it succeeds with its bullying approach of imposing a contract on junior doctors that has been roundly rejected by the profession it will no doubt seek to do the same for other NHS staff.” No doubt, indeed. But a few 24-hour walkouts by junior doctors, who constitute a handful of the more than one million NHS employees, cannot by themselves reverse the capitalist government’s vicious onslaught on the NHS. Meanwhile, many demoralised junior doctors are talking of leaving medicine altogether, or moving to Wales or Scotland (which have different contracts) or abroad.

Three of the country’s biggest unions—Unite, Unison and the GMB—which represent hundreds of thousands of NHS workers, have the clout to bring the NHS, and much of Britain’s economy, to a standstill. But the union tops have not lifted a finger to mobilise their members in solidarity with the junior doctors. Their response to Hunt’s provocation was worse than pathetic. Unison general secretary Dave Prentis bemoaned the fact that unions will lose “faith” in the government’s intentions “if ministers just choose to impose what they want.” The Unite union, headed by Len McCluskey, offered to look “into the legal consequences of imposition” and, predicting a “mass exodus” from the NHS, to “assist junior doctors in the weeks and months to come as their employment circumstances change.”

The government’s vendetta against the junior doctors—and their determined resistance—have placed the future of the NHS at centre stage. A new study by the King’s Fund think tank states, “This is shaping up to be a make or break year for the NHS” (Guardian, 18 February). It could not be clearer that piecemeal privatisation and massive underfunding are wrecking the health service. The Tories are determined to escalate that process until nothing remains of the NHS but a logo. Scarcely a day goes by without some newly reported catastrophe—from the failure to meet the most minimal targets for accident and emergency care to a mental health system that can leave children waiting more than four months for an appointment.

A solid strike throughout the healthcare system—private as well as public—in defence of the junior doctors and of free medical care for all would electrify the proletariat and galvanise the many millions who are fed up with having their housing, healthcare, education and livelihoods hang by a thread. It is necessary to fight for a new leadership of the unions—one which does not sacrifice its members’ wages and jobs in a futile attempt to patch up a bankrupt system but instead pursues a class-struggle fight against capitalist misery. Tied to this is the forging of a revolutionary workers party that will champion the cause of all the oppressed.

The War Against the NHS

Following the passage of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, which signalled a fundamental shift towards private-sector healthcare, the Spartacist League/Britain noted:

“For the British bourgeoisie, the NHS presents an unwelcome overhead—not to mention the easy profits privatisation offers the financial speculators in the City. The interest of the capitalist class in the health of the population comes down to maintaining a workforce fit enough to exploit and soldiers to fight their wars and imperialist adventures. In times of social upheaval, the capitalists may shell out enough to placate the population, but they will always attempt to take those concessions back.”

— “Mobilise Union Power to Defend the NHS,” Workers Hammer No. 222, Spring 2013; reprinted in WV No. 1023, 3 May 2013

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and others on the left lionise the postwar Labour government headed by Clement Attlee as “socialist” because of the nationalisations it carried out. Most of these amounted to giant bailouts of bankrupt industries, for which the state assumed direct responsibility after generously compensating the former owners. But the establishment of the NHS in 1948 was a genuine and far-reaching gain. No longer did working-class families have to worry about paying for the doctor to treat a sick child, or to fear for the needless death of a mother due to infection after childbirth. Many received dental care and glasses for the first time in their lives. This reform was not the result of the kind hearts of the British ruling class. Rather, it was a byproduct of their fear of revolution, as the Soviet workers state, albeit bureaucratically degenerated under Stalinist rule, emerged triumphant from World War II and a wave of working-class militancy swept Europe.

So long as capitalist rule remains, even the most profound reform is reversible under the dictates of the profit system. As the postwar peace turned into a Cold War against the Soviet Union, the capitalists’ priorities shifted. Inroads into the NHS began only four years after its founding, as charges for prescriptions and glasses were introduced to help finance Britain’s involvement in the counterrevolutionary U.S.-led war against the North Korean deformed workers state and the insurgent workers and peasants of South Korea.

In 1990, “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher, whose hatred for the Soviet Union was rivalled only by her hatred for the trade unions, introduced an “internal market” into the NHS, planting the seeds of disintegration. A few years later, the New Labour government of Tony Blair vastly expanded the role of “private finance initiatives” (PFIs), supposedly to provide funds for building new hospitals and schools. The NHS trusts, which manage healthcare provision, were gradually transformed into “foundation trusts,” which borrowed on the financial market, entered joint enterprises with private companies and set their own terms of employment. Blair also created the “Extended Choice Network,” allowing handsomely remunerated private centres to treat NHS patients. Then came Cameron’s Health and Social Care Act, which created the clinical commissioning groups that control the lion’s share of the NHS budget, “a gateway for the outflow of billions in NHS funds to private firms,” as we wrote in our 2013 article.

Now the NHS is fragmented into a plethora of different organisations, some public and some private. As Neena Modi, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, noted in an article in the Guardian (9 February), “The private sector is said to have received 70% of contracts awarded over 2013-14, estimated at £20bn of the total NHS budget of £113bn.” Another £10 billion a year goes towards PFI repayments, and administrative costs of the “internal market” swallow up a further £5-10 billion of NHS funds. Among the private firms currently gouging the NHS are Richard Branson’s Virgin operation as well as the Hospital Corporation of America and Optum, a subsidiary of another U.S. healthcare giant, UnitedHealth Group. The CEO of NHS England is in fact a former executive of UnitedHealth.

The quality of care provided by these profit-hungry outfits can be gleaned from the experience of Circle, the pioneer in private sector involvement in the NHS. Last year, Circle pulled out of a £1 billion contract to run Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridgeshire after a Care Quality Commission inspection gave the facility an “inadequate” rating. The hospital’s privatisation had been upheld as a model for the whole NHS. Circle was only three years into its ten-year contract.

At 7 per cent, Britain’s healthcare budget is a lower percentage of GDP than that of almost any other West European country. To match the average rate of spending of other European countries, the annual NHS budget would have to rise by £43 billion. Yet the government demands billions in “efficiency” cuts while insisting that NHS trusts will be further penalised if they refuse to implement the new contract for junior doctors.

According to the Guardian (13 February), one in five general practice surgeries [doctor’s offices] in London, covering nearly one million people, may close in the next three years because they cannot find replacements for retiring doctors. Meanwhile, the NHS is short of some 15,000 hospital nurses. Coincidentally, that is just about the number of nurses who would have been recruited from outside Europe in the last few years if tighter immigration controls had not been applied. Now the government is also slashing the domestic supply of new nurses by abolishing the NHS bursaries which currently allow student nurses to pay no university fees [tuition] and to receive means-tested subsidies ranging between £1000 and £4000 a year. To make up for the lack of available nurses, the NHS pays parasitic private agencies to provide contract workers.

Defence of the NHS cannot be divorced from other social questions. It is tied to the fight against all racial, sexual and national discrimination and for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, who are heavily represented in the workforce; for an end to university tuition fees and a full living stipend for all students; for cancellation of the PFI debt and the return of privatised hospitals and other health facilities to the public sector; to shut down the parasitic private agencies.

Instead of the division of the workforce among 13 different unions and professional associations, which sows disunity and is used to justify scabbing and passivity, what is needed is a single union made up of all healthcare workers, including [employment] agency workers—from doctors and nurses to lab technicians and cleaners. Such a union could lead a struggle for a massive infusion of funds into the public health service. This includes the fight to expand education and training and increase hiring, under union control, with special programmes to reach out to minorities and immigrants, so that there would be enough doctors, nurses, technicians and other medical staff to care for the whole population. A revolutionary workers party would fight for the expropriation of the private healthcare, insurance and drug companies and for quality healthcare for all free at the point of use, as part of the struggle for socialist revolution.

Workers Need Revolutionary Leadership

It speaks to the spinelessness of the don’t-rock-the-boat apparatchiks who currently head the trade unions that they have left it to a layer of petty-bourgeois professionals to play a vanguard role in defence of the NHS. The union misleaders are driven by a desire not to defend the workers who pay their salaries but to police the working class and maintain class peace. They hide behind a respectful veneration of the bourgeoisie’s laws (and profits!), avoiding any infringement of the anti-union laws, which proscribe spontaneous or solidarity strike action. The capitalists and City [of London] speculators are certainly not so concerned about flouting the laws that supposedly regulate their activities! The union tops’ obeisance to the capitalist order goes a fair way to explain why working people find themselves in their current, parlous state—saddled with declining incomes and zero-hour contracts [with no guaranteed number of hours], working two or more jobs to make ends meet, etc.

In the absence of union struggle, the capitalists have gorged themselves on huge profits derived from the sweat and blood of the workers they exploit while reducing a large and growing part of the populace to penury. The “bedroom tax” on allegedly unoccupied bedrooms of people on housing benefits penalises especially those who can’t or won’t move out of the homes they’ve lived in for decades, e.g., the elderly and disabled. Now, the government proposes that families with a joint income of more than £30,000 (£40,000 in London) be forced to pay exorbitant market rents for council housing. This means that a London family could be penalised an estimated average of £12,000 per year!

Suicides, the leading cause of death among men aged 15-49, are steadily increasing. The lack of mental health facilities plays a role here. But so, surely, must the fact that many people—young and not-so-young—can no longer afford to set up their own households, that college-leavers are saddled with unbearable debts for much of their working lives, that young workers—and older workers who have been thrown out of work—can never expect a well-paid, full-time job.

Health means more than jabs [shots], pills and surgical knives: It means a decent place to live, plenty of good food to eat, safe working conditions, the promise of a future that is not just instability and despair. The inequities and manifold oppressions in capitalist society have their roots in a system based on production for bourgeois profit rather than for human need. To guarantee not only quality healthcare for all but all the other fundamental requirements of life demands the construction of a planned, collectivised economy in which those who labour rule. The only future that will allow the all-sided development of humanity, no longer haunted by material want, is one based on an enormous leap in the productive capacity of society—a global classless, communist society guided by the principle: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. Advances in science and technology beginning with the Industrial Revolution made it possible for Marx and Engels to envisage such a future; the prospect of deepening immiseration and bloody wars underlines how necessary it is to fight for it.

The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, undermined by decades of Stalinist misrule, was seized on by capitalist ideologues to proclaim that socialism was contrary to human nature. Yet today Jeremy Corbyn, the first Labour leader in decades to speak positively of socialism, enjoys the support of millions of working people in this country who are fed up with how the profiteers have wrecked their lives. However, Corbyn’s “parliamentary socialism” is truly a pipe dream, a contradiction in terms. Parliament is a capitalist institution, a cover for the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It is no more possible to achieve workers rule through Parliament than it is to defend the workers interests against the bosses while adhering to the bosses’ rules.

Workers need a revolutionary vanguard party, based on the teachings of Marx and Engels and on the experience of the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Led by the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky, the Revolution demonstrated that it is necessary for the workers to replace the capitalist state with a workers state based on elected workers councils (soviets) in order to open the road to socialism. Although isolated and burdened by the backwardness of an overwhelmingly rural and peasant society and years of economic devastation and social dislocation caused by war and imperialist rampage, the workers state nevertheless used such resources as were available to begin to provide free healthcare and education for all. The Spartacist League is dedicated to building a party of the Bolshevik type, composed of the most conscious and dedicated workers and pro-socialist intellectuals, as part of a reforged Trotskyist Fourth International. The victory of the Fourth International on a global scale will bring about a truly humane epoch.

In Honor Of Women's History Month-From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-How The Bolsheviks Fought For Women's Emancipation

 

In Honor Of Women's History Month-From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-How The Bolsheviks Fought For Women's Emancipation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Honor Of Women's History Month-From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-How The Bolsheviks

*****From The Pen Of American Communist Party Founder And Trotskyist Leader James P. Cannon

*****From The Pen Of American Communist Party Founder And Trotskyist Leader James P. Cannon

Click below to link to the “James P. Cannon Internet Archives.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/
 

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From The Pen Of Josh Breslin

Back in the early 1970s after they had worked out between themselves the rudiment of what had gone wrong with the May Day 1971 actions in Washington, D.C. Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris began some serious study of leftist literature from an earlier time, from back earlier in the century. Those May Day anti-Vietnam War actions, ill-conceived as they in the end turned out to be, centered on the proposition that if the American government would not close down the damn blood-sucking war then they, those thousands that participated in the actions, would close down the government. All Sam, Ralph and those thousands of others got for their efforts was a round-up into the bastinado. Sam had been picked off in the round-up on Pennsylvania Avenue as his group (his “affinity group” for the action) had been on their way to “capture” the White House. Ralph and his affinity group of ex-veterans and their supporters were rounded-up on Massachusetts Avenues heading toward the Pentagon (they had no plans to capture that five-sided building, at least they were unlike Sam’s group not that naïve, just surround it like had occurred in an anti-war action in 1967 which has been detailed in Norman Mailer’s prize-winning book Armies Of The Night). For a time RFK (Robert F. Kennedy) Stadium, the home of the Washington Redskins football team) had been the main holding area for those arrested and detained. The irony of being held in a stadium named after the martyred late President’s younger brother and lightening rod for almost all anti-war and “newer world” political dissent before he was assassinated in the bloody summer of 1968 and in a place where football, a sport associated in many radical minds with all that was wrong with the American system was lost on Sam and Ralph at the time and it was only later, many decades later, as they were sitting in a bar in Boston across from the JFK Federal Building on one of their periodic reunions when Ralph was in town that Sam had picked up that connection.

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

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

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

That is the back story of a relationship has lasted until this day, an unlikely relationship in normal times and places but in that cauldron of the early 1970s when the young, even the not so very young, were trying to make heads or tails out of what was happening in a world they did not crate, and were not asked about there were plenty of such stories, although most did not outlast that search for the newer world when the high tide of the 1960s ebbed in the mid-1970s. Ralph had noticed while milling around the football field waiting for something to happen, waiting to be released, Sam had a VVAW button on his shirt and since he did not recognize Sam from any previous VVAW action had asked if he was a member of the organization and where. Sam told him the story of his friend Jeff Mullin and of his change of heart about the war, and about doing something about ending the damn thing. That got them talking, talking well into the first night of their captivity when they found they had many things in common coming from deeply entrenched working-class cultures. (You already know about Troy. Carver is something like the cranberry bog capital of the world even today although the large producers dominate the market unlike when Sam was a kid and the small Finnish growers dominated the market and town life. The town moreover has turned into something of a bedroom community for the high-tech industry that dots U.S. 495.) After a couple of days in the bastinado Sam and Ralph hunger, thirsty, needing a shower after suffering through the Washington humidity heard that people were finding ways of getting out to the streets through some side exits. They decided to surreptiously attempt an “escape” which proved successful and they immediately headed through a bunch of letter, number and state streets on the Washington city grid toward Connecticut Avenue heading toward Silver Springs trying to hitchhike out of the city. A couple of days later having obtained a ride through from Trenton, New Jersey to Providence, Rhode Island they headed to Sam’s mother’s place in Carver. Ralph stayed there a few days before heading back home to Troy. They had agreed that they would keep in contact and try to figure out what the hell went wrong in Washington that week. After making some connections through some radicals he knew in Cambridge to live in a commune Sam asked Ralph to come stay with him for the summer and try to figure out that gnarly problem. Ralph did, although his father was furious since he needed his help on a big GE contract for the Defense Department but Ralph was having none of that.    

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

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

As they learned more information about past American movements Sam, the more interested writer of such pieces began to write appreciation of past events, places and personalities. His first effort was to write something about the commemoration of the 3 Ls (Lenin, Luxemburg, and Liebknecht) started by the Communist International back in the 1920s in January 1972, the first two names that he knew from a history class in junior college and the third not at all. After that he wrote various pieces like the one below about the labor party question in the United States (leftist have always posed their positions as questions; the women question, the black question, the party question, the Russian question and so on so Sam decided to stick with the old time usage.) Here is what he had to say then which he had recently freshly updated. Sam told Ralph after he had read and asked if he was still a “true believer” said a lot of piece he would still stand by today:      

 

Frank Jackman comment on founding member James P. Cannon and the early American Communist Party taken from a book review, James P. Cannon and the Early American Communist Party, on the “American Left History” blog:

If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past mistakes of our history and want to know some of the problems that confronted the early American Communist Party and some of the key personalities, including James Cannon, who formed that party this book is for you.

At the beginning of the 21st century after the demise of the Soviet Union and the apparent ‘death of communism’ it may seem fantastic and utopian to today’s militants that early in the 20th century many anarchist, socialist, syndicalist and other working class militants of this country coalesced to form an American Communist Party. For the most part, these militants honestly did so in order to organize an American socialist revolution patterned on and influenced by the Russian October Revolution of 1917. James P. Cannon represents one of the important individuals and faction leaders in that effort and was in the thick of the battle as a central leader of the Party in this period. Whatever his political mistakes at the time, or later, one could certainly use such a militant leader today. His mistakes were the mistakes of a man looking for a revolutionary path.

For those not familiar with this period a helpful introduction by the editors gives an analysis of the important fights which occurred inside the party. That overview highlights some of the now more obscure personalities (a helpful biographical glossary is provided), where they stood on the issues and insights into the significance of the crucial early fights in the party.

These include questions which are still relevant today; a legal vs. an underground party; the proper attitude toward parliamentary politics; support to third- party bourgeois candidates;trade union policy; class-war prisoner defense as well as how to rein in the intense internal struggle of the various factions for organizational control of the party. This makes it somewhat easier for those not well-versed in the intricacies of the political disputes which wracked the early American party to understand how these questions tended to pull it in on itself. In many ways, given the undisputed rise of American imperialism in the immediate aftermath of World War I, this is a story of the ‘dog days’ of the party. Unfortunately, that rise combined with the international ramifications of the internal disputes in the Russian Communist Party and in the Communist International shipwrecked the party as a revolutionary party toward the end of this period.

In the introduction the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of the book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show? I would argue that the period under study represented Cannon’s apprenticeship. Although the hothouse politics of the early party clarified some of the issues of revolutionary strategy for him I believe that it was not until he linked up with Trotsky in the late 1920’s that he became the kind of leader who could lead a revolution. Of course, since Cannon never got a serious opportunity to lead revolutionary struggles in America this is mainly reduced to speculation on my part. Later books written by him make the case better. One thing is sure- in his prime he had the instincts to want to lead a revolution.

As an addition to the historical record of this period this book is a very good companion to the two-volume set by Theodore Draper - The Roots of American Communism and Soviet Russia and American Communism- the definitive study on the early history of the American Communist Party. It is also a useful companion to Cannon’s own The First Ten Years of American Communism. I would add that this is something of a labor of love on the part of the editors. This book was published at a time when the demise of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was in full swing and anything related to Communist studies was deeply discounted. Nevertheless, for better or worse, the American Communist Party (and its offshoots) needs to be studied as an ultimately flawed example of a party that failed in its mission to create a radical version of society in America. Now is the time to study this history.

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BOOK REVIEW

NOTEBOOK OF AN AGITATOR- JAMES P. CANNON, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, 1971

If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the socialist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. This book is part of a continuing series of the writings of James P. Cannon that was published by the organization he founded, the Socialist Workers Party, in the 1970’s. Look in this space for other related reviews of this series of documents on and by an important American Communist.

In the introduction the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of the book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show? This certainly is the period of Cannon’s political maturation, especially after his long collaboration working with Trotsky. The period under discussion- from the 1920’s when he was a leader of the American Communist Party to the red-baiting years after World War II- started with his leadership of the fight against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and then later against those who no longer wanted to defend the gains of the Russian Revolution despite the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution. Cannon won his spurs in those fights and in his struggle to orient those organizations toward a revolutionary path. One thing is sure- in his prime which includes this period- Cannon had the instincts to want to lead a revolution and had the evident capacity to do so. That he never had an opportunity to lead a revolution is his personal tragedy and ours as well.

I note here that among socialists, particularly the non-Stalinist socialists of those days, there was controversy on what to do and, more importantly, what forces socialists should support. If you want to find a more profound response initiated by revolutionary socialists to the social and labor problems of those days than is evident in today’s leftist responses to such issues Cannon’s writings here will assist you. I draw your attention to the early part of the book when Cannon led the Communist-initiated International Labor Defense (ILD), most famously around the fight to save the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti here in Massachusetts. That campaign put the Communist Party on the map for many workers and others unfamiliar with the party’s work. For my perspective the early class-war prisoner defense work was exemplary.

The issue of class-war prisoners is one that is close to my heart. I support the work of the Partisan Defense Committee, Box 99 Canal Street Station, New York, N.Y 10013, an organization which traces its roots and policy to Cannon’s ILD. That policy is based on an old labor slogan- ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’ therefore I would like to write a few words here on Cannon’s conception of the nature of the work. As noted above, Cannon (along with Max Shachtman and Martin Abern and Cannon’s long time companion Rose Karsner who would later be expelled from American Communist Party for Trotskyism with him and who helped him form what would eventually become the Socialist Workers Party) was assigned by the party in 1925 to set up the American section of the International Red Aid known here as the International Labor Defense.

It is important to note here that Cannon’s selection as leader of the ILD was insisted on by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) because of his pre-war association with that organization and with the prodding of “Big Bill’ Haywood, the famous labor organizer exiled in Moscow. Since many of the militants still languishing in prison were anarchists or syndicalists the selection of Cannon was important. The ILD’s most famous early case was that of the heroic anarchist workers, Sacco and Vanzetti. The lessons learned in that campaign show the way forward in class-war prisoner defense.

I believe that it was Trotsky who noted that, except in the immediate pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods, the tasks of militants revolve around the struggle to win democratic and other partial demands. The case of class-war legal defense falls in that category with the added impetus of getting the prisoners back into the class struggle as quickly as possible. The task then is to get them out of prison by mass action for their release. Without going into the details of the Sacco and Vanzetti case the two workers had been awaiting execution for a number of years and had been languishing in jail. As is the nature of death penalty cases various appeals on various grounds were tried and failed and they were then in imminent danger of execution.

Other forces outside the labor movement were also interested in the Sacco and Vanzetti case based on obtaining clemency, reduction of their sentences to life imprisonment or a new trial. The ILD’s position was to try to win their release by mass action- demonstrations, strikes and other forms of mass mobilization. This strategy obviously also included, in a subordinate position, any legal strategies that might be helpful to win their freedom. In this effort the stated goal of the organization was to organize non-sectarian class defense but also not to rely on the legal system alone portraying it as a simple miscarriage of justice. The organization publicized the case worldwide, held conferences, demonstrations and strikes on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. Although the campaign was not successful and the pair were executed in 1927 it stands as a model for class war prisoner defense. Needless to say, the names Sacco and Vanzetti continue to be honored to this day wherever militants fight against this system.

I also suggest a close look at Cannon’s articles in the early 1950’s. Some of them are solely of historical interest around the effects of the red purges on the organized labor movement at the start of the Cold War. Others, however, around health insurance, labor standards, the role of the media and the separation of church and state read as if they were written in 2014 That’s a sorry statement to have to make any way one looks at it.

Spring Walk For Peace

*****I Hear The Voice Of My Arky Angel-Once Again-With Angel Iris Dement In Mind

*****I Hear The Voice Of My Arky Angel-Once Again-With Angel Iris Dement In Mind

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman  

SWEET FORGIVENESS (Iris DeMent)

(c) 1992 Songs of Iris/Forerunner Music, Inc. ASCAP

Sweet forgiveness, that's what you give to me

when you hold me close and you say "That's all over"

You don't go looking back,

you don't hold the cards to stack,

you mean what you say.

Sweet forgiveness, you help me see

I'm not near as bad as I sometimes appear to be

When you hold me close and say

"That's all over, and I still love you"

There's no way that I could make up for those angry words I said

Sometimes it gets to hurting and the pain goes to my head

Sweet forgiveness, dear God above

I say we all deserve a taste of this kind of love

Someone who'll hold our hand,

and whisper "I understand, and I still love you"

AFTER YOU'RE GONE (Iris DeMent)

(c) 1992 Songs of Iris/Forerunner Music, Inc. ASCAP

There'll be laughter even after you're gone

I'll find reasons to face that empty dawn

'cause I've memorized each line in your face

and not even death can ever erase the story they tell to me

I'll miss you, oh how I'll miss you

I'll dream of you and I'll cry a million tears

but the sorrow will pass and the one thing that will last

is the love that you've given to me

There'll be laughter even after you're gone

I'll find reason and I'll face that empty dawn

'cause I've memorized each line in your face

and not even death could ever erase the story they tell to me

Every once in a while I have to tussle, go one on one with the angels, or a single angel is maybe a better way to put it. No, not the heavenly ones or the ones who burden your shoulders when you have a troubled heart but every once in a while I need a shot of my Arky angel, Iris Dement. Now while I don’t want to get into a dissertation about the thing, you know, that old medieval Thomist argument about how many angels can fit on the end of a needle. Or, Jesus,  or get into playing sides in the struggle between pliant wimpy god-like angels and defiant hellion devil-like angels in the battles in the heavens over who would rule the universe that the great revolutionary English poet from the time of the 17^th century  English revolution of blessed memory, you know old Jehovah fearing Oliver Cromwell time, John Milton, when he got seriously exercised over that notion in Paradise Lost.  However  I do believe we our faced, vocally faced with someone who could go mano y mano with whoever wants to enter into the lists against her.

Yes, and I know too that that “angel,” earthly material five feet plus of flesh and bone angel thing has been played out much too much in the world music scene, the popular music scene, you know rock and roll in the old days and now mainly hip-hop. You could hardly live a 1950s childhood extending into a 1960 coming of age teenage-hood  without being bombarded by every kind of angel every time you put your quarter in the jukebox especially if the other hand attached to that quarter, as it usually was had been your everlovin’ dreamy date who just had to hear you compare her to the Earth Angel of the then currently popular song.

On a more sober note when some poor by the midnight telephone (now cellphone, okay, Smartphone) girl was beside herself when her Johnny did not call at nine like he said he would and she wanted to deny reality, a reality pointed out to her by her best friend one Monday morning before school talkfest that her Johnny Angel just couldn’t keep one girl happy but had to play the field (including an almost successful run at that best girlfriend). Going to the distaff side (nice old-fashioned word, right) some Honky-Tonk Angel who was lured into the night life, who went back to the wild side of life where the wine and liquor flowed and she was just waiting there to be anybody’s darling who would eventually be done in by her own her own hubris, Hank’s morbid angel of death that seemed to hover over his every move until the big crash out, until the lights flickered out.

There’s my favorite, no question, though showing just how recklessly secular the angel angle could spin on a platter, no question, Teen Angel. And this will put paid to the notion that the teens in those days were any smarter in going about the business of being a teenager than today’s crop. Let me give few details and if you don’t believe me then just go God Google the lyrics and be done with it. Some, I don’t know how else to say it although I will give advanced apologies to the rest of women-kind, some maybe sixteen year old bimbo of unknown intelligence but you decide for yourselves once you hear the story line  and of unknown looks whose boyfriend’s car got stuck on a railroad track one Friday date night after a full course of heavy breathing, you can figure the doing what part, down at the local beach, the boyfriend got her out safely and yet she went running back, running back to get his two-bit class ring, a ring that he had probably given to half the girls in school before her, and did not come out alive. Of course the guy was broken up about it, probably personally wrote the words to the song for the guy who sang the song for all I know but let’s leave it at this since I don’t like to speak unkindly of the dead, even the reckless dead, RIP, sister, RIP.

So that's off my chest.  No, that fleet of angle-tipped songs are strictly from nowhere, I will take my sensible Arky angel, take her with a little sinning on the side if you can believe there is any autobiographical edge to some of the songs she sings, take her with a little forlorn lilt in her voice, take her since she has seen the seedy side of life. Seen “from hunger” days and heart hurts. Yeah, that is how I like my angels. Alive as hell and well.                 

Every once in a while when I am blue, not a Billie Holiday blue, the blues down in the depths when you have to just hear her, flower in hair, maybe junked up, maybe clean, hell, it did not matter, when she hit her stride, and she “spoke” you out of your miseries, but maybe just a passing blue I needed to hear a voice that if there was an angel heaven voice Iris would be the one I would want to hear.    

I first heard Iris DeMent doing a cover of a folksinger-songwriter Greg Brown’s tribute to Jimmy Rodgers, the old time Texas yodeler discovered around same time as the original Carter Family in the late 1920s out in some Podunk town in Tennessee when the new-fangled radio and the upstart small independent record companies were desperate for roots music to feed their various clienteles whatever soap, flour, detergent, deodorant their hungry advertisers had to sell, on his tribute album, Driftless. I then looked for her solo albums and for the most part was blown away by the power of Iris’ voice, her piano accompaniment and her lyrics (which are contained in the liner notes of her various albums, read them, please). It is hard to type her style. Is it folk? Is it Country Pop? Is it semi-torch songstress? Well, whatever it maybe that Arky angel is a listening treat, especially if you are in a sentimental mood.

Naturally when I find some talent that “speaks” to me I grab everything they sing, write, paint, or act I can find. In Iris’ case there is not a lot of recorded work, with the recent addition of Sing The Delta just four albums although she had done many back-ups or harmonies with other artists most notably John Prine. Still what has been recorded blew me away (and will blow you away), especially as an old Vietnam War era veteran her There is a Wall in Washington about the guys who found themselves on the Vietnam Memorial without asking for the privilege or knowing what the hell they were fighting for in that hellish war, probably one of the best anti-war songs you will ever hear. That memorial containing names very close to me, to my heart and I shed a tear each time I even go near the memorial when I am in D.C. It is fairly easy to write a Give Peace a Chance or Where Have All the Flowers Gone? sings-song type of anti-war song. It is another to capture the pathos of what happened to too many families when we were unable to stop that war.

The streets of my old-time growing up neighborhood are filled with memories of guys I knew, guys who didn’t make it back, guys who couldn’t adjust coming back to the “real world” and wound up in flop houses, half-way houses, and along railroad “jungle” camps and also strangely enough these days given my own experiences guys who could not get over their not going into the service, in retrospect, to experience the decisive event of our generation, the generation of ‘68.

Other songs that have drawn my attention like When My Morning Comes hit home with all the baggage working class kids have about their inferiority when they screw up in this world. Walking Home Alone evokes all the humor, bathos, pathos and sheer exhilaration of saying one was able to survive, and not badly, after growing up poor, Arky poor amid the riches of America. (That may be the “connection” as I grew up through my father coal country Hazard, Kentucky poor.)  

Frankly, and I admit this publicly in this space, I love Ms. Iris Dement. Not personally, of course, but through her voice, her lyrics and her musical presence. This “confession” may seem rather startling coming from a guy who in this space is as likely to go on and on about Bolsheviks, ‘Che’, Leon Trotsky, high communist theory and the like. Especially, as well given Iris’ seemingly simple quasi- religious themes and commitment to paying homage to her rural background in song. All such discrepancies though go out the window here. Why?

Well, for one, this old radical got a lump in his throat the first time he heard her voice. Okay, that happens sometimes-once- but why did he have the same reaction on the fifth and twelfth hearings? Explain that. I can easily enough. If, on the very, very remotest chance, there is a heaven then I know one of the choir members. Enough said. By the way give a listen to Out Of The Fire and Mornin’ Glory. Then you too will be in love with Ms. Iris Dement.

Iris, here is my proposal, once again. (I have made the offer in other spaces reviewing her work more seriously.) If you get tired of fishing up in the U.P., or wherever, with Mr. Greg Brown, get bored with his endless twaddle about old Iowa farms and buxom aunts, about the trials and tribulations of Billy from the hills, or going on and on about Grandma's fruit cellar just whistle. Better yet just yodel like you did on Jimmie Rodgers Going Home on that Driftless CD. Okay.

In Honor Of Women's History Month- Lucy On The Edge Of The World

In Honor Of Women's History Month- Lucy On The Edge Of The World

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman   

People, ordinary night owls, strung out on bennie or cousin coke and coming the hours until day break and sun, hung-over sotted refugees from the now closed bars and cabarets filled with cheap liquors and quaffed beers, average sainted vagabond Saint Francis of Assisi dream  wanderers of the Harvard Square night, the shiftless watch out for dark alleys when they stalk the benighted earth, the toothless homeless, coming into the all-night Hayes-Bickford seeking, like him,  relief from their collective woes with a cup of weak-kneed coffee from the giant spouted tureen all aglow from the cloudburst above trailing off to the chipped paint ceiling which only those looking to some misbegotten heaven paid attention, and steamed, steamed carrots, potatoes, broccoli, celery, steamed everything, did not bother Lucy (the first name Lucy was all anybody ever found out about her name as far as he knew) sitting alone at her “reserved” table in the back of the cafeteria toward the well-abused rest rooms. Lucy Lilac (nicknamed by some ancient want-to-be fellow bard perhaps but like her surname the genesis undisclosed to him by the other regular tenants of the night when he asked around and so he called her by that moniker as well) spent her youthful (she was perhaps twenty-two, maybe twenty-three, had just finished college, he had heard, so that age seemed about right) middle of the nights just then hunched over a yellow legal notepad filling up its pages with her writings and occasionally she would speak some tidbit she had written out loud, not harmful offensive so you prayed for shut ears, a well-placed handkerchief in mouth, a metaphorical gun, loud like some of the drunks at a few of the tables, or some homeless wailing banshee cry, but just sing-song out loud.

Some of it was beautiful, and some of it was, well, doggerel, about par  for the course with poets and other writers, But all of it, whatever he heard of it, was centered on her plight in the world as a woman torn, as a woman on the edge, the edge between two societies, between as one professor that he had asked about it later stated it, two cultural gradients if that term has any meaning, and maybe she had been, had been between those two cultural gradients,  but let him try to reconstruct what it was all about, all about for Lucy Lilac night owl.

See he became so fascinated by where she was going with her muse in 1962 summer nights, about how she was going to resolve that battle between “cultural gradients” and about the gist of what she had to say to a callow world in those days that he turned up many a two in morning weekend morning to try to figure her dream out. He had more than a passing interest in this battle since he was also spooked by those same demons that she spoke of.    

[Oh, by the way, Lucy Lilac, was drop-dead beautiful, with long black iron-pressed straight hair as was the style then after the folk singer Joan Baez, her sister Mimi and Judy Collins set the pace and the Square and college air was filled singed smells, alabaster white skin whether from her daylight hours of  sleep or by genetic design was not clear, big red lips, which he did not remember whether was the style then or not, the bluest eyes of blue, always wearing dangling earrings and usually wearing some long dress so it was never really possible to determine her figure or her legs important pieces of knowledge to him, and not just to him, in those sex-obsessed  days, but he would have said slender and probably nice legs too. Since neither her beauty, nor the idea of sex, at least pick-up sex, enter into this sketch that is all that needs to be pointed out. Except this, her beauty, along with that no-nonsense demeanor, was so apparent that it held him, and others too, off from anything other than an occasional distant forlorn smile. ]               

What Lucy Lilac would speak of, like a lot of the young in those days, was her alienation from parents, society, just everything to keep it simple, but not just that. On that she had kindred spirits in abundance.  She was also alienated from her race, her white race, her nine to five, go by the rules, we are in charge, trample on the rest of the world, especially the known black world, like lot of  the young, him included, were in those days as well.  Part of it was that you could not turn open a newspaper or turn on a radio or television without having the ugly stuff going down South in America (and sometimes stuff in the North too confronting you headlong). But part of it was an affinity with black culture (the gradient, okay), mainly through music and a certain style, a certain swagger in the face of a world filled with hostility. Cool, to use just one word. 

Now this race thing, this white race thing of Lucy’s had nothing to do, he did not think, at least when she spoke never came through, with some kind of guilt by association with the rednecks and crackers down in places like Alabama and Mississippi goddams. It was more that given the deal going down in the world, the injustices, the not having had any say in what was going on, or being asked either made her feel like she was some Negro in some shack some place. Some mad priestess fellaheena scratching the good earth to make her mark. And as she expanded her ideas (and began to get a little be-bop flow as she spoke, a flow that he secretly kept time to), each night he got a better sense of what she was trying to say. (He later learned that she was, as he had been, very influenced by Norman Mailer’s essay in The Partisan Review The White Negro, a screed on what he called the white hipster, those who had parted company with their own culture and moved to the sexier, sassy cultural gradient.) And while they both were comfortably ensconced in the cozy Cambridge Hayes (well maybe not cozy but safe anyway) and had some very white skin to not have Mister James Crow worry about he began to see what she meant.

And Lucy Lilac really hit home when she spoke of how she had, to his surprise since she gave every indication of being some cast-off Mayfair swell’s progeny, minus that important race thing, been brought up under some tough circumstances down in New Jersey. She spoke about being from poor, very poor white folks somewhere around Toms River, her father out of work a lot worrying about the next paycheck and keeping him and his under some roof, her mother harried by taking care of five kids on two kids money, about being ostracized by the other better off kids, about seeking solace in listening to Bessie Smith, Billie, and a ton of other blues names that he recognized. And he too recognized fellahin kindred since his own North Adamsville existence seemed so similar ….

Yes, those nights he knit a secret and unknown bond with Lucy Lilac, Lucy who a few months later vanished from the Hayes-Bickford night, Lucy from the edge of the world, and wherever she wound he knew just what she meant by the white Negro hipster-dom she was seeking, and that maybe he was too…

And hence this Women’s History Month contribution.