*****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

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/
 

*************

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