*****The Promise of a Socialist Society

*****The Promise of a Socialist Society

(Quote of the Week)

 

Workers Vanguard No. 1025	3    1 May 2013

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Promise of a Socialist Society

(Quote of the Week)

In the selection below, Friedrich Engels makes plain how proletarian revolution opens the road to an emancipated future in which the productive powers of humanity are unleashed for the benefit of all mankind.

Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them.

Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself....

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears.... Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history—only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.

—Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878)

 

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

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

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

 
Here is  good reason why: 

Late one night in 2014 Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton had been sitting at a bar in Boston, Jack Higgin’s Grille, down a few streets from the financial district toward Quincy Market talking about various experiences, political experiences in their lives, as they were wont to do these days since they were both mostly retired. Ralph having turned over the day to day operation of his specialty electronics shop in Troy, New York to his youngest son as he in his turn had taken over from his father Ralph, Sr. when he had retired in 1991 (the eldest son, Ralph III, had opted for a career as a software engineer for General Electric still a force in the local economy although not nearly as powerful as when Ralph was young and it had been the largest private employer in the Tri-City area) and Sam had sold off his small print shop business in Carver down about thirty miles south of Boston to a large copying company when he had finally seen a few years before the writing on the wall that the day of the small specialty print shop specializing in silk-screening and other odd job methods of reproduction was done for.

So they had time for remembrances back to the days in the early 1970s when they had first met and had caught the tail-end of the big splash 1960s political and social explosion that stirred significant elements of their generation, “the generation of ’68” so-called by Sam’s friend from New York City Fritz Jasper although neither of them had been involved in any of the cataclysmic events that had occurred in America (and the world) that year. Occasionally Ralph would come to Boston on trips and Sam would return the favor by going out to Albany (or more frequently to Saratoga Springs where he, they could see who from the old days, the old folk minute of the early 1960s that Sam had been very interested in when he started to hang around Cambridge later in the decade, was still alive enough to be playing at the famous coffeehouse still going from the 1960s, the Café Lena, minus Lena for quite a while now).         

The conversation that night in 2014 got going after the usual few whiskey and sodas to fortify them have been pushed in the direction of what ever happened to that socialist vision that had driven some of their early radical political work together. The specific reason for that question coming up that night had been that Sam had asked Ralph a few weeks before to write up a little remembrance of when he first heard the socialist-anarchist-communist-radical labor militant international working class anthem, the Internationale for Fritz Jasper’s blog, American Protest Music. Sam had noted that Ralph with a certain sorrow had stated that he no longer had occasion to sing the song. Moreover one of the reasons for that absence was despite his and Sam’s continued "good old cause" left-wing political activism socialism as a solution to humankind’s impasses was deeply out of favor (that activism as Ralph mentioned to Sam on more than one occasion considerably shortened these days from the old frenzied 24/7 desperate struggles around trying to unsuccessfully end the Vietnam War from the American side by getting the government to stop the damn thing although the Vietnamese liberation forces had in the end and at great cost no trouble in doing so).

 

People, radical intellectuals and thoughtful working stiffs alike, no longer for the most part had that socialist goal on their radar, didn’t see a way out of the malaise through that route. Had backed off considerably from that prospective since the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites if not before and despite the obvious failure of capitalist society to any longer put a dent in the vast inequalities and injustices, their suffered inequalities and injustices, in the world. Sam had had to agree to that sad statement, had to agree that they in effect too had abandoned that goal in their own lives for all practical purposes even though they had been driven by that vision for a while once they got “religion” in the old days in the early 1970s, once they saw that the anti-war struggle that animated their first efforts was not going to get the war-makers to stop making war, or do anything else of human good.

Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was growing older and more reflective, maybe Ralph’s comments had stirred up some sense of guilt for losing the hard edge of their youthful dreams but that night Sam wanted to press the issue of what that socialist prospective meant, what they thought it was all about (both agreed in passing, almost as an afterthought that what happened, what passed for socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was NOT what they were dreaming of although they gave "Third World" liberation struggles against imperialism like in Vietnam and Cuba  dependent on Soviet aid plenty of wiggle room to make mistakes and still retain their support).        

Both men during the course of their conversation commented on the fact that no way, no way in hell, if it had not been for the explosive events of the 1960s, of the war and later a bunch of social issues, mainly third world liberation struggles internationally and the black liberation struggles at home they would not even be having the conversation they were having (both also chuckling a little at using the old time terms, especially the use of “struggle” and “question,” for example the  black, gay, women question since lately they had noticed that younger activist no longer spoke in such terms but the more ephemeral “white privilege,” “patriarchy,”  “gender” reflecting the identity politics that have been in fashion for a long time now, since the ebb flow of the 1960s and which partially caused that ebbing). 

No, nothing in the sweet young lives of Samuel Eaton to the Carver cranberry bog capital of world (then) working-class born (his father a bogger himself when they needed extra help) and Ralph Morris, Junior to the Troy General Electric plants-dominated working class born would have in say 1967, maybe later, projected that almost fifty years later they would be fitfully and regretfully speaking about their visions of socialism and it demise as a world driving force for social change. 

Ralph and Sam had imbibed all the standard identifiable working-class prejudices against reds, some more widespread among the general population of the times, you know, like the big red scare Cold War “your mommy is a commie, turn her in,” the Russians are coming get under the desk and hold onto your head,  anybody to the left of Grandpa Ike, maybe even him, communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy; against blacks (Ralph had stood there right next to his father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with him and his corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people sometimes to their faces and Sam’s father was not much better, a southerner from hillbilly country down in Appalachia who had been stationed in Hingham at the end of World War II and stayed, who never could until his dying breathe call blacks anything but the “n” word); against gays and lesbians (Ralph and his boys mercilessly fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where those creeps spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other and Sam likewise down in Provincetown with his boys, he helping, beating up some poor guy in a back alley after one of them had made a false pass at the guy, Jesus; against uppity women, servile, domestic child-producing women like his good old mother and wanna-bes were okay as were “easy” girls ready to toot their whistles, which they had only gotten beaten out of them when they ran into their respective wives who had both been influenced by the women’s liberation movement although truth to tell those wives were not especially political, but rather artistic.  Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar, were written off in any case as fodder for cowboys and soldiers in blue. But mainly they had been red, white and blue American patriotic guys who really did have ice picks for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around Ralph’s hometown way).       

See Ralph, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war movement for personal reasons at first reasons which had to do a lot with ending the war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking world” (Ralph’s term). Certainly not creeping around the fringes of socialism before the 1960s ebbed and they had to look to the long haul. Ralph’s story is a little bit amazing, see, he had served in the military, served in the Army, in Vietnam, had been drafted in early 1967 while he was working in his father’s electrical shop and to avoid being “cannon fodder” as anybody could see what was happening to drafted as infantry guys he had enlisted (three years against the draft’s two) with the expectation of getting something in the electrical field as a job, something useful. But in 1967, 1968 what Uncle needed, desperately needed as General Westmoreland called for more troops, was more grunts to flush out Charlie and so Ralph wound up with a unit in the Central Highlands, up in the bush trying to kill every commie he could get his hands on just like the General wanted. He had even extended his tour to eighteen months to get out a little early from his enlistment not so much that he was gung-ho but because he had become fed up with what the war had done to him, what he had had to do to survive, what his buddies had had to do to survive and what the American government had turned them all into, nothing but animals, nothing more, as he told everybody who would listen.

 

When he was discharged in late 1969 he wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the main anti-war veterans group at the time and a real indication even today of how unpopular that war was when the guys, mostly guys then, rose up against the slaughter, taking part in a lot of their actions around Albany and New York City mainly.

Sam as he recalled how he and Ralph had met in Washington had remembered that Ralph had first noticed that he was wearing a VVAW supporter button and Ralph had asked if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little sheepishly, explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was the sole support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away of a massive heart attack in 1965. (He had gone to work in Mister Snyder’s print shop where he had learned enough about the printing business to later open his own shop after he settled down when the 1960s ebbed and people started heading back to “normal.”) He then told Ralph the reason that he had joined the anti-war movement after years of relative indifference since he was not involved had been that his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in the Central Highlands and that made him question what was going on. Jeff, like them had been as red, white and blue as any guy, had written him in Vietnam though that the place, the situation that he found himself in was more than he bargained for, and that if he didn’t make it back for Sam to tell people, everybody he could what was really going on. Then with just a few months to go he was blown away near some village that Sam could not spell or pronounce correctly even all these many years later. Jeff had not only been Sam’s best friend but was as straight a guy as you could meet, and had gotten Sam out of more than a few scrapes, a few illegal scrapes that could have got him before some judge. So that was how Sam got “religion,” not through some intellectual or rational argument about the theories of war but because his friend had been blown away, blown away for no good reason as far as that went.  

At first Sam had worked with Quakers and other pacifist types because he knew they were in Cambridge where he found himself hanging out more and more trying to connect with the happenings that were splitting his generation to hell and back. They got him doing acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, including the Carver Draft Board on Allan Road the place where Jeff had been drafted from (and which created no little turmoil and threats among the neighbors who were still plenty patriotic at that point, his mother and sisters took some of the fire as well), military bases and recruiting stations to try to get the word out to kids who might get hoodwinked in joining up in the slaughter. As the war dragged on though he started going to Cambridge meetings where more radical elements were trying to figure out actions that might stop the damn war cold and that appealed to him more than the “assuming the government was rational and would listen to reason” protest actions of those “gentile little old ladies in tennis sneakers.”

1971 though, May Day 1971 to be exact is, where these two stories, two very different stories with the same theme joined together. Sam at that point in 1971 was like Ralph just trying to get the war ended, maybe help out the Panthers a little but before May Day had no grandiose ideas about changing the “whole freaking world.” Sam had come down to Washington with a group of Cambridge radicals and “reds” to do what he could to shut down the war. They met on the bizarre football field at RFK Stadium which was the main holding area for the thousands of people arrested that day (and throughout the week)

So May Day was a watershed for both men, both sensing that even to end the war would take much more, and many more people, than they had previously expected. Ralph, in particular, had been carried away with the notion that what he and his fellow veterans who were going to try to symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as veterans would cause the government pause, would make them think twice about any retaliation to guys who had served and seen it all. Ralph got “smart” on that one fast when the National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it that day, treated them like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968, treated them like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and like anybody else who raised their voices against governmental policy in the streets.

They after the fall-out from that event were thus searching for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those few days of detention in D.C. not only started what would be a lifelong personal friendship but an on-going conversation between them over the next several years about how to bring about the greater social change they sensed was needed before one could even think about stopping wars and stuff like that. Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red collectives” that were sprouting up then peopled by others who had the same kind of questions which they would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few years before both men sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s had ebbed. 

Such thoughts even with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back of his brain crossed his mind when Ralph thought of Marx, Lenin (he, they, were not familiar with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes. Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told Ralph one night after a class and they were tossing down a few at Jack’s before heading home.

And the Marxism did not come easy, the theory part, maybe for Ralph a little more than Sam who had taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had built from nothing after Mister Snyder moved his operation to Quincy to be nearer his main client, State Street Bank and Trust (although for long periods his old Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his campaigns). They got that the working-class, their class, should rule and be done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind Marxism, that impossible to read Das Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with seven seals for them both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976 when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see they hung around with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation struggles and political prisoner defense work. Those were really the earnest “socialist years” although if you had asked them for a model of what their socialism looked like they probably would have pointed to Cuba which seemed fresher than the stodgy old Soviet Union with their Brezhnev bureaucrats.

After that time while they would periodically read the left press and participate any time somebody, some group needed bodies for a rally, demonstration, some street action they would be there in their respective hometowns that they had both eventually filtered back to. Then 2002 came and the endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and seemingly a million other places drove them to drop their “armed truce” (Sam’s term picked up by Ralph) with society and return to the streets , return with an almost youthful vengeance. They would see young people at the rallies hocking their little Marxist papers, maybe buy one to read at home but that flame that had caused them to join study groups, to work with Marxist-oriented “red collectives,” to read books that were hard to fathom had passed, had passed just as socialism as a way to end humankind’s impasses had fallen out of favor once the Soviet Union and its satellites had gone up in a puff of smoke. Sam thought one time that maybe those earnest kids with their wafer-thin newspapers will study the classics and make more sense out of them than Sam and Ralph could. As for Sam and Ralph they would now just keep showing up to support the “good old cause.”              

*****Got Them Down-Hearted Blues-With The Empress Of The Blues Bessie Smith In Mind

*****Got Them Down-Hearted Blues-With The Empress Of The Blues Bessie Smith In Mind  

From The Pen Of Sam Eaton

Sure 1920s guys, gals too, black guys, black gals sweating out their short, brutalized lives on Mister’s 28,000 acres of the best bottomland along the river in Mississippi or some such number of acres,  probably it didn't matter to have an official count on the acres to them because all of the land went endlessly to the horizon and the work too had plenty to have the blues about. Had suffered the double whack of having to put up with Mister's Mister James Crow laws to boot which only added to the misery of those endless acres. Sure maybe some woe begotten poor white trash down in hard-boiled Appalachia in those famed hills and hollows had plenty of blues too although they did not call them that even in those few integrated evenings when the whole town went to Rence Jackson's dirty red barn in need of a serious paint job but this is about the blues, the musical blues and not some general social issues commentary. So those “no account” whites don’t play a role here at this time, don't play except as devotes of generic old country British Isles ballads like the ones collected by Francis Child back in the 1850s which thrilled the Brahmins of Brattle Street on a wild utilitarian Saturday night. Actually whites in general don't play a role in the blues since their access to such songs by the likes of the various Blinds, Robert Johnson, and the belting barrelhouse mamas would be minimal in an age when "race" record pieced everybody off into their own tangent. They will not play a role until the music heads north in a generation, or so,  and the “white negro” hipsters (to use big daddy Norman Mailer’s term for the little daddies who hung around the back streets of cool, Harlem 125th Street cool at that time), “beats (to use Jack Kerouac term hustled from some dead-pan beat down hustler, a white negro hipster if it came right down to it named Huncke via high brow John Clellon Holmes for Christ sake),” folkies (to use the Lomaxes’, father and son, expression), college students (to use oh I don’t know the U.S. Department of Education’s expression), and assorted others (junkies, grifters, midnight sifters, drifters on the wing, winos trying to sober up, good time prostitutes, the denizens of Hayes-Bickford's, the Automat, places like that, no hip as a rule) decided that that beat in their heads had Mother Africa who spawned us all had to be investigated but all that indeed was later.

Like I said the real blues aficionados, if only by default, had their say, had their lyrics almost written for them by the events of everyday human existence what with talking in their own "code words" about how Mister and his Mister James Crow laws fitted him, Mister, and his just fine at the expense of those black guys, their women and their righteous children (righteous when they, his children and their children smote the dragon come freedom summer times, come Mississippi and Alabama too goddamn times but that is a story for their generations to tell I want to talk about the great-grand pa’s and ma’s and their doings).

Here is how the scene played out as near as I can figure from a wide-ranging reading of most of the lyrics from that time (and always remember when you speak of "blues," speak of the folk in general this is mostly an oral tradition handed down and bastardized as it gotten handed down so there are very few definitive lyrics but rather more a sense of what miseries were being talked about. How Mister James Crow said every day of the week, even the Lord’s Day, Sunday that if you were black, get back, if you were white and right you were alright and proved it by separate this and separate that, keeping his street clear of stray “negros,” yeah, with small “n” if he was being kind that day, another today socially not acceptable expression if not, telling the brethren to go here, not go there, look this way but not that (and by all means not peeking at his womenfolk), walk there but not here, or face nooses and slugs for his troubles.

So yeah the blues almost cried out to be the order of things. Working all day for chump change in Mister’s fields or worse share-cropper-ing and having Mister take the better portion and leaving the leavings he didn’t want, meaning what he couldn’t sell to his profit as the rest.

Yeah, so there is no way that black guys could not have had the blues back then except some old nappy Tom who didn’t get the word but they were far fewer than you might think the others just fumed at who knows what psychic costs (now too but that in dealt with by the step-child of the blues, maybe second step-child via in your face if there is space hip-hop nations, the angry ones who put words to the rages of the modern “post racial” American society that somebody has jerked them around with lately). Hey and to Mister’s miseries, very real, very scary when the nightriders came, woman trouble (maybe at night the worse kind of trouble if Mister wasn’t in your face all day with her where you been, do this, do that, put it right here, put it right there), trouble with Sheriff Law (stay off the sidewalks, keep your head down, stay down in the bottom lands or else) and trouble with Long Skinny Jones if you mess with his woman, get your own (or face his razor and gun down on Black Mountain).

Plenty of stuff to sing about come Saturday night after dark at Smilin’ Billy’s juke joint complete with his home-made brew, freshly batched, which insured that everybody would be at Preacher Jack’s  Sunday service to have their sins, lusts, greeds, avarices, covets, swaggers, cuts, from the night before (or maybe just minutes before) washed clean under the threat of damnation and worse, worse for listening to the “devil’s music” (funny because come the white rock and roll teen explosion a generation later Mister, some Mister, said that too was the devil’s music which confused those clean cut angelic angst-filled teens although not enough to stop listening to Satan and his siren song) by a guy like Charley Patton, Son House (who had the worst of both worlds being a sinner, loving his whiskey more than somewhat which Howlin’ Wolf took him to task for down in Newport one year in the early 1960s at a jam session, and a preacher man), Lucky Quick, Sleepy John, Robert J, and lots of hungry boys who wanted to get the hell out from under Mister and his Mister James Crow laws by singing the blues and making them go away.          

That’s the guys, black guys and they had a moment, a country blues moment back in the 1920s and early 1930s when guys, white guys usually as far as I know, from small label record companies like Paramount, RCA, the radio company looking to feed the hours on their stations with stuff people would listen to (could listen to in short wave range times and hence regional roots work). They were agents who were parlaying two ideas together getting black people, black people with enough money  (and maybe a few white hipsters, Village, North Beach, Old Town denizens tired of the same old, same old if they were around and if they were called that before the big 1950s “beat” thing), buy, in this case, “race records,” that they might have heard on that self-same radio, nice economics, scoured the South looking for talent and found plenty in the Delta (and on the white side of that same coin plenty in the Southern hill-billy mountains, and hills and hollows too).

But those black blues brothers were not what drove the race label action back then since the rural poor had no money for radios or records for the most part and it was the black women singers who got the better play, although they if you look at individual cases suffered under the same Mister James Crow ethos that the black guys did. There they were though singing barrelhouse was what it was called mostly, stuff with plenty of double meanings about sex and about come hither availability and too about the code that all Southern blacks lived under. And the subjects. Well, the subjects reflected those of the black guys in reverse, two-timing guys, guys who would cut their women up as soon as look at them, down-hearted stuff when some Jimmy took off with his other best girl leaving her flat-footed, the sins of alcohol and drugs (listen to Victoria Spivey sometime on sister cocaine and any number of Smiths on gin), losing your man to you best friend. Some sound advice too like Sippy Wallace’s don’t advertise your man, and some bad advice about cutting up your no good man and taking the big step-off that awaited you, it is all there to be listened to.   

And the queen, the self-anointed queen, no, better you stay with the flow of her moniker, the empress, of barrelhouse blues was Bessie Smith, who sold more records than anybody else if nothing else. But there is more to her claim than mere record sales since she left a treasure trove of songs, well over two hundred before her untimely early death in the mid-1930s (untimely in the Mister James Crow South after an car accident and they would not admit an empress for chrissakes into a nearby white hospital, yes, rage, rage against the night unto the nth generation-black lives matter).

Guys, sophisticated guys, city guys, black guys mainly, guys like Fletcher Henderson, Tin Pan Alley kind of guys in places like high holy Harlem and Memphis, Saint Louis would write stuff for her, big fat sexy high white note sax and chilly dog trombone players would back her up and that was that. Sure Memphis Minnie could wag the dog’s tail with her lyrics about every kind of working guy taking care of her need (and you know she needed a little sugar in her bowl just like Bessie and a million, million other women, and a quick listen to any of a dozen such songs will tell you what that need was or you can figure it out and if you can’t you had better move on), the various other Smiths could talk about down-hearted stuff, about the devil’s music get the best of them, Sippy Wallace could talk about no good men, Ivy Stone could speak about being turned out in the streets to “work” the streets when some guy left town, address unknown, and Victoria Spivey could speak to the addictions that brought a good girl down but Bessie could run it all.

From down-hearted blues, killing her sorrows with that flask of gin, working down to bed-bug flop houses, thoughts of killing that no good bastard who left her high and dry, seeing a good Hustlin’ Dan man off to the great yonder after losing that bout with TB coughing, blowing high and heavy in the thick of the Jazz Age with the prince of wails, looking for a little sugar in her bowl, and every conceivable way to speak of personal sorrows.

Let me leave it like this for now with two big ideas. First if you have a chance go on YouTube and listen and watch while she struts her stuff on Saint Louis Woman all pain, pathos and indignity as her good man throws her over for, well, the next best thing. That will tell you why in her day she was the Empress. The other is this-if you have deep down sorrows, some man or woman left you high and dry, maybe you need a fixer man for what ails you, you have deep-dyed blues that won’t quite unless you have your medicine then you have to dust off your Billie Holiday records and get well. But if the world just has you by the tail for a moment, or things just went awry but maybe you can see the light of day then grab the old Bessie Vanguard Record or later Columbia Record multiple albums (four double record sets from beginning to end) and just start playing you won’t want to turn the thing off once Bessie gets under your skin.

That’s what I done more than once when I was down on my luck living in flea-bitten rooming house in a cold-water flat with me and my bed, bureau, desk and chair and a battered old RCA record player and just let it wail, let the fellow stew-ball tenants usually behind on their rents anyway howl against the night. Bessie was on the square.                

*****The Latest From The Justice For Lynne Stewart Website

*****The Latest From The Justice For Lynne Stewart Website

 

 

 Click below to link to the Justice For Lynne Stewart website

http://lynnestewart.org/

Although Lynne Stewart has been released by “Uncle” on medical grounds since last winter (2014) after an international campaign to get her adequate medical attention her case should still be looked at as an especially vindictive ploy on the part of the American government in post-9/11 America to tamp down on attorneys (and others concerned about the fate of "los olvidados," the forgotten ones, the forgotten political prisoners)  who  have been zealously defending their unpopular clients (and political prisoners). A very chilling effect on the legal profession and elsewhere as I have witnessed on too many occasions when legal assistance is desperately needed. As a person who is committed to doing political prisoner defense work I have noted how few such “people’s lawyers” there around to defend the voiceless, the framed and “the forgotten ones.” There are not enough, there are never enough such lawyers around and her disbarment by the New York bar is an added travesty of justice surrounding the case. 

Back in the 1960s and early 1970s there were, relatively speaking, many Lynne Stewarts. Some of this reflecting the radicalization of some old-time lawyers who hated what was going in America with its prison camp mentality and it’s seeking out of every radical, black or white but as usual especially black revolutionaries, it could get its hands on.  Hell, who hated that in many cases their sons and daughters were being sent to the bastinado. But mostly it was younger lawyers, lawyers like Lynne Stewart, who took on the Panther cases, the Chicago cases, the Washington cases, the military cases (which is where I came to respect such “people’s lawyers” as I was working with anti-war GIs at the time and we needed, desperately needed, legal help to work our way in the arcane military “justice” system then, and now witness Chelsea Manning) who learned about the class-based nature of the justice system. And then like a puff those hearty lawyers headed for careers and such and it was left for the few Lynne Stewarts to shoulder on. Probably the clearest case of that shift was with the Ohio Seven (two, Jann Laamann and Tom Manning, who are still imprisoned) in the 1980s, working-class radicals who would have been left out to dry without Lynne Stewart. Guys and gals who a few years before would have been heralded as front-line anti-imperialist fighters like thousands of others were then left out to dry. Damn.      

Before The Jug….Was The Jug-With John Sebastian’s Hungry Eye Jug Band In Mind

Before The Jug….Was The Jug-With John Sebastian’s Hungry Eye Jug Band In Mind 

By Lester Lannon

A while back, maybe two three years ago just after they had witnessed the fiftieth anniversary union performance of what was left of the original Jim Kweskin Jug Band (Jim, Maria Muldaur and ex-husband Geoff Muldaur) at the Club Passim in Harvard Square Sam Lowell, Bart Webber and Jack Callahan had been sitting in Jack’s down the street sipping some high end whiskeys when they started to cut up old touches about their own experiences at jug music and jug band under the long ago influence of that very jug band(and of course through them finding out running back to genesis to the Memphis Jug Band, Cannon’s Stompers, The Mississippi Shieks and a half dozen old state name in front Shieks where all the really good jug band material was to be found). Jack, the old-time washboard player, had blurted out what was on everybody’s mind after that performance-“what the hell we have time now let’s get a hold of Laura Lynn and Frank Riley and give the old Riverdale Jug Band a local revival.” (Riverdale the home town of all five of the original named players, an occasional sit in fiddler and magic kazoo player were from neighboring Gloversville and hence Riverdale).

Sam, the jug man supreme, was at first hesitate for the very same reason the band had disbanded after a couple of years and some local success-there was not enough space in the then fading folk revival minute to support, support as a professional operation more than one serious jug band and that band was clearly the Jim Kweskin outfit (which in their turn would split up for various reasons, personality clashes, declining energies, declining public interest and the usual hubris). Fifty years later and a look at the greying demographics at Passims’ only made Sam more sanguine about such prospects. At least that night Jack was unsuccessful in persuading either Sam or Bart both who were in the slow process of giving up the day to day running of their respective law office and print shop to know that they had needed more time think about reforming the old group. His argument that the Kweskin Jug Band was, except for ceremonial occasions, not now an on-going operation went for naught. His other argument, a historical argument, that even the Kweskin experience back in the day had only been possible because of various reconfigurations in the personal of that band after various “raids” on other jug bands also fell on deaf ears that night.

But Jack sensed that there was some mulling over going on and so he went for the jugular (no pun intended) and brought Laura and Frankie into the mix. Did it in a very tricky way. John Sebastian, well known from the folk and folk rock days as the leader of the group The Lovin’ Spoonful (that left out “g” all the rage back then when everybody wanted to be at one with the “folk” although one never saw a real “folk” who were trying to get away from that designation and could not be found within ten miles of any folk revival site) which had hits with Summer in the City, Lovin’ Spoonful (remember no “g”) and Nashville Cats, was scheduled to appear at the Newport Folk Festival down in Rhode Island like he had in the old days. Jack had purchased a block of five tickets in order to entice them back to that old summer stomping ground where they had done a daytime, although no primetime, stage performance a couple of years in a row when their star was rising (and the lack of any serious follow-up, follow-up in the way such things counted in those days with a record contract except a small nimble from Dollar Records who thereafter passed on producing their first album claiming their work was too derivative, derivative of the Kweskin Jug Band particularly which started Riverdale Jug band members, first of all Laura to get married, to go their separate ways).

The hook of Newport for Jack was that he was privy to something that the others were not aware of. John Sebastian in the old days before the Lovin’ Spoonful success had been the founder (and re-founder) of various jug band combinations in the Village in the early 1960s when jug music was getting a lot of play in the folk revival. Sebastian’s most famous group, his most famous effort was the Hungry Eye Jug Band with the great Fritz Diamond on wash basin and Maria Donato on vocals and tambourines. That grouping was ready to break out, make it to the night stage at Newport when Fritz and Maria abandoned ship, went over to another unnamed jug band (but one could figure that out easily enough) and that was that. John as we know landed on his feet and so he therefore claimed no foul. The source of the story-John Sebastian himself one night when he was playing by himself in a stellar performance at the now defunct Boston Folk Festival.           

See in those free and easy 1960s days s groups formed, reformed, talent got stolen away and every other thing that has happened in the music industry since there was an industry, maybe before. Jack though if the other members of the old jug band heard John’s story they might reconsider their position of not re-forming the band. He also figured once they were back together, back on the road a few nights playing small coffeehouses and cafes to grab some work in order to work out the kinks in their material that they too could “raid” the talent pool. Might have some name in lights like John Sebastian and the Riverdale Jug Band. Or the Riverdale Jug Band with Jim Kweskin (it would emphatically not be the Riverdale Jug Band with Maria Muldaur not if he didn’t want to lose Laura and with her the whole enterprise since her vocals and good looks had gotten them plenty of play and she would not then nor now abide playing second to any other female vocalist). But he needed to get them on board, needed to get them to sunny Newport, needed to have them heard that patented John Sebastian story. 

Jack need not have worried because there must have been something in the air as the next time the group of five gathered in Cambridge for drinks and conversation Laura asked if it was still possible to sign up to do a daytime workshop at Newport. The subject- jug music. And Sam was talking feverishly about where he could find a worthy jug these days, and so it went. Yeah, before the jug was… the jug.  

In Honor Of The 145th Anniversary Of The Paris Commune-From The American Left History Blog Archives (2007) - On American Political Discourse

In Honor Of The 145^th Anniversary Of The Paris Commune-From The American Left History Blog Archives (2007) - On American Political Discourse

 

 

 

Markin comment (Winter 2016):

 

In the period 2006-2008 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time and my only fear is that now that Obama and his lame duck presidency are in full flower that as the machines are gearing up for the 2016 presidential campaign maw I will seeking another watershed election where there is none will be tempted, sorely tempted to put my foot in the waters of campaign commentary again. If I do so I deserve the fate that befell Theodore White in his endless campaign books every four years starting with the JFK-Nixon fistfight in 1960 which left his a blathering idiot before he was done. Or worse since he was (is) something of a muse for me what happened to the later Hunter Thompson, Doctor Gonzo when he got caught up in the avalanche of presidential campaigns which probably played no little part in his eventual suicide. I am forewarned.   

 

In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter (literally now as that stunted social network operation replaces Facebook as the place to be). I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers’ party that fights for a workers government . That is where the link to the Paris Commune comes in which in its time was a beacon for the international working class, a first failed attempt for the fellahin to taek charge of their own lives, govern as they saw fit. So with the Paris Commune and its lessons as heady backdrop we have enough, more than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some of the stuff I wrote then as talking points to drown out the coming deluge does not have a bad feel to it. Read on.

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

A Small Victory

One of the best pieces of political wisdom I have ever received, and that from an old communist, is that a left political militant must make sure to protect the gains of the past political fights after going on to fight new battles. The nature of capitalist politics is such that no hard-fought political gain comes with an automatic guarantee that it is not reversible. Additionally, I was told that if the political tide is running against you and you cannot hold on to those hard fought gains then you must keep up the propaganda fight and not give into the reactionary flow. Enduring a seemingly never-ending stream of political and social reversals in the ‘culture wars’ over the last few decades that advice has kept my head above water.

In my ‘flaming’ at first liberal, then radical youth three issues formed the core of my political beliefs: the fight for black civil right in the South (and later in the North); the fight for nuclear disarmament; and, the fight against the barbaric death penalty. A look at the current political landscape confirms that those struggles are still in dire need of completion. One need only look at the current fight for freedom for the Jena Six down in Louisiana, the overflowing American nuclear arsenal and the fact that 37 states and the federal government still have the death penalty on their books. This last fact is what I am interested in commenting on today.

On Thursday December 14, 2007 the New Jersey Assembly voted, apparently mainly along party lines, to abolish the death penalty in that state. As a result it only awaits the governor’s signature to become law and thus become the first state in forty years to take such action. The governor has indicated that he will sign the legislation. What is more, other states are in various stages of taking the same action. And, of course, there is an unofficial moratorium in place while the United States Supreme Court decides whether lethal injection in the administration of the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment. So the worm turns, perhaps.

During the past decade there has been more than enough evidence from such sources as DNA testing to the results of the various Innocent Projects to convince any rationale person that the administration of the death penalty and even the idea of that ultimate act as a penalty is ‘arbitrary and capricious’, as the language of the legal decisions would have it. In the New Jersey debate one Democratic Assemblyman Wilfredo Caraballo was quoted by Tom Hester, Jr. of the Associated Press as saying “It’s time New Jersey got out of the execution business. Capital punishment is costly, discriminatory, immoral, and barbaric. We’re a better state that one that puts people to death.” Well put. I would only add that from my leftist perspective we do not want to concede to this government the power over life and death for the guilty or the innocent. Put concretely in today’s political terms we do not want the George W. Bushes of the world to have that power.

Coming from Massachusetts, the state that sent the framed-up and martyred Sacco and Vanzetti to their executions, in my youth I was strongly aware of the injustice of the death penalty. One of my early political acts in high school was to attend the annual memorial meeting here in their honor. Moreover, in my household at least, there were always whispers about the injustice done to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Not out of any political sympathy but from the traditional Catholic antipathy to the death penalty. Those were the days when we had the death penalty advocates somewhat on the run but the spirit of the Sixties barely outlasted the decade as the yahoos went on a rampart for reintroduction. Pardon me then if I see just a little glimmer of light that we may have turned the corner on this issue again. But, as noted above, we better keep fighting like hell just the same.

 

One Hundred Years Plus Later-Still A Problem For Working People-Stop Corporate Greed!

“Victory To The Fast-Food Workers......Fight For $15 Is Just A Beginning-All Labor Must Support Our Sisters And Brothers

“Victory To The Fast-Food Workers......Fight For $15 Is Just A Beginning-All Labor Must Support Our Sisters And Brothers

Comments of a supporter of the “Fight for $15” action in Downtown Boston on September 4, 2014 as part of a national struggle for economic justice and dignity for the our hard working sisters and brothers. The words still apply as we head into 2016:

No question in this wicked old world that those at the bottom are “the forgotten ones.” Here we are talking about working people, people working and working hard for eight, nine, ten dollars an hour. Maybe working two jobs to make ends meet since a lot of times these McJobs, these Wal-Marts jobs do not come with forty hours of work attached but whatever some cost-cutting manager deems right. And lately taking advantage of cover from Obamacare keeping the hours below the threshold necessary to kick in health insurance and other benefits. Yes, the forgotten people.

But let’s do the math here figuring on forty hours and figuring on say ten dollars an hour. That‘s four hundred a week times fifty weeks (okay so I am rounding off for estimate purposes here too since most of these jobs do not have vacation time figured in).That’s twenty thousand a year. Okay so just figure any kind of descent apartment in the Boston area where I am writing this-say one thousand a month. That’s twelve thousand a year. So the other eight thousand is for everything else. No way can that be done. And if you had listened to the young and not so young fast-food workers, the working mothers, the working older brothers taking care of younger siblings, workers trying to go to school to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty you would understand the truth of that statement. And the stories went on and on along that line all during the action. 

Confession: it has been a very long time since I have had to scrimp and scrim to make ends meet, to get the rent in, to keep those damn bill-collectors away from my door, to beg the utility companies to not shut off those necessary services. But I have been there, no question. And I did not like it then and I do not like the idea of it now.  I am here to say even the “Fight for $15” is not enough, but it is a start. And I whole-heartedly support the struggle of my sisters and brothers for a little economic justice in this wicked old world. And any reader who might read this-would you work for slave wages? I think not. So show your solidarity and get out and support the fast-food and Wal-Mart workers in their just struggles. 

Organize Wal-Mart! Organize the fast food workers! Union! Union! 

*****Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Then, And Now

*****Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Then, And Now  

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Several years ago, I guess about four years now, in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement with the shutting down of its campsites across the country by the police acting in concert with other American governmental bodies I wrote a short piece centered on the need for revolutionary and radical intellectuals, or those who had pretensions to such ideas to take their rightful place on the activist left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines. Or wherever they were hiding out, hiding out maybe as far back in some cases as the Vietnam War days which saw much of the current senior contemporary academia turn from the streets to the ivied-buildings, maybe hiding out in bought and paid for think tanks with their bright-colored “wonk” portfolios like some exiles-in-waiting ready to spring their latest wisdom, maybe posing as public intellectuals although with no serious audience ready to act on their ideas since they were not pushing their agendas beyond the lectern, maybe some in the hard-hearted post 9/11 world having doubts about those long ago youthful impulses that animated "the better angels of their natures" have turned to see the “virtues” of the warfare state and now keep their eyes averted to the social struggles they previously professed to live and die for, or maybe a la Henry David Thoreau retiring to out in some edenic gardens in Big Sur or anywhere Oregon like some 60s radicals did never to be heard from again except as relics when the tourists pass through town.

One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a certain stock-taking was in order (and which is in 2015 and beyond still in order). A stock-taking at first centered on those young radicals and revolutionaries that I ran into in the various campsites and on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses they professed to be fighting for (and with not a little hostility from that same work-a-day mass hostile to people hanging out and not working, or not doing much of anything, as well but mainly indifference to the fight these idealistic youth were pursuing, really their fight too since that had been pummeled by the main Occupy culprits, the banks who got bailed out, the mortgages companies who sold them a false bill of goods, the corporations more than ready to send formerly good paying jobs off-shore leaving Wal-Mart for the unemployed. Now a few years later it is apparent that they, the youth of Occupy have, mostly, moved back to the traditional political ways of operating via the main bourgeois parties who let the whole thing happen (witness the New York mayor’s race, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders et. al) or have not quite finished licking their wounds (they couldn’t believe as we elders could have told them after all the anti-Vietnam War actions, including the massive May Day 1971 arrests that the government had no problem crushing their own, their own young if they got out of line).

Although I initially addressed my remarks to the activists still busy out in the streets I also had in mind those intellectuals who had a radical streak but who then hovered on the sidelines and were not sure what to make of the whole experiment although some things seemed very positive like the initial camp comradery, the flow of ideas, some half-baked on their faces but worthy of conversation and testing, the gist for any academic. In short, those who would come by on Sundays and take a lot of photographs and write a couple of lines about what they saw but held back. (I would argue and this may be the nature of the times that the real beneficiaries of Occupy were all those film students and artists, media-types who made the site their class project, or their first professional documentary.) Now in 2015 it is clear as day that the old economic order (capitalism if you were not quite sure what to name it) that we were fitfully protesting against (especially against the banks who led the way downhill and who under the sway of imperialism's imperative made it clear finance capitalism writ large is in charge) has survived another threat to its dominance. The old political order, the way of doing political business now clearly being defended by one Barack Obama and his hangers-on, Democrat and Republican, with might and main is still intact (with a whole ready to take his place come 2016).

The needs of working people although now widely discussed in academia and on the more thoughtful talk shows have not been ameliorated (the increasing gap between the rich, really the very rich, and the poor, endlessly lamented and then forgotten, the student debt death trap, and the lingering sense that most of us will never get very far ahead in this wicked old world especially compared to previous generations). All of this calls for intellectuals with any activist spark to come forth and help analyze and plan how the masses are to survive, how a new social order can be brought forth. Nobody said, or says, that it will be easy but this is the plea. I have reposted the original piece with some editing to bring it up to date.          
******
No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon, a founding member of the American Communist Party in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and when that revolution began to seriously go off the rails followed the politics of the Trotsky-led International Left Opposition  and eventually helped found the Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned elsewhere  that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution in less developed capitalist countries and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined. A century later with some tweaking, unfortunately, those same theories and the same need for organization are still on the agenda although, as Trotsky once said, the conditions are overripe for the overthrow of capitalism as it has long ago outlived its progressive character in leading humankind forward.   

The conclusion that I originally drew from that initial  observation was that the revolutionary socialist movement was not as desperately in need of theoreticians and intellectuals as previously (although having them, and plenty of them, especially those who can write, is always a good thing). It needed leaders steeped in those theories and with a capacity to lead revolutions. We needed a few good day-to-day practical leaders, guys like Cannon, like Debs from the old Socialist Party, like Ruthenburg from the early Communist Party, to lead the fight for state power.

In that regard I have always held up, for the early part of the 20th century, the name Karl Liebknecht the martyred German Communist co-leader (along with Rosa Luxemburg) of the aborted Spartacist uprising of 1919 as such an example. He led the anti-war movement in Germany by refusing to vote for the Kaiser’s war budgets, found himself in jail as a result, but also had tremendous authority among the left-wing German workers when that mattered. In contrast the subsequent leadership of the German Communists in the 1920’s Paul Levi, Henrich Brandler and Ernest Thaelmann did not meet those qualifications. For later periods I have, as mentioned previously, held up the name James P. Cannon, founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (to name only the organization that he was most closely associated with), as a model. Not so Communist Party leaders like William Z. Foster and Earl Browder (to speak nothing of Gus Hall from our generation of '68) or Max Shachtman in his later years after he broke with Cannon and the SWP. That basically carried us to somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Since I have spent a fair amount of time lately going back to try to draw the lessons of our movement I have also had occasion to think, or rather to rethink my original argument on the need for revolutionary intellectuals. I find that position stands in need of some amendment now.

Let’s be clear here about our needs. The traditional Marxist idea that in order to break the logjam impeding humankind’s development the international working class must rule is still on the historic agenda. The Leninist notions that, since the early part of the 20th century, we have been in the imperialist era and that a ‘hard’ cadre revolutionary party is necessary to lead the struggle to take state power are also in play. Moreover, the Trotskyist understanding that in countries of belated development the working class is the only agency objectively capable of leading those societies to the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois revolutions of the 19th century continues to hold true. That said, rather than some tweaking, we are seriously in need of revolutionary intellectuals who can bring these understandings into the 21st century.

It is almost a political truism that each generation of radicals and revolutionaries will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory mentioned above hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size and importance of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working class specific questions play in world politics (the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not felt they needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.

Since the mid- 20th century we have had no lack of practical revolutionary leaders of one sort or another - one thinks of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and even Mao in his less rabid moments. We have witnessed any number of national liberation struggles, a few attempts at political revolution against Stalinism, a few military victories against imperialism, notably the Vietnamese struggle. But mainly this has been an epoch of defeats for the international working class. Moreover, we have not even come close to developing theoretical leaders of the statue of Lenin or Trotsky.

As a case in point, recently I made some commentary about the theory of student power in the 1960s and its eventual refutation by the May 1968 General Strike lead by the working class in France. One of the leading lights for the idea that students were the “new” working class or a “new” vanguard was one Ernest Mandel. Mandel held himself out to be an orthodox Marxist (and Trotskyist, to boot) but that did not stop him from, periodically, perhaps daily, changing the focus of his work away from the idea of the centrality of the working class in social struggle, an idea that goes back to the days of Marx himself.

And Mandel, a brilliant well-spoken erudite scholar probably was not the worst of the lot. The problem was that “he was the problem” with his impressionistic theories based on, frankly, opportunistic impulses. Another example, from that same period, was the idea of Professor Regis Debray (in the service of Fidel at the time ) that guerrilla foci out in the hills were the way forward ( a codification of the experience of the Cuban Revolution for which many subjective revolutionary paid dearly with their lives out in bloody nomadic jungles of the American continent). Or the anti-Marxist Maoist notion codifying the experiences of the third Chinese revolution that the countryside (the “third world with its then predominant peasantry now increasingly proletarianized) would defeat the cities (mainly the West but the Soviet Union as well in some circles) that flamed the imagination of many Western radicals in the late 1960s. I could go on with more examples but they only lead to one conclusion- we are, among other things, in a theoretical trough. The late Mandel’s students from the 1960s have long gone on to academia and the professions (and not an inconsiderable few in governmental harness-how the righteous have fallen). Debray’s guerilla foci have long ago buried their dead and gone back to the cities. The “cities” of the world now including to a great extent China had broken the third world countryside though intense globalization. This, my friends, is why today I have my Help Wanted sign out. Any takers?

***Films To While Away The Class Struggle By-The Other (Non-"Beat") New York Writers’ World Of The 1950s- "New York In The 1950s"

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of a movie trailer for "Pluck" that is about New York in the 1950s and serves as background for the review below.

DVD Review

New York In The 1950s, Dan Wakefield, Gay and Nan Talese, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and many other authors who came of age in the 1950s, 1999

I have prattled on endlessly about the role of the beat writers and poets and their hangers-on, led by the trio of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, in leading the breakout from mainstream American society, literary society at least, in forming my own cultural tastes and that of many of my generation, the Generation of ’68. That "beat" cultural movement, in my mind rightly or wrongly, is forever associated with New York City, and particularly Greenwich Village. And that is where the question of taste comes in for, except for short periods, the beat movement was as much a part of the San Francisco scene of the 1950s as that of New York. Moreover, there is another group of writers, as portrayed in this interesting, short film documentary that can claim, and do claim, for themselves the role of avant guarde anti-establishment New York writers. The names James Baldwin, Dan Wakefield, Norman Mailer, come quickly to mind, as do the “Village Voice” and Irving Howe's social democratic journal “Dissent”.

I have detailed elsewhere my own feeling of suffocation with the cultural morass of the 1950’s, although I was too young to articulate that angst even in a caricature James Dean-like “Rebel Without A Cause” way. That period was exemplified by the stolidity of the Eisenhower administration. Nevertheless other little clots of people, who had come of age in the 1940s and who were molded by the Great Depression of the 1930s and the sacrifices of World War II, were interested in breaking out of the cultural straight jacket but also interested in making a name for themselves in the serious literary world. Those who succeeded are the writers who for the most part make up this film, led by those named authors above. I might add as this is a somewhat older film that since its production a number of those writers, and they were mainly writers here, the poets tended to go with the beats, have passed on, including recently, J.D Salinger, who I was surprised to note influenced and was a model for many of those who spoke in the film.

I mentioned the “Village Voice” and “Dissent” above, and it was those small relatively small publications that sustained these writers who came from all over America, even from the wilds of Indiana (Wakefield), to make their mark in the American cultural capital. Their reasons were as varied as any other group but to parody an answer that bank robber, Willie Sutton, gave when asked why he did robberies- that’s where the publishing houses are (or were). Surprisingly many of these writers, unlike the beats, went to work writing copy, or what not, in the medium somewhere in order to make the connections. So that is one thing that separates this group from the beats.

More than one writer interviewed here did, as Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne did, make there mark in New York and then moved on. For, as all interviewees seemingly agreed upon, the cultural oasis of New York of the 1950’s had a defining, and finite, moment. Later other cultural movements, movements that I am more familiar with, and not necessarily driven by writers took center stage. Still this film, and the archival footage that made up most of the backdrop, did its job in evoking a certain ‘feel’ for the period. Moreover, some of the negative issues involved with a movement based in the “corrupt” city in the 1950s: the excessive alcohol consumption and partying that formed part of the writerly ethos; the definite second- class citizenship of women; and the high burn-out rate, are addressed here. All in all this is a good presentation centered on the writers themselves. Still, I always think of that famous photograph of a cigarette-smoking Jack Kerouac, a heaven-bent, dream-like Allen Ginsberg and a blasé-posing William Burroughs when I think of New York. The “beat” habit is hard to break.

Note: Much of this film is driven by the anecdotes and storytelling of author Dan Wakefield, who is the central speaker here, and who helps to fill in the “back office” details of this period. I never would have known about his personal and professional (as a writer) connection to Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement that formed the backdrop for one of his early book without his mentioning it as well as a host of other little arcane facts like that. Good job.

*A Photo History- American Socialist Workers Party Founder James P. Cannon And IWW Founder Big Bill Haywood

Click on title to link to famous photograph of American Communist Party founder (and subsequently American Socialist Workers Party founder)James P. Cannon with old Wobblie Big Bill Haywood, founder of the IWW. Max Eastman, then an important Communist sympathizer, completes the picture.