Free All The Class-War Prisoners-Help Those Behind The Walls
Sunday, April 24, 2016
*****From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-Their Struggles To Build Communist Organizations-The Early Days
*****From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-Their Struggles To Build Communist Organizations-The Early Days
Click below to link to the Marx-Engels Internet Archives.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
Fritz Jasper comment:
History of the Paris Commune, Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, translated by Eleanor Marx, Black and Red Press, St. Petersburg, Florida, 2007
When one studies the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 one learns something new from it even though from the perspective of revolutionary strategy the Communards made virtually every mistake in the book. This book by a participant and survivor of the Commune has historically been the starting point for any pro-Commune analysis. The original English translation by Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx, has given the imprimatur of the Marx family to that view.
Through a close study of the Paris Commune one learn its lessons and measure it against the experience acquired by later revolutionary struggles and above all by later revolutions, not only the successful Russian Revolution of October 1917 but the failed German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese and Spanish revolutions in the immediate aftermath of World War I. More contemporaneously we have the experiences of the partial victories of the later Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.
Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of these later experiences, as if to show that history is not always totally a history of horrors against the fate of the masses we honor the Paris Commune as a beacon of the coming world proletarian revolution. It is just for that reason that Karl Marx fought tooth and nail in the First International to defend it against the rage of capitalist Europe. It is one of our peaks. The Commune also presented in embryo the first post-1848 Revolution instance of what was later characterized by Lenin at the beginning of World War I as the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement. So this question that after Lenin’s death preoccupied Trotsky for much of the later part of his life really has a much longer lineage that I had previously recognized. Unfortunately, as we are too painfully aware that question is still to be resolved. Therefore, even at this great remove, it is necessary to learn the lessons of that experience in facing today’s crisis of leadership in the international labor movement.
As a final thought, I note that in the preface to this edition that the editors have given their own view about the lessons to be learned from the experience of the Paris Commune. Although virtually every page of Lissagaray’s account drips with examples of the necessity of a vanguard party their view negates that necessity. While we can argue until hell freezes over, and should, about the form that a future socialist state will take one would think that there should be no dispute on that necessity of the vanguard party at this late date in history. In any case read this important work (including the above-mentioned provocative preface) as it tells the tale of an important part of our working class history.
Sam Eaton had to laugh, laugh a little anyway when he read something written by his old friend and longtime political accomplice Ralph Morris whom he had recently asked to write a little remembrance of the time in the 1970s when he first started to identify with the working class anthem, The Internationale, for an archival protest music blog that another friend of his Fritz Jasper ran. By the way don’t take that accomplice designation in a criminal way just because they had been arrested a number of times at various sit-ins, walk-ins, and the like, hell, once in Washington, D.C. on May Day 1971. That had been the day they first met just for being on the streets, although both would have to confess the reason for being in the streets was to shut down the government if it did not shut down the Vietnam War and maybe the government from its bastardly perspective had reason to sweep them up. Sam just didn’t want to use the word comrade these days when it had fallen out of favor as a term for working together politically.
Ralph had gone out of his way to note in that blog entry for Fritz that before he got “religion” on the anti-war and later social justice issues he held as many anti-communist prejudices as anybody else in Troy, New York where he hailed from, not excluding his rabidly right-wing father who never really believed until his dying days in 2005 that the United States had lost the war in Vietnam. Ralph had also expressed his feelings of trepidation when after a lot of things went south on the social justice front with damn little to show for all the arrests, deaths, and social cataclysm he and Sam had gotten into a study group in Cambridge run by a “Red October Collective” which focused on studying “Che” Guevara and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky after an introduction to the Marxist classics. Sam who was living in a commune in Cambridge at the time, the summer of 1972, had invited Ralph to come over from Troy to spent the summer in the study group trying to find out what had gone wrong (and right too, as Sam told him not to forget), why they were spinning their wheels trying to change the world for the better just then and to think about new strategies and tactics for the next big break-out of social activism. At the end of each meeting they would sing the Internationale before they broke up. At first Ralph had a hard time with the idea of singing a “commie” song (he didn’t put it that way but he might as well have according to Sam) unlike something like John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance, songs like that. As he, they got immersed in the group Ralph lightened up and would sing along if not with gusto then without a snicker.
That same apprehensive attitude had prevailed when after about three meetings they began to study what the group leader, Jeremy, called classic Marxism, the line from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. See Ralph, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war movement for personal reasons at first 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). Ralph, who had served in the military in Vietnam, had been a grunt, and who had even extended his tour to eighteen months to get out a little early from his enlistment, 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) and taking part in a lot of their actions around Albany and New York City mainly but also the key one for this piece the May Day demonstrations down in Washington, D. C. on May Day 1971 when they attempted, massively unsuccessfully attempted, to shut down the government if it would not shut down the war.
That event is when Ralph and Sam met, Sam having 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) when Ralph noticed Sam wearing a VVAW button and asked him 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 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. At first he had worked with Quakers and other pacifist types doing acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, 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.” Sam too 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.”
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 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 them 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.
But Ralph remained for a long time very unsure that studying with “reds,” studying Marx was the right thing to do, and Sam would confess later that he too had concerns based on his upbringing in Carver down in southeastern Massachusetts, the cranberry capital of the world then, and another working-class town like Troy, New York. Ralph had imbibed all the all the working class prejudices against reds (you know communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy), against blacks (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), against gays and lesbians (you know fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where they spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other), against uppity woman (servile, domestic women like his good old mother and wanna-bes were okay). Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar. But mainly he had been a red, white and blue American patriotic guy who really did have ice picks for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around his hometown way).
Such thoughts even with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back of his brain crossed his mind when he thought of Marx, Lenin (he was not familiar very much 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 been running since his father’s death (although for 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.
After that time while they would periodically read the left press and participate any time somebody, some group needed bodied for a rally, demonstration, some street action they would be there in their respective hometowns that they 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 a 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. They would now just keep showing up to support the good old cause.
History of the Paris Commune, Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, translated by Eleanor Marx, Black and Red Press, St. Petersburg, Florida, 2007
When one studies the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 one learns something new from it even though from the perspective of revolutionary strategy the Communards made virtually every mistake in the book. This book by a participant and survivor of the Commune has historically been the starting point for any pro-Commune analysis. The original English translation by Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx, has given the imprimatur of the Marx family to that view.
Through a close study of the Paris Commune one learn its lessons and measure it against the experience acquired by later revolutionary struggles and above all by later revolutions, not only the successful Russian Revolution of October 1917 but the failed German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese and Spanish revolutions in the immediate aftermath of World War I. More contemporaneously we have the experiences of the partial victories of the later Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.
Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of these later experiences, as if to show that history is not always totally a history of horrors against the fate of the masses we honor the Paris Commune as a beacon of the coming world proletarian revolution. It is just for that reason that Karl Marx fought tooth and nail in the First International to defend it against the rage of capitalist Europe. It is one of our peaks. The Commune also presented in embryo the first post-1848 Revolution instance of what was later characterized by Lenin at the beginning of World War I as the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement. So this question that after Lenin’s death preoccupied Trotsky for much of the later part of his life really has a much longer lineage that I had previously recognized. Unfortunately, as we are too painfully aware that question is still to be resolved. Therefore, even at this great remove, it is necessary to learn the lessons of that experience in facing today’s crisis of leadership in the international labor movement.
As a final thought, I note that in the preface to this edition that the editors have given their own view about the lessons to be learned from the experience of the Paris Commune. Although virtually every page of Lissagaray’s account drips with examples of the necessity of a vanguard party their view negates that necessity. While we can argue until hell freezes over, and should, about the form that a future socialist state will take one would think that there should be no dispute on that necessity of the vanguard party at this late date in history. In any case read this important work (including the above-mentioned provocative preface) as it tells the tale of an important part of our working class history.
May Day 2016 In Boston-Sunday May 1st-Join Us In Celebration
May Day 2016 In Boston-Sunday May 1st-Join Us In Celebration
*****On Passing Left-Wing Political “Wisdom” To The Next Generation-With The Lessons Of The 1960s In Mind
*****On Passing Left-Wing Political “Wisdom” To The Next Generation-With The Lessons Of The 1960s In Mind
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
One of the worst excesses, and there were many although made mostly from ignorance and immaturity and were moreover minuscule compared to the conscious policies of those in power who we were opposing, that we who came of political age in the 1960s were culpable of was our sense that we had to reinvent the wheel of left-wing political struggle. Mostly a very conscious denial and rejection of those thinkers, cadre and organization who had come before us and whom were disqualified from the discourse by having been worn out, old-timey, or just ideas and methods that we had not thought of and therefore irrelevant. The expression “throwing out the baby with the bath water” may seem a cliché but serves a purpose here. Most of the time back then until fairly late, maybe too late when the tide had begun to ebb toward the end of the 1960s and the then current and fashionable anticommunist theories proved to be ridiculously inadequate, we turned our noses up at Marxism, and at Marxist-Leninist ways of organizing the struggle against the American beast.
I can remember more than a few times when somebody identified him or herself as a Marxist that I and the others in the room would groan audibly. Occasionally, as well, taking part in some of the shouting down exercises when the political disputes became heated. Part of the problem was that those who organizationally claimed to be Marxists-the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party and to some extent the Progressive Labor Party were following political lines that were far to the right (right being relative here in the context of the left-wing movement in this country) of the politics of those who considered themselves radical and revolutionary youth. Those organizations far too eager to traffic with what we called respectable bourgeois forces who were part of the problem since they helped control the governmental apparatus. (I won’t even mention the moribund Socialist/Social Democratic organizations that only old laborites and “old ladies in tennis sneakers,” although that might be a slander against those nice do-gooder ladies, followed as the expression went at the time.) I know, and I know that many others at the time, had no time for a look at the history books, had nothing but a conscious disregard for the lessons of history, good and bad, that we thought was irrelevant in seeking to build the “newer world.” (Strangely, later after all our empirical experiment proved futile and counter-productive, quoting, quoting loudly and vehemently from this or that book, by this or that thinker, this or that revolutionary or radical became the rage. Ah, the excesses of youth.)
Of course not everybody who came through the 1960s passed through any left-wing political school. Despite the nostalgia, despite the now puffed-up claims that we had this or that decisive effect on history, especially these days with the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the trotting out once again of the overblew claims that the American anti-war movement stopped the Vietnam War rather than the heroic struggles of the people of Vietnam, the number of the young who got catch up more than marginally was significantly smaller that the photographs, videos, and remembrances of the times would suggest. A case in point is my old friend Sam Lowell, from my growing in Carver times whose longtime political trajectory I want to highlight in this sketch.
Highlight to provide something, I am not sure what, perhaps a cautionary tale, to what appears to be the makings of the next “fresh breeze” coming through the land that another Carver corner boy, the late Peter Paul Markin, would harangue us with on lonely Friday nights was coming. The big turn in the environmental movement, the fight for better conditions for young workers (and old) epitomized by the “Fight for $15” movement and above all, the bedrock struggle of the “Black Lives Matter” movement portends some new awakening and we old-timers who have kept the political faith have something about all of that early experience which may push those struggles forward. Here’s Sam’s story and see what you think:
Sam Lowell when he was young, when he was coming of age in the 1960s along with his hang around guys at Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street in Carver, did not give a “tinker’s damn” (Sam’s term which he would endlessly utter especially when the late Peter Paul Markin would start talking about what was going on outside of the Jimmy Jack corner world) about politics, about the fate of the world, about the burning and pressing issues of that day nuclear disarmament, black civil rights down South (he if anything had the Northern white working class prejudices inherited from his parents and relatives using the “n” word to refer to blacks for a very long time), and the exploding war in Vietnam. Sam’s world, like many guys of that time, like now too as far as anybody can see, was about girls or sex or name the gender combinations, above all about the music of the times, about what is now called the classic age of rock and roll (the folk music minute of that period which Bart Webber tried to get him interested in was, is, a book sealed with seven seals and he still grinds his teeth when any of us who hang with him still mention that genre).
Sam, declared by his local draft board exempt from military service as the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after he father had passed away suddenly of a massive heart attack in 1965, had pretty much kept his head in the sand about the war, probably supported the war against demon communism as much as anybody in town who was not directly involved in the escalation of the war. That is until one of his hang around guys, Freddie Callahan, Jack’s younger brother, had lain down his head in some rotted jungle in some unpronounceable hamlet in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in late 1967 and who would later have his name placed on that black granite down in Washington, D.C. which would bring a tear to Sam eye every time he visited it despite his complete change of heart about the war.
The war, the hellish flare-up and destructiveness of the war had not been Freddie’s fault, it had not been Freddie’s war as Sam was at pains to explain when he did get active in the anti-war movement and people around town thought that he was being disrespectful of Freddie’s memory and of the flag, actually probably more the flag until very late, maybe about 1972 when even the American Legion types in town saw the writing on the wall, some of them anyway.
Bart Webber was the first to take his slightly held anti-war feelings to the holding up the wall in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner night but he was facing the draft himself in 1966 so Sam had not taken his plight to heart. It really had been Freddie’s death that got him thinking, Freddie whom he had known since fifth grade when his own family had moved to Carver from North Adamsville when the shipbuilding trade there bottomed out and his father sought work in the new electronics plant just built up the road from Carver. Got him thinking about lots of things that did not add up in the world, the world of people just trying to get by without being shot at, or shot up by friend or foe.
One day, maybe in early spring 1968 in any case sometime before summer of that year, Sam had gone to Boston about thirty miles up the road from Carver on some business when he was walking near the Park Street subway station and a young guy about his age in regulation long hair (Sam’s was short although long for Carver young adults just then and commented on at Jimmy Jack’s by the older crowd going in for the old-timers’ blue plate specials and gung-ho guys who had no truck with “fairies” and “hippies”), unkempt beard, blue jeans and sandals, a picture of heaven’s own high priest hippie who handed him a leaflet for an anti-war rally sponsored by Students for a Democratic Society that was going to take place on the Common later that afternoon. (That was the notorious SDS that every right-thinking American believed, including Sam a little before Freddie’s death, as they could not understand kids who seemed to have everything going for them including draft exemptions were so rebellious unless some unknown source was prodding them, as the agents, paid or unpaid, of Moscow or China or someplace antagonistic to the interests of the United States. Every time an SDS rally was broken up by the cops, or mass arrests occurred, those believers breathed a short sigh of relief).
The guy in hippie garb pressed the issue, something Sam thought was odd since in his experience these hippie types were too laid back doing dope and sex and listening to acid rock to bother about politics usually saying that to get involved only “encouraged” those politicians who had depended on free-wheeling unpaid volunteer youth to campaign for them. That drug, sex and rock and roll were okay with him although he had not been into the dope scene then but rather the traditional Carver Friday and Saturday night down by the cranberry bogs drinking cheap whiskey scene, a scene that Carver guys had been doing since time immemorial at the bogs from what he had heard.
This dippy hippie started yelling at him that it that it was his “duty” to attend the rally and help “stop the fucking war.” Something in that common language “speech” made Sam take notice and he asked the hippie where he was from. He answered from Lynn, a very working class town on the North Shore of Boston, and told Sam, who blushed a little at the information, that he had already been in the Army, had served in Vietnam and had had enough of seeing his buddies killed or otherwise “fucked up.” Sam then out of the blue mentioned the death of Freddie Callahan, something he had never talked about except with the guys at Jimmy Jack’s, and the hippie told him that he had better get his ass to the rally before half their generation went up in smoke.
Sam pleaded business but that afternoon and early evening as the sun went down in Boston Sam was no longer “not political.” And Lance Jones, the hippie who had “recruited” him was there that afternoon and many times later to make sure that he did not backslide, and to give him the “skinny” on what was really going on in Vietnam and whose interests that commitment was serving. Sam and Lance (and others) would do many things together, sit-in at draft boards (Sam uneasy about that given his own status as exempt but Lance said everybody counted in the struggle), rallies, blocking highways and every other kind of civil protest against the damn war.
The defining moment, the moment Sam saw that the movement was ebbing, was becoming ineffective as a way to stop the “fucking war” as even he was prone to express his outrage at the constant bombings and constant lies about the situation, was down in Washington D.C. on May Day 1971 where there was a separation in the movement between those who wanted to endlessly built, presumably, larger mass rallies to show the people’s war weariness and those who decided it was time for more militant in-your-face tactics when the proposal was to “stop the government, if the government did not stop the war.” Sam had gone with the militants, a decision he has since never regretted although not for the outcome of the event itself which was an unmitigated failure but because of the enormity of that failure he had to think through things a bit more carefully, think more strategically.
He had been manhandled and arrested by the cops the first day out as the governmental forces far outnumbered and were more effective in containing the mass than that mass of people had been in evading the waiting cops and troops. Sam had spent a week in detention in RFK Stadium, a goddam football field as he would always tell everybody afterward, for his troubles (although he tempered his remarks about the stadium after the coup in Chile in 1973 where those militants were not merely harassed and detained but jailed for long periods or shot death out of hand in many cases).
Sam, Lance, Jack Callahan, Frankie Riley, me, maybe a couple of other guys did other things too, things like taking those continent-wide hitchhikes to the West Coast, the rock concerts, all of the stuff that those who had broken from the old expected cookie-cutter, if in Sam’s case only partially and slowly since he was not sure that the whole thing had not been a dream, and he had those family responsibilities although they lessened as his sisters came of age and left the house and his mother re-married to a good guy who ran a tool and die shop in town and had government contracts for high precision machine work. But it was funny thing about Sam, a thing that was not apparent when he hung around Carver in high school but once he was convinced that he needed to do something he stuck with it (he would later tell anybody who would listen that “sticking with it” included his two drawn out failed marriages beyond repair).
Sam, after that debacle in Washington, had settled in for the long haul, had listened to what Lance had to say about needing to organize better, get more substantial allies. Gave a glance at Marx and some other thinkers who knew what they were talking about if you wanted to effect real change and not just play at the thing for kicks, or for something to do while you are in school or on the loose, had read some and while for a long time he had his misgivings about taking his political cues from around the edges of rational politics, politics that he and his family, his neighbors, his corner boys had dismissed or worse stigmatized as “commie” talk which still hovered over his thinking. But Sam had been the first in the group to sense in the mid-1970s, particularly after the fall of Saigon and the close of the Vietnam era which had almost split the country in two, that the Garden of Eden was going to be postponed for a long time, that the tide had ebbed just as Bart Webber had sensed the rising tide in the mid-1960s.
But Sam stayed with the commitment to serious political change, to right some wrongs, to be a stand-up guy when some egregious governmental decision reared its ugly head. Stayed with it far longer that Lance who wound up going to school and becoming a CPA, longer than Bart who decided writing law briefs was easier than sitting around with about twelve people dedicated to changing the world and projecting when the next great mass upsurge would occur. Stayed with longer than Frankie Riley who also was drawn to writing legal briefs although he made a comeback in the lead-up to the first Iraq war in 1991. Longer than even the late Peter Paul Markin who had totally lost his moorings, let that “wanting habits” hunger that all the Jimmy Jack’s hang out guys had near the surface of their lives get the best of him and got caught up in the down side of the dope trade and wound up in a back alley face down under mysterious conditions in Sonora down in Mexico after a dope deal went bad. Yeah, those were not good years
So Sam faced the next few decades doing his best to keep up the good fight, working mainly with ad hoc committees that would rise and fall over specific issues like the effects of the “Reagan revolution” in this country, the struggles in Central America throughout the 1980s, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, that first Iraq war in 1991, and a laundry list of other causes great and small which filled his political life in hard times. But always kept his eyes open and ears to the ground to see if some new version of that 1960s experience would get some wind in its sails as new generations got caught up in the whirlwind of trying to right the world’s wrongs. He knew that the 1960s experience could never be exactly replicated, that each new generation would come to understandings in its own ways and forms, did not believe that a lot of 1960s stuff should be replicated but he did believe that another wave would come, believed in that vision for a long time. But when, damn it.
One of Sam’s worries as he got older and got more concerned about the future, especially in the post 9/11 world of the early 2000s, got much more concerned about the possibilities of a socialist future if not for him then for later generations as the American body politic took one of its prolonged turning in and against itself was that there would be no one to pass on whatever accumulated political wisdom he and his dwindling band of aging 1960s sisters and brothers had been through. No one to make sense of the political battles won and lost, no one to pick up the skills necessary to organize any effective opposition to the fierce predatory appetites of the American imperium, or maybe better said, any opposition at all as the post-2003 anti-war landscape demonstrated. Most importantly no one to learn how to avoid the mistakes of the past, mistakes made, unlike the American government, mostly out of willful ignorance, foolhardiness and hubris but certainly avoidable. Avoidable since a great if fairly obvious lesson from his own experiences had been that uprisings against the government, against the social norms of the day are short and precious opportunities not to be squandered by willful ignorance, foolhardiness and hubris.
Sam’s youthfully derived certitudes had taken a hammering in the process of the reactionary counter-offensive that erupting in the mid-1970s as the spirit of the 1960s rapidly dissipated, and took a decisive turn right under the auspices of the Reagan Revolution. The self-serving, self-promoting, social Darwinist view of society systematically laid out in that period has held a full head of steam since then as everyone almost daily has his or her nose rubbed in the hard fact that most people are not getting ahead while the bourgeoisie, the economic royalists, what did one wag call them, oh yeah, “the one-percent” with all the guns, prosper with no sweat. That ethos had never really abated despite a couple of promising uprising blips around opposition to the second Iraq war in 2003 which evaporated after the hellish bombs began to fall in earnest in Baghdad and after the world financial meltdown in 2008 and the subsequent short-lived and anarchistic Occupy movement of late 2011.
So Sam had more recently begun to feel that feeling in the extreme, the fear that there would be nobody to pass the torch to, nobody in the American body politic to learn a couple of things about past left-wing struggles and organizational efforts to attempt to “tame the monster.” Began to wonder if what he believed had not been an idle thought or some kind of self-induced paranoia.
Over the previous several years he had given the immediate reasons some thought as he began to realize that the generation after his which was the logical place to have passed that information onto never in the aggregate cared much about his kind of politics, had turn tail and gotten caught up in the “Reagan revolution” or after witnessing what happened to the ‘60s crowd ducked their heads, seriously ducked their heads when the deal went down. He had also become pretty sanguine about prospects for the generation after that, the grandkids, who seemed preoccupied with “Me” and with looking down toward the ground with their technological gadgetry and their ethereal “social networking” tweeter. But of late he was not so sure he should have been ready to throw in the towel but a new gathering storm, or what old Bart Webber, who he had run into recently in town for the funeral of a brother, had called “the fresh breeze” was still in its embryonic stage.
Sam had had to laugh at one point after a small demonstration of few hundred in Boston’s Park Street on the Common, the historic spot for such activities, against the escalation of the war in Afghanistan in the early days of the Obama administration (one of the “surges” that was supposed to secure “victory” and which in the final analysis led to more doors in more villages being kicked in and the United States’ action acting, once again, as a “recruiting sergeant” for ISIS-type organizations). That demonstration drew a cohort young people, people who had not previously been out in the public square but who were bewildered by a “peace” American President, a Nobel Peace Prize winner to boot, sending more boots on the ground after he had told the nation that the best American course was to withdraw from that benighted country. Of course the usual dwindling crew of AARP-worthy older types, the ones that his old friend Pete Markin had called when they were young the “little old ladies in tennis sneakers, Quakers up-tights, and assorted harmless do-gooders” back in the Carver days when he didn’t give a damn about politics and now here he was a “little old man in tennis sneakers” carrying on their seemingly utopian struggle.
An unusual combination indeed. The sly laugh part though was his realization that if there was any new action, any seeking of the “newer world” as that same Markin liked to called it comparable to the 1960s, that it would be the grandpas and grandmas and the grandkids linked up against the world. He was okay with that if that ever happened but after that initial burst of young energy faded he got increasingly more morose about that prospect, and the handing of that goddam torch.
Like with a lot of things in the world of politics, particularly left-wing politics where due to the smallness and isolation of those forces there is tendency to have to react to events not of your own making, the reaction by governments, particularly the United States, following 9/11 with its attempt to institutionalize the national security state and to seek vengeance at any target foreign or domestic that it considered dangerous. No question the scariest time of his political life, the only time he felt the full heat of physical threat from the average citizen whom he assumed usually view people demonstrating about anything as mere cranks and weirdoes was in the aftermath of the frenzied American bombing campaign and troop occupation in Afghanistan in 2001 right after 9/11 when he had with very few others had organized a small, a very small demonstration in opposition to the bombing campaign at Park Street and took more menacing guff from passers-by than he had ever encountered before. Those were dark days when some locally well-known committed peaceniks dependable in fair weather favored folding up the tent rather than face the hostile streets, and no question they were hostile, were suddenly not available to rally.
Like Sam said he hoped the later Occupy movement which arose phoenix-like out of the ashes of the world financial crisis but that fizzled fairly quickly and that sent Sam into another bout with what the hell, no who the hell was going to lead the struggle, who among the young who of necessity with their energy and sense of wonder drive all the great movements, was going to step forward. He felt at that time that he would have no problem taking a back sit in the struggle if the new blood came along.
Here is a funny thing, a quirk of politics. Everybody Sam talked to, young and old, understood that the social tinder underlying American society only needed a little push to go wild. Knew that as a result of the vast increase in income inequality, knew the weight of the endless wars on the budget and human resources was at a breaking point, knew that people, a lot of people, did not feel they were getting ahead in life always something that will steadily enflame people. So Sam, and they, the ones he talked to and talked to him knew something had to flare up. But didn’t, for a long time didn’t. Then in a rather quick succession the environment, the fight for a living wage and the fight against police brutality and the fight against the hard racism against black people were taken up by the young, or rather sections of the young from say late 2013 to now.
Not everything that has been proposed, not every action has made political sense but there is some motion toward upping the struggle, getting back into the street politics that Sam had been pushing for some time in various committee meetings since the portals of government seemed to be tone-deaf to what was going on down at the base of society. Here is the kicker though. The kicker for now as things are still in flux, still have a way to go before they are sifted out. Things may be in flux and need sifting out but Sam is starting to get and uneasy feeling already. Sam went to a meeting of those who wanted to respond to the various egregious police shootings of the past years around the country and tried to make some points, give some perspectives. He was rather unceremoniously dismissed by the young leaders there, both the young black and white leaders, as an old-timey too talkative guy.
The young, like in his generation, appear ready to seek to reinvent the wheel. Appear too as well to be as naïve about the enemies they are facing as they were in his generation. But what bothered Sam most of late has been that the young in their identity political way are “ageist” if such a term makes sense, are disrespectful of his right to have his say since when the deal goes down he will be on the barricades right beside them. Sam thought that even with the slights he could still say-“Ah, to young was very heaven” though as old Wordsworth had said in his sunnier days.
The Irish Easter 1916 Uprising- From The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) Of All Places
The Irish Easter 1916 Uprising- From The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) Of All Places
Click on the link to hear about various aspects, including the key role of women as fighters and aid workers, of the Easter 1916 Uprising on the 100th Anniversary of the occasion.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-35873316Saturday, April 23, 2016
In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Irish Easter Uprising, 1916-Sean Flynn’s Fight-Take Two
A word on the Easter Uprising
In the old Irish working-class neighborhoods where I grew up the aborted Easter Uprising of 1916 was spoken of in mythical hushed reverent tones as the key symbol of the modern Irish liberation struggle from bloody England. The event itself provoked such memories of heroic “boyos” (and “girlos” not acknowledged) fighting to the end against great odds that a careful analysis of what could, and could not be, learned from the mistakes made at the time entered my head. That was then though in the glare of boyhood infatuations. Now is the time for a more sober assessment.
The easy part of analyzing the Irish Easter Uprising of 1916 is first and foremost the knowledge, in retrospect, that it was not widely supported by people in Ireland, especially by the “shawlies” in Dublin and the cities who received their sons’ military pay from the Imperial British Army for service in the bloody trenches of Europe which sustained them throughout the war. That factor and the relative ease with which the uprising had been militarily defeated by the British forces send in main force to crush it lead easily to the conclusion that the adventure was doomed to failure. Still easier is to criticize the timing and the strategy and tactics of the planned action and of the various actors, particularly in the leadership’s underestimating the British Empire’s frenzy to crush any opposition to its main task of victory in World War I. (Although, I think that frenzy on Mother England’s part would be a point in the uprising’s favor under the theory that England’s [or fill in the blank of your favorite later national liberation struggle] woes were Ireland’s [or fill in the blank ditto on the your favorite oppressed peoples struggle] opportunities.
The hard part is to draw any positive lessons of that national liberation struggle experience for the future. If nothing else remember this though, and unfortunately the Irish national liberation fighters (and other national liberation fighters later, including later Irish revolutionaries) failed to take this into account in their military calculations, the British (or fill in the blank) were savagely committed to defeating the uprising including burning that colonial country to the ground if need be in order to maintain control. In the final analysis, it was not part of their metropolitan homeland, so the hell with it. Needless to say, cowardly British Labor’s position was almost a carbon copy of His Imperial Majesty’s. Labor Party leader Arthur Henderson could barely contain himself when informed that James Connolly had been executed. That should, even today, make every British militant blush with shame. Unfortunately, the demand for British militants and others today is the same as then if somewhat attenuated- All British Troops Out of Ireland.
In various readings on national liberation struggles I have come across a theory that the Easter Uprising was the first socialist revolution in Europe, predating the Bolshevik Revolution by over a year. Unfortunately, there is little truth to that idea. Of the Uprising’s leaders only James Connolly was devoted to the socialist cause. Moreover, while the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army were prototypical models for urban- led national liberation forces such organizations, as we have witnessed in later history, are not inherently socialistic. The dominant mood among the leadership was in favor of political independence and/or fighting for a return to a separate traditional Irish cultural hegemony. (“Let poets rule the land”).
As outlined in the famous Proclamation of the Republic posted on the General Post Office in Dublin, Easter Monday, 1916 the goal of the leadership appeared to be something on the order of a society like those fought for in the European Revolutions of 1848, a left bourgeois republic. A formation on the order of the Paris Commune of 1871 where the working class momentarily took power or the Soviet Commune of 1917 which lasted for a longer period did not figure in the political calculations at that time. As noted above, James Connolly clearly was skeptical of his erstwhile comrades on the subject of the nature of the future state and apparently was prepared for an ensuing class struggle following the establishment of a republic.
That does not mean that revolutionary socialists could not support such an uprising. On the contrary, Lenin, who was an admirer of Connolly for his anti-war stance in World War I, and Trotsky stoutly defended the uprising against those who derided the Easter rising for involving bourgeois elements. Participation by bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements is in the nature of a national liberation struggle. The key, which must be learned by militants today, is who leads the national liberation struggle and on what program. As both Lenin and Trotsky made clear later in their own experiences in Russia revolutionary socialists have to lead other disaffected elements of society to overthrow the existing order. There is no other way in a heterogeneous class-divided society. Moreover, in Ireland, the anti-imperialist nature of the action against British imperialism during wartime on the socialist principle that the defeat of your own imperialist overlord in war as a way to open the road to the class struggle merited support on that basis alone. Chocky Ar La.
********
Here is a little commemorative piece based on the exploits of Frankie Riley from the old neighborhood grand-uncle’s, Sean Flynn, who gave a good account of himself when the time for fighting came:
Funny, Sean Flynn thought, about how words and phrases can capture a moment, capture an Irish poetic moment, of which in the benighted history of this benighted isle there were few and far between. He had been reading, really re-reading, William Butler Yeats’ homage to the men of Easter 1916, his men (although he had been a mere slip of a boy, if a tall manly looking boy then), and about that powerful refrain that ended a few verses -“a terrible beauty was born.” Yes, Sean thought, that phrase fit the occasion to a tee, fit those working men like himself and his brother, Seamus, who gave their all those bloody April days to free Ireland from the English yoke. Yes, funny too how an Anglo-Irishman, a bloody heathen if you really thought about it, captured the spirit of those times, of those times when men, a few men , had to step up and be counted. Ordinary working men mostly, the ones from his Irish Citizens’ Army, the one Jimmy Connolly (the late lamented martyred James Connolly to most) put together to defend the neighborhoods against the bloody reprisals after the big 1914 strike. The others too, too few others in Dublin no question what with all the confusion, mainly poets and students caught up in some professor’s exaltations.
Sean remembered, distinctly remembered, how nervous he had been waiting, eternally waiting for the sign of the uprising to take place-he knew for sure it would not be like some Wolfe Tone thing, or the rising of the moon. Not this time not when the Irish finally had the British at a disadvantage. That big war in Europe was actually to their benefit. Oh no, not at first when everybody, even hot-headed Irishmen if one could believe that, was ready to give his or her all for the bloody King of England against the damn Huns. No, rather later once everybody knew that England was so desperate to beat the Huns in Europe with everything they had that a small military encounter with whatever remnants the British left behind to garrison the Irish colony could be disposed of with ease and a free Ireland delivered at little cost. The question that made Sean nervous, made many a man nervous, was when. As 1915 slipped into 1916 those nerves only got more frayed since there were constant rumors that the war in Europe would soon be over and a chance to gain the upper hand would be lost.
Finally, finally word filtered down to the “boyos” that the Irish Citizens’ Army (meaning James Connolly above all others) would join with the Irish Volunteers (Patrick Pearse’s operation, among others) to declare a republic and stand and fight. Naturally there were more delays as the chieftains (now including the previously non-committal Irish Republican Brotherhood) argued about the necessity, the validity, and then the timing of a rising. (All this not known until later after the smoke had cleared and the survivors could take stock of who, and who did not, do what, who did, and did not, show up, and what else went wrong.) Then that Easter week came and the order to arm came. And all arms to head to Dublin, to the strategic General Post Office (their, the bloody English’s post office). Sean got there just in time to hear the Proclamation read and posted. The battle was on and suddenly all of Sean’s nervousness about being exposed, about not being a military man, about being shy around guns evaporated.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)