*****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.          
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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?

May Day 2016 In Boston-Sunday May 1st-Join Us In Celebration

May Day 2016 In Boston-Sunday May 1st-Join Us In Celebration

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Unpublished Articles Of Interest-SPAIN: The Politics of the Underground

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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The following article was prepared for, but not included (because of the space available) in the special double issue of Revolutionary History on the Spanish Civil War (Vol.4 Nos.1/2). It was first published in the journal Socialist Current, which was the voice of a long lived but small, independent Trotskyist group led by Sam Levy and Frank Rowe. (Obituaries for both of these comrades can be found in the back issues of Revolutionary History. Work is continuing on indexing and annotating the files of Socialist Current, and it is hoped at some stage to make available a selection of their most important analytical articles.)

For a full obituary of the author, Grandizo Munis, see Revolutionary History Vol.2 No.2, Summer 1969, which also published 3 articles by Munis, and a personal memoir of him by Ernest Rogers.

SPAIN: The Politics of the Underground

In 1962 an alliance between the principle underground organisations in Spain was signed. The following comment is from ALARMA (see end footnote).

The agreement signed between the CNT, UGT and STV (the Anarcho-Syndicalist, Social Democratic and Basque “underground” unions respectively – Eds) cannot be applauded. The Declaration of Principles and Working Agreement adopted by these three organisations does not contain a single revolutionary point and does not even inspire a vague impulse of revolt against the social conditions which are the result of the Franco dictatorship. A superficial analysis is enough to convince one of this. In effect the third point of the Agreement, the most radical of all, only commits the signatories, “To re-establish civil liberties until the full enjoyment of the rights of man, as defined in the declaration of the Rights of Man, approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10th 1948, is reached” (That is freedom of association, of propaganda, both oral and written, and so on.)

To the younger generation, overwhelmed by the daily routines of the dictatorship, there is perhaps an attractive promise here. But nothing is further from reality. The stated declaration of the United Nations protects no more than the right of men to submit to the exploitation and political dictates of capitalism. It would be difficult for it to be otherwise since the UN is an association of the property-owning states of world capital. And, incidentally, these same rights, agreed in the declaration, are a dead letter in the majority of the countries of the western bloc and the so-called neutrals, as they are in all the states of the Eastern bloc. But let us suppose for the moment that, tomorrow, these rights were fully implemented in Spain. Would they thus solve the problems of a society that has been established for more than 30 years? Would they, hell! As far as the rights which are necessary and immediately achievable, the stated declaration hardly represents those agreed by the regulations of a prison for condemned men. Thus the third point of the agreement is limited to creating a rational capitalist society.

However it is worth the toil involved to note the very deliberate formulation of this point in the agreement “To re-establish civil liberties UNTIL the full enjoyment is reached … (etc.)”. That is to say the signatories, even if they had the power to do so, would not grant the full normal rights and liberties of bourgeois legality, but setting themselves up as the tutors of a people supposedly overcome by pettiness, incapacity, indifference etc, they would simply define, according to their own views, what such “liberty” means. At the most the pact is merely a promised ‘Constitution’.

It is of course quite natural that the so-called “Sindical de Trabajadores Vascos” (Basque Workers Union – Eds) should “rise in revolt” in this sort of way, because, being just a clerico-paternalistic organisation, it considers itself called upon to ward off a new revolution with volleys of harsh words. And neither is it a wonder that the UGT tends to the same sort of thing. For decades now the “Socialist” Parties have adopted all the values of existing society – exploitation included. The new feature is that the CNT now makes an act of contrition and also bows down before the same “legality”. But the novelty is only relative because, after the first few months of the civil war, it was they who permitted the Stalinists to get away with the destruction of revolutionary conquests. The signing of the pact gives a dominant character to bourgeois tendencies, and from its birth, this will give it an organic stability.

For many years we have maintained that a revolution based on trade union organisations is an impossibility, and that is irrespective of whether they are anarchist or marxist. All trade unionism becomes, sooner or later, useful to capital, and in the course of society’s development it has shown a great partiality to State Capitalism: that is to say with the same thing that the enemies of the working class call “Socialism”. Humiliating themselves before the UGT and the little men of the crucifix who lead the Basque union, the CNT has reached the end of its evolutionary cycle. Now it can be no more than an another body within capitalist legality. Thus the revolutionary defence of the economic interests of the working class will need new forms of organisation: directly elected committees in the work-places. By this means, the working class can achieve the expropriation of capital and the abolition of wage labour, a task that, if nothing else, is incompatible with Trade Union organisation (including the best that can be imagined).

Point no.4 of the Agreement promises in vain “to oppose any other anti-democratic regime” that tries to succeed the Franco one. But world forces will not be stopped or diverted by words. The dictatorial tendencies of Spanish capitalism, until now embodied in the clergy and army, are a necessity imposed by their particular characteristics within a concrete historical framework. This tendency can find new outlets in State Capitalism, which has already given proof of its reactionary efficiency in so many countries, but cannot be abolished except by the death of capitalism itself. And if the Pact in question reveals itself to be ineffective in limiting the misconduct of the clergy and army, it would not represent much of an obstacle to a State Capitalist dictatorship. It is impossible to move to the future without ending the economy of capital and wage labour.

The same sort of ideas has also given birth to the so-called “Frente de Fuerzas Democraticas” (Front of Democratic Forces) These democratic forces are partly composed of ex-falangists that now call themselves, “monarchists” and “Christian Democrats”, and partly of adherents of the Socialist Party. Like other similar organisations built in the past, it is probable that the “Frente” does not reach any circles outside (inside? ERC) Spain, though most of the aforementioned string along with prominent people inside Spain who, at the same time, have their own fish to fry. The one thing they will not do is to rally the people against the regime, and even less to encourage the revolt of the oppressed. Their clear intention is the opposite: to guarantee that the succession to Franco takes place takes within the existing social order.

These pseudo-democratic pact-makers promise to submit the question of the kind of regime that would have to be established in Spain to the popular will. They abuse the words. They will promise to hold elections, whether very monarchist or very republican, which are only two of the many forms of the same capitalist society. A real choice of regime has to be based on the property system: socialism or capitalism, precisely establishing that state property is no less capitalist than the individual variety. But in making this choice, the labouring masses find themselves in a plain position of inferiority, since all resources and means of influence are in the hands of their opponents. Neither the gentlemen of the “Frente”, nor the worshippers of Stalin, ever called upon them to take this sort of decision.

The concrete problems to decide are these: either the army and the professional police or their dissolution and the arming of the working class; either an economy based on capitalism and wage labour or an economy based on the workers of production and distribution; either a parliamentary democracy or a government based on workers’ committees. But, as in 1936, these and other decisive questions will have to be resolved by working class struggle.

GM



Footnote. The editorial board wish to point out that they do not necessarily agree with all the views and ideas expressed in the above article. Since however the article is a) informative and b) the considered assessment of a Spanish grouping on the political situation in Spain, they hope that its appearance in English will prove useful. ALARMA (organ of the group known as ‘Fomento Obrero Revolutionario’) is published in France, but also circulates illegally in Spain.

from Socialist Current, pp.16-18, October 1962

Songwriter's Corner- Spain 1936- The Irish Connection -In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of the Easter Uprising

Songwriter's Corner- Spain 1936- The Irish Connection

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of the Easter Uprising

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

Peter Paul Markin Commentary

 

I have spilled no small amount of ink, and gladly, writing about the heroic military role of those Americans who fought in the American-led Abraham Lincoln Battalion of 15th International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. The song "Viva La Quince Brigada" can apply to those of other nationalities who fought bravely for the Republican side in that conflict. Here's a take from the Irish perspective. Note the name Frank Ryan included here, a real hero of that operation.

Viva La Quince Brigada
(Christy Moore)

Ten years before I saw the light of morning

A comradeship of heroes was laid.

From every corner of the world came sailing

The Fifteenth International Brigade.

They came to stand beside the Spanish people.

To try and stem the rising Fascist tide

Franco's allies were the powerful and wealthy,

Frank Ryan's men came from the other side.

Even the olives were bleeding

As the battle for Madrid it thundered on.

Truth and love against the force af evil,

Brotherhood against the Fascist clan.

Vive La Quince Brigada!

"No Paseran" the pledge that made them fight.

"Adelante" was the cry around the hillside.

Let us all remember them tonight.

Bob Hillard was a Church of Ireland pastor;

From Killarney across the Pyrenees ho came.

From Derry came a brave young Christian Brother.

Side by side they fought and died in Spain.

Tommy Woods, aged seventeen, died in Cordoba.

With Na Fianna he learned to hold his gun.

From Dublin to the Villa del Rio

Where he fought and died beneath the Spanish sun.

Many Irishmen heard the call of Franco.

Joined Hitler and Mussolini too.

Propaganda from the pulpit and newspapers

Helped O'Duffy to enlist his crew.

The word came from Maynooth: 'Support the Fascists.'

The men of cloth failed yet again

When the bishops blessed the blueshirts in Dun Laoghaire

As they sailed beneath the swastika to Spain.

This song is a tribute to Frank Ryan.

Kit Conway and Dinny Coady too.

Peter Daly, Charlie Regan and Hugh Bonar.

Though many died I can but name a few.

Danny Doyle, Blaser-Brown and Charlie Donnelly.

Liam Tumilson and Jim Straney from the Falls.

Jack Nally, Tommy Patton and Frank Conroy,

Jim Foley, Tony Fox and Dick O'Neill.

Written in 1983

Copyright Christy Moore

apr97

Here are a couple more Yeats classics.

THE SECOND COMING

by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

"The Second Coming" is reprinted from Michael Robartes and the Dancer. W.B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1921.

ON A POLITICAL PRISONER

by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

HE that but little patience knew,

From childhood on, had now so much

A grey gull lost its fear and flew

Down to her cell and there alit,

And there endured her fingers' touch

And from her fingers ate its bit.

Did she in touching that lone wing

Recall the years before her mind

Became a bitter, an abstract thing,

Her thought some popular enmity:

Blind and leader of the blind

Drinking the foul ditch where they lie?

When long ago I saw her ride

Under Ben Bulben to the meet,

The beauty of her country-side

With all youth's lonely wildness stirred,

She seemed to have grown clean and sweet

Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird:

Sea-borne, or balanced in the air

When first it sprang out of the nest

Upon some lofty rock to stare

Upon the cloudy canopy,

While under its storm-beaten breast

Cried out the hollows of the sea.

 

"On a Political Prisoner" is reprinted from Michael Robartes and the Dancer. W.B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1921.

*****In The Beginning Was... The Jug- The Jim Kweskin Jug Band

*****In The Beginning Was... The Jug- The Jim Kweskin Jug Band

 

Who knows how it happened, how the jug bug craze got started in the folk minute of the 1960s, maybe it happened just like in the 1920s and early 1930s when “jug” got a boost by the likes of the Memphis Jug Band, The Mississippi Sheiks, and about twelve other state-named Sheik groupings using home-made weapons, uh, instruments, picked up from here and there, a jug here, a triangle there, fashion a kazoo of wood or grab a metal one at Woolworth's 5&10 there (got you on that one folkies, right, but they along with Sears & Roebuck's catalogue and maybe Marshall Fields' too sold all manner of musical instruments and before the folk boom of the 1960s when with disposable income [read: allowances and parents of means ready to indulge a few fantasies through their kids] which allowed kids to buy instruments from music stores a lot of guys, guys like Hobart Smith, Homer Jones and Matthew Arnold got their instruments handed down to them or some desperate mother or father like Guy Davis,' Son House's, Cliff Mathers', and Slim Parsons' ordered straight from the catalogue not the finest instruments but those guys spoke highly of their first store-bought instruments even when they could afford better when they made their marks), pluck a worn out grandmother's washtub there and come up with some pretty interesting sounds. Yeah, once you listen to the old stuff on YouTube these days where the Memphis Jug Band has a whole video file devoted to their stuff, same with a lot of the others, you could see where that period might have been the start of the big first wave.

Maybe though back in the 1960s somebody, a few musicians, got together and figured here was something that folk-crazed kids, a very specific demographic not to be confused with all of the generation of ’68 post-war baby boomers coming of age rock and roll jail break-out but those who were sick unto death of the vanilla rock and roll that was being passed out about 1960 or so, get this, music that more than one mother, including my mother, thought was “nice” and that was the kiss of death to that kind of music after the death of classic Elvis/Chuck/Bo/Jerry Lee rock for a while before the Brits came over the pond to stir things up and the West Coast acid-eaters ate enough of the drug to sink the Golden Gate Bridge or at least the park and headed east in the Second Coming of rock and roll (not to be confused with the Christian second coming which would signify the end of the world as we know it or with Yeats' mystical version with the seven-headed dragon staring you in the face so stay away from those who want to travel that route) so they started tinkering. Maybe, and remember the folk milieu perhaps more widely that the rock milieu was very literate, was very into knowing about roots and genesis and where things fit in (including where they, the folkies who also a vision about a kinder, gentler world all mixed in until heads got busted in goddam Mississippi goddam, got their heads busted on Fifth Avenue in NYC for calling for an armed truce to the Vietnam War, got their heads busted come May Day 1971 when all the evil spirits in the world rose to bust a certain kind of dream) somebody in the quickly forming and changing bands looked up some songs in the album archives at the library, or, more likely from what later anecdotal evidence had to say about the matter, found some gem in some record store, maybe a store like Sandy’s over between Harvard and Central Squares in Cambridge who had all kinds of eclectic stuff if you had the time and wherewithal to shuffle through the bins. Institutions like Sandy's and a lot of towns had such oases even some unknown name ones like Larry's in Portland, Maine and Sukie's out in Eire, Pennsylvania if you can believe that sustained many for hours back then in the cusp of the 1960s folk revival when there were record stores on almost every corner in places like Harvard Square and the Village in the East you could find some gems if you searched long enough and maybe found some old moth-eaten three volume set Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and came up with The Memphis Jug Band and K.C. Moan or the Sheiks doing Rent Man Blues, maybe Furry Lewis on Kassie Jones (although sometimes the search was barren or, maybe worse, something second hand by Miss Patti Page singing about Cape Cod Bay all moony for the parents or try to hustle our young emotions but traipsing a dog in front of us, Tennessee Ernie Ford singing about sixteen tons, tons of coal and breaking your back too, or good god, some country bumpkin George Jones thing like I couldn't even give you a title for stared you in the face).

From there they, the jug masters of the revival, found the Cannon’s Stompers, the Mississippi Sheiks or the Memphis Jug Band, could be the way to prosper by going back to those days if they kept the arrangements simple, since that was what allowed the jug bands to prosper in the commercial markets of those days, keep the melody so simple that every working stiff and every forlorn housewife had the tune coming out of the sides of their brains and that was that. See, everybody then was looking for roots, American music roots, old country roots, roots of some ancient thoughts of a democratic America before the robber barons and their progeny grabbed everything with every hand they had on their fetid bodies. Let’s make it simple, something that was not death-smeared we-are- going-to-die-tomorrow if the Ruskkies go over the top red scare bomb shelter Cold War night that we were trying to shake and take our chances, stake our lives that there was something better to do that wait for the foreordained end.

And that wide awake search was no accident, at least from the oral history evidence I have held from those who came of age with me in that time after having grown up with rock and roll and found in that minute that genre wanting.  Some went reaching South to the homeland of much roots music, since those who were left behind or decided out of ennui or sloth to stay put kept up the old country British Isles Child ballad stuff (their own spin on the stuff not Child’s Brattle Street Brahmin rarified collection stuff) and found some grizzled old geezers like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, Homer Jones, Reverend Jack Robinson and the like, who had made small names for themselves in the 1920s when labels like RCA and Paramount went out looking for talent in the hinterlands.

So there was history there, certainly for the individual members of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Jim, Geoff Mulduar, Mel Lymon, Maria Muldaur, Fritz Richmond , the most famous and long-lasting of the 1960s jug groupings, all well-versed in many aspects of the American Songbook (hell, I would say so, say they were well-versed, even old tacky Tin Pan Alley Irving Berlin, smooth Cole Porter and the saucy Gershwin Brothers got a hearing from them and if they could simple those damn complicated Tin Pan Alley melodies they took a shot at those as well), history there for the taking. All they needed was a jug, a good old boy homemade corn liquor jug giving the best sound but maybe some down in the cellar grandpa jug from the old days of Ball jars and crockery, a found washtub grandma used to use before she got that electric washer from the old garage where she put it against a rainy day when she might have to use it again when hard times came again as they usually did, a washboard found  in that same location, a triangle from somewhere, a kazoo from the music store, some fiddle, a guitar, throw in  a tambourine for Maria and so they were off, off to conquer places like Harvard Square, like the Village, like almost any place in the Bay area within the sound of the bay.

And for a while the band did conquer, picking up other stuff chimes, more exotic kazoos, harmonicas, what the heck, even up-graded guitars and they made great music, great entertainment music, not heavy with social messages but just evoking those long lost spirits from the 1920s when jug music would sustain a crowd on a Saturday night. Made some stuff up as they went along, or better, made old stuff their own like Washington At Valley Forge, Bumble Bee, Sweet Sue from Paul Whitman and plenty of on the edge Scotty Fitzgerald Jazz Age stuff that got people moving and forgetting their blues. Here is the beauty of it unlike most of the 1920s first wave stuff which was confined to records and radio listening, a lot of the rarer stuff now long gone lost, you can see the Kweskin Jug Band back in the day on YouTube and see the kind of energy which they produced when they were in high form (music that they, Jim and Geoff anyway, still give high energy to when they occasionally appear together in places like Club Passim in Harvard Square these days). Yeah, in the beginning was the jug… 

A View From The Left-Democrats, Republicans—Dump ’Em All!-For a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!-Fear, Loathing and the Primaries

Workers Vanguard No. 1087	8 April 2016

Democrats, Republicans—Dump ’Em All!-For a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!

Fear, Loathing and the Primaries

In his 1917 book, The State and Revolution, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin succinctly described the fraud of bourgeois democracy: “To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism.” As revolutionary Marxists, we oppose on principle a vote to Republicans, Democrats and any other bourgeois candidates. At the same time, this year’s primaries show the anger and despair that has been building at the bottom of U.S. society for decades.

There is widespread hatred for the political establishments of both parties, who are correctly seen as the bought-and-paid-for agents of the financial con men on Wall Street and the profit-bloated corporations that are responsible for the ruin of millions. But thanks above all to the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, the anger among working people has found no expression in class struggle against the rulers. As a result, the discontents of the ruled are finding expression in support for bourgeois “anti-establishment” candidates. The flagrantly racist, billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump is, to date, dominating the Republican primaries. The self-declared “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders is giving the second coming of the Clinton dynasty a run for her money to an extent greater than anyone predicted.

Sanders is the only candidate in this electoral circus to offer bread to the masses with his calls for free tuition, Medicare for all and a $15-an-hour minimum wage. This has struck a chord particularly among white petty-bourgeois youth, as well as with a layer of white workers who have seen their unions destroyed, wages plummet, benefits looted and decent-paying jobs all but disappear. Sanders’s promises are nothing but hot air. Such concessions will only be wrung from the bourgeoisie through class struggle. Despite being redbaited, Sanders is no socialist, but a capitalist politician. Nevertheless, it is a gauge of the mounting anger in this society, where socialism has long been reviled as an attack on “the American way of life,” that he is garnering support from a layer of white workers.

Sanders’s claims to be leading “a political revolution against the billionaire class” have been tolerated by the Democratic Party establishment. He has long served the interests of the ruling class, particularly with his support for the bloody wars, occupations and other military adventures of U.S. imperialism that have devastated countries around the globe (see “Bernie Sanders: Imperialist Running Dog,” WV No. 1083, 12 February). Not only is Sanders running for the top ticket of a party that, as much as the Republicans, represents the interests of the bourgeoisie; he is helping refurbish the image of the Democrats as the “party of the people.” Moreover, he has made clear that in the general election he would support whoever is the Democratic nominee, presumably Hillary Clinton. For her part, Clinton is overwhelmingly winning the black vote as fear of Republican victory, amplified by the fascists crawling between Trump’s toes, further drives black people into the Democrats, the onetime party of the Confederacy and Jim Crow.

On the Republican side, we now witness the spectacle of the party’s establishment pouring millions of dollars into ads attacking, not the Democrats, but their own party’s front-runner. Former Republican Party candidates are being trotted out to preach against Trump’s raving anti-immigrant racism and his revolting sexism. Coming from the mouths of those who told “illegal immigrants” to “self deport,” who reviled workers and the poor as “moochers” for wanting health care, food and housing, who have worked overtime to roll back every gain of the civil rights movement and who have reveled in biblical scripture and railed against women needing abortions, gay people and other “deviants,” the hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Trump is simply saying openly what Republican Party leaders have been promoting for years. What bothers them is that he is not playing by the party establishment’s rule book. For them, inciting racist reaction serves as an ideological battering ram to further impoverish the working class and poor by slashing such social programs as continue to exist. Trump says that he will not attack Social Security and Medicare. This reactionary demagogue will say or do anything. His claim that he’ll bring back manufacturing to the U.S., invoking a particularly racist variant of “save American jobs” protectionism, has won him a hearing among the white working poor. For its part, the Republican Party leadership is worried that Trump is whipping up the jobless and impoverished masses at home and putting at risk the profits that U.S. imperialism garners from its “free trade” rape of the neocolonial world.

For the Republican leadership, Trump is adding insult to injury by trading on the campaign slogan of Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the Republican Party: “Make America Great Again.” Reagan rode into the Oval Office by playing on and ramping up a white racist backlash against social programs seen as benefiting the black ghetto poor. The race card was played, as it always has been by America’s rulers, to further the brutal exploitation of the working class as a whole. Today, the devastation that was visited first on the black working class and poor is increasingly the reality for many white workers and poor.

In the 1990s, racist ideologue Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve blamed the misery of ghetto poor on the “genetic inferiority” of black people. In 2012, his book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 blamed the destitution facing poor whites on their insufficient family and other values. Such class contempt was put most baldly by a recent article in the right-wing National Review (28 March) by one Kevin D. Williamson. Titled “Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction,” the article raves:

“Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white America....

“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally they are indefensible.”

The liberation of working people from the bondage of wage slavery will never happen without the proletariat taking up the cause of black freedom, which itself requires the shattering of this racist capitalist system through socialist revolution. In Volume I of Capital (1867), Karl Marx captured the great truth about American capitalist society when he wrote: “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” Our purpose as Marxists today is to translate the boiling anger and discontents of the toiling masses into a conscious understanding that the working class needs its own party—not an electoral vehicle vying to be the administrators of the capitalist state but a party championing the cause of all the exploited and oppressed in the fight for workers rule.

Whom the Gods Would Destroy They First Make Mad

The insanity in the Republican Party is simply a manifestation of the dangerous irrationality of U.S. imperialism. Having achieved the 1991-92 counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union—which emerged from the world’s first and only successful proletarian revolution—America’s capitalist rulers acted as if they were the unrivaled masters of the world. Under Republican and Democratic administrations alike, they have thrown their military might around the world. But U.S. imperialism’s unending series of wars has done nothing to stem its declining economic might.

Declaring that “Trump needs to be stopped,” a former foreign policy adviser to the Bush administration railed, “He has upset our allies in Central America, Europe, East Asia and the Middle East.” Trump’s denunciation of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq has particularly riled up the neocons who were the architects of that war. An op-ed column reviling Trump in the Washington Post (25 February) by Robert Kagan concluded: “For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.” Why not? Her credentials as a leading hawk for U.S. imperialism are solid gold.

Many, including Republicans writing op-ed pieces in the New York Times, have asked, “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” Others compare his candidacy to the end of the Weimar Republic and rise of Hitler’s Nazis. But the soil in which the Nazis grew was that of an imperialist power that had been defeated in World War I. Appealing to the discontents of an increasingly destitute petty bourgeoisie, the Nazis became a mass movement by the early 1930s. When the leadership of the millions-strong Communist and Socialist workers parties failed to make a bid to overturn the decayed capitalist order in Germany, the discredited bourgeoisie unleashed the Nazis in order to preserve their rule through crushing the workers movement, and in the process set the stage for the unspeakable barbarism of the Holocaust.

In contrast, the U.S. is not a defeated imperialist country but rather remains the “world’s only superpower,” whose military might is many times greater than that of its imperialist rivals combined. Nor does the American ruling class currently face a challenge from the working class at home. On the contrary, thanks to sellouts standing at the head of the now dwindling ranks of organized labor, the U.S. bourgeoisie has thus far prevailed in its decades-long war against labor.

Trump is not a fascist; his projected road to power is not outside the electoral framework. But there is nonetheless plenty to fear from the yahoos being whipped into a red-white-and-blue anti-immigrant frenzy at his rallies, which have spurred integrated protests against him throughout the country. Demonstrators protesting Trump’s rallies have been assaulted and black protesters subjected to cries of “go back to Africa.” The KKK and other fascist groups are crawling out of their holes, with former Klan grand wizard David Duke declaring, “Voting against Donald Trump at this point, is really treason to your heritage.”

In the 1980s, the official racism emanating from the Reagan White House similarly encouraged the Klan and Nazis. When they tried to stage their rallies for racist terror in major urban areas, we put out the call for mass labor/minority mobilizations to stop them. In Chicago, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and elsewhere they were stopped by thousands-strong protests based on the social power of the multiracial unions mobilized at the head of the black ghetto poor, immigrants and all the intended victims of fascist terror. In microcosm, these mobilizations demonstrated the role of the revolutionary workers party that we seek to build.

Workers, Blacks: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

It is squarely the responsibility of the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy that a significant layer of white working people supports a man once best known for the phrase, “you’re fired.” Trump is gaining that support by flying the AFL-CIO misleaders’ flag of “America first” protectionism. Under this flag, the labor fakers have continually surrendered gains won through the militant battles of the working class—black, white and immigrant.

In order to maximize their profits, the capitalists will always go where labor is cheapest. But the scapegoating of foreign workers for the loss of jobs in the U.S. is a reactionary response. Protectionism reinforces illusions in American capitalism. It undermines prospects of struggle by poisoning the working class’s consciousness and subverting solidarity with its potential class allies in China, Mexico and elsewhere. Such protectionism also imbues workers with the false notion that improving their material conditions is completely out of their hands and their ability to organize and fight, but rather lies with a bourgeois savior.

Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump play the same economic-nationalist card. But while Sanders appeals for “unity” in opposition to Trump’s xenophobic racism, Trump’s rallies are simply a stark reflection of the chauvinism that lies at the heart of calls to “save American jobs” from foreign competition. If the unions are going to be instruments of struggle against the bosses, they must take up the fight for immigrant rights, demanding an end to deportations and raising the banner of full citizenship rights for all immigrants. The fight for such demands would advance common struggle between American workers and their working-class allies internationally.

Today, the discontent of many working people is being channeled into the campaigns of either Trump or Sanders. But the workers’ anger has also found expression in an impulse to struggle against the capitalists’ offensive—an impulse that has been repeatedly thwarted by the union misleaders. Last year, young auto workers, many of them black, were ready and willing to strike against the hated multi-tier system, which fosters divisions in the workforce. In this, they had considerable support from older workers, white and black, pointing to the potential for class unity across racial lines. But the United Auto Workers union tops crammed down their throats a sellout contract with the “Detroit Three” that in fact expanded the hated tier system.

In 2011, such a fighting spirit was also vividly manifest in Wisconsin, where Republican governor Scott Walker launched an offensive threatening the very existence of public unions. Thousands of workers occupied Wisconsin’s Capitol rotunda and mobilized in demonstrations that drew 100,000 people. Despite the workers’ militancy, the trade-union bureaucrats ensured that no strike action was taken, instead funneling the workers’ outrage into the losing strategy of recalling Walker.

The result? The devastation of an already declining union movement. In 2011, over 50 percent of public workers in Wisconsin were unionized; by 2015, the unionization rate had plummeted to 26 percent. Similar earlier attacks in Indiana resulted in the virtual disappearance of public-sector unions there. And in 2015, Wisconsin joined Indiana, Michigan and 22 other states in becoming an anti-union “right to work” state. Wisconsin stands as a most glaring example of the bankruptcy of the union bureaucracy and its strategy of reliance on the Democrats. It is such defeats that clear the way for reactionaries like Trump to posture as defenders of working people’s interests.

Since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Republican Party has had a strategy of appealing to white workers, with some success, on the basis of racist scapegoating, pushing the lie that these workers suffer because the liberal establishment has showered blacks and other minorities with benefits at their expense. The central enduring feature of American capitalism is the structural oppression of the black population as a race-color caste, the majority of which is forcibly segregated at the bottom of society. Obscuring the fundamental class division between the capitalists who own the means of production and the working class who must sell their labor power to survive, racism and white supremacy have served to bind white workers to their capitalist exploiters based on the illusion of a commonality of interest based on skin color.

In the Democratic primaries, black people are overwhelmingly voting for Hillary Clinton, viewing her as the best option to defeat the Republican ghouls in November. In fact, in her 2008 contest with Obama, Clinton openly played to anti-black racism by declaring that Obama couldn’t win the support of “hard-working Americans, white Americans.” Now she presents herself as the torchbearer of Obama’s legacy, while simultaneously cashing in on the popularity of her husband, Bill Clinton, with the black population.

During his time in office, Bill Clinton probably did more harm to black people than any American president since World War II. During the 1992 election campaign, he grotesquely flew back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a brain-damaged black man, Ricky Ray Rector. In office, he eradicated “welfare as we know it” and vastly increased the powers of the state, including to round up and imprison black youth. In this, he was backed by Hillary Clinton, who described black ghetto youth as “superpredators.” At the same time, Bill Clinton was the first president who had black friends and who openly and comfortably engaged with black people. It is a bitter measure of the depth of racist reaction in America that Clinton’s token gestures have won him the support of many black people despite his gruesome deeds.

With the 2008 election of Barack Obama, black expectations were high. But while those are a faded memory, there remains among black people a deep sense of racial solidarity with Obama. This has been reinforced by nearly eight years of backlash from Congressional Republicans, amplified by the likes of the teabaggers and “birthers.” Nonetheless, the truth is that black people have gained nothing from his reign, during which black unemployment spiked, wages flatlined and the median wealth crashed. Meanwhile, blacks continue to be gunned down with abandon by racist cops.

Contrary to the arguments of many black spokesmen, this state of affairs is not because Obama has been held hostage by the Republicans. Certainly their relentless attacks on Obama are overwhelmingly driven by racism. But the black man in the White House was from the beginning a Wall Street Democrat. This was demonstrated shortly after he took office. At a March 2009 meeting with the high-rolling financial swindlers, he pledged to them that his “administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” adding, “I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you.” And he was as good as his word, ably assisted by his labor lieutenants in the union bureaucracy who sacrificed their members’ jobs, wages and working conditions to preserve the profitability of U.S. capitalism.

Black people remain that section of the population that is most keenly aware of the vicious nature of racist America. At the same time, they are tied to the Democratic Party and will in their mass continue to support it so long as there appears to be no alternative. The key to unlocking that situation is forging that alternative.

Workers Need Their Own Party

With millions unemployed or scrambling to get by through miserably paid part-time and temporary work, many thrown out of their homes and reliant on food stamps, their pensions and health benefits slashed, there is a pressing need to build a workers party based on the fundamental understanding that the workers have no common interests with the bosses. Such a party would unite the employed and unemployed, the ghetto poor and immigrants in a struggle for jobs and decent living conditions for all. The power to carry out such a fight lies in the hands of the men and women—black, white and immigrant—whose labor keeps the wheels of production turning and produces the wealth that is robbed from them by the capitalist profiteers.

Leon Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional Program, the founding document of the Fourth International, set forth a series of demands that addressed the catastrophe facing the working class amid the 1930s Great Depression. The aim of these demands was to arm workers with the understanding that the only answer was the conquest of power by the proletariat. To fight against the scourge of unemployment, it called for uniting the employed and the jobless in struggle for a shorter workweek at no loss in pay to spread the available work around as well as a sliding scale of wages rising with the cost of living. It demanded a massive program of public works at union wages. All must have housing and other social facilities to provide decent living conditions, as well as access to medical care and education at no cost to them. Benefits for the unemployed must be extended until they have jobs, with all pensions completely guaranteed by the government. Only a struggle for such demands can address the dire conditions workers face today.

As Trotsky, who together with Lenin was a leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, argued:

“Property owners and their lawyers will prove the ‘unrealizability’ of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a ‘normal’ collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization, and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. ‘Realizability’ or ‘unrealizability’ is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what its immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.”

Renewed labor battles will lay the basis for reviving and extending the unions, ousting the current sellouts and replacing them with a new, class-struggle leadership. For the workers to prevail against their exploiters, they must be armed with a Marxist political program that links labor’s fight to the struggle to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party. Such a party would lead the struggle to sweep away the capitalist state through socialist revolution and to establish a workers state where those who labor rule.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come-Divest From The Pentagon-Now!

An Idea Whose Time Has Come-Divest From The Pentagon-Now! 

Frank Jackman comment:

 

As I pointed out in the headline the idea of “divesting” from the deadweight of the Pentagon overlay on society’s resources is the beginning of wisdom. Hell, a nice idea until you figure out that the military-industrial complex that old-time President Eisenhower, a recipient of much military largess in his time, railed against is degrees of magnitude far greater than the “skimpy” role it played in society in his day. For leftist militants, for anti-imperialist fighters, heck, for just rational people the real beginning of wisdom is to not to “tweak” this or that aspect of the complex but to smash it, smash it utterly. There is no other way so when you thing about this slogan-think about what is behind it. The task. Think too that you will be about being a slayer of some very big monster-and there will be blowback. For now that is enough said.

*Not Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle- Who Was That Man In The Orange Pants?-“Michael Jackson’s: This Is It”- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of the movie trailer for "Michael Jackson: This Is It".

DVD Review

Michael Jackson’s: This Is It, starring Michael Jackson, dancers, singers, and musicians, Columbia Pictures, 2009

I have done a fair number of musical reviews in this space from old country blues tunes to Cole Porter to Billy Holiday to Bob Dylan and so on. All either reflected my personal interests or represented a segment of, mainly, American cultural expression that I thought was important to take note of. Some groups and individuals like the Beatles, most, but not all, hip-hop, Joan Baez and others have gotten short shrift in this space not because they are not important components of the modern cultural scene but out of sheer personal preference. The late performer, Michael Jackson, with or without the Five, fit very comfortably in that niche for me. No longer though after viewing the film documentary, although performance is a better term, “”This Is It”, based on rehearsals for what was to be Michael Jackson’s last world tour.

I am not sure, and in any case it is not important to this review, whether the film footage here would have seen the light of day if Michael Jackson had not died in 2009. The core of the film is a series of rehearsals that Jackson and his cast of singers, dancers, and musicians went through in preparation for a “This Is It” last Jackson world tour that was planned to begin just after his untimely death. The concept, according to Jackson, was to give his fans one last extravagant chance to hear and see him perform his greatest hits.

Now these kinds of world tours, last ones or not, are all in a day’s work in the entertainment business. As are behind-the scenes “reality” looks at how certain cultural events are put to together. What make this film extraordinary are the fire, the imagination, and the sheer stage presence that Michael Jackson brought to the whole enterprise.

Did you read that right? This reviewer, who has spend the last forty or some years happily ignoring Michael Jackson, his music, his dancing, his off-stage antics, and his legal difficulties was totally transfixed, totally riveted by Jackson’s work here. In rehearsal, of all places. Christ, as the headline indicates, he is probably one of few men who have ever lived who did not turn into a cartoonish character while wearing orange pants during some of his numbers. Although this film also demonstrates the very deferential way in which those who worked with him treated him, which may be a key to some of his off-stage problems going back to his childhood days, and I am positive I would not want to work with him this man, as singer, dancer and stage personality comes through. This kind of personality does not pass through this earth all that often. Watch what you missed. Watch what I missed.