This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Usually when I post
something from some other source, mostly articles and other materials that may
be of interest to the radical public that I am trying to address I place the
words “ A View From The Left” in the headline and let the subject of the
article speak for itself, or let the writer speak for him or herself without
further comment whether I agree with the gist of what is said or not. After all
I can write my own piece if some pressing issue is at hand. I do so here.
How Can We Continue the Political Revolution? Meeting!
Bernie's campaign has enthused millions around the country with his call for a "political revolution against the billionaire class." We have built more than just an election campaign; we've built a movement, and we need it to continue.
Hillary Clinton is a candidate for war, Walmart and Wall Street. We can't leave it to her to stop Donald Trump. We need a movement on the campuses, streets, and workplaces against racism, sexism, and inequality.
This meeting will discuss the best way to continue the political revolution and build movements to win victories. We will address questions like: Can the Democratic Party help win fundamental change? Should Bernie run as an independent? Do we need a new party of the 99%? Why are millions of people interested in socialism?
Join us for a lively and informative discussion and get involved with Socialist Alternative and Movement4Bernie.
Click on the headline to link to a "Workers Vanguard" article, dated April 27, 2007 in defense of full citizenship rights for all immigrants.
Markin comment:
In a country that has seen many successive waves of mass immigration from all corners of this earth the demand in the headline and as detailed in the article seems like the beginning of wisdom rather than the "red meat" issue that the right-wing yahoos have made it.
“Victory To The Fast-Food Workers......Fight For $15 Is Just A Beginning-All Labor Must Support Our Sisters And Brothers
Comments of a supporter of the “Fight for $15” action in Downtown Boston on September 4, 2014 as part of a national struggle for economic justice and dignity for the our hard working sisters and brothers. The words still apply as we head into 2016:
No question in this wicked old world that those at the bottom are “the forgotten ones.” Here we are talking about working people, people working and working hard for eight, nine, ten dollars an hour. Maybe working two jobs to make ends meet since a lot of times these McJobs, these Wal-Marts jobs do not come with forty hours of work attached but whatever some cost-cutting manager deems right. And lately taking advantage of cover from Obamacare keeping the hours below the threshold necessary to kick in health insurance and other benefits. Yes, the forgotten people.
But let’s do the math here figuring on forty hours and figuring on say ten dollars an hour. That‘s four hundred a week times fifty weeks (okay so I am rounding off for estimate purposes here too since most of these jobs do not have vacation time figured in).That’s twenty thousand a year. Okay so just figure any kind of descent apartment in the Boston area where I am writing this-say one thousand a month. That’s twelve thousand a year. So the other eight thousand is for everything else. No way can that be done. And if you had listened to the young and not so young fast-food workers, the working mothers, the working older brothers taking care of younger siblings, workers trying to go to school to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty you would understand the truth of that statement. And the stories went on and on along that line all during the action.
Confession: it has been a very long time since I have had to scrimp and scrim to make ends meet, to get the rent in, to keep those damn bill-collectors away from my door, to beg the utility companies to not shut off those necessary services. But I have been there, no question. And I did not like it then and I do not like the idea of it now. I am here to say even the “Fight for $15” is not enough, but it is a start. And I whole-heartedly support the struggle of my sisters and brothers for a little economic justice in this wicked old world. And any reader who might read this-would you work for slave wages? I think not. So show your solidarity and get out and support the fast-food and Wal-Mart workers in their just struggles.
Organize Wal-Mart! Organize the fast food workers! Union! Union!
*****Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Then, And Now
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Several years ago, I guess about four years now, in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement with the shutting down of its campsites across the country by the police acting in concert with other American governmental bodies I wrote a short piece centered on the need for revolutionary and radical intellectuals, or those who had pretensions to such ideas to take their rightful place on the activist left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines. Or wherever they were hiding out, hiding out maybe as far back in some cases as the Vietnam War days which saw much of the current senior contemporary academia turn from the streets to the ivied-buildings, maybe hiding out in bought and paid for think tanks with their bright-colored “wonk” portfolios like some exiles-in-waiting ready to spring their latest wisdom, maybe posing as public intellectuals although with no serious audience ready to act on their ideas since they were not pushing their agendas beyond the lectern, maybe some in the hard-hearted post 9/11 world having doubts about those long ago youthful impulses that animated "the better angels of their natures" have turned to see the “virtues” of the warfare state and now keep their eyes averted to the social struggles they previously professed to live and die for, or maybe a la Henry David Thoreau retiring to out in some edenic gardens in Big Sur or anywhere Oregon like some 60s radicals did never to be heard from again except as relics when the tourists pass through town.
One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a certain stock-taking was in order (and which is in 2015 and beyond still in order). A stock-taking at first centered on those young radicals and revolutionaries that I ran into in the various campsites and on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses they professed to be fighting for (and with not a little hostility from that same work-a-day mass hostile to people hanging out and not working, or not doing much of anything, as well but mainly indifference to the fight these idealistic youth were pursuing, really their fight too since that had been pummeled by the main Occupy culprits, the banks who got bailed out, the mortgages companies who sold them a false bill of goods, the corporations more than ready to send formerly good paying jobs off-shore leaving Wal-Mart for the unemployed. Now a few years later it is apparent that they, the youth of Occupy have, mostly, moved back to the traditional political ways of operating via the main bourgeois parties who let the whole thing happen (witness the New York mayor’s race, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders et. al) or have not quite finished licking their wounds (they couldn’t believe as we elders could have told them after all the anti-Vietnam War actions, including the massive May Day 1971 arrests that the government had no problem crushing their own, their own young if they got out of line).
Although I initially addressed my remarks to the activists still busy out in the streets I also had in mind those intellectuals who had a radical streak but who then hovered on the sidelines and were not sure what to make of the whole experiment although some things seemed very positive like the initial camp comradery, the flow of ideas, some half-baked on their faces but worthy of conversation and testing, the gist for any academic. In short, those who would come by on Sundays and take a lot of photographs and write a couple of lines about what they saw but held back. (I would argue and this may be the nature of the times that the real beneficiaries of Occupy were all those film students and artists, media-types who made the site their class project, or their first professional documentary.) Now in 2015 it is clear as day that the old economic order (capitalism if you were not quite sure what to name it) that we were fitfully protesting against (especially against the banks who led the way downhill and who under the sway of imperialism's imperative made it clear finance capitalism writ large is in charge) has survived another threat to its dominance. The old political order, the way of doing political business now clearly being defended by one Barack Obama and his hangers-on, Democrat and Republican, with might and main is still intact (with a whole ready to take his place come 2016).
The needs of working people although now widely discussed in academia and on the more thoughtful talk shows have not been ameliorated (the increasing gap between the rich, really the very rich, and the poor, endlessly lamented and then forgotten, the student debt death trap, and the lingering sense that most of us will never get very far ahead in this wicked old world especially compared to previous generations). All of this calls for intellectuals with any activist spark to come forth and help analyze and plan how the masses are to survive, how a new social order can be brought forth. Nobody said, or says, that it will be easy but this is the plea. I have reposted the original piece with some editing to bring it up to date. ****** No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon, a founding member of the American Communist Party in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and when that revolution began to seriously go off the rails followed the politics of the Trotsky-led International Left Opposition and eventually helped found the Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned elsewhere that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution in less developed capitalist countries and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined. A century later with some tweaking, unfortunately, those same theories and the same need for organization are still on the agenda although, as Trotsky once said, the conditions are overripe for the overthrow of capitalism as it has long ago outlived its progressive character in leading humankind forward.
The conclusion that I originally drew from that initial observation was that the revolutionary socialist movement was not as desperately in need of theoreticians and intellectuals as previously (although having them, and plenty of them, especially those who can write, is always a good thing). It needed leaders steeped in those theories and with a capacity to lead revolutions. We needed a few good day-to-day practical leaders, guys like Cannon, like Debs from the old Socialist Party, like Ruthenburg from the early Communist Party, to lead the fight for state power.
In that regard I have always held up, for the early part of the 20th century, the name Karl Liebknecht the martyred German Communist co-leader (along with Rosa Luxemburg) of the aborted Spartacist uprising of 1919 as such an example. He led the anti-war movement in Germany by refusing to vote for the Kaiser’s war budgets, found himself in jail as a result, but also had tremendous authority among the left-wing German workers when that mattered. In contrast the subsequent leadership of the German Communists in the 1920’s Paul Levi, Henrich Brandler and Ernest Thaelmann did not meet those qualifications. For later periods I have, as mentioned previously, held up the name James P. Cannon, founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (to name only the organization that he was most closely associated with), as a model. Not so Communist Party leaders like William Z. Foster and Earl Browder (to speak nothing of Gus Hall from our generation of '68) or Max Shachtman in his later years after he broke with Cannon and the SWP. That basically carried us to somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Since I have spent a fair amount of time lately going back to try to draw the lessons of our movement I have also had occasion to think, or rather to rethink my original argument on the need for revolutionary intellectuals. I find that position stands in need of some amendment now.
Let’s be clear here about our needs. The traditional Marxist idea that in order to break the logjam impeding humankind’s development the international working class must rule is still on the historic agenda. The Leninist notions that, since the early part of the 20th century, we have been in the imperialist era and that a ‘hard’ cadre revolutionary party is necessary to lead the struggle to take state power are also in play. Moreover, the Trotskyist understanding that in countries of belated development the working class is the only agency objectively capable of leading those societies to the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois revolutions of the 19th century continues to hold true. That said, rather than some tweaking, we are seriously in need of revolutionary intellectuals who can bring these understandings into the 21st century.
It is almost a political truism that each generation of radicals and revolutionaries will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory mentioned above hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size and importance of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working class specific questions play in world politics (the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not felt they needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.
Since the mid- 20th century we have had no lack of practical revolutionary leaders of one sort or another - one thinks of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and even Mao in his less rabid moments. We have witnessed any number of national liberation struggles, a few attempts at political revolution against Stalinism, a few military victories against imperialism, notably the Vietnamese struggle. But mainly this has been an epoch of defeats for the international working class. Moreover, we have not even come close to developing theoretical leaders of the statue of Lenin or Trotsky.
As a case in point, recently I made some commentary about the theory of student power in the 1960s and its eventual refutation by the May 1968 General Strike lead by the working class in France. One of the leading lights for the idea that students were the “new” working class or a “new” vanguard was one Ernest Mandel. Mandel held himself out to be an orthodox Marxist (and Trotskyist, to boot) but that did not stop him from, periodically, perhaps daily, changing the focus of his work away from the idea of the centrality of the working class in social struggle, an idea that goes back to the days of Marx himself.
And Mandel, a brilliant well-spoken erudite scholar probably was not the worst of the lot. The problem was that “he was the problem” with his impressionistic theories based on, frankly, opportunistic impulses. Another example, from that same period, was the idea of Professor Regis Debray (in the service of Fidel at the time ) that guerrilla foci out in the hills were the way forward ( a codification of the experience of the Cuban Revolution for which many subjective revolutionary paid dearly with their lives out in bloody nomadic jungles of the American continent). Or the anti-Marxist Maoist notion codifying the experiences of the third Chinese revolution that the countryside (the “third world with its then predominant peasantry now increasingly proletarianized) would defeat the cities (mainly the West but the Soviet Union as well in some circles) that flamed the imagination of many Western radicals in the late 1960s. I could go on with more examples but they only lead to one conclusion- we are, among other things, in a theoretical trough. The late Mandel’s students from the 1960s have long gone on to academia and the professions (and not an inconsiderable few in governmental harness-how the righteous have fallen). Debray’s guerilla foci have long ago buried their dead and gone back to the cities. The “cities” of the world now including to a great extent China had broken the third world countryside though intense globalization. This, my friends, is why today I have my Help Wanted sign out. Any takers?
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.
********
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.
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
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 foundin that same location, a triangle from somewhere, a kazoo from the music store, some fiddle, a guitar, throw ina 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…
