As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues... Some Remembrances-The First Small Anti-War Cries Are Raised To Stop The Madness - Lenin's War Against War

As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues... Some Remembrances-The First Small Anti-War Cries Are Raised To Stop The Madness -

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman  

The events leading up to World War I (known as the Great War before the world got clogged up with expansive wars in need of other numbers and names and reflecting too in that period before World War II a certain sense of “pride” in having participated in such an adventure even if it did mow down the flower of European youth from all classes) from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources had all the earmarks of a bloodbath early on once the industrial-sized carnage set in with the stalemated fronts. Also clogged in the trenches, or rather thrown in the nearest bin were the supposedly eternal pledges not honored by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those imperialist capitalist powers and their hangers-on in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history. Other than isolated groups and individuals mostly in the weaker lesser capitalistically developed countries of Europe the blood lust got the better of most of the working class and its allies as young men rushed to the recruiting stations to “do their duty” and prove their manhood.

Decisive as well as we head down the slope to the first months of the second year of the war although shrouded in obscurity early in the war in exile was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a necessary nom de guerre in hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business, that nom de guerre not a bad idea in today’s NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the Second International under the sway of the powerful German party although not for long), architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many revolutionary experiences in Russia and Europe in the 19^th century), and author of an important, important to the future communist world perspective, study on the monopolizing tendencies of world imperialism, the ending of the age of “progressive” capitalism (in the Marxist sense of the term progressive in a historical materialist sense that capitalism was progressive against feudalism and other older economic models which turned into its opposite at this dividing point in history), and the hard fact that it was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by the establishment of the socialist order. But that is the wave of the future as 1914 turns to 1915 in the sinkhole trenches of Europe that are already a death trap for the flower of the European youth.  

Lenin also has a "peace" plan, a peace plan of sorts, a way out of the stinking trench warfare stalemate eating up the youth of the Eurasian landmass. Do what should have been done from the beginning, do what all the proclamations from all the beautifully-worded socialist manifestos called on the international working-class to do. Not a simple task by any means especially in that first year when almost everybody on all sides thought a little blood-letting would be good for the soul, the individual national soul, and in any case the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everybody could start producing those beautifully worded-manifestos against war again. (That by Christmas peace “scare” turned out to be a minute “truce” from below by English and German soldiers hungry for the old certainties banning the barbed wire and stinking trenches for a short reprieve in the trench fronts in France and played soccer before returning to drawn guns-a story made into song and which is today used as an example of what the lower ranks could do-if they would only turn the guns around. Damn those English and German soldiers never did turn the damn things around until too late and with not enough resolve and the whole world has suffered from that lack of resolve.)

Lenin’s hard-headed proposition: turn the bloody world war among nations into a class war to drive out the war-mongers and bring some peace to the blood-soaked lands. But that advanced thinking is merely the wave of the future as the rat and rain-infested sinkhole trenches of Europe were already in the first year a death trap for the flower of the European youth.   

 

The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way as did the various German-induced wars attempting to create one nation-state out of various satraps almost could not be avoided in the early 20^th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and range and the increased rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last wars. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas.

The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began the damn thing among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’s  prisons) and Rosa Luxemburg ( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time as being on “the planet without a passport” was then as now, dangerous to the lives of left-wing revolutionaries), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America the Big Bill Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war), many of his IWW (Industrial Workers Of the World) comrades and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “club fed” for speaking the truth about American war aims in a famous Cleveland speech and, fittingly, ran for president in 1920 out of his Atlanta Penitentiary jail cell),  were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.

Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well when the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. Even my old anti-war amigo from my hometown who after I got out of the American Army during the Vietnam War marched with me in countless rallies and parades trying to stop the madness (and plenty of other “wise” heads from our generation of ’68 made that sea-change turn with him).

At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. Be ready to fight the operative words.

So imagine in the hot summer of 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody trenches and death.                   

Over the next period as we continue the long night of the 100^th anniversary of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before the first frenzied shots were fired, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in places like Russia, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the hodge-podge colonies all over the world map, in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.     

 

V. I.   Lenin

On the Two Lines in the Revolution

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Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 48, November 20, 1915. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 415-420.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: Zodiac, B. Baggins, D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2003 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats:   Text • README

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In Prizyv^[1] (No. 3), Mr. Plekhanov attempts to present the fundamental theoretical prohlem of the impending revolution in Russia. He quotes a passage from Marx to the effect that the 1789 Revolution in France followed an ascending line, whereas the 1848 Revolution followed a descending line. In the first instance, power passed gradually from the moderate party to the more radical—the Constitutionalists, the Girondists, the Jacobins. In the second instance, the reverse took place—the proletariat, the petty-bourgeois democrats, the bourgeois republicans, Napoleon III. “It is desirable,” our author infers, “that the Russian revolution should be directed along an ascending line”, i.e., that power should first pass to the Cadets and Octobrists, then to the Trudoviks, and then to the socialists. The conclusion to be drawn from this reasoning is, of course, that the Left wing in Russia is unwise in not wishing to support the Cadets and in prematurely discrediting them.

Mr. Plekhanov’s “theoretical” reasoning is another example of the substitution of liberalism for Marxism. Mr. Plekhanov reduces the matter to the question of whether the “strategic conceptions” of the advanced elements were “right” or wrong. Marx’s reasoning was different. He noted a fact: in each case the revolution proceeded in a different fashion; he did not however seek the explanation of this difference in “strategic conceptions”. From the Marxist point of view it is ridiculous to seek it in conceptions. It should be sought in the difference in the alignment of classes. Marx himself wrote that in 1789 the French bourgeoisie united with the peasantry and that in 1848 petty-bourgeois democracy   betrayed the proletariat. Mr. Plekhanov knows Marx’s opinion on the matter, but he does not mention it, because he wants to depict Marx as looking like Struve. In the France of 1789, it was a question of overthrowing absolutism and the nobility. At the then prevalent level of economic and political development, the bourgeoisie believed in a harmony of interests; it had no fears about the stability of its rule and was prepared to enter into an alliance with the peasantry. That alliance secured the complete victory of the revolution. In 1848 it was a question of the proletariat overthrowing the bourgeoisie. The proletariat was unable to win over the petty bourgeoisie, whose treachery led to the defeat of the revolution. The ascending line of 1789 was a form of revolution in which the mass of the people defeated absolutism. The descending line of 1848 was a form of revolution in which the betrayal of the proletariat by the mass of the petty bourgeoisie led to the defeat of the revolution.
Mr. Plekhanov is substituting vulgar idealism for Marxism when he reduces the question to one of “strategic conceptions”, not of the alignment of classes.
The experience of the 1905 Revolution and of the subsequent counter-revolutionary period in Russia teaches us that in our country two lines of revolution could be observed, in the sense that there was a struggle between two classes—the proletariat and the liberal bourgeoisie—for leadership of the masses. The proletariat advanced in a revolutionary fashion, and was leading the democratic peasantry towards the overthrow of the monarchy and the landowners. That the peasantry revealed revolutionary tendencies in the democratic sense was proved on a mass scale by all the great political events: the peasant insurrections of 1905-06, the unrest in the army in the same years, the “Peasants’ Union” of 1905, and the first two Dumas, in which the peasant Trudoviks stood not only “to the left of the Cadets”, but were also more revolutionary than the intellectual Social-Revolutionaries and Trudoviks. Unfortunately, this is often forgotten, but still it is a fact. Both in the Third and in the Fourth Dumas the peasant Trudoviks, despite their weakness, showed that the peasant masses were opposed to the landed proprietors.
The first line of the Russian bourgeois-democratic revolution, as deduced from the facts and not from “strategic” prattle, was marked by a reso]ute struggle of the proletariat, which was irresolutely followed by the peasantry. Both these classes fought against the monarchy and the landowners. The lack of strength and resolution in these classes led to their defeat (although a partial breach was made in the edifice of the autocracy).
The behaviour of the liberal bourgeoisie was the second line. We Bolsheviks have always affirmed, especially since the spring of 1906, that this line was represented by the Cadets and Octobrists as a single force. The 1905-15 decade has proved the correctness of our view. At the decisive moments of the struggle, the Cadets, together with the Octobrists, betrayed democracy and went to the aid of the tsar and the landowners. The “liberal” line of the Russian revolution was marked by the “pacification” and the fragmentary character of the masses’ struggle so as to enable the bourgeoisie to make peace with the monarchy. The international background to the Russian revolution and the strength of the Russian proletariat rendered this behaviour of the liberals inevitable.
The Bolsheviks helped the proletariat consciously to follow the first line, to fight with supreme courage and to lead the peasants. The Mensheviks were constantly slipping into the second line; they demoralised the proletariat by adapting its movement to the liberals—from the invitation to enter the Bulygin Duma (August 1905), to the Cadet Cabinet in 1906 and the bloc with the Cadets against democracy in 1907. (From Mr. Plekhanov’s point of view, we will observe parenthetically, the “correct strategic conceptions” of the Cadets and the Mensheviks suffered A defeat at the time. Why was that? Why did the masses not pay heed to the wise counsels of Mr. Plekhanov and the Cadets, which were publicised a hundred times more extensively than the advice from the Bolsheviks?)
Only these trends—the Bolshevik and the Menshevik—manifested themselves in the politics of the masses in 1904-08, and later, in 1908-14. Why was that? It was because only these trends had firm class roots—the former in the proletariat, the latter in the liberal bourgeoisie.
Today we are again advancing towards a revolution. Everybody sees that. Khvostov himself says that the mood of the peasants is reminiscent of 1905–06. And again we see the same two lines in the revolution, the same alignment of classes, only modified by a changed international situation. In 1905, the entire European bourgeoisie supported tsarism and helped it either with their thousands of millions (the French), or by training a counter-revolutionary army (the Germans). In 1914 the European war flared up. Everywhere the bourgeoisie vanquished the proletariat for a time, and swept them into the turbid spate of nationalism and chauvinism. In Russia, as hitherto, the petty-bourgeois masses of the people, primarily the peasantry, form the majority of the population. They are oppressed first and foremost by the landowners. Politically, part of the peasantry are dormant, and part vacillate between chauvinism (“the defeat of Germany”, “defence of the fatherland”) and revolutionary spirit. The political spokesmen of these masses—and of their vacillation—are, on the one hand, the Narodniks (the Trudoviks and Social-Revolutionaries), and on the other hand, the opportunist Social-Democrats (Nashe Dyelo, Plekhanov, the Chkheidze group, the Organising Committee), who since 1910, have been determinedly following the road of liberal-labour politics, and in 1915 have achieved the social-chauvinism of Potresov, Cherevanin, Levitsky, and Maslov, or have demanded “unity” with them.
This state of affairs patently indicates the task of the proletariat. That task is the waging of a supremely courageous revolutionary struggle against the monarchy (utilising the slogans of the January Conference of 1912, the “three pillars”), a struggle that will sweep along in its wake all the democratic masses, i.e., mainly the peasantry. At the same time. the proletariat must wage a ruthless struggle against chauvinism, a struggle in alliance with the European proletariat for the socialist revolution in Europe. The vacillation of the petty bourgeoisie is no accident; it is inevitable, for it logically follows from their class stand. The war crisis has strengthened the economic and political factors that are impelling the petty hourgeoisie, including the peasantry, to the left. Herein lies the objective foundation of the full possibility of victory for the democratic   revolution in Russia. There is no need here for us to prove that the objective conditions in Western Europe are ripe for a socialist revolution; this was admitted before the war by all influential socialists in all advanced countries.
To bring clarity into the alignment of classes in the impending revolution is the main task of a revolutionary party. This task is being shirked by the Organising Committee, which within Russia remains a faithful ally to Nashe Dyelo, and abroad utters meaningless “Left” phrases. This task is being wrongly tackled in Nashe Slovo by Trotsky, who is repeating his “original” 1905 theory and refuses to give some thought to the reason why, in the course of ten years, life has been bypassing this splendid theory.
From the Bolsheviks Trotsky’s original theory has borrowed their call for a decisive proletarian revolutionary struggle and for the conquest of political power by the proletariat, while from the Mensheviks it has borrowed “repudiation” of the peasantry’s role. The peasantry, he asserts, are divided into strata, have become differentiated; their potential revolutionary role has dwindled more and more; in Russia a “national” revolution is impossible; “we are living in the era of imperialisnu,” says Trotsky, and “imperialism does not contrapose the bourgeois nation to the old regime, but the proletariat to the bourgeois nation.”
Here we have an amusing example of playing with the word “imperialism”. If, in Russia, the proletariat already stands contraposed to the “bourgeois nation”, then Russia is facing a socialist revolution (!), and the slogan “Confiscate the landed estates” (repeated by Trotsky in 1915, following the January Conference of 1912), is incorrect; in that case we must speak, not of a “revolutionary workers’” government, but of a “workers’ socialist” government! The length Trotsky’s muddled thinking goes to is evident from his phrase that by their resoluteness the proletariat will attract the “non-proletarian [!] popular masses” as well (No. 217)! Trotsky has not realised that if the proletariat induce the non-proletarian masses to confiscate the landed estates and overthrow the monarchy, then that will be the consummation of the “national bourgeois revolution” in Russia; it will be a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry!
A whole decade—the great decade of 1905-15—has shown the existence of two and only two class lines in the Russian revolution. The differentiation of the peasantry has enhanced the class struggle within them; it has aroused very many hitherto politically dormant elements. It has drawn the rural proletariat closer to the urban proletariat (the Bolsheviks have insisted ever since 1906 that the former should be separately organised, and they included this demand in the resolution of the Menshevik congress in Stockholm). However, the antagonism between the peasantry, on the one hand, and the Markovs, Romanovs and Khvostovs, on the other, has become stronger and more acute. This is such an obvious truth that not even the thousands of phrases in scores of Trotsky’s Paris articles will “refute” it. Trotsky is in fact helping the liberal-labour politicians in Russia, who by “repudiation” of the role of the peasantry understand a refusal to raise up the peasants for the revolution!
That is the crux of the matter today. The proletariat are fighting, and will fight valiantly, to win power, for a republic, for the confiscation of the land, i.e. to win over the peasantry, make full use of their revolutionary powers, and get the “non-proletarian masses of the people” to take part in liberating bourgeois Russia from military-feudal “imperialism” (tsarism). The proletariat will at once utilise this ridding of bourgeois Russia of tsarism and the rule of the landowners, not to aid the rich peasants in their struggle against the rural workers, but to bring about the socialist revolution in alliance with the proletarians of Europe.
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Notes

[1] Prizyv (The Call )—a weekly published in Paris by the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, from October 1915 to March 1917. The reference is to Plekhanov’s article “Two Lines in the Revolution”, published in this newspaper on October 17, 1915.

*****Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind

*****Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind  

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

 

You know sometimes what goes around comes around as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco Bay Area Town and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, looked like difference from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence. Oh sure, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood and have it count has tried to march to its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of the decade, maybe the first part of the next. But what Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed. 

The way Sam told it one night at his bi-weekly book club where the topic selected for that meeting had been the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook was that he had been looking for roots as a kid. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of his generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree. Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So his generation had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.

Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different. That transistor radio for those not in the know was “heaven sent” for a whole generation of kids in the 1950s who could care less, who hated the music that was being piped into the family living room big ass floor model radio which their parents grew up with since it was small, portable and could be held to the ear and the world could go by without bothering you while you were in thrall to the music. That was the start. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week.

Sam’s lucky station had been a small station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too, thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like roots music.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music, well, cheaply alone or on a date. Basically as he related to his listeners for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs).

He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Muddy River Boys, and some bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.

This is where it all got jumbled up for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high school and had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement of Jimmy Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.                                 

As Sam warmed up to his subject he told his audience two things that might help explain his interest when he started to delve into the reasons why fifty years later the sound of that finely-tuned fiddle still beckons him home. The first was that when he had begun his freshman year at Boston University he befriended a guy, Everett Lally, the first day of orientation since he seemed to be a little uncomfortable with what was going on. See Everett was from a small town outside of Wheeling, West Virginia and this Boston trip was only the second time, the first time being when he came up for an interview, he had been to a city larger than Wheeling. So they became friends, not close, not roommate type friends, but they had some shared classes and lived in the same dorm on Bay State Road.

One night they had been studying together for an Western History exam and Everett asked Sam whether he knew anything about bluegrass music, about mountain music (Sam’s term for it Everett was Bill Monroe-like committed to calling it bluegrass). Sam said sure, and ran off the litany of his experiences at Harvard Square, the Village, listening on the radio. Everett, still a little shy, asked if Sam had ever heard of the Lally Brothers and of course Sam said yes, that he had heard them on the radio playing the Orange Blossom Express, Rocky Mountain Shakedown as well as their classic instrumentation version of The Hills of Home.  Everett perked up and admitted that he was one of the Lally Brothers, the mandolin player.

Sam was flabbergasted. After he got over his shock Everett told him that his brothers were coming up to play at the New England Bluegrass Festival to be held at Brandeis on the first weekend of October. Everett invited Sam as his guest. He accepted and when the event occurred he was not disappointed as the Lally Brothers brought the house down. For the rest of that school year Sam and Everett on occasion hung out together in Harvard Square and other haunts where folk music was played since Everett was interested in hearing other kinds of songs in the genre. After freshman year Everett did not return to BU, said his brothers needed him on the road while people were paying to hear their stuff and that he could finish school later when things died down and they lost touch, but Sam always considered that experience especially having access to Everett’s huge mountain music record collection as the lynchpin to his interest.             

Of course once the word got out that Everett Lally was in a bluegrass group, played great mando, could play a fair fiddle and the guitar the Freshman girls at BU drew a bee-line for him, some of them anyway. BU, which later in the decade would be one of the hotbeds of the anti-war movement locally and nationally but then was home to all kinds of different trends just like at campuses around the country, was filled with girls (guys too but for my purposes her the girls are what counts) from New York City, from Manhattan, from Long Island who knew a few things about folk music from forays into the Village. Once they heard Everett was a “mountain man,” or had been at Brandeis and had seen him with his brothers, they were very interested in adding this exotic plant to their collections. Everett, who really was pretty shy although he was as interested in girls as the rest of the guys at school were, told Sam that he was uncomfortable around these New York women because they really did treat him like he was from another world, and he felt that he wasn’t. Felt he was just a guy. But for a while whenever they hung out together girls would be around. Needless to say as a friend of Everett’s when there were two interested girls Sam got the overflow. Not bad, not bad at all.        

But there is something deeper at play in the Sam mountain music story as he also told the gathering that night. It was in his genes, his DNA he said. This was something that he had only found out a few years before. On his father’s side, his grandfather, Homer, whom he had never met since after his wife, Sam’s grandmother, Sara died he had left his family, all grown in any case, without leaving a forwarding address, had actually been born and lived his childhood down in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, down near the fabled Hazard of song and labor legend before moving to the North after World War I. Here is the funny part though when his father and mother Laura were young after World War II and at wits end about where his grandfather might be they travelled down to Prestonsburg in search of him. While they stayed there for a few months looking Sam had been conceived although they left after getting no results on their search, money was getting low, and there were no father jobs around so he had been born in the South Shore Hospital in Massachusetts. So yes, that mountain music just did not happen one fine night but was etched in his body, the whirlwind sounds on Saturday night down amount the hills and hollows with that sad fiddle playing one last waltz to end the evening.                  

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"Hey, Stop Dogging Me Around”-With Blues Empress Koko Taylor In Mind

"Hey, Stop Dogging Me Around”-With Blues Empress Koko Taylor In Mind

 

By Sam Lowell

 

Frank Jackman had to laugh, had to memory laugh when he recently listened to the late great blues empress Koko Taylor doing her version of Dog Me Around, an old blues number that dealt with some two-timing, hell, maybe three timing guy, a guy who slips out the back door to his daytime woman after going through all his nighttime gal’s time, sex and dough, maybe left her high and dry to when she got in the family way when they went a little too far without protection one night. Frank’s laugh, his memory laugh when back to his youth, to the days when he first heard blues music, first heard the term “dog me around” from some old Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf record, some vinyl platter (yeah, it has been a while) except of course the sexual roles were reversed and it was some poor Joe getting two-timed, hell, maybe three-timed by woman, a woman who slipped out the back door to her daytime man after going through all her nighttime guy’s time, sex and dough, maybe left him high and dry with nothing but sore balls and nothing else to show for his efforts.

In those old days learning about the blues had been at the feet of his old corner boy Pete Markin hanging around Salducci’s Pizza Parlor who had introduced him, introduced the whole gang, Frankie, Bart, Jack, Jimmy, and a couple of others to the blues that was starting to make a come-back in the early 1960s after being beaten down the road can once rock and roll, no question a child of the blues at least according to later music critics and musicologists but at the time just seen as generational jail-breakout music, took over the airwaves of coolness. Markin was the guy who would, incessantly, give everybody the word that the blues along with the new wave of interest in generic folk music would be the music that would be a boon companion to the new wave of cultural events that would knock everybody socks off in those hopeful days.       

Yeah, Markin was a piece of work, a guy whose untimely early demise down in Mexico over some still undefined busted drug deal with some mal hombres from the cartel was still moaned over among his remaining corner boys when they gathered together. Frank had been thinking more and more about Markin, the old gang, and the old days lately since his retirement gave him time to think back to the “good old days.” Thinking too about things Markin would say, would put into circulation among the corner boys which would become the coin of the realm from that time on, or until he came up with something he liked better.  But this day Frank was thinking more about the times, the lifetime of times, when he had been dogged around, dogged around by every woman who turned his fancy. Every woman who had two-timed, hell, maybe three-timed him. Every woman who after spending all his hard-earned money, his time, his sex had slipped out the back door to catch up with her daytime man. Worse, worst of all the women who left him high and dry with nothing but sore balls to show for his efforts.

Who knows when the dog around started. Hell, Frank knew, knew straight up when the miseries had started, they had started with fair and blond Rosalind who to a twelve something boy was like some maiden out of a Walter Scott novel, something out of chivalrous times, started way back in sixth grade when he had filched an onyx ring from Jason’s Jewelry Store “up the downs” in North Adamsville for her as a sign of his true devotion and she had lost the damn thing the next day, and rather than being contrite about the whole affair had given him the big brush-off. Had gone off with her “day-time,” okay, okay boy Webb Myer as if he didn’t exist. (That “filched” by the way a more mature way of saying the “clip,” the “five-finger discount,” you know without paying that was one of the rites of passage in his corner boy society.)  

From there it was one thing after another tightly earned money spend on dates where there was “no action,” heck, maybe even no second date to propel any action with a series of chicks, the term of art for young women then among his corner boys, starting with Georgia, Linda, Diana, Joan, and half a dozen others whose names after a half a century had escaped him but their number was correct. You know the usual teenage male hunger not being satisfied in the stifling early 1960s red scare Cold War night. Nights when taking the losses hit hard, when “striking out” with some frivolous, lust-less girl, young woman, after all was the kiss of death for one doomed to social isolation when word got around that you had missed the boat. And the word got around quickly enough, quickly enough to make any mad monk NSA or CIA operative blush with envy.   

In young manhood, in college times, maybe as a reflection of the new breeze blowing times as he came of social and political age things seemed to get better for a while but this night he was not interested in memory laughter about successes, such as they were, but about all the times he had gotten the short end of the stick. That time with Irish Mary who led him a merry chase for almost a year who would see him on Friday nights, and only Friday nights for chaste dates who was sucking off and getting pounded by every guy around on Saturday nights, including his best college friend, or better ex-friend. A whole list of short changers, Fiona Faye, Marian, Terry, Leila, Jewel, Jewel the worse of the lot since after giving herself to him on a regular basis once he carefully coaxed her into “doing the do,” another old blues expression learned at the feet of Markin and the reader can figure out with ease exactly what that mean, she ran off with some carny grifter when the low-rent circus hit town and was never heard from again. (They, he and Jewel had bought a silverware set in anticipation of married life, ha-ha.)      

After college though, after the Army whatever silly childish complaints about two-timing women, frigidity, no action, whatever, he had previously encountered seemed like some so much gossamer wing when compared to the heavens and hells of three wives, three marriages and three divorces, complete with a parcel of kids (the kids, good kids and so left out of the memory grim laughter) bringing with those social disasters alimony payments, child support and several college tuitions, the latter which almost broke his spirit. Yeah, Annie B. a French girl whom he knew so well took him to the altar the first time claiming she was pregnant, which she was except by another man. A fact not known until after years of alimony, child support and college payments (again the kid, Luz, a beauty left out of the memory grim laughter). Took him to the altar and then ran back to Paris before six months was over to live with a boyfriend from Norway. Jesus. Then Ruthie R., the best of the lot who just liked to fuck a lot and with as many guys who were willing to indulge her, in the nighttime or day it didn’t seem to matter. Lastly Josie, Josie D. whom he had actually tried to connect with again several years after their divorce but by then although she said she might have been willing under other circumstances she was settled in with her Jewish dentist husband for better or worse. (Frank would in the age of Facebook connect again many, many years later when Josie D. was a widow but by then it was clear to both of them that “you can’t go home again.”)

Here’s the ironic part, here’s the underside of the “been dogged around” part. Our boy Frank whom you would have thought of as having learned a few lessons in life about being the major league strike-out king in getting dogged around as recently as two years before the night he was having his memory grim laughter session had attempted to rekindle an old high school romance after attending against all good sense his 50^th anniversary class reunion. It worked for about as long as one would expect once the ex-flame, Diana, started taking about taking trips around the world (and not that “trip around the world” for those who remember that sexual expression of yore). A couple of months and then she went back to some car salesman who also wanted to go around the world to, ah, see places.

More irony? A couple of months before quite by accident he had run into a younger woman, a much younger woman who was looking for an older man to settle in with. Frank was all ears, as ready for the nth leap of faith against a sordid track record as he had been when fair and blond Rosalind beckoned. Of course with younger women older guys had best show plenty of appreciation, plenty of dough, for their even being allowed to breathe the same air as the lovelies. And of course that hustle was what Katerina was all about. All about the illusion of sex, about spending dough in very ingenious ways. Such a situation couldn’t last, couldn’t get past that wanting habits stage once a younger boyfriend surfaced out of nowhere (that is what she claimed anyway). Hey, any time you see Frank around getting ready to regale you with his sorry ass tales of woe about how he had been “dogged around” all his life look back at him with a very jaded eye, a very jaded eye indeed. Some guys are built for the tag.      

*From The Archives Of The “ Revolutionary History” Journal-Walter Held- "Stalinism and the POUM in the Spanish Revolution"

Click on the headline to link to the “Revolutionary History” Journal entry listed in the title.

*****Then and Now-A Pamphlet On The American Labor Struggles Of The 1930s

*****Then and Now-A Pamphlet On The American Labor Struggles Of The 1930s

 

Workers Vanguard No. 1072 7 August 2015 New Spartacist Pamphlet   Newly available for purchase is our publication Then and Now, which explains how class-struggle leadership made a key difference in three citywide strikes in 1934. We reprint below the pamphlet’s introduction describing its contents.   The “Then and Now” article in this pamphlet addresses the crucial political lessons of the 1934 strikes by Minneapolis truckers, maritime workers on the West Coast and Toledo auto parts workers. Waged amidst the all-sided destitution of the Great Depression, these strikes, like others that year, confronted the strikebreaking forces of the capitalist state. A key difference was that these strikes won. What made this outcome possible is that their leaders were, at the time, committed to a program of class struggle. Unlike other trade-union leaders of that day—and today—they did not buy into the notion that the workers had interests in common with the employers, their political parties or their state. Instead, these strikes were fought by mobilizing the mass strength and solidarity of the workers in opposition to the forces of the capitalist class enemy.   The review of Bryan Palmer’s book Revolutionary Teamsters provides a more in-depth study of the Minneapolis truckers’ strikes, which were led by the Trotskyists of the Communist League of America (CLA). Here they confronted the Farmer-Labor Party (FLP) governor of Minnesota, Floyd Olson, who commanded the allegiance of many workers with his often radical-sounding, friend-of-the-little-guy rhetoric. The FLP postured as a “third party” alternative to both the Democrats and Republicans, but it was no less a capitalist party.   This is effectively addressed in the 1930 article “The Minnesota F.L.P.” by Vincent Dunne, who went on to become a central leader of the truckers’ strikes. As Dunne makes clear, the two-class Farmer-Labor Party was based on the subordination of the workers’ struggles to farmers and other petty-bourgeois forces “whose political outlook is bounded by the illusion that it is possible to achieve security under the capitalist order.” After an on-again, off-again alliance with the Democratic Party, the FLP finally merged with the Democrats in 1944.   Dunne and other CLA leaders of the Minneapolis strikes had been armed for battle against farmer-labor populism by Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, who in the early 1920s had intervened to pull the young American communist movement back from giving political support to the capitalist “third party” candidacy of Robert La Follette, a maverick Republican Senator from Wisconsin. The excerpts from Trotsky’s introduction to his book, The First Five Years of the Communist International, summarize his opposition to this opportunist course which, if pursued, would have politically liquidated the fledgling Communist party.   Today, what remains of the gains that were won through the momentous class battles of the past continues to be ravaged in a one-sided class war enabled by trade-union misleaders, who have long forsaken the very means through which the unions were founded. The working class, the poor, black people, immigrants and countless others at the bottom of this society have paid the price in busted unions, broken lives and all-sided misery.   To be sure, it is not easy for the workers to win in the face of the forces arrayed against them. Many strikes, even very militant ones, will lose. But as was demonstrated in the three 1934 strikes addressed in this pamphlet, when important working-class battles are won it can dramatically alter the situation. These victories inspired a huge labor upsurge later in the 1930s that built the mass industrial unions in this country.   Hard-fought strikes can provide an important school of battle for the workers in which they learn the power of their collective strength and organization and begin to understand the class nature not only of the capitalist system but of the government, laws and political parties that defend its rule. But while able to strike important blows against the conditions of the workers’ exploitation, trade-union struggle on its own cannot end that exploitation. To win that war there must be a struggle for working-class power under the leadership of a revolutionary party that can arm the workers with the understanding and consciousness of their class interests in the fight to emancipate labor and all of the oppressed from the bondage of capitalist exploitation.

 

Spartacist League/U.S.

Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116, USA

Frank Jackman comment on the labor Struggles of the 1930s:

Everybody, everybody who has been around for the last generation or two and has been breathing knows that the rich have gotten richer exponentially in the one-sided class war that they have so far successfully been pursuing here in America (and internationally as well). We really do not need to have the hard fact of class thrown in our faces one more time by the dwindling band of brave pro-working class leftists who must be legitimately perplexed by the lack of push-back, lack of basic trade union consciousness that animated those of a couple of generations ago to at least fight back and win a few precious gains. Or to have those of the think tank crowd of craven sociologists and make-shift policy wonks who are always slightly behind whatever the current reality is and well behind on what the hell to do about it if they would dream of lowering themselves to such considerations tell us of their recent discovery that the working classes (and the vaunted middle too) are getting screwed to put in working class language. What we really do need to have is some kind of guidance about how to fight back, how to get some room to breathe and figure out a strategy to win some class battles, small, large, hell, any size if for no other reason than to get the capitalists, mostly finance capitalists these days to back off a bit in that relentless drive to push everybody else to the bottom.

So it is very good, and very necessary, that this informative and thought-provoking pamphlet, Then and Now, goes back to the 1930s, the last serious prolonged struggle by the American working class as a class. Goes back and discusses those three very important class battles of 1934 –Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco all led centrally by “reds,” by those who had some sense that they were joining  in episodes of the class struggle and were willing to take their lumps on that basis. It probably would have seemed crazy to those militants that over 75 years later that their battles would be touted as the last great struggles of the class and that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren would be looking over their exploits with a certain admiration (and maybe puzzlement too since they have not seem such uppity-ness, ever). It speaks volumes that today’s leadership of the organized working class in the trade unions is clueless, worse, consciously works to keep everybody under their thumbs clueless about the battles that gave them their jobs. But that should not stop the rest of us from picking up some pointers. Read this one-and act.  

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Grant Barnes,

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Grant Barnes,

 

http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html

 

A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)

In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!

June Is Class-War Prisoners Month- From The Partisan Defense Committee-30th Annual Holiday Appeal-Solidarity with Class-War Prisoners-A Report

Workers Vanguard No. 1083	12 February 2016

30th Annual Holiday Appeal-Solidarity with Class-War Prisoners

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

 

The Partisan Defense Committee held its 30th annual Holiday Appeal in January and raised thousands of dollars for its program of sending monthly stipends to class-war prisoners. For three decades, the PDC has sent money to those imprisoned for standing up to racist capitalist repression and has also given holiday gifts to them and their families. Support for class-war prisoners is not an act of charity but an act of solidarity from those fighting on the outside to those behind prison walls. The fundraisers took place in New York, Chicago, Oakland, Los Angeles and Toronto and were attended by PDC supporters, former political prisoners, trade unionists and others.

Launched in 1986, the PDC stipend program revived a tradition of the International Labor Defense (ILD). Under James P. Cannon, a founding leader of the Communist Party and the ILD’s first secretary (1925-28), that organization provided support to over 100 class-war prisoners. Today, we send $50 a month to each of 14 prisoners: former Black Panther and MOVE supporter Mumia Abu-Jamal; American Indian Movement spokesman Leonard Peltier; Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janine Africa, Janet Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Chuck Africa of the Philadelphia MOVE organization; former Black Panther members and supporters Mondo we Langa, Ed Poindexter and Albert Woodfox; and Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning of the Ohio 7. (For more information on the prisoners, see: “Free the Class-War Prisoners!” WV No. 1080, 11 December 2015.)

This expression of support helps ameliorate the harsh conditions of prison hell, both by reminding the prisoners that they are not forgotten and to help them buy things they need in prison, such as snacks, postage, writing materials and sometimes art supplies. As expressed by Ed Poindexter in his greetings to the Holiday Appeal: “Having been abandoned by my five-member team of attorneys, it’s heartening to know that your generous donations are enabling me to retain the services of a new attorney, and for that I’m profoundly thankful.”

This year’s Holiday Appeal was dedicated to the memory of two recently deceased class-war prisoners. Phil Africa died under suspicious circumstances in January 2015. Phil and eight others known as the MOVE 9 were wrongly convicted and sentenced to 30-100 years for the killing of a police officer during a 1978 raid on their home. Hugo Pinell, a courageous anti-racist activist who fought vehemently for prisoners’ rights, was brutally assassinated in New Folsom prison in August 2015, two weeks after his release into the general prison population after 40 years of solitary confinement. Pinell was the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison. They were framed up on charges stemming from the prison upheaval sparked by the August 1971 assassination of Black Panther Party member George Jackson by guards.

Pinell’s daughter Allegra Taylor was a featured speaker at the Oakland fundraiser (see facing page). A poignant tribute to Hugo was also sent by his San Quentin 6 comrades, Willie Sundiata Tate and David Johnson, who recalled: “Those of us who knew him loved him, and those that he railed against hated him because he would not stand by and watch injustices being perpetrated by racism and white supremacy.” On Hugo’s decades in solitary, they noted, “He never broke...and never lost touch with his humanity.”

Every year, a highlight of the Holiday Appeals is the opportunity to hear from the prisoners—and former prisoners—themselves. Mumia sent recorded greetings as did Jaan Laaman (see facing page). Thomas Manning reported that he is waiting to hear about his parole eligibility. The PDC also received greetings from MOVE 9 members Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Eddie Africa, Janine Africa and Janet Africa.

Medical needs are a constant concern for many of the aging class-war prisoners. The generally dismal state of prison health care is exacerbated by the state vendettas against them. Manning’s letter queried whether the prison authorities would allow him to receive desperately needed neck and back surgery. Leonard Peltier was recently diagnosed with a life-threatening abdominal aortic aneurysm. Participants at the New York City fundraiser heard a report of a recent PDC visit to Mumia, including an update on his medical crisis (see page 7).

In New York City we also again welcomed Lynne Stewart. As a lawyer, Stewart spent decades defending Black Panthers and leftist radicals until she was arrested in 2009 and subjected to a frame-up “war on terror” show trial for defending an Islamic cleric imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. After nearly dying from breast cancer in prison, Stewart was finally released in December 2013 after a months-long fight for compassionate release, a demand supported by more than 40,000 petitioners worldwide, including the PDC.

Over the past 30 years, the PDC has provided stipends to over 40 prisoners internationally, including eight union militants. Many of these prisoners, largely victims of the racist rulers’ war against militant black activists, have been supported since nearly the beginning of our stipend program. Among them are victims of the notorious FBI Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance, frame-up and murder.

One COINTELPRO victim, Francisco Torres, spoke at the New York benefit. Torres, along with other former members of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army known as the San Francisco 8, was falsely charged in 2007 for the 1971 killing of a San Francisco police officer. The charges against Torres were finally thrown out in 2011.

In his speech referencing protests against the epidemic of racist cop killings in the U.S. and student protests in Puerto Rico, Torres pointed to the importance of our stipend program, emphasizing how any dissent against the racist capitalist system could land someone in the crosshairs of the racist rulers: “You are potential political prisoners. Like when you get arrested at demonstrations, they try to criminalize you, but you are a political prisoner once you are arrested.”

Protests against the epidemic of racist cop killings and other forms of police terror were in the forefront of all presentations. Other speakers in New York included Muata Greene of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and MOVE supporter Orie Lumumba. In Toronto, Bruce Allen, vice president of the Niagara Regional Labour Council, spoke to the ongoing ordeal of Albert Woodfox.

James P. Cannon described the defense work of the ILD as a “school for class struggle,” an opportunity to learn the real nature of the capitalist state. Along those lines, comrade Vincent of the Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste Montreal local described to the Toronto event his experience of brutal state repression during the 2012 student strike in Quebec. Experiencing that repression taught him some basic truths about the capitalist state. But, as he explained, it took the study of Marxism and the workers movement to understand that “without a perspective of socialist revolution centered on the working class, you end up vainly pressuring one wing or another of the bourgeoisie.”

We urge our WV readers to support the work of the Partisan Defense Committee and to write to these prisoners. Become a PDC sustainer to help drive the work forward. Send contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013. For more information on how to contribute and how to correspond with the class-war prisoners, go to www.partisandefense.org.

A View From The International Left-Poland: Far-Right Government Targets Immigrants, Women, Leftists

Workers Vanguard No. 1090	20 May 2016

Poland: Far-Right Government Targets Immigrants, Women, Leftists

We print below the translation of an article from Platforma Spartakusowców No. 20 (April 2016), newspaper of the Spartakusowska Grupa Polski, Polish section of the International Communist League.

Since its victory in the parliamentary elections last October, the clerical-chauvinist Law and Justice (PiS) Party led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski has launched a series of rapid-fire measures aimed at stifling dissent and implementing its reactionary agenda. While the PiS previously led a coalition government a decade ago, and Lech Kaczynski, Jaroslaw’s twin brother, was president until his death in 2010, this is the first time since the restoration of capitalism in Poland in 1989-90 that a single party controls the presidency and both the Senate and the Sejm [the lower chamber of parliament]. With Kaczynski firmly in charge from the backseat, President Andrzej Duda, elected in May 2015, and newly elected Prime Minister Beata Szydlo have rushed to consolidate the party’s grip on the state administration.

The state media, the civil service and the heads of the military, the police, the special (intelligence) services and state-owned companies have been purged and replaced by regime loyalists. The Constitutional Tribunal, which is perceived by the PiS as an obstacle on the road to total control, has been paralyzed. Attorney General Zbigniew Ziobro, who held the same post in the previous PiS government, will have the power to intervene in any investigation and to utilize illegally obtained evidence. The planned law on “anti-terrorist activities” vastly expands the powers of the intelligence services and police for spying and repression, especially against foreigners. Published materials will be censored for “injuring or defaming the Polish Republic or the Polish nation.” The new government also plans to create a 35,000-strong territorial defense militia this year. Drawn from existing paramilitary formations, many of them fascist, this militia is to be used against immigrants and other “threats” to “state security” (ncss.org.pl, 5 April). All of this has been accompanied by a steady fusillade of threats against immigrants, Muslims, Jews, women and leftists, including a frontal assault on what few reproductive rights women retain in Catholic-dominated capitalist Poland.

The PiS scored just less than 38 percent of the vote in the parliamentary election, but this was enough to defeat the former governing coalition, Civic Platform (PO) and the Polish Peasant Party (PSL). Joining these parties in the Sejm are the “free market” Nowoczesna [Modern] party of banker Ryszard Petru and the reactionary populist Kukiz’15 coalition led by rock star Pawel Kukiz, which includes a number of legislators from the fascistic National Movement. The PiS was able to get an absolute majority in the Sejm because several parties failed to get the minimum number of votes needed for parliamentary representation. These include the Razem [Together] Party, a petty-bourgeois grouping that stands for a more “social” way of managing capitalism. Also absent from the Sejm is the social-democratic Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), a product of the Stalinist ruling party in the former Polish People’s Republic (PRL), which ran as part of a bourgeois coalition. The SLD was already marginalized in the 2005 parliamentary elections, a result of its many years of betrayals of the working people.

The measures introduced by the PiS government have provoked a wave of mass demonstrations beginning last December, something not seen in this country for many years. These protests have been led by the newly established Committee for the Defense of Democracy (KOD), supported by Nowoczesna and PO. Demonstrating under national and European Union (EU) flags “in defense of the Constitution,” the KOD has criticized the regime’s violation of the separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers. The KOD’s name recalls the KOR (Workers Defense Committee), which in the late 1970s and ’80s played a pivotal role in the formation of Solidarność, and its rallies attract mainly older generations of supporters of the Solidarność counterrevolution of 1989-90. Razem has also organized several small demonstrations. And beginning in April, there has been a wave of protests against plans to outlaw abortion under all circumstances. The Spartacist Group of Poland, section of the International Communist League, has intervened in the anti-government protests with our unique line in opposition to Solidarność counterrevolution and for a Leninist workers party that champions the cause of all the oppressed.

Both the PiS and the bourgeois opposition rely on anti-communism. While the KOD accuses the PiS of acting like the old Stalinist regime, PiS leader Kaczynski labels his opponents “communists and thieves” and “the worst sort of Poles.” Pawel Kukiz, a sometime PiS ally, asserts that the KOD is financed by a “Jewish banker.” Another parliamentarian, Kornel Morawiecki, invokes the language of Hitler lieutenant Hans Frank, who ran the Nazi administration of occupied Poland, ranting that, “Law is not sacred. The good of the nation is above it.... If it does not serve the nation, it is lawlessness.” The PiS and Kukiz’15 benches in the Sejm erupted in a standing ovation for these words. In the 1980s Morawiecki was the founder and leader of an underground counterrevolutionary group, Fighting Solidarność.

Solidarność Counterrevolution Meant Poverty for Working People

The PiS and PO can both rightly claim the mantle of Solidarność. The future PO and PiS leaders were politically shaped as reactionaries by that movement. The “neoliberal,” pro-EU policy of the PO (represented by current EU “president” Donald Tusk) is one face of Solidarność; the overtly chauvinist, clericalist and populist stance of the PiS is the other. Solidarność promised that the overthrow of the PRL deformed workers state and the embrace of the Western bankers and the U.S.-led anti-Soviet NATO alliance would usher in a second “miracle on the Vistula” [where Jozef Pilsudski’s imperialist-backed Polish forces stopped the Red Army advance on Warsaw in 1920] in the form of instant Western-style prosperity. The PiS claims that this promise was betrayed by a cabal of former “Communists” and their agents (supposedly including Solidarność leader Lech Walesa!) working in cahoots with foreign capitalists. This appeal to the millions of disgruntled Polish workers and farmers who do not have access to the luxuries of the newly rich is garnished with a sprinkling of populist proposals to benefit “real” Poles, such as an increase in family child benefits and a return to the previous age of retirement, which the PO had raised.

The truth is that Walesa, the Kaczynskis and Tusk all share responsibility for the impoverishment of the working people, which was the inevitable result of the victory of Solidarność. From the moment Solidarność consolidated around a program for capitalist counterrevolution at its founding congress in September 1981, we described it as an instrument of the CIA, the Vatican and the Western bankers and raised the call: “Stop Solidarność Counterrevolution!” In December 1981, we supported General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s military deployment to spike an attempt by Solidarność to seize power, writing:

“Lech Walesa’s Solidarność was moving to overthrow not merely the corrupt and discredited Stalinist regime, but social gains inherited from the Bolshevik Revolution—centrally a collectivized planned economy—which were bureaucratically extended to Poland after the Red Army liberated the country from Nazi occupation. That is why this Polish ‘free trade union’ is supported by the forces of imperialist reaction.”

— “Solidarność Counterrevolution Checked: Power Bid Spiked,” WV No. 295, 18 December 1981

Trotskyists struggled for proletarian political revolution to replace the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy with the rule of workers councils based on defense of the socialized property.

The collectivization of the Polish economy and the consolidation of a workers state in the late 1940s, though bureaucratically deformed from its inception, represented an enormous gain for the working people. For the first time, the masses had universal access to free education and health care, to jobs for all and apartments. New schools, kindergartens, hospitals, apartment blocks and factories were built across the country. Gone were the Pilsudskiite and Endek (National Democrat) reactionaries who had ruled interwar Poland for the benefit of the British and French imperialists—imprisoning Communists, drowning workers struggles in blood, persecuting Jews, Ukrainians and other minorities. The retrograde Catholic hierarchy no longer had a stranglehold over the populace: education became secular and abortion was available on demand.

These gains were achieved at considerable cost: some 600,000 Red Army soldiers who died in liberating the country from Nazi tyranny. Many more Soviet soldiers, Polish Communists and Jews who survived the Holocaust were slaughtered after World War II by cutthroat reactionary gangs, remnants of the Home Army today known as the “cursed soldiers,” who sought a return to the old order. However, the workers state was also undermined by the nationalism and bureaucratic mismanagement of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Three times—in 1956, 1970 and 1976—the workers rose up against Stalinist misrule, opening a perspective of a proletarian political revolution, whose victory would have resulted in workers democracy and a restoration of the revolutionary and internationalist traditions of the historically pro-socialist Polish proletariat personified by Rosa Luxemburg.

But Solidarność, after emerging from a mass strike at the Gdansk shipyard in 1980, was different. It spurned those revolutionary traditions and instead embraced Pilsudski, Pope Wojtyla and the anti-Soviet and anti-union U.S. president, Ronald Reagan. Once in power, Solidarność dismantled the collectivized economy and instituted an imperialist-dictated economic “shock therapy” that reduced the working people to penury. Among the earliest acts of the Solidarność government was the suppression of a rail strike in the Pomerania region in 1990. Presiding over the assault on the living standards of the Polish masses were not only the precursors of PO, but Walesa and his allies of the time, the Kaczynski twins. Jaroslaw Kaczynski helped in Walesa’s campaign when he won the presidency in late 1990.

Following the capitalist reunification of Germany, our comrades of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany warned in a June 1990 “Letter to Polish Workers”:

“Now Solidarność has taken over the reins of government. What has this brought you? You are being forced to suffer the kind of economic ‘shock treatment’ usually carried out by Latin American juntas. You are being bled white by the Frankfurt bankers, by Wall Street and by the world bankers cartel, the International Monetary Fund....

“Now you are threatened with being turned into vassals by German imperialism in its drive for a Fourth Reich.”

— Reprinted in WV No. 504, 15 June 1990

Solidarność served as the spearhead for capitalist counterrevolution throughout East Europe and the Soviet Union. (Its consolidation as a pro-capitalist movement is documented in Platforma Spartakusowców No. 14, Summer 2007, translated from the 1981 Spartacist pamphlet, “Solidarność—Polish Company Union for CIA and Bankers.”) The restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union, homeland of the October Revolution of 1917, was a historic defeat for workers and the oppressed around the globe, fueling economic misery and internecine conflict and encouraging the imperialists to ride roughshod over weaker countries and peoples. We in the ICL are proud that we stood at our posts from Berlin to Moscow, throwing our forces into the struggle to defend the endangered workers states against the wave of counterrevolution in 1989-92 and fighting for proletarian political revolutions.

In contrast, the fake-Trotskyist social democrats enthusiastically embraced Solidarność. Among those were the predecessors of Socialist Alternative, affiliated to the Committee for a Workers’ International, and Employee Democracy (PD), linked to the British Socialist Workers Party founded by Tony Cliff. These groups went on to hail [Boris] Yeltsin’s counterrevolution in the Soviet Union in 1991-92 and have since spent many years tailing after various Solidarność splinters. Most recently, the Polish Cliffites called for a vote for the petty-bourgeois Razem, which embraces the “democratic opposition” against the former workers state (partiarazem.pl, 7 November 2015).

Anti-Immigrant Racism Fueled PiS Electoral Victory

The elections took place amid a crisis in the EU over the mass wave of immigration to Europe, intensified by imperialist bombing and civil war in Syria and imperialist depredations elsewhere in the Near East and Africa. Kaczynski used the election campaign to denounce immigrants for allegedly using churches in Italy as toilets and to proclaim that there were “sharia enclaves” in Sweden and other countries in Western Europe that the police could not enter. Echoing [Nazi propagandist Joseph] Goebbels’s racist propaganda against the Jews in occupied Poland during World War II, he railed against Muslim immigrants introducing “cholera on Greek islands; dysentery in Vienna; various types of parasites, protozoa, which aren’t dangerous in the organisms of these people, but which could be dangerous here.” Such racist poison is also seen in Poland’s southern neighbors: it dominated the recent parliamentary elections in Slovakia, from re-elected social-democratic prime minister Robert Fico to the fascists.

The PiS victory has further emboldened the fascist gangs that proliferated in the wake of the counterrevolution. The fascists have staged numerous anti-Muslim rallies and marches as well as physical attacks against immigrants. Anti-immigrant rallies are ten times bigger than pro-immigrant ones. On 11 November 2015, the biggest ever “Independence March” in Warsaw drew 70,000 fascists and their sympathizers marching under the slogan “Poland for Poles.” Among the slogans chanted was “Non-Islamic, non-secular—Great Catholic Poland!” and the old Fighting Solidarność chant, “On the trees, instead of leaves, Communists will be hanging.” An anti-Muslim march organized the same day by the fascist NOP in Wroclaw numbered 10,000. In today’s Poland, it is not only Syrian refugees who suffer from brutal beatings, but also Chilean, Indian and other immigrants. In the town of Limanowa near Krakow, Roma (Gypsy) community homes were covered with racist slogans last November while anti-immigrant posters appeared with the call: “No to an Islamic district in our town!” This was followed by a PiS politician calling to “disperse” the Roma “ghetto.”

The previous Civic Platform government of Ewa Kopacz also contributed to the current anti-immigrant wave. While shying away from accepting the quota of Syrian refugees imposed by the EU, Kopacz announced last May that as a “Christian country” Poland would take in 60 families of Syrian Christians. Finally, the EU-loyal PO-PSL government agreed to admit about 7,000 Syrian refugees in 2016-17. However, PiS government officials have frequently stated that they won’t admit any immigrants, with Prime Minister Szydlo saying: “I don’t see any possibility of migrants coming to Poland at the moment,” claiming that they might be “terrorists” (superstacja.tv, 23 March).

Today the bourgeoisie seizes on Muslims as a convenient scapegoat to redirect the social anger provoked by capitalist exploitation, placing them on the list of “Poland’s enemies” alongside homosexuals and Jews. Hitler’s war against “Jew-Bolshevism” fit in neatly with the Polish nationalist myth of a “Jewish-Communist” conspiracy against Poland. After the counterrevolution, the Polish bourgeoisie enshrined in its 1997 constitution the despicable equation of communism with Hitlerite fascism. A new chapter in this murderous mythology has been added by Szydlo’s minister of national defense, Antoni Macierewicz, a notorious fan of the anti-Jewish tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Macierewicz claims that “terrorism” is “a product of socialist-Soviet thought,” which he blames for “provoking a giant wave of people’s migration, which is to destabilize the whole European continent” (tv-trwam.pl, 11 March). He later added that such “terrorism” has its “media form,” as exemplified by the “leafleting activities of the Bolshevik army in 1939” (wyborcza.pl, 17 March).

These anti-communist tirades amount to a threat that disseminating leaflets propagating socialist ideas or defending immigrants might bring accusations of “terrorism” by the Polish capitalist state. If any class-conscious worker has doubts about whether to defend immigrants against racist attacks, you should keep in mind that your trade union or leftist organization is next in the crosshairs of the same capitalist state and the fascist goon squads. Down with the anti-immigrant and anti-communist witchhunt!

The working class is the only social class that has the power and interest to champion all the oppressed on the road to ousting the class rule of the bourgeoisie and replacing it with a socialized planned economy under the rule of workers councils. This understanding was formulated by Lenin in What Is To Be Done? (1902): the vanguard of the working class, represented by the revolutionary party, should act as the “tribune of the people.” Lenin’s Bolshevik Party fulfilled this role, as was evident in the composition of the first revolutionary government of Soviet Russia, many members of which came from various oppressed peoples of the tsarist “prison house of peoples.” For example, Trotsky was Jewish, Stalin was Georgian and Felix Dzerzhinsky—who was the first leader of the Cheka, the Soviet commission to combat counterrevolution—was Polish.

As revolutionary Marxists, we don’t give advice to the bourgeoisie on its immigration quotas. The call for “open borders” raised by some bourgeois liberals and leftist groups reflects illusions in the EU as a superstate, moreover one representing a “social Europe”; these are bourgeois myths. We call on the working class to struggle for full citizenship rights for all immigrants who are in this country. For worker/minority mobilizations to stop fascist attacks! No to racist deportations!

Reactionary Catholic Offensive Against Women

The government’s election promise of 500 zlotys [$127] in [monthly] benefits for every child a family has after the first one, aimed at enhancing its populist stance, will actually serve to reinforce the oppressive bourgeois family and help drive women out of the labor market. The PiS electoral victory has fueled social reaction across the board and encouraged the Catholic church in its attacks on women, sexual minorities and youth, as seen for example in plans to bar access to the “morning after” pill without a prescription, which will especially affect young women.

More recently, Kaczynski and Szydlo spoke out in favor of a renewed initiative by the Catholic hierarchy for a total ban on abortion. The existing law, enacted in 1993, overturned the right to abortion under the deformed workers state. The 1993 law is called a “compromise” because it allows for abortion when the fetus is seriously deformed, when pregnancy poses an immediate threat to the woman’s life or health or is the result of rape or incest—and even then only if the doctor’s “conscience” allows for performing an abortion. But a total ban on abortion remains widely unpopular, especially among poor and working-class women who cannot afford to travel outside the country to get one. When the bishops issued a diktat to Catholics demanding support for a total ban, it sparked a series of mass demonstrations against the “torture of women,” complemented by dramatic staged walkouts from churches as the priests were reading the pastoral letter during Sunday mass.

Initiated by Razem, the protests were soon taken over by a coalition of feminist and other “non-party” groups hoping to attract the KOD, whose support for democratic rights goes no further than defending the draconian 1993 “compromise.” But not all protesters accept the shackles fashioned by Solidarność counterrevolution, as shown by a chant at a rally in front of the Sejm on April 9: “Liberty, equality, abortion on demand!” We say: Free abortion on demand as part of quality health care for all! Down with the concordat! For strict separation of church and state! A revolutionary workers government would expropriate all church properties in Poland. As history has shown, women will be among the most tenacious fighters for a socialist revolution.

Down With NATO and the EU!

The imperialist overlords of the EU hypocritically wring their hands over the new government’s threats to the “rule of law.” But the PiS regime simply ignored an appeal by the EU’s Venice Commission that “Warsaw end a standoff with its highest court by accepting a ruling that the government broke the law” (ft.com, 11 March). U.S. Republican Senator John McCain, joined by two Democrats, wrote an open letter to Szydlo appealing to “shared democratic values” and expressing concern that the government’s actions against the Constitutional Tribunal and state media “undermine Poland’s role as a democratic model for other countries in the region.” Szydlo replied: “The interest and good will of the American politicians cannot be changed into instructing and imposing actions concerning my fatherland” (reuters.com, 14 February).

Notwithstanding this cynical charade, the PiS is not about to snub its imperialist patrons nor are Washington and the EU about to cut off Poland. On February 16, the New York Times published a groveling piece by PiS foreign affairs minister Witold Waszczykowski. This avowed “Islamophobe” pointed to Poland’s “shared history and values” with the U.S. and boasted: “Poland takes its NATO obligations very seriously,” especially in opposing “Russia’s aggression.” Waszczykowski ran through capitalist Poland’s long history of service to U.S. imperialism, from troop deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq to its agreement to host an American missile base targeting Putin’s capitalist Russia.

Even after the destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state in 1991-92, the Polish bourgeoisie retained its deep-seated anti-Russian chauvinism. Defense Minister Macierewicz insists that Russia has been at war with Poland since the presidential plane crashed in 2010 while landing in fog in [the Russian city of] Smolensk, killing Lech Kaczynski and much of Poland’s military and political elite. Without any evidence, Macierewicz claims the plane was blown up by Russia. Kaczynski and Co. were on their way to a commemoration of the Polish officers killed by Stalin’s secret police in 1940 in the Katyn forest. As we wrote earlier on Katyn:

“Revolutionary Marxists do not support the indiscriminate killing of the bourgeois officer caste any more than that of factory owners or bourgeois politicians. (Those personally responsible for crimes and atrocities against the working masses are another matter; they will certainly be subject to revolutionary justice.) Nevertheless, Katyn is not a crime against the Polish working people. These were the military officers of a fascistic, anti-Semitic dictatorship which regularly butchered workers and even bourgeois dissidents.”

— “Pilsudski and Counterrevolution in Poland,” WV No. 293, 20 November 1981

For its part, U.S. imperialism needs Poland not only as a model for “democratic” counterrevolution in the remaining deformed workers states (China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, Laos) but also as a springboard for NATO provocations against Russia. The Obama administration has sent a stream of diplomats to Poland to make sure that the NATO summit to be held in Warsaw in July goes smoothly. The summit is to be preceded by military maneuvers near Russia’s western flank involving 25,000 troops from 24 countries. No to U.S. troops and bases in Poland! Down with NATO!

That working people look to the PiS (and rightist and fascist formations elsewhere) because of its chauvinist “Euroskeptic” stance speaks to the bankruptcy of the social democrats who embrace the EU. Originating as an economic adjunct to the anti-Soviet NATO alliance, the European Union is a reactionary imperialist-dominated consortium, with Germany on top, whose purpose is to better squeeze sweat from the workers in their own countries and more effectively dominate the weakest countries, like Greece today. We Trotskyists oppose this imperialist project from the standpoint of proletarian internationalism. Likewise, we opposed the extension of the EU in 2004 (when Poland joined). The European imperialists raised a series of criteria for entry into the EU that represented a program of brutal social attacks. For example, in Poland the significantly reduced mining sector was “rendered competitive,” that is, miners were laid off en masse and pits were closed. Unemployment compensation was so low that it was not enough for survival. Referring to the fact that the German car manufacturer Opel [a subsidiary of General Motors] paid lower wages at its factory in Poland, our German comrades wrote:

“Workers in Germany must help workers in Poland to fight for decent wages and working conditions against the greed for capitalist profits which was unleashed by the counterrevolution. For this, a revolutionary party is necessary, based on a program of internationalist class struggle. Ultimately, only a planned economy under the control of the working class can eliminate the glaring economic and social differences between various countries.”

— Spartakist No. 157, Winter 2004-5 [quoted in WV No. 848, 13 May 2005]

It is necessary to fight for workers revolutions to sweep away all the European bourgeoisies on the road to the formation of a Socialist United States of Europe. It will take a massive expansion of the forces of production under the rule of the proletariat to lay the basis for a world socialist order, which will finally transcend the historically obsolete framework of nation-states and put an end to hunger, oppression and war. Down with the imperialist EU!

As the PiS intends to build a strong “national” industry out of the myriad of small and medium Polish-owned factories which flourished on the remnants of the once significant socialized industrial base destroyed after the counterrevolution, it will increase the exploitation of the proletariat in Poland. In order to struggle effectively against the reactionary PiS regime, Polish workers must counterpose proletarian internationalist solidarity to chauvinism and defend the democratic rights of all the oppressed in capitalist society. Inspired by the legacy of the “Three L’s”—Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht—the proletariat must once again fight for the revolutionary unity of the Russian, Polish and German workers. The aim of the SGP is to build a revolutionary workers party, modeled on the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky. For new October Revolutions! For the reforging of Trotsky’s Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution!

In The Time Of The Time Of An Outlaw Country Music Moment- The Belfast Cowboy Rides Again Van Morrison’s “Pay The Devil”

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Van Morrison performing his pre-Belfast Cowboy Into The Mystic.

CD Review

Pay The Devil, Van Morrison, Exile Productions, 2006

Apparently just now, although this time rather accidentally, I am on something of an outlaw country moment tear, again. I have mentioned on previously occasions when I have discussed county music, or rather more correctly outlaw country music, that I had a very short, but worthwhile period when I was immersed in this genre in the late 1970s. After tiring somewhat of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and other more well know country outlaws I gravitated toward the music, eerily beautiful and haunting music, of Townes Van Zandt whose Steve Earle tribute album Townes I have recently reviewed in this space. As I noted there, as well, while this outlaw country thing was short-lived and I scrambled back to my first loves, blues, rock and folk music I always had time to listen to Townes and is funny mix of blues, folk rock, rock folk, and just downright outlaw country.

And that brings us to the album under review, Pay The Devil, and another “outlaw” country music man, the Belfast cowboy Van Morrison. Wait a minute, Van Morrison? Belfast cowboy? Okay, let me take a few steps back. I first heard Van Morrison in his 1960s rock period when I flipped out over his Into The Mystic on his Moondance album. And when I later saw him doing some blues stuff highlighted by his appearance in Martin Scorsese PBS History of Blues series several years ago I also flipped out, and said yes, brother blues. But somewhere along the way he turned again on us and has “reinvented” himself as the “son”, the legitimate son, of Hank Williams. And hence the Belfast cowboy.

If you do not believe me then just listen to him ante up on There Stands The Glass, a classic honky-tonk midnight sorrows tune; the Williams’ classic Your Cheatin’ Heart; the pathos of Back Street Affair; the title song Pay The Devil; and, something out of about 1952, and the number one example of his cowboyishness (whee!),Till I Gain Control Again. The Belfast cowboy, indeed, although I always thought that was in the North.