*****Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- We Want The World And We Want It Now!

*****Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- We Want The World And We Want It Now!    

 

 

 

 

***Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- We Want The World And We Want It Now! 

Sam Lowell comment September 2014:

A while back, maybe a half a decade ago now, I started a series in this space that I presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Struggle By where I posted some songs, you know, The Internationale (reflecting the long-time need for international brother and sister solidarity sorely lacking these days), Which Side Are You On? (yeah, which side are you on when the deal goes down and you can’t hide and have to say yeah or nay), Viva La Quince Brigada (in homage to the heroic “pre-mature” anti-fascists from the United States who fought for the Republican side in the 1930s Spanish Civil War), Solidarity Forever(reflecting the desperate need to organize the  organized and reorganize the previously organized like the mass of autoworkers into unions) and others like Deportee (in serious need of a renewed hearing these days where it is a toss-up between resident minorities here and the undocumented for who has gotten the rawest deal out of this system, it ain’t pretty), Where Have All The Flowers Gone (reflecting the need to keep the fight for nuclear disarmament on the front burner with international tensions now approaching the Cold War of my youth levels), Blowin’ In The Wind (reflecting, well, reflecting that the new breeze a-borning for new generations that has not happened again in the long “night of the long knives” since the 1970s), This Land Is Your Land (reflecting that this land is your land, that you or your forbears created the wealth, your land if you have the chutzpah to grab it back) while not as directly political had their hearts in the right place, that I thought would help get us through the “dog days” of the struggle for our socialist future.

Those “dog days” in America anyway, depending on what leftist political perspective drove your red-bannered, seek a newer world, turn the world upside down heart’s imagination then or drives it now looking back in retrospect could have gone straight back as far as the late 1960s and early 1970s when all things were possible and the smell of revolution could be whiffed in the air for a while before we were defeated. Many have put their particular brand on when the whole thing ebbed, fell down of its own hubris but all agree from my inquiries no later than say 1975. I personally, having been on the streets of Washington that week, date the ebb from May Day 1971 when we attempted to shut down with numerically and politically inadequate forces the government if it did not shut down the war, the Vietnam War for those who need a name to their wars, and got nothing but teargas, police batons, and agonizingly huge numbers of arrests for our troubles.

Oh yeah and forty plus years of the short end of the stick of “cultural wars” still beating us down. Some have worked the defeats the other way not from the ebb of our experiments but the from high tide of reaction thinking of later when we all abandoned hope for the least bit of social justice in the lean, vicious, downtrodden Reagan years of unblessed memory or later still around the time of the great world- historic defeats of the international working class in East Europe and the former Soviet Union which left us with an unmatched arrogant unipolar imperialist world. That one pole being the United States, the “heart of the beast” the beast which we work within these days. Whatever your personal benchmark they were nevertheless if you had the least bit of political savvy clearly dog days.        

I began posting these songs at a time, 2009, when it was touch and go whether there would be some kind of massive uprising against the economic royalists who blew the economy, the freaking world economy, all to kingdom  come, who had just dealt the world a blow to the head through their economic machinations in what is now called the Great Recession of 2008 (those “economic royalists” later chastised under the popular sobriquet “the one-percent” come flash-in-the-pan Occupy movement that held out a flicker of hope before it died on the vine). Subsequently, while there were momentary uprisings, the Arab Spring which got its start in Tunisia and Egypt and enflamed most of the Middle East one way or another, here in America the defensive uprising of the public workers in Wisconsin and later as I said the quick-moving although ephemeral Occupy movement, and the uprisings in Greek, Spain and elsewhere in Europe in response to the “belt-tightening" demanded by international financial institutions to name a few, the response from the American and world working classes has for lots of reasons if anything further entrenched those interests.

So as the “dog days” continue here in 2014 I have resumed the series. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs selected; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, an old-time communist (you know guys like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson) although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground (and one would be truly hard-pressed to name even one musical one today in America carrying that designation unless they are hiding somewhere). Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this kind of formation would mean political death for any serious revolutionary upheaval and would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

I like to invite others to make additional comments on certain pivotal songs, groups and artists and here is one by my old friend Josh Breslin, whom I met out in California during the heyday of the summer of love 1967, that reflects those many possibilities to “turn the world upside down” back in the 1960s and early 1970s mentioned earlier before the “night of the long knives” set in. Listen up:

WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

My old friend from the summer of love 1967 days, the late Peter Paul Markin always used to make a point then of answering, or rather arguing which tells a lot about the kind of guy he was when he got his political hind legs up with anybody who tried to tell him back in the day that “music is the revolution.” Markin whom I met along with Sam Lowell when I first arrived out in California, out on a nameless hill, or if it had a name in that hilly San Francisco night I never found out what it was, looking for some dope or a place to stay in that order was the most political guy I had ever met then (maybe ever) and I had known some guys who helped form SDS back East in so I knew some “heavies.”

Strangely when I first met him in San Francisco that summer you would have been hard-pressed to tell him, under the influence of dope, the new acid rock musical dispensation, and the flowering of new lifestyle  that could not have been the case but after a few hits on the head by the coppers, a tour of duty in the military at the height of the Vietnam War, and what was happening to other political types trying to change the world for the better like the Black Panthers he got “religion,” or at least he got that music as the agency of social change idea out of his head.  Me, well, I was (and am not now ) as political as Markin had been so that I never got drowned in the counter-culture where music was a central cementing act. Nor did I have anything that happened to me subsequently that would have given me Markin’s epiphany, particularly that Army stint that gave him “religion” on the questions of war and peace but which I think, given his later fate, left something hollow inside him since I had been declared 4-F (unfit for military service) due to a childhood physical injury that had left one arm withered. (Markin, is now buried in a nameless grave in a potter’s field down in Sonora, Mexico after he was found on a dusty back road with two slugs in him after what we had heard was some busted cocaine deal in either 1976 or 1977, probably the summer of the former from what a private detective hired by one of our friends to go down and find out what happened told him from the shaky information he had received down there from a guy, a doper, who claimed to know Markin.)  

 I would listen half-attentively (a condition aided by being “stoned,” all doped up or in thrall to some ephemeral woman a lot of the time) when such conversations erupted and Markin with go through his position for a candid world to hear (candid, his word). That position meaning, of course that contrary to the proponents, including many mutual friends of his, and ours, who acted out on that very idea and got burned by the flame, some dropping out, some going back to academia, some left by the wayside and who are maybe still wandering out in the Muir Woods, by some Big Sur tidal pool or, god forbid, out in rain-soaked Oregon that eight or ten Give Peace A Chance, Kumbaya, Woodstock or even acid-etched Someone To Love songs would not do the trick, would not change this nasty, brutish, old short-lived world into the garden, into some pre-lapsarian Eden. (We all called it “looking for the garden” in short-hand meaning the lost Garden of Eden which we were hung up on seeking, and not always only in our dope-flamed moments either.)

Meaning that the gathering of youth nation unto itself out in places like million butterfly Woodstock, flying kites Golden Gate Park, pop bop Monterrey, hell, the Boston Common when things headed east, or even once word trickled down the way the word has always trickled down to the sticks once the next new thing gets a workout, Olde Saco Park, in the town up in Maine where I grew up would not feed on itself and grow to such a critical mass that the quite nameable enemies of goodness, kindness starting with one Lyndon Johnson and one Richard M. Nixon and working down to the go-fers and hangers-on, and leave us alone would sulk off somewhere, defeated or at least defanged.

Many a night, many a dope-blistered night before some seawall ocean front Pacific Coast campfire I would listen to Markin blast forth against that stuff, against that silliness. As for me, I was too “into the moment,” too into finding weed, hemp, mary jane and too into finding some fetching women to share it with to get caught up in some nebulous ideological struggle. It was only later, after the music died, after rock and roll turned in on itself, turned into some exotic fad of the exiles on Main Street that I began to think through the implications of what Markin, and the guys on the other side too, were arguing about.

Now, belated now, it makes perfect sense that music, or any mere cultural expression standing alone, would be unable to carry enough weight to turn us back to the garden (I won’t use that “pre-lapsarian" again to avoid showing my, and Markin’s, high Roman Catholic up-bringing and muddy what I want to say which is quite secular). I guess that I would err on the side of the “angels” and at least wish that we could have carried the day against the monsters of the American imperium we confronted back in the day. Although like I said I had a draft deferment due to a serious physical condition, not helped by the “street” dope I was consuming by the way, I supported, and sometimes vehemently and with some sense of organization, a lot of the political stuff Markin was knee deep into, especially the Black Panther defense when we lived in Oakland after he got out of the Army and all hell was raining down on the brothers and sisters.                  

Thinking about what a big deal was made of such arguments back then recently in preparing my remarks for this effort (arguments carried deep into the night, deep in smoke dream nights, and sometimes as the blue–pink dawn came rising up to smite our dreams) I thought back to my own musical appreciations. In my jaded youth (if one could be jaded in Podunk Olde Saco, although more than one parent and more than one teacher called me “beatnik” back then whatever that meant to them) I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. Perhaps it was some off-shoot DNA thing since my people on my mother’s side (nee LeBlanc) were French-Canadian which had a deep folk heritage both up north and in Maine although such music was not played in the house, a house like a lot of other ethnics where in the 1950s everybody wanted to be vanilla America (Markin had mentioned to me that same thing about his Irish-etched parents). So it initially started as a reaction to my parents’ music, the music that got them through the Great Depression of the 1930s and later waiting for other shoe to drop (either in Normandy where my father first went to Europe under some very trying conditions or at home waiting in Olde Saco like my mother), and that became a habit, a wafting through the radio of my childhood home habit.

You know who I mean Frank (Sinatra for the heathens), Harry James, the Andrews Sisters, Peggy Lee, Doris Day and the like. Or, maybe, and this is something that I have come closer to believing was the catalyst along with the DNA stuff I already mentioned, my father’s very real roots in the Saturday night mountain barn dance, fiddles blazing, music of his growing up poor down in Appalachia. (Again such music except every once in a while Hank Williams who I didn’t know about at the time was not played in the house either. Too “square” I guess.) 

The origin of my immersion into roots music first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House(and that raspy, boozy country voice on Death Letter Blues), Skip James ( I went nuts over that voice first heard after he had been “discovered” at the Newport Folk Festival I think in 1963 when he sang I’d Rather Be With The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man on the radio after I had just broken up with some devil woman, read girl and later caught hell, including recently, from later women companions when I mentioned the idea in a heated love argument), Mississippi John Hurt (that clear guitar, simple lyrics on Creole Belle and that sly salacious run through Candy Man), Muddy Waters (yes, Mannish-Boy and those manly appetites off-stage), Howlin’ Wolf ( I again went nuts when I heard his righteous Little Red Rooster  although I had heard the Stones version first, a version originally banned on Boston and hence Maine radio if you can believe that ) and Elmore James ( his Dust My Broom version of the old Robert Johnson tune I used to argue was the “beginning” of rock and roll to anybody who would listen but that later proved to be only marginally true even to me once I heard Ike Turner’s Rocket 88).

Then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis (stuff like One Night With You, Jailhouse Rock and the like before he died in about 1958 or whatever happened to him when he started making stupid movies that mocked his great talent making him look foolish and which various girlfriends of the time forced me to go see at the old Majestic Theater in downtown Olde Saco), Jerry Lee (his High School Confidential, the film song, with him flailing away at the piano in the back of a flat-bed truck blew me away  although the film was a bust, as was the girl I saw it with), Chuck (yeah, when he declared to a candid  world that while we all gave due homage to classical music in school Mister Beethoven and his brethren better move on over with Roll Over Beethoven), Roy (Roy the boy with that big falsetto voice crooning out Running Scared, whoa), Big Joe (and that Shake, Rattle and Roll which I at one point also argued was the “beginning” of rock and roll, okay, I liked to argue those fine points)   and Ike Turner (who I ultimately settled on with his Rocket 88 as that mythical beginning of rock and roll).

Then later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, the folk music minute before the British invasion took a lot of the air out of that kind of music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan (even a so-so political guy like me, maybe less than so-so then before all hell broke loose and we had to choose sides loved Blowin’ in the Wind), Dave Von Ronk (and that raspy old voice, although he was not that old then sing Fair And Tender Ladies  one of the first folk songs I remember hearing) Joan Baez (and that long ironed-hair singing that big soprano on those Child ballads), etc.

I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Meaning rootless or not meaningfully or consciously rooted in any of the niches mentioned above. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music (paying final conscious tribute to the mountain DNA in my bones) and so on.

All those genres are easily classified as roots music but I recall one time driving Markin crazy, driving him to closet me with the “music is the revolution” heads he fretfully argued against when I mentioned in passing that The Doors, then in their high holy mantra shamanic phase with The End and When The Music’s Over epitomized roots music. That hurt me to the quick, a momentary hurt then, but thinking about it more recently Markin had been totally off base in his remarks.

The Doors are roots music? Well, yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derived from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of The Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native- American culture that drove the beat of many of his trance-like songs like The End. Add in heavy doses of peyotes or some other herbals known to produce that very effect and you have a pretty good case for what the group was trying to do out on those whirling dervish stages. More than one rock critic, professional rock critic, has argued that on their good nights when the dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired up the Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here, and it is not a far stretch to go further and classify their efforts on those night as in the great American roots tradition.  I argued then and will argue here almost fifty years later when that original statement of mine was more prophetic The Doors put together all the stuff rock critics in one hundred years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men (and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll, played the people’s music, played to respond to a deep-seeded need of the people before them to hear such sounds, for keeps.

So where does Jim Morrison fit in an icon of the 1960s if he was not some new age latter day cultural Lenin/Trotsky. Some icon that Markin could have latched onto.  Jim was part of the trinity, the “J” trinity for the superstitious – Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young, way too young. The slogan of the day (or hour) – “Drugs, sex, and rock and roll.” And we liked that idea however you wanted to mix it up. Then.

Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most political among us, including Markin in his higher moments (you figure out what that “higher,” means since you are bright people) felt those cultural winds blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative vision as part of the chosen whatever he thought of their political perspective. The righteous headed to the “promise land,” yeah, back to the garden.  Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.

Know this as well if you are keeping score. Whatever excesses were committed by our generation and there were many, many made some by sheer ignorance, some by willfully refusing to draw the lessons of the past and re-inventing the wheel yet again, by the generation that came of political and cultural age in the early 1960s, the generation I call the generation of ’68 to signify its important and decisive year internationally, but were mainly made out of inexperience and a foolish naiveté.  Our opponents, exemplified by outlaw big cowboy red neck President Lyndon B. Johnson and one weaseling Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, and their minions like J. Edgar Hoover (a truly demonic figure and treated like a rattlesnake even by people who liked him, or kowtowed to him), Mayor Richard Daley (evil, pure evil, in a business suit and a serious representative of what old-timey poet Carl Sandburg called his city, Chicago, hog-butcher to the world) and Hubert Humphrey ( insidious because he was such a toothless hack sucking up to whoever was in front of him when he had his poor boy wanting habits on but on that  joyous face it took longer to see he was as evil as the rest)  spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty plus years of “cultural wars” in revenge by their protégés, hangers-on and now their descendants has been a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. And the sorely missed and mourned late Markin would surely have endorsed this sentiment. Enough.

*Oh, My Back Pages- The Film Work of Dennis Hopper- “Flashback”-A Review And A Short Note

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of a scene from the Dennis Hopper film, Flashback.

DVD Review

Flashback, Dennis Hopper, Kiefer Sutherland, Carol Kane, 1990

Okay, blame it on Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters (including “beatnik” bus driver/holdover Neal Cassady). Or blame it on a recently re-read of Tom Wolfe’s classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that pays “homage” to Kesey, his Pranksters, their psychedelically-painted bus Further, and their various adventures and misadventures. Or, better, blame it on Jack Kerouac and that self-same Cassady for his On The Road. Whatever it is I am in a kind of “back to the future” 1960s counter-cultural mood today. And what figure, at least in some senses, represented an aspect of that scene better than the late Dennis Hopper’s character in the classic Easy Rider. And with that introduction/justification as a prompt out of the way other Hopper efforts have come to mind, including this 1990 send-up of some of the iconic figures of the 1960s, whether they deserved that status or not. Or whether they deserved the sent-up either, come to think of it.

In the character of 1960s radical icon Huey Walker, as played by Hopper, we have a prima facie case for not, self-admittedly, deserving that status. It seems that fugitive from the law Huey needs an angle to get his (probably) massive memoir published but needs a publicity hook to stir memories (and sales). So naturally he “snitches” on himself. The plot centers gearing up the ante on that publicity in the process of law enforcement (FBI and local) trying to move Huey from point A to point B, by train no less. To give Huey his just desserts and to cap off a fanciful recapture of the fugitive radical up steps a child of the 1960s children (admirers of Huey) turned renegade FBI Agent Borden (aka Free, played by Sutherland) who, however, in end, after myriad hi-jinks, comical or otherwise, finds his way back to his DNA core. Its in the genes, right?

Along the way we are also treated to send-ups of everything the 1960s stood for, from those gaudy buses to the antics or some rueful then middle- aged “liberation fighters”, at least according to the story writers. We are also treated to a very fetching Carol Kane as Earth Mother-last of the hippie remnant- who is holding out in…Oregon (must be something in the water. Kesey slipped back there after his legal hassles were over). The rest of the plot you can see for yourselves. And you should, if only to see Dennis Hopper playing….Dennis Hopper in mid-life. He carries this thing.


Note: This space usually preaches ‘high Trotskyism” and I would be remiss if I didn’t make at least one political counter-point to round out this review on this commercially-driven comedic effort. The 1960s had more than it far share of Huey Walker figures, like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and other leading Yippies, who started out with serious standard left-wing politics and a political compass and moved, sometimes ahead of the crowd , and sometimes by being pushed from behind to a more theatrical sense of politics (to be kind). The kind highlighted in Flashback.

Well, we were young then and made every political mistake in the book, except that those “mistakes” we made even from today’s vantage point, were nothing compared to the actions of the “monsters” (led by Johnson/Nixon) that we were fighting back then. And fighting for our very lives. Against a very vicious and vindictive FBI (to name only the most well-known law enforcement agency in the mix. There were plenty of others.) The work of ConIntelPro, central to the physical liquidation of the Black Panthers and other black liberation fighters should be etched in every leftist’s brain, for eternity. In the end the bourgeoisie got off easy, and got to keep its system. We, on the other are still rolling the rock up the hill. And know who, and who was not “on the side of the angels,” then and now.

I want to finish with the one truism that struck me from the film, although I am sure that the story writers did not intend it as such. Huey, as he is in the process of “bonding” with “Free” lets the cat out of the bag- being a fugitive sucks. Not as much as being a class-war prisoner behind bars like Marilyn Buck, David Gilbert, Mumia Abu-Jamal and others today or in exile like Assata Shakur, is but it still sucks. Why? As Huey candidly stated (and as many real life political fugitives, including ex- Weather Underground leaders Professor Bill Ayers , ya, that Bill Ayers, and Professor Bernadine Dorhn can testify to) you are literally on the run, can’t make lasting friends, have to look over you shoulder constantly and, most importantly, are out of the political loop. You are down there with Huey, half-forgotten in the mist of time. And while one cannot reasonably call those who were involved in the production of what is essentially a commercial comic look at past times (and sometimes a very funny look, at that) that little point needs to be made here.

*Not Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle- Merle Haggard's Song- "Okie From Muskogee"

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Merle Haggard performing his classic anti-countercultural song, Okie From Muskogee.

Markin comment:

Okay, blame it on Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters (including “beatnik” holdover/bus driver Neal Cassady). Or blame it on the recently re-read Tom Wolfe's classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that pays “homage” to Kesey and his Pranksters. Or, better blame it on Jack Kerouac and that self-same Cassady for his On The Road. Or just blame it on a residue of the Fourth of July (which as a recent entry indicated, we don’t celebrate these days). But do not, please do not, blame it on me and my sometimes perverse sense of humor for placing the lyrics to Okie From Muskogee on this site. I like the song and that is that. Although I prefer Jim Kweskin's (of Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band fame in the 1960s)1970 version better than old Merle’s.


Merle Haggard, Okie from Muskogee Lyrics

We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee;
We don't take our trips on LSD
We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street;
We like livin' right, and bein' free.

I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,
A place where even squares can have a ball
We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse,
And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all

We don't make a party out of lovin';
We like holdin' hands and pitchin' woo;
We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy,
Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.

And I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,
A place where even squares can have a ball.
We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse,
And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all.

Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear;
Beads and Roman sandals won't be seen.
Football's still the roughest thing on campus,
And the kids here still respect the college dean.

We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse,
In Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA.

Support The October 2016 Maine Peace Walk-Stop The Wars On Mother Nature!

Support The October 2016 Maine Peace Walk-Stop The Wars On Mother Nature!

 

All Out July 9th In New York City-Anti-NATO Rally

From The Honduras Solidarity Movement-On The Assassination Of Berta Caceres

From The Honduras Solidarity Movement-On The Assassination Of Berta Caceres  

***From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-The Spanish Left in its Own Words-Counter-Theses for the Conference of the POUM

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

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

Trouble Is His Business-Sixkill- A Spenser Novel By Robert B. Parker-A Review

Trouble Is His Business-A Spenser Novel By Robert B. Parker-A Review  

Book Review

By Sam Lowell

Sixkill, Robert B. Parker, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2011 

Funny what will turn up on your summer reading list and why. Sure I am like any other heated, roasted urban dweller looking for a little light reading to while away the summer doldrums. Most days I like to review high-toned literary masterpieces or squirrelly little historical books fit for the academy. But those kinds of books cannot survive the summer siege. Which brings us to the book under review, Robert B. Parker’s last Spenser series book written by him Sixkill. (Others, I think, have written for the series under their own names if I am not mistaken.) Or will bring us to the book under review after I go through a little of how I came to read this one. How I came to read a crime novel for crying out loud. That is not as condescending as it sounds since long ago I learned the very hard lesson that serious crime writers like Dashiell Hammett, the above-mentioned Raymond Chandler, Nelson Algren, Ross MacDonald and a few others, had earned their places in the American literary canon. Their hard-bitten sparse dialogues and plotlines were worthy of emulation, or if not that then a thoroughgoing serious read.

That is how in a roundabout way we get to this book. See every year when the doldrums come I automatically reach for a little Chandler or Hammett from my library to see the real deal, to see the masters strut their stuff in order to spruce up (and parse, if possible) my own writing. This year when I did so I noticed a book Poodle Spring by Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker. This final Philip Marlowe series book was never finished by Chandler before he died in 1959. Parker finished it up in 1989. I have reviewed that book mostly in positive fashion in this space.

Robert B. Parker, of course had been a name known to me as the crime novel writer of the Spenser series of which I had read several of the earlier ones before moving on to others interests. While checking up on what Parker, who died in 2010, had subsequently written I noticed another Chandler-Parker collaboration Perchance To Dream: Robert B. Parker’s Sequel To Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. I have reviewed that effort, again mostly in positive fashion, although with some longing for old Chandler’s touch and flair for language. Since I was on a roll, was being guided by the ghost of Raymond Chandler maybe, I decided to check out what turned out to be Parker’s last Spenser effort. Now we are all caught up on genesis.

Spenser (like the English poet as he liked to note early in the series), an intrepid PI working out of familiar to me Boston, had many of Marlowe’s qualities, had faced danger alone with a sure hand. Naturally he had to be updated a bit for modern sensibilities around the women question, the race question and how to operate in proper Boston a very different milieu from the slumming streets of LA that Marlowe worked in his prime. The Spenser series’ strong points reflected that toughness, that errant knight tilting after windmills that had made Marlowe (especially onscreen) such a compelling character. And Parker’s story lines early on as well. This last one of the series while it had its moments told me a lot about why I had abandoned the series after the first several novels in the days when he and his pal Hawk did seeking rough justice thing. This one seemed rather formula-driven in the dialogue. The usual love bug stuff with his sweetie Susan, their eating habits at better Boston restaurants and an off-hand search for justice around the edges. The story of Sixkill, the Cree who became his “associate” was the only thing that saved this one from being below ho-hum.     

Check out this story line and see what I mean. A young woman is dead in the room of a famous if slovenly and overweight not one of nature’s noblemen movie star, Jumbo Nelson, in Boston to shoot a film and make a ton of money. Now this Jumbo is nothing but a sexist pig to put it bluntly among his many off-putting qualities but Spenser is asked by a cop friend who has his own doubts about what happened to see if Jumbo did the deed, committed rape and murder to cover his tracks. Or if it was an accident, or something. So Spenser went to work, checked everything and everyone out like he always did as a professional. Jumbo though was stonewalling him (to be kind, it was actually worse than that), tried to beat him down with his hefty Cree bodyguard Sixkill of the title. The kid was some kind of ex-college football star who could have made the pros except he liked sex, drugs, and booze too much. So bodyguard. But not bodyguard enough to take old pro Spenser down.    

So, fired in a rage by Jumbo, Sixkill latched onto Spenser, and Spenser latched onto Sixkill, maybe not like Hawk in the old days but with something driving to help the kid out, get him thinking straight. Meanwhile the mystery around the young woman’s death after checking with family, friends and others began to look like a weird sex tryst gone wrong. And in the end whether Spenser liked it or not that is the way he played it to his cop friend. Old Jumbo might just walk if push came to shove. Of course along the way some very influential film-backers, some very “connected” in the old-fashioned sense of the word, mobsters, gangsters, okay , had been very, very nervous about what Spenser might find out, might find that Jumbo did the deed, actually murdered the girl,  and they would be out serious dough. Despite being warned off repeatedly Spenser naturally kept pushing the envelope, kept making the connected guys nervous. They finally sent some local hit men after Spenser. What a joke. They sent their top guy, a guy who liked to kill for kicks. What a joke. Zeroes. Ho hum. But you can see what I mean by the series having run out of steam by this time in Parker’s career. Thankfully Sixkill was hanging around enough to create a nice mini-story.             

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-The Spanish Left in its Own Words-The Communist Party Denounces the POUM

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

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Bob Dylan's "My Back Pages"

Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of The Byrds covering Bob Dylan's My Back Pages.

In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.

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

My Back Pages Bob Dylan Lyrics

Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin’ high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I
Proud ’neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Girls’ faces formed the forward path
From phony jealousy
To memorizing politics
Of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Unthought of, though, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My pathway led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music

*****International Women's Day, 1916; From The Archives Of Women And Revolution

*****International Women's Day, 1916;A From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-

-Greeting of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women for Peace and Against Chauvinism

From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-

 

 

Markin comment:

The following is a set of archival issues of Women and Revolution that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting articles from the back issues of  Women and Revolution during Women's History Month in March and periodically throughout the year.

Women and Revolution-1971-1980, Volumes 1-20  


http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/w&r/WR_001_1971.pdf

From The Archives-International Women's Day, 1916;A Greeting of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women for Peace and Against Chauvinism

Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Spring 2001, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.


****
International Women's Day, 1916;A Greeting of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women for Peace and Against Chauvinism

We reprint below a statement of greetings from the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women, an internationalist oppositional grouping within the French social democracy, on International Women's Day 1916. It is translated from the version published by the Gruppe Internationale, led by Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and Leo Jogiches, in the illegal Spartacusbriefe (No. 17, 30 March 1916).


Following the definitive betrayal by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) at the outbreak of World War I, when its entire Reichstag fraction (initially including even such revolutionists as Karl Liebknecht, who misguidedly yielded to considerations of party "discipline" and "unity") voted the war credits demanded by the government, the minority of revolutionary -internationalists within the party were reduced to tiny, isolated propaganda groups without a party press or a party apparatus.

"Without an organization," said Lenin, "the masses are deprived of the sole expression of their will." The task, then, which the left radicals in the German social democracy faced, was the creation of an organization that might begin to overcome the atomization of the working class. This task had to be accomplished under conditions of illegality and against the old party leadership which, in its fear of such attempts to reach the masses of disfranchised party members, had imposed a moratorium on all discussion and criticism of the "official" line and refused to hold the yearly party congresses required by SPD statutes.

Coinciding with the increasing class collaboration of the party executive from 1910 onward had been a cessation in the growth of party membership (indeed, membership would have dropped, for the first time ever, had it not been for disproportionate recruitment of women). The large masses of non-organized workers were unwilling to take risks for a party whose timidity had emboldened employers to ever harsher attacks on their living standards.

The SPD section for work among women led by Clara Zetkin constituted a laudable exception to the party's general drift to the right (see "Foundations of Communist Work Among Women: The German Social Democracy," Women and Revolution Nos. 8 and 9, Spring and Summer; 1975). While subscriptions to the central party press were falling off, Zetkin's Die Gleichheit ("Equality") was able to chalk up a large increase in subscribers; similarly, it was undoubtedly Zetkin's activizing radicalism which in large measure accounted for the growth in women members—an indication that the SPD's capitulation to national chauvinism was not an expression of the "will of the masses" but rather of the revisionist leadership's default of socialist principle.

But Zetkin was able to carry on her fight for socialist international working-class solidarity in the forum of Die Gleichheit only for a short time longer; with the collaboration of the Prussian authorities the party leadership was able to gain control, install a compliant editor and proceed to run the journal into the ground. Circulation fell off sharply, and soon Die Gleichheit was suspended.

The statement of the Paris Action Committee is of interest not merely for its uncompromising interna¬tional proletarian solidarity in the midst of the chauvinist hysteria of the imperialist holocaust but also for the solutions it advances to the crisis of proletarian leadership.

Revolted by the quiescence and then by the outright betrayal of the party leadership and correctly viewing the masses as far more revolutionary than this petty-bourgeoisified leadership, many revolutionists over¬reacted by adopting a theory of mass revolutionary initiative exemplified by the "spontaneism" of Rosa Luxemburg. According to this view, the party was to be primarily an educational organization, providing leadership when the masses did decide on their own to initiate the final collapse of capitalism.

Such glorification of the masses' undirected revolutionary will led the social-democratic lefts to downplay the role of proletarian leadership. Thus, Luxemburg could write in 1910, when the SPD party executive was throttling mass demonstrations in favor of electoral reform: "If the mass of party comrades comprehends and truly feels this [the need for militant struggle], then our leaders will also be found at their posts. 'It's the masses that are decisive'."

Similarly, in the Paris Action Committee's statement, there is the belief that the old social democracy will somehow be revived and reconstituted "from below." A complementary error was the divided left social-democrats' neglect of the crucial need for organiza¬tional unity achieved on a firm programmatic basis.

But the theoretical/organizational failings of the social-democratic left opposition display a deeper inadequacy: a failure to come to grips with the changed conditions generated by the dominance of imperialism by the turn of the century. In foreign affairs imperialism had meant an unprecedented aggressiveness of the major capitalist powers, posing an imminent threat of world imperialist conflict. Internally, the dominance of monopoly cartels interpenetrated with bank capital found reflection within the German Second Reich in a closing of ranks by the capitalist exploiters and an unparalleled intransigence toward the labor move¬ment. Now, for example, lockouts were financed by a joint fund set up by all significant German industry. This hard-nosed stance of the German bourgeoisie vis-a-vis the social-democratic threat found expression politi¬cally in a strengthening of the reactionary bloc between industry and the East Elbran junkers with the aim of excluding the SPD from parliament. Within the labor movement itself, imperialism was accompanied by increasing divisions within the working class—not only industrialist-fostered "yellow unionism" but also what Lenin termed a "labor aristocracy" of relatively well-paid workers.

In the face of this challenge, the German social democracy remained tied to its old policy of verbal militancy and practical impotence. In particular, the entire left still clung to the Kautskyan theory of the "party of the entire class," i.e., including both those backward, reactionary layers which had not even achieved trade-union consciousness and a labor aristocracy whose relatively, elevated status made it prone to accept the status quo. Proponents of proletarian "unity" overlooked the fact that backward and non-revolutionary layers in the party would certainly generate spokesmen for their views within the party leadership.

While the Gruppe Internationale, which published this greeting, consisted of uncompromising revolution¬ists who were to found the German Communist Party, in failing to lend an organizational form to their views, they could offer no real solution to the social-democratic betrayal of the SPD leadership. It was only in the codification of Bolshevik practice in the early Comintern (particularly in the "Theses on Tactics" and "Guidelines on Organization") that the division between maximum and minimum program, enunciat¬ed in the Erfurt Program of 1891, was to be transcended in the creation of a party of a new type, the Leninist vanguard party of the proletariat, in which a conscious leadership of professional revolutionaries would be able to intervene decisively at crucial world-historical junctures precisely because it rested on an alert, class-conscious rank and file. Not Kautskyan "unity"-mongering, but such tactics as the united front simultaneously unmasked the old social-democratic misleaders and achieved working-class unity around the achievement of particular shared, strictly limited goals.

The statement of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women reprinted below is thus essentially a backward-looking document, harking back to the great traditions of the Second International and attempting to preserve a synthesis—"the great socialist family"— that had been first eroded and then dissolved by a triumphant imperialism. But the Second International had died in an act of definitive class-collaborationist betrayal. It was the Third International which was to continue the fight for international proletarian revolu¬tion through the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war directed against the international bourgeoisie under the leadership of an effective and disciplined international party of the working class.

To socialist and proletarian women of all countries the Committee sends an expression of its warmest sympathy on International Women's Day. From the ' bottom of its heart it hopes and desires that a great many socialist women's organizations will succeed— more freely and openly than it has itself been able to— in calling upon women everywhere to express their dearest wish, the wish for an immediate end to the frightful struggle that for 19 months now has been inundating the world in blood, and in uttering in numerous mass meetings with a clear voice the, word "peace" tabooed in our country.

We feel ourselves in solidarity with the socialist proletarians of the so-called enemy nations, with the proletarians whom we no more confuse with their exploiters than we would be confused with our own hangmen. We feel this solidarity the more strongly the more zealously our own, our true enemies, the capitalists, strive to incite us against foreign proletari¬ans. Thus under the present conditions it is particularly to the socialist and proletarian women of countries at war with us and especially to the proletarian women of Germany that we offer the assurance of our most heartfelt, warmest sympathy, and above all to Clara Zetkin and all the women comrades who, heroically and inspired with glowing conviction, are struggling for socialism and for peace without counting the costs to themselves.

The Committee renews the vow of proletarian solidarity made by its members at the time of their entry into the great socialist family. To each and every one it sends fraternal greetings, sad, painful greetings, but greetings supported by the unshakable belief in the future of the proletariat.

For the Committee: Louise Saumoneau, Paris

 

 

 

From The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives- Biography Of A Volunteer-Hyman David Wallach

Markin comment:
Whatever political differences separate us, then and now, whatever the later fates of those who fought in the Lincolns, those "pre-mature anti-fascists" who fought the good fight in Spain will always be kindred spirits! Long Live The Memory Of 15th Brigade!


Hyman David Wallach

Biography
At the age of 23, working as a shipping clerk in the garment industry and belonging to the Young Communist League, I volunteered to fight against fascism in Spain for the peoples of the world as well as for the United States. Stopping the advance against fascism was the most important task of the times. I fought in the battles of Brunette, of Quinto and Belchite, of Fuentes del Ebro and Teruel. I was selected to attend an Officer’s Training School but at the end of the first week, the entire school had to be sent to the front lines near Gandesa to stop the world’s first blitzkrieg, threatening to cut the Republic in two.

In the battle of Gandesa – after 8 days behind the lines – I was captured by Italian fascist troops. I was imprisoned more than 17 months in San Pedro de Cardenas, a fascist concentration camp. The treatment was horrible. We not only stood up to it, but also developed a positive program. Many things were going on in San Pedro. We created a newspaper, “The Jaily News” edited by Sidney Rosenblatt and myself. I also helped to organize the “San Pedro University”, where we would get first hand information on historical and contemporary events from our fellow prisoners, people involved in progressive and revolutionary movements all over the world. But chess was the principal activity at San Pedro.

The remarkably skilled artisans and craftsmen among the prisoners carved pieces out of charred wood and stone. Chess served to take the prisoners’ minds off the hunger, cold, and beatings, which were especially frequent after there had been a successful Republican offensive. I wrote a chess column in “The Jaily News.” I also gave simultaneous exhibitions. I once played against 25 prisoners and did not lose a game. I have had some success in chess outside of Spain and have won many trophies, but I am proudest of having won the chess championship of San Pedro de Cardenas.

I also became a “betting man” at San Pedro, because I felt it would help morale. I would pick a month in which a particular nationality would leave San Pedro to be repatriated and would bet a dinner and a show. If I lost I would have to push a coin with my nose along the filthy floors of our quarters. I explained that people were working hard for our release. I am not certain I was that optimistic, however I was amazingly accurate in my predictions. I won all bets and this included the previous departure of the majority of Americans from San Pedro. Although I never collected on the bets, nothing gave me greater satisfaction than seeing the hope inspired by winning these bets.

I have served for many years on the National Board of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and as Executive Secretary from 1975 – 1977. I was VALB Corresponding Secretary from 1977 - 1979. Before that, I was Treasurer of the VALB.

In World War II, I served in the Army of the United States in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. I received three battle stars and a Presidential Citation. During WWII, I was in the Signal Corps, attached to the 15th Air Force. After the Battle of the Bulge, I volunteered for the Infantry and wound up with the Fifth Army. On VE Day, I had enough points to be discharged but I turned it down, volunteering for the Pacific. I went home on furlough and then to Fort Dix waiting to be shipped to the Pacific. VJ came while I was awaiting reassignment and I was immediately discharged.

We did not defeat the fascists in Spain and succeed in stopping WWII. But the fascist timetable was upset. It was set back 2 years and 8 months – 2 years and 8 months in which millions of people all over the world were mobilized in the struggle against fascism. Our fight in Spain was a significant contribution to the victory over the fascists in WWII. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade has stood for the principles I feel so strongly about - the struggle against fascism, against war, against racism and against anti-Semitism.

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- An Abraham Lincoln Battalion Salute-"Viva La Quince Brigada"

Click on the title to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Pete Seeger and The Almanac Singers performing the Abraham Lincoln Battalion tribute, "Viva La Quince Brigada".


In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

LA QUINCE BRIGADA

Viva la Quince Brigada,
Rhumbala, rhumbala, rhumbala.
(Repeat)

Que se ha cubierta de gloria,
Ay Manuela, Ay Manuela
(Repeat)

Luchamos contra los Morros,
Rhumbala, rhumbala, rhumbala.
(Repeat)

Mercenarios y fascistas
Ay Manuela, Ay Manuela
(Repeat)

Solo es nuestro deseo
Rhumbala, rhumbala, rhumbala
(Repeat)

Acabar con el fascismo
Ay Manuela, ay Manuela!
(Repeat)

En el frentes de Jarama,
Rhumbala, rhumbala rhumbala
(Repeat)

No tenemos ni aviones,
Ni tankes, ni canones, ay Manuela!
(Repeat)

Ya salimos de Espana
Rhumbala, rhumbala, rhumbala
(Repeat)

Por luchar en otras frentes
Ay Manuela, ay Manuela!
(Repeat)

THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

BOOK REVIEW
A STRUGGLE FOR POWER: IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, THEODORE DRAPER, VINTAGE BOOKS, NEW YORK, 1997

In my study of revolutions I have always been interested in two basic questions- what were the ideas swirling around prior to the revolution that brought people to see the need for revolution and the related question of how those ideas played out in the struggle for power. I recently reviewed Professor Gordon Wood’s Radicalism in the American Revolution. That book centrally posed the first of these questions, which is the influence of ideas about the nature of individual freedom, about the creation of the frame of government and about who should govern- the patricians or the plebes?

In the present review of Theodore Draper’s book the second question of how those played out in the revolutionary process is dealt with at length. Although Mr. Draper has many insightful thoughts about the duration and intensity of the American revolutionary struggle against dear old mother England one must recognize that this is not a major historical contribution to the study of the American revolutionary experience. Draper’s major historical work, his definitive two-volume study of the formation and later Stalinization of the American Communist Party, for which he will be well remembered, is qualitatively better in every way. Not the least of which was that Mr. Draper was tapping new veins of previously unavailable material on the subject and had been personally involved in some aspects of the Communist Party’s history.

That said, as mentioned above one of the most interesting of Mr. Draper’s insights is the rather long period of struggle by groupings in virtually every individual colonial government against the rule (or better, rules since they were not uniformly applied) imposed by England. Previous study had led me to assume that these struggles had a relatively recent origin only a few decades prior to the revolution. What is apparent is that a ‘cold’ dual power situation existed between England and some of the administrations in the colonies for a fairly long time before ‘hot’ dual power occurred with the creation of the Continental Congress and the formation of militias and then the establishment of a full-blown army. Part of this tension stemmed from the distance from the mother country and the relatively looseness of the ties between colony and metropolis. Part of it also came from a need to deal with political, social and economic questions faster than edicts from England would permit and partly also by the structure of many of the colonial governments that acted to check the Imperial power by controlling the purse strings of the local power elite.

An overriding question that hovers over Mr. Draper’s theme is whether a revolution in America was necessary (or wise) given the relatively narrow issues that pulled the parties apart for most of the pre-revolutionary period. His answer is that the whole long pre-history of struggle between indigenous elements of colonial society and the haughtiness and unresponsiveness of officialdom under imperial rule dictated the need for revolution. That is certainly not an unreasonable conclusion. However, to this reviewer’s mind the question itself is rather fruitless. Revolutions occur; whatever reasons underlie any particular revolution because the parties (or at least one of the parties) see no other way out. Post-hoc analysis, while interesting, does not explain why this occurs and perhaps this why post-hoc knowledge does not make one wiser about how to avoid revolution. In modern sociology that, in any case, is the general intent of such analysis. Mr. Draper has, nevertheless, presented an interesting thesis about the sources of conflict in the American setting and the role of national consciousness in the pre- revolutionary period. Read on.
REVISED: NOVEMBER 4, 2006

*The King Of The Hill?- Elvis' "Jailhouse Rock"

A  YouTube's Film Clip Of Elvis Doing "Jailhouse Rock" From The Film Of The Same Name.

The King Of The Hill?

Jailhouse Rock, starring Elvis Presley and others, Warner Brothers, 2007

I am been involved lately, on a blog site that I belong to, in a friendly but spirited “debate” over whether Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis was the real “king of the hill” in the early days of rock & roll. I have argued that, pound for pound, Jerry Lee had more energy, more musical skill, more …, well, you get the picture, than Elvis could ever dream of. And with some exceptions, noted below, this movie, “Jailhouse Rock” based on the successful recording of one of his most famous early songs only buttresses that argument. Any Elvis aficionado would have to agree that this film is probably Elvis’ best cinematic effort (most of the others being merely vehicles for promoting his latest songs of the time). Overall, however, after fifty years it does not stand the test of time.

The premise of the film is not a bad one, paralleling in some senses the real life Elvis’ story of a backwoods kid who has two strikes against him trying for the brass ring- and winning. Elvis (Vince), as an ex-con is up against it in trying to crash into the record business. After falling flat on his face trying to get the established record companies to give him a shot he goes on to set up his own record company (not as hard to do in those days as one would think and certainly much easier than trying to do that today, Internet or not). After some frustrations and a few fights, verbal and otherwise, he catches the elusive break. Talent, will out. Oh, did I mention that he has a partner (two, really, but I want to discuss only one)? A young, vibrant and upscale woman who sees potential in a bad boy from across the tracks. She has faith in him. A classic 1950’s teen movie cinematic trope. T he class struggle here, oops, the love struggle, forms the backdrop to the action of the film. Naturally after the now cocky Vince gets his comeuppance the couple live happily ever after making platters and making the hearts of teenage girls in the 1950’s spin.

Now one and all will agree that the movie script deserves no Academy Award nomination. Moreover, these kinds of movies were made to cash in on Elvis’ sex appeal and to promote his songs. However, except for the classic “Jailhouse Rock” scene where we get high swiveling Elvis at his best the rest of the songs are sleepers. His acting, as the alienated youth trying to find his own way in a hard world that he didn’t make, rings false. The alienated youth image was done better, a million times better, by James Dean who made an art form out of that alienation. On Elvis it seems contrived. In any case, I will give Elvis his big moment in that “Jailhouse Rock” scene. But if you have one scene to think about musically from the 1950’s doesn’t Jerry Lee Lewis playing like a crazy man on “High School Confidential” on the back of a flat top truck on the way to the local high school really represent a better iconic image of what early rock & and roll was about in the late 1950’s. Case closed.

"Jailhouse Rock"

(words & music by jerry leiber - mike stoller)

The warden threw a party in the county jail.
The prison band was there and they began to wail.
The band was jumpin and the joint began to swing.
You shouldve heard those knocked out jailbirds sing.
Lets rock, everybody, lets rock.
Everybody in the whole cell block
Was dancin to the jailhouse rock.

Spider murphy played the tenor saxophone,
Little joe was blowin on the slide trombone.
The drummer boy from illinois went crash, boom, bang,
The whole rhythm section was the purple gang.
Lets rock, everybody, lets rock.
Everybody in the whole cell block
Was dancin to the jailhouse rock.

Number forty-seven said to number three:
Youre the cutest jailbird I ever did see.
I sure would be delighted with your company,
Come on and do the jailhouse rock with me.
Lets rock, everybody, lets rock.
Everybody in the whole cell block
Was dancin to the jailhouse rock.

The sad sack was a sittin on a block of stone
Way over in the corner weepin all alone.
The warden said, hey, buddy, dont you be no square.
If you cant find a partner use a wooden chair.
Lets rock, everybody, lets rock.
Everybody in the whole cell block
Was dancin to the jailhouse rock.

Shifty henry said to bugs, for heavens sake,
No ones lookin, nows our chance to make a break.
Bugsy turned to shifty and he said, nix nix,
I wanna stick around a while and get my kicks.
Lets rock, everybody, lets rock.
Everybody in the whole cell block
Was dancin to the jailhouse rock.

"Good Rockin' Tonight"
(words & music by Roy Brown)

Well, I heard the news
there's good rockin' tonight.
Well, I heard the news
There's good rockin' tonight.

I'm gonna hold my baby
as tight as I can.
Tonight she'll know
I'm a mighty, mighty man.
I heard the news,
there's good rockin' tonight.

I say, well, meet me in a hurry
behind the barn,
Don't you be afraid, darling,
I'll do you no harm
I want you to bring
along my rockin' shoes,
'Cause tonight I'm gonna rock away
all my blues.
I heard the news,
there's good rockin' tonight.

Well, we're gonna rock. We're gonna rock.
Let's rock. Come on and rock.
We're gonna rock all our blues away.

Have you heard the news?
Everybody's rockin' tonight.
Have you heard the news?
Everybody's rockin' tonight.

I'm gonna hold my baby
as tight as I can,
Well, tonight she'll know
I'm a mighty, mighty man.
I heard the news,
There's good rockin' tonight.

Well, we're gonna rock, rock, rock,
Come on and rock, rock, rock,
Well, rock, rock, rock, rock,
Let's rock, rock, rock, rock,
We're gonna rock all our blues away.

I Want You, I Need You, I Love You lyrics

Hold me close, hold me tight
Make me thrill with delight
Let me know where I stand from the start
I want you, I need you, I love you
With all my heart

Ev'ry time that you're near
All my cares disappear
Darling, you're all that I'm living for
I want you, I need you, I love you
More and more

I thought I could live without romance
Until you came to me
But now I know that
I will go on loving you eternally

Won't you please be my own?
Never leave me alone
'Cause I die ev'ry time we're apart
I want you, I need you, I love you
With all my heart

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Domenico Sedran-Carlini in Spain-An Italian Trotskyist in the Spanish Civil War

Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History journal entry listed in the title.

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” 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.

**********
Trotsky and the POUM

From Revolutionary History, Vol.1 No.2, Summer 1988. Used by permission.

Despite Trotsky’s trenchant criticism of the political parties in the workers’ camp in Spain there were few people in Spain who were listening to him. A Spanish section of the International Left Opposition had been formed by Andres Nin after his expulsion from the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) in 1927. For two and a half years – from September 1930 to February 1933 – Trotsky corresponded with Nin who was virtually alone in Barcelona. Relations with other supporters in Madrid were slight, a fact which already revealed a chronic provincialism (an adaptation to Catalan nationalism) in Nin’s political make-up.
During these years Nin oriented himself almost exclusively to the Catalan Federation which was a split from the PCE. It was led by Joaquim Maurin who was a right-centrist who only objected to the ultra-leftist excesses of Stalinism. Nin refused to criticise Maurin openly and refused to build a left opposition faction within Maurin’s group. Indeed, Nin went further in his opportunism and even helped to write the Federation’s documents and edit its paper.
Trotsky’s political ties with Nin were effectively broken in 1933 although Nin did not publicly break with Trotsky until 1935 when he joined forces with Maurin to form the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). In the intervening period Trotsky upbraided Nin for failing to enter the PSOE (the Spanish Socialist Party) and its union (UGT) whose rank and file were undergoing massive radicalisation in 1934 and 1935.
Despite these failings Trotsky recognised that the POUM, small as it was, organised some of the best vanguard elements in the Catalan working class. (Its influence outside this region was negligible.) It was a lone voice in Spain in unmasking the crimes of the Stalinists in the Moscow Trials. Also during 1935 the POUM developed the best formal criticisms of the Popular Front and the Second Republic in the pages of its paper La Batalla. Its leftism earned it the hostility of even the CNT and UGT leaders who sought to exclude POUMists from their unions.
The POUM was small. Before the Civil War estimates of its size vary from 3000 to 8000. Like most of the left groups it grew during the Civil War and by September 1936, it was about 30 000 strong, with l0 000 in its own militia. Yet much more than to contribute to its numerical growth, the Popular Front government and the Civil War cruelly exposed the centrist politics of the POUM leaders. Capable of left criticisms, the POUM consistently refused to carry through a break with the leaders of the CNT and UGT. Fearful above all of ‘isolation’ from these leaders they diplomatically refused to be critical of their practice. Worse still, they acted as a ‘loyal opposition’ in the Popular Front, often arguing against the PCE’s proposals but accepting to abide by them and even taking responsibility for them when they were defeated.
It is for this reason that Trotsky ruthlessly called the POUM ‘the chief obstacle on the road to the creation of a revolutionary party’. Unlike Stalinism, which refused for a second to adapt to the revolutionary impulses of the masses after July 1936 and instead derailed and destroyed all radical initiatives, the POUM wanted revolution, proclaimed its necessity and even on occasion proposed correct tactics. However, it did this alongside covering-up the weaknesses and betrayals of the anarchist, socialist and even Stalinist leaders. For one whole year La Batalla refused to criticise the CNT leadership!
The best example of the POUM’s centrism was to be found in its attitude to the Popular Front itself. Before the February 1936 elections the POUM campaigned against any coalition with the republican bourgeoisie. Then, on the very eve of the elections, they actually entered the Popular Front – only to renounce it again when the elections were over. However, Nin’s criticism of the Popular Front after February was not that it tied the workers’ organisations to the programme of the bourgeoisie but that it was not genuinely a Popular Front. La Batalla of 17 July 1936 on the eve of the Civil War, called for ‘an authentic government of the Popular Front, with the direct participation of the Socialist and Communist parties’.
Yet, when the Civil War erupted and the initiative was with the masses, the POUM shifted direction sharply and gave voice to the demands of the socialist revolution. In those early weeks the POUM exercised the leadership in the Lerida revolutionary committee. It was the only committee in Catalonia to refuse to have a representative of the republican bourgeoisie on it.
But even here the POUM stopped halfway. It could and should have used its revolutionary influence in towns like Lerida and Gerona to agitate for the formation of district and provincial Soviet-type bodies which would have developed into a decisive challenge to the authority of the Generalidad.
Not only did they refuse this road but Nin went out of his way to explain at great length that Soviet-type bodies were unnecessary and ‘alien’ to Spain. This unforgivable rationalisation for the prejudices and libertarian localism of the anarcho-syndicalist masses was typical of the POUM. Instead of ‘saying what is’, the POUM tried at every turn of events to minimise the differences and above all to conciliate with the leaders of the CNT.
Nin was to get his wish for a ‘genuine’ Popular Front in September 1936. Up until 7 September La Batalla denounced ‘bourgeois ministers’, unlike the PCE which heaped praise upon them. But once the Caballero cabinet was formed (ie, the PSOE leader and the leftist face of the bourgeoisie) in Madrid and the offer was made to the POUM of a seat in the provincial government in Catalonia, all this ceased.
In its place Nin assured the readers of La Batalla that a revolutionary orientation was ‘assured’ whenever there was a majority of ‘socialists’ in the government. Nin went so far as to define the dictatorship of the proletariat as a united front of workers’ parties and trade union leaders who assume governmental power! Nin ‘forgot’ the little matter of the democratic control and accountability of the mass of workers and poor peasants!
Once the POUM took its seat in the Catalan government it also took responsibility for the measures of the government. Of course, the POUM proposed radical measures to its Stalinist and bourgeois allies: an industrial and credit bank; no compensation to factory owners, etc. But these were rejected and the POUM remained respectfully silent. Worse, when the government proposed that there should be a government agent in each factory, or that there should be no further elections of factory councils for two years, the POUM agreed.
Worse even than that – indeed criminal – was Nin’s readiness to accompany President Companys on a tour of Lerida to convince the workers that the powers of the revolutionary committees should be dissolved. Nin argued:

These revolutionary committees, whether Popular Executive Committees, or Committees of Public Safety, represent only part of the workers’ organisations, or else represent them in incorrect proportions ... Obviously, the suppression of their revolutionary initiative is to be regretted, but one must recognise the need to codify ... the various municipal organisations, as much with the aim of replacing them uniformly as of setting them under the authority of the new General Council.

After having performed these valuable services for the bourgeoisie, on 16 December 1936 Nin was kicked out of the government. The POUM’s usefulness was at an end. Trotsky commented:
In the heat of the revolutionary war between classes Nin entered a bourgeois government whose goal it was to destroy the workers’ committees, the foundation of proletarian government. When this goal was reached, Nin was driven out of the bourgeois government.
Postscript
Despite the record of Trotsky’s criticism of the POUM it is sad to reflect that the British Trotskyists grouped around Reg Groves, the Marxist League, and their paper the Red Flag tended to obscure these criticisms and parade the POUM as a revolutionary organisation. The September 1936 Red Flag argued that ‘upon the rapid evolution of POUM into a Bolshevik Party depends the fate of the Spanish Revolution’. This does not reflect Trotsky’s own view of the POUM at the time. The Bolshevik-Leninists of Spain were only formed in the spring of l937 but they were formed in opposition to the POUM.
Keith Hassell

*From "The Rag Blog" -Bob Feldman Gives Us The "Skinny" On "Rolling Stone" -The Magazine That Is-It Ain't Pretty

Click on the headline to link to a The Rag Blog entry -Bob Feldman Gives Us The "Skinny" On "Rolling Stone" -The Magazine That Is-It Ain't Pretty

Markin comment:

Ya, for a minute in the 1960s "Rolling Stone" was a real alternative magazine. But it was just a minute, the great writing of Hunter Thompson notwithstanding.

*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor The American Revolution's Sam Adams

Click on the title to link to an "American Left History" blog entry reviewing a biography about American revolutionary leader, Sam Adams.

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Leibknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.