Once Again On Making Allies Where You Can-On The Question Of The War Tax Resisters

Once Again On Making Allies Where You Can-On The Question Of The War Tax Resisters

 

 

 

Frank Jackman comment:

 

Recently I made a comment concerning this same general subject of basically individual resistance to war by refusing to pay for the war taxes demanded by the government to continue their endless wars where I mentioned that a long time ago I had given up trying to figure out the best way to combat war, the best way to make the war- makers scream “uncle” (“Uncle Sam,” better). This of course was said in frustration after I/we had tried to shame the monster back in the old days of the Vietnam War with marches, vigils, rallies in our local cities and towns, and ultimately Washington when the monster continued to prove unmovable. Tried to shut down their damn government, unsuccessfully, bitterly unsuccessfully, on May Day 1971 and got nothing but mace, tear gas and mass arrests into the bastinado for our efforts. Tried to get to the front-line fighters of their wars-the mainly working class soldiers, the cannon-fodder, the grunt who fight every war with coffeehouses and advice that it was in their hands to end the damn thing. To walk away guns in hand and say the hell with it and if that didn’t work maybe “turn the guns around” on those who were ordering the fighting from the front-line generals to the President and his cronies.

 

All along that way, working in the background a lot except for the requisite formal endorsement of whatever good work was worth endorsing-on paper anything- stood the War Resisters League with the seemingly simple proposition that if you, meaning you the individual, withheld your war tax money from the government that would dry up their capacity to fund war, and thus put a big crimp in their ability to wage war.

 

I also mentioned in that comment that sometimes though a simple proposition turns into its opposite, turns into a nightmare of bureaucratic paperwork when you come right down to the core of the matter. The dear friends at the IRS do not like, very much do not like, folks who do not pay their taxes, for good reasons or bad. Strangely go after the good reasons, the refusal to fund wars reasons almost more fervently that fraudulent tax evaders and others seem not to pay their fair share for the wars they have created, or have a vested interest in. Don’t like folks sending in letters in lieu of taxes saying exactly why they are not paying up. Get worked up so bad that they have a field day dragging you before investigators, inspectors, supervisors, boards, and such. Are gleeful when they are able to finally garnish your salary including lots of penalties and interest. So that simple strategy, one might say absolutely rational strategy, got added by one Frank Jackman to the heap of ideas that did not work out so well about stopping the war-makers in their footsteps. Oh, by the way, that has not stopped one Frank Jackman from protesting every other way he has been able to raise as much hell as he could with the war-makers.               

 

Once Again, Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Frankie Out In The Adventure Car Hop Night

Once Again, Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Frankie Out In The Adventure Car Hop Night

 

 

A YouTube film clip of the Dubs performing the classic Could This Be Magic? to set the mood for this piece.

 

By Josh Breslin

 

Frankie Riley, the old corner boy leader of the crowd, our crowd of the class of 1964 guys who made it and graduated, not all did, a couple wound up serving time in various state pens but that is not the story I want to tell today except that those fallen brothers also imbibed Frankie’s wisdom (else why would they listen to him for they were tougher if not smarter than he was) about what was what in rock and roll music in the days when we had our feet firmly planted in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in North Adamsville, had almost a sixth sense about what songs would and would not make it in the early 1960s night. Knew like the late Billy Bradley, my corner boy when my family lived on the other side of town back then, did in the 1950s elementary school night what would stir the girls enough to get them “going.” And if you don’t understand what “going” meant or what “going” and “rock and roll” together in the same sentence meant then perhaps you should move along. Why else would we listen to Frankie, including those penal tough guys, if it wasn’t to get into some girl’s pants. Otherwise guys like Johnny Blade (and you don’t need much imagination to know what kind of guy and what kind of weapon that moniker meant) and Hacksaw Jackson would have cut of his “fucking head’ (their exact expression and that is a direct quote so don’t censor me or give me the “what for”).

 

But that was then and this is now and old, now old genie Frankie had given up the swami business long ago for the allure of the law profession which he is even now as I write starting to turn over to his younger partners who are begging just like he did in his turn to show their stuff, to herald the new breeze that the austere law offices of one Francis Xavier Riley and Associates desperately needs to keep their clients happy. In that long meantime I have been the man who has kept the flame of the classic days of rock and roll burning. Especially over the past few years when I have through the miracles of the Internet been able between Amazon and YouTube to find a ton of the music, classics and one-shot wonders of our collective youths and comment on those finds from the distance of fifty or so years.

 

I have presented some reviews of that material, mostly the commercially compiled stuff that some astute record companies or their successors have put together to feed the nostalgia frenzy of the cash rich (relatively especially if they are not reduced to throwing their money at doctors and medicines which is cutting into a lot of what I am able to do), on the Rock and Roll Will Never Die blog that a guy named Wolfman Coyote had put together trying to reassemble the “youth nation” of the 1960s who lived and died for the music that was then a fresh breeze compared to the deathtrap World War II-drenched music our parents were trying to foist on us.        

 

That work, those short sketch commentaries, became the subject for conversation between Frankie and me when he started to let go of the law practice (now he is “of counsel” whatever that means except he get a nice cut of all the action that goes through the office without the frenzied work for the dollars) and we would meet every few weeks over at Jack’s in Cambridge where he now lives since the divorce from his third wife, Minnie. So below are some thoughts from the resurrection, Frankie’s term, for his putting his spin on “what was what” fifty or so years ago when even Johnny Blade and Hacksaw Jackson had sense enough to listen to his words if they wanted to get into some frill’s pants.

 

“Okay, you know the routine by now, or at least the drift of these classic rock reviews. [This reference is what had been the sixth in the series that I had originally commented on but which Frankie felts he had to put his imprimatur on just like in the old days- JB] The part that starts out with a “tip of the hat” to the hard fact that each generation, each teenage generation that is makes its own tribal customs, mores and language. Then the part that is befuddled by today’s teenage-hood. And then I go scampering back to my teenage-hood, the teenage coming of age of the generation of ‘68 that came of age in the early 1960s and start on some cultural “nugget” from that seemingly pre-historic period. Well this review is no different, except, today we decipher the drive-in restaurant, although really it is the car hops (waitresses) that drive this one.

 

See, this series of reviews had been driven, almost subconsciously driven, by the Edward Hopper Nighthawk-like illustrations on the The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era CDs of this mammoth set of compilations (fifteen, count them, fifteen like there were fifteen times twenty or so songs on each compilation or over three hundred classic worth listening to today. Hell, even Frankie would balk at that possibility-we both agree something like fifty of them have withstood the test of time and that is giving guys like Gene Pitney with his Town Without Pity the best of it best mainly on melody not lyrics).

 

In this case it is the drive-in restaurant of blessed teenage memory. For the younger set, or those oldsters who “forgot” that was a restaurant idea driven by car culture, especially the car culture from the golden era of teenage car-dom, the 1950s. Put together cars, cars all flash-painted and fully-chromed, “boss” cars we called them in my working class neighborhood, young restless males, food, and a little off-hand sex, or rather the promise or mist of a promise of it, and you have the real backdrop to the drive-in restaurant. If you really thought about it why else would somebody, anybody who was assumed to be functioning, sit in their cars eating food, and at best ugly food, not as bad as at the drive-in movies but you expected that there, the theater owners knew every teenager was there for reasons other than nutrition and so could have foisted of paper cut-outs of food and we would have bought that, but bad, off a tray while seated in their cherry, “boss" 1959 Chevy.

 

And beside the food, of course, there was the off-hand girl watching (in the other cars with trays hanging off their doors), and the car hop ogling (and propositioning, if you had the nerve, and if your intelligence was good and there was not some 250 pound fullback back-breaker waiting to take her home after work a few cars over with some snarl on his face and daggers in his heart or maybe that poundage pounding you) there was the steady sound of music, rock music, natch, coming from those boomerang speakers in those, need I say it, “boss” automobiles. And that is where all of this gets mixed in.

 

Of course, just like another time when I was reviewing one of the CDs in this series, and discussing teenage soda fountain life, the mere mention, no, the mere thought of the term “car hop” makes me think of a Frankie story. Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, Frankie from the old hell-fire shipbuilding sunk and gone and it-ain’t-coming-back-again seen better days working class neighborhood where we grew up, or tried to. Frankie who I have already told you I have a thousand stories about, or hope I do. Frankie the most treacherous little bastard that you could ever meet on one day, and the kindest man (better man/child), and not just cheap jack, dime store kindness either, alive the next day. Yeah, that Frankie, my best middle school and high school friend Frankie.

 

Did I tell you about Joanne, Frankie’s “divine” (his term, without quotation marks) Joanne because she enters, she always in the end enters into these things? Yes, I see that I did back when I was telling you about her little Roy “The Boy” Orbison trick. The one where she kept playing Running Scared endlessly to get Frankie’s dander up. But see while Frankie has really no serious other eyes for the dames except his “divine” Joanne (I insist on putting that divine in quotation marks when telling of Joanne, at least for the first few times I mention her name, even now. Needless to say I questioned, and questioned hard, that designation by Frankie on more than one occasion to no avail) he is nothing but a high blood-pressured, high-strung shirt-chaser, first class. And the girls liked him, although not for his looks although they were kind of Steve McQueen okay. What they went for him for was his line of patter, first class. Patter, arcane, obscure patter that made me, most of the time, think of fingernails scratching on a blackboard (except when I was hot on his trail trying to imitate him) and his faux “beat” pose (midnight sunglasses, flannel shirt, black chinos, and funky work boots (ditto on the imitation here as well). And not just “beat’ girls liked him, either as you will find out. Certainly Joanne, the rose of Tralee, was not a “beat” sister (although she was his first wife and beat him out his first serious bout of alimony and child support). 

 

Well, the long and short of it was that Frankie, late 1963 Frankie, and the...(oh, forget it) Joanne had had their 207th (really that number, or close, since 8th grade) break-up and Frankie was a "free” man. To celebrate this freedom Frankie, Frankie, who was almost as poor as I was but who has a father with a car that he was not too cheap or crazy about to not let Frankie use on occasion, had wheels. Okay, Studebaker wheels but wheels anyway. And he was going to treat me to a drive-in meal as we went cruising the night, the Saturday night, the Saturday be-bop night looking for some frails (read: girls, Frankie had about seven thousand names for them)

 

Tired (or bored) from cruising the Saturday be-bop night away (meaning girl-less) we hit the local drive-in hot spot, Arnie’s Adventure Car Hop for one last, desperate attempt at happiness (yeah, things were put, Frank and me put anyway, just that melodramatically for every little thing). Now this Arnie’s was a monument to the post-World War II values and while you may have an idea of what this drive-ins looked like if you had watched the 1973 film American Graffiti which was nothing but a paean to car culture in the Modesto night most of those scenes except they would have entailed ocean rather than valley life could have taken place in North Adamsville or a million other towns on a weekend night back in the day. So yes Arnie’s had the huge neon sign advertising his place which could be seen from miles around since it was on a hill and acted as a magnet for youth nation, circa 1960s, had the stalls reserved for “boss” cars (that extra perk brought forth by the hard fact that Red Radley the owner of the “bossest” ’57 Chevy and acknowledged king of the “chicken run” had been, ah, upset one night when he could not find a parking spot to highlight his beauty of a car and proceeded to wreck half of Arnie’s. He got the message, got it loud and clear), and had the menu in bright lights. He also had red vinyl booths inside for the “walkers,” those goofs without cars (and had picnic tables outside and in the back for summer use of those same goofs) since everybody cool or goof wanted to hug to the bright lights and possible action come weekend nights. 

 

That was the set-up we lived and died for and on an ordinary date-less Friday night that would have been a sad last call before an early night home. What I didn’t know that night was that Frankie, king hell skirt-chaser had his off-hand eye on one of the car hops, Sandy, and as it turned out she was one of those girls who was beyond belief enamored of his patter (or so I heard later when I grabbed the details and she actually confirmed that she thought Frankie was the smartest guy she knew, book smart wise, and maybe he was). So he pulled into her station and started to chat her up as we ordered the haute cuisine.  Everybody admitted that Arnie’s had the best burgers in town especially if the late hour and maybe some lingering booze, drug, or sex overload made one hungry enough to eat anything placed before you but the other stuff was so-so and you were better off going to Jimmy Jake’s Diner over on Thornton Street if you really wanted to eat a  meal but which also meant that you had given up early on that lingering business mentioned above. But here was the funny thing, now that I saw her up close I could see that she was nothing but a fox (read: “hot” girl). Part of the draw to Arnie’s was that the car hop uniforms were half-way to the whorehouse, or maybe better a burlesques show, what with the skimpy almost see-through blouses which showed in Sandy’s case her beautiful pointy proud bust, the very short, short pants that showed off her long well-turned legs and ankles, topped off by a rakish bellboy’s hat fixed at an angle. Her blue eyes and long reddish blonde hair and big ruby red lips completed the picture. Yeah, an A-one fox.   

 

The not so funny thing though was that she was so enamored of Frankie’s patter that he was going to take her home after work. No problem you say. No way, big problem. I was to be left there to catch a ride home while they set sail into that good night. Thanks, Frankie.

Well, I was pretty burned up about it for a while but as always with “charma” Frankie we hooked up again a few days later. And here is where I get a little sweet revenge (although don’t tell him that).

Frankie sat me down at the old town pizza parlor [Tonio’s Pizza Parlor of blessed memory-JB] and told me the whole story and even now, as I recount it, I can’t believe it.

 

Sandy was a fox, no question, but a married fox, a very married fox, who said she when he first met her that she was about twenty-two and had a kid. Her husband was in the service and she was “lonely” and like I said she said she had succumbed to Frankie’s charms. Fair enough, it is a lonely world at times. But wait a minute, I bet you thought that Frankie’s getting mixed up with a married honey with a probably killer husband was the big deal. No way, no way at all. You know, or you can figure out, old Frankie spent the night with Sandy. Again, it's a lonely world sometimes.

 

The real problem, the real Frankie problem, was once they started to compare biographies and who they knew around town, and didn’t know, it turned out that Sandy, old fox, old married fox with brute husband, old Arnie’s car hop Sandy was some kind of cousin to Joanne, second cousin maybe. And she was no cradle-robber twenty-two (as if any woman could rob the cradle according to Frankie) but nineteen, almost twenty and was just embarrassed about having a baby in high school and having to go to her "aunt's" to have the child. This “aunt” business variously Aunt Emmy or Aunty Betsy usually lived in some place like Kansas or the Dakotas, you know out West so that the girl who was visiting auntie would have some reason to be away for several months and the farther away the mythical aunt lived the better. Get how I said mythical since the whole thing was eyewash as every twelve year old guy around our working class neighborhood and maybe every eleven year old girl knew once they started thinking about sex and what really happened if you were not careful-or did not abstain as the good parish priests tried to hammer home every freaking Sunday and other times too.

So the “visit” meant that some girl whether she wanted to or not let some guy go too far and all of us ignorant about sex and precautions knew she was in the “family way,” knocked-up, you know pregnant and was the reason they would have to go to the aunt’s. Sometimes not returning and sometimes going to auntie more than once. I would give a dollar to figure out how many girls were “away” at any given time but you know I, we, were mostly too interested in the girls who were around to worry about some bimbo who couldn’t keep her knees together (the way my father would express it about the “visit” when we kids got old enough not to have to listen to aunt silliness).

 

 

Moreover, and here is where the rubber hit the road as far as Frankie’s fate got twisted and turned around somewhere along the line Sandy, dish Sandy, lonely Sandy, and cousin Joanne had had a parting of the ways, a nasty parting of the ways. (Frankie thought it might be about bringing shame on the Murphy family name, Joanne and Sandy’s last names but that seems too adult world dross although Joanne was a religious girl always even when she was secretly to the world giving Frankie whatever he wanted in the sex department outside of missionary intercourse so it could have had something to do with it.)  So sweet as a honey bun Arnie's car hop Sandy, sweet teen-age mother Sandy, was looking for a way to take revenge and Frankie, old king of the night Frankie, was the meat. She had him sized up pretty well, as he admitted to me. And he was sweating this one out like crazy, and swearing everyone within a hundred miles to secrecy. So I’m telling you this in strictest confidence even now fifty years later and long after his divorce from her, from the divine Joanne. Just don’t tell Joanne. Ever.

Of Angels And Things-With Mark Dinning’s Teen Angel (1960) In Mind

Of Angels And Things-With Mark Dinning’s Teen Angel (1960) In Mind

By Zack James

 

Fritz Taylor as he has grown older, has reached retirement age from his career as a professional printer having worked for newspapers and after that position went south along with the industry with the crush of the new digital technology as a main form of people getting their news then as the owner of a small specialty print shop that he is in the process of turning over to younger hands, has been increasing inclined to stray thoughts from seemingly out of nowhere. Recently he told his old friend Bart Webber over lunch and cocktails at Johnny’s Dinner in Gloversville the town where both had come of age as both had harkened back to on occasion just to thrash out old memories. He told Bart that he had been having a series of dreams about angels, although not in any context that one would expect from a guy who was getting closer to meeting his maker or whatever happens when he passes.            

No, emphatically no, old Fritz as he explained to a credulous Bart he was having neither one of those increasingly frequent “senior moments” nor was he reverting back to his youth when discussing what he now called the Tommy-rot that plagued his life. That Tommy-rot reference referring to the days before he got “religion” on religion and would take on all-comers on such Thomist scholastic subjects as how many angels could fit on the head of a needle. When he was a believer, a believer in the hard-core Roman Catholic version of religion the religion of his forbears as far back as anybody could remember, he would think nothing of wiling away the hours with anybody who wanted to discuss what was what about religion, about the “true” religion and eventually the question of angels would come up, especially the question of that vaporous guardian angel who every priest, nun, his mother, hell, the Pope in Rome told him was looking out for him. Then one day when he really was down on his luck, had made a series of disastrous decision when he could not hold his wanting habits in and was homeless and friendless and needed an angel in the worst way he got wise and finally figured out that he was on his own. After that the thrill of such argumentation abandoned him as well along with the thoughts of angels.  

No, Fritz was thinking of a different context, a different way in which angels came into play also in his youth. As one could have figured out indirectly since it was mentioned earlier that Fritz had come of retirement age so one could also figure out that he had come of age in the classic age of rock and roll and while there may have been a few guys around who loved their rock better Fritz held his own when it came to the songs that influenced his generation. So his series of dreams centered on his sitting fixed like glue in a booth in Doc’s Drugstore circa 1960 listening to something on Doc’s jack-up top end jukebox provided for the listening pleasure of the Gloversville High students who made the trek across the street from the school to listen and sip sodas and grab a snack. But here is the freaky part of the dreams every song that would come on that fabulous jukebox had something to do with angels-and no other songs would penetrate the airwaves. Fritz told Bart he took this for a sign, a sign of what he did not know.     

Those dreams when he awoke one morning after having a particularly vivid one got him thinking that there were in fact many angel-based songs back in the day. So he went onto YouTube typed in “angel” and came up with a zillion angel songs. Not all were from his time but enough were so that they brought back reminiscences of lost time.

Say a song like Earth Angel by the Penguins where the heavens, or heavenly angels take a back seat to the earthly delights, a song like Johnny Angel where some frill was crying for some loving from her Johnny boy who was out two-timing her, probably with her best friend, a song like Angel Eyes which is self-explanatory, or a song like Devil or Angel where the composer of the song forgot his or her basic John Milton Paradise Lost when we all knew that devils and devils’ kindred were all noting but fallen angels, those who took the wrong side in the big ass civil war in the heavens before the gates of Eden fell. Fritz said that he could have gone on but Bart who after all had been there sitting in real time alongside him most afternoons at Doc’s and so knew what Fritz was getting at  could figure out the rest for himself.

The one song Fritz couldn’t figure, one that kept recurring in several dreams was the eternal playing of Mark Dinning’s famous classic angel song, Teen Angel. Then he finally figured out what that damn song kept reoccurring. This was the one song that he and Seth Garth, yes, Seth Garth the well-known free-lance music critic for such publications as Rock, Folk Age and The Stone Today whom they had gone to school with had fought a battle royal over. See Seth had back then, back in 1960 when they were both just naïve and ignorant freshman, had  written a review of the song for Mimi Murphy, the editor of the school newspaper, The Magnet where he extolled the young girl in the song whose rash action would soon make her a teen angel as a model for the real girls of Gloversville. Undying devotion to her boyfriend after she had run back her boyfriend’s car which was stalled on the tracks and a railroad train was heading that way. Apparently the boyfriend narrator of the song had pulled her out when the car first got stuck and they were safe but somehow during the confusion she had left his class ring, a big deal then signifying “going steady,” signifying hands off and stuff like that, in the car. She ran back and you know the rest, or can figure it out.         

“Bullshit” said Fritz to Seth one Friday night in front of Vinny’s Sub Shop where they all hung out when they had no dough or no dates after he had read Seth’s article extolling this phantom angel. The frill was a cluck, a stupe, and about seven dizzy other things according to Fritz. Here is how the fight progressed at least from Fritz’s side since Seth as was his wont then, and now, would not budge on his take on the song. First of all Fritz said that the guy narrator’s car probably was some “shit-box” and the bimbo should have had had better sense than to hang with a guy who didn’t have a “boss” car, or had a car probably handed down from a hard-pressed father that couldn’t even maneuver a railroad track without causing mayhem. Next point, really the clincher, the guy probably had given that cheapjack class ring to every girl whom he tried to get into the pants of before teen angel’s time, used that token of teenage seriousness to get whatever he could from any bimbo who would fall for his two-bit charm. Worse, worse of all was that a freaking class ring was about one rung above giving a girl a cigar band, or maybe a twisted paper clip. Anybody who would even think of buying an overpriced nowhere class ring from Kay’s Jewelry which would tarnish about three days after you got it was, well, from nowhere. The guys around Vinny’s that night tended to line up with Fritz seeing the dizzy doll as just another hapless fool for love-and good riddance.    

The funny thing was that “controversy” would come up periodically the rest of freshman year, usually on those dough-less, date-less Friday nights until at some point all sides got tired of the thing and moved on to critiquing some other song. Funnier still was that fifty years later when Fritz Googled “teen angel” to look once more at the lyrics he knew in his heart that he had been right and all the old bile came to the surface. Maybe not world-historic right, but right. The frail was a cluck then, and now. Funniest of all though was the recent interest that Fritz had been taking old time folk ballads and religious hymns a number of them dangling angels around their lyrics. One in particular was drawing his attention, Angel Band. As he was getting closer to meeting his maker or whatever happened when he passed Fritz thought about one phrase in the last verse of that hymn-“I hear the noise of wings.” He wondered whether just before that end as the light faded he would hear that noise of wings. And too whether he would get the “skinny” from “teen angel” about her take on that rash move she made that fateful night.    

Fight Deportations-Join Veterans For Peace At The US-Mexico Border In Nogales-October 7-10, 2016

Fight Deportations-Join Veterans For Peace At The US-Mexico  Border In Nogales-October 7-10, 2016

Fight Deportations-Join Us At The US-Mexico Border In Nogales-October 7-10, 2016

Fight Deportations-Join Us At The US-Mexico  Border In Nogales-October 7-10, 2016

 

Of Governmental Obfuscation Back In The Day-Otto Preminger’s Film Adaptation Allen Drury’s Advise And Consent (1960)

Of Governmental Obfuscation Back In The Day-Otto Preminger’s Film Adaptation Allen Drury’s Advise And  Consent (1960)

DVD Review

By Frank Jackman

 

Advise and Consent, starring Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, Walter Pidgeon, Franchot Tone, Don Murry, and an ensemble cast, directed by Otto Preminger, based on the novel by Allen   

 

For those who have forgotten or are too young to remember the seemingly endless obfuscations, bullyings, dirty tricks, ill-humored attacks and deep hubris of the Congressional set we are bombarded with these days is not of recent origin. Those of us who came of age, of political age in the time of the ill-fated Camelot of our youths know only too well the capacity of guys like one Lyndon Baines Johnson and one Richard Milhous Nixon, guys who for better or worse, mostly worse according to the historical record were actually Presidents of the United States their Congressional cronies (mostly Southern Democratic segregationists and red-neck rube Republicans from out in the heartland) to obfuscate, to bully, to do dirty tricks, to make ill-humored attacks and to act out of deep hubris. In some ways they would have had the current crop of Congress-people on their knees for lunch and had time for a nap. That brings us to this slice of life, this Congressional slice of life, particularly the Senate, film Advise and Consent from that ill-starred period based on the book by Allean Drury of the same name.     

Here’s how it played out then in the film and not too very far off in the normal course of governmental bickering then. The President, played by Franchot Tone, decided to nominate a long time governmental official, Leffingwell, played by Henry Fonda to be his Secretary of State. Such executive branch nominations under the separations of powers and check and balances reasoning behind the original constitution require the “advice and consent of the Senate to go through. That is the rub. Under ordinary circumstances such nominations are in the end whatever small hurdles are put before the nominees by the Presidents’ opponents or those who get a kick out of being contrarians are routinely processed. Not this nomination though.

Why? Well in those times mercifully past, mercifully passed maybe, the red scare Cold War night had the country in a deep freeze. Had average folk see reds under every bed, had every All-American kid putting the whammy on mommie the commie and that was on the rational days on the bad days they were ready to deep fry us with a quick nuclear strike just to keep us on our toes. The President’s nominee had been on the record as someone who was “soft on communism” maybe even a communist fellow-traveler or dupe himself.  That charge, or even the whiff of such accusations under ordinary circumstances then, who knows maybe now too although the red menace has been off the agenda for a while so I wonder where those “true believers” have been the last twenty-five years, would easily sink a nominee. And that was how it looked to one and all including the Majority leader of the Senate, played by Walter Pidgeon.

 

Despite Leffingwells’ lying, lying under oath, in other words he perjured himself, about his political past the President, ill and seemingly about to pass on, dug in his heels and against all conventional wisdom good judgment, and frighten fellow party officials  decided to push the nomination forward. That is where things get interesting from both the right, represented by Senator Cooley played by the old curmudgeon, a type long gone from the slick PR conscious politicos today, Charles Laughton who believed that Leffingwell was a sell-out, that he was in a word, a very strong political word at the time, now too an “appeaser” in the aftermath of the Munich capitulation by the West to Hitler just before World War II to the Russkies ready to blow us to smithereens. Strangely the right and left meet here in terms of sheer skullduggery since the leader of the “peace” faction used the dirty trick of exposing the homosexual past of a key Senator who was holding up bringing the Leffingwell nomination to a vote. Nasty stuff politics, the politics behind closed doors, the politics that makes the average citizen drossy and forgetful of the ballot box. Well the thing finally went to a vote by the films end. Guess what it ended in a tie. No nomination confirmed. No “advise and consent” pushed through. As for the why of why a tie meant no go in the constitutional process of the time watch the film. (Watch too the various historical anachronisms like the Vice President of the United States travelling on a commercial aircraft in what appeared to not even be first-class).       

Stop Continuing To Let The Military Sneak Into The High Schools-Down With JROTC And Military Recruiter Access

Stop Continuing To Let The Military Sneak Into The High Schools-Down With JROTC And Military Recruiter Access

 

 Frank Jackman comment:

 

One of the great struggles on college campuses during the height of the struggle against the Vietnam War back in the 1960s aside from trying to close down that war outright was the effort to get the various ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps, I think that is right way to say it) programs off campus. In a number of important campuses that effort was successful, although there has been back-sliding going on since the Vietnam War ended and like any successful anti-war or progressive action short of changing the way governments we could support do business is subject to constant attention or the bastards will sneak something in the back door.

        

To the extent that reintroduction of ROTC on college campuses has been thwarted, a very good anti-war action indeed which had made it just a smidgen harder to run ram shot over the world, that back door approach has been a two-pronged attack by the military branches to get their quota of recruits for their all-volunteer military services in the high schools. First to make very enticing offers to cash-strapped public school systems in order to introduce ROTC, junior version, particularly but not exclusively, urban high schools (for example almost all public high schools in Boston have some ROTC service branch in their buildings with instructors partially funded by the Defense Department and with union membership right and conditions a situation which should be opposed by teachers’ union members).

 

Secondly, thwarted at the college level for officer corps trainees they have just gone to younger and more impressible youth, since they have gained almost unlimited widespread access to high school student populations for their high pressure salesmen military recruiters to do their nasty work. Not only do the recruiters who are graded on quota system and are under pressure produce X number of recruits or they could wind doing sentry guard duty in Kabul or Bagdad get that access where they have sold many young potential military personnel many false bills of goods but in many spots anti-war veterans and other who would provide a different perspective have been banned or otherwise harassed in their efforts.  

 

Thus the tasks of the day-JROTC out of the high schools-military recruiters out as well! Let anti-war ex-soldiers, sailors, Marines and airpersons have their say.         

* All Those Who Fight Against Imperialism Are Kindred Spirits- A "Young Spartacus" Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link the Lenin Internet Archive's copy of an article about the socialist struggle against imperialism in wartime by V.I. Lenin in 1915, "The First International Socialist Conference at Zimmerwald"

Miami FTAA Protest: Cops Rampage Against Youth, Labor

What Strategy to Defeat Imperialism?

Reprinted from Young Spartacus pages of Workers Vanguard No. 817, 9 January 2004.

This article is based on eyewitness reports from SYC comrades.

Thousands of protesters from across the U.S., and to a lesser extent Canada and Latin America, gathered in Miami during the week of November 17 to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), as government ministers holed up in the downtown Hotel Inter-Continental were negotiating the pact’s terms.

The FTAA represents the potential extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to 34 countries in the Western Hemisphere, excluding Cuba. From NAFTA’s inception in 1994, the International Communist League has opposed the pact as U.S. imperialism’s “free trade” rape of Mexico; it has since brought increased misery and poverty to the people of Mexico. The U.S. is pursuing the FTAA as a means to further cement its control over the smaller capitalist states in Central and South America in the face of greater economic competition from rival imperialist powers in Europe and Asia. The fight against NAFTA and the FTAA is a battle against imperialist domination of Mexico and all of the Americas.

One unofficial slogan of the anti-globalization movement is “Another world is possible.” Some steel workers in Miami even had the slogan emblazoned across the backs of their union T-shirts. How to bring about that other world? A range of political opinions was on display. The AFL-CIO officials presented the protests as an opportunity “to educate our elected officials and candidates in preparation for the 2004 elections” and collected “ballots” from “millions of workers” from the Americas opposing the FTAA. Liberals like those in the coalition United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), in a call endorsed by the reformist International Socialist Organization and Left Turn among others, sought to inspire the delegates of poorer countries at the FTAA talks to walk out, as Brazil’s Lula did at the Cancún WTO meetings earlier last year. Many youth activists, identifying themselves as anarchists and rejecting reliance on any government officials, wanted to disrupt the FTAA meeting through direct action. None of these tactics will actually stop the FTAA.

The FTAA talks did end a day early, without a broad agreement. But this failure was not a result of the protests. As one radio reporter observed, at the Inter-Continental the demonstrations went unheeded by the delegates, confident in the protection accorded by the armed police camp in the downtown area. Instead, this failure was due to the competing national economic interests of the capitalist governments involved in the FTAA.

Ultimately there is no way to stop capitalist exploitation and bring about a just world short of working-class socialist revolution. We look to the working class as the only force in society that has the ability and class interest to defeat imperialism.

Miami Blues: Armed Police Camp

Miami was witness to a massive police mobilization, now routine at anti-globalization demos. The “security” measures were underwritten by $8.5 million from the federal government, allocated in the spending bill for the Iraq occupation. Also borrowed from the “war on terror” in Iraq: Miami police invited reporters to “embed” with them in armored vehicles and helicopters. The bourgeois media, civic leaders and Miami police engaged in an orgy of anarchist-bashing in the lead-up to the protests; several “suspected anarchists” (youth with backpacks walking down the street) were arrested. Days before the protests began, the Miami City Commission passed an ordinance banning the use and possession of common items like glass bottles and the puppets used in street theater.

On Thursday, the main day of protests, the cops totally shut down central Miami. Stores and offices were closed, the streets were empty, the elevated rail system was locked up, with cops perched at the stations. The police, many in full riot gear, unleashed a variety of weapons from batons and tasers to rubber bullets and water cannons. Youth were allowed to gather at Government Center Park at 7 a.m. but were swarmed by cops when they broke off into smaller groups engaging in direct actions.

Later that day at the end of the AFL-CIO-sponsored parade demanding “No to the FTAA!”, some anarchoid youth and a small number of steel workers advanced to the security perimeter fence separating the rally site from the Inter-Continental. The cops decided to end the rally on their own terms, attacking and dispersing the protesters. Youth and steel workers alike were injured in the onslaught. As we retreated, we talked to several youth who were assaulted, including a young man who was shot in the leg and hobbled and another who was shot in the back with a paint ball. Outside the “Wellness Center,” the temporary medical clinic set up by the protesters, a long line had formed. The cops later attacked the center.

“This should be a model for homeland defense,” Miami mayor Manny Diaz would later say. Almost 300 protesters were arrested, including 62 in a protest outside Miami-Dade County Jail the next day in solidarity with those arrested on Thursday. The Partisan Defense Committee issued a statement on November 24 demanding: “Free the arrested protesters and drop all charges now!”

The Miami events were a vivid lesson in how the capitalist state cannot be neutral but is rather the armed and violent defender of the capitalist order. The armed police camp in downtown Miami was a complete refutation of those leftists who peddle the illusion that the capitalist state, sufficiently pressured, can serve the interests of working people and the oppressed. However, this lesson was not necessarily generalized by all. Even youth crippled in the cop rampages thought that the “Convergence Center” was a safe place to assemble afterwards. While it was not raided, police had it staked out and picked off protesters as they came and went. There was this dangerous belief that if one declares a “safe space” or “autonomous zone” it thereby exists. Not so—black inner-city youth or the hundreds of immigrants locked up in federal detention centers can attest to the brutal daily reality of police repression.

Proletarian Internationalism or Pressure Politics?

Despite the naked display of capitalist “law and order” in Miami, many youth were intent on somehow disrupting the meetings. This impulse to fight the “system” through well-intentioned, but futile, acts of self-sacrifice sprang from a gut hatred of their “own” government and its attempts to ride roughshod over the rest of the globe. What often was behind this justified hatred was a misplaced feeling of responsibility for the fundamentally oppressive character of American capitalism.

But youth and the working masses do not share the blame for the crimes of the brutal U.S. ruling class, which exploits workers, makes life miserable for black people and goes to war for itself alone. It only serves the class enemy for radical youth in this country to feel guilt for these crimes, because this guilt flows from the dangerously false idea that the capitalist U.S. is or could be pressured into being a democracy “for the people” if only the anti-globalization youth were determined or creative enough to make the rulers pay attention. Under the circumstances of the anti-globalization protests, the cops will assault, brutalize and arrest youth without fail. Lacking a perspective of mobilizing the working class against the rule of capital, such confrontations with the cops amount to the streetfighting face of reformism.

Ultimately what is at work is an idealist conception of social change, which sees the transformation of society as resulting from enlightening the “misinformed” or tempering social attitudes like “greed” and racism in capitalist society. From the exploitation of the working masses to the racial oppression of black people, the evils of the capitalist world are not simply a matter of retrograde ideas; they are materially rooted in a system based on exploitation and oppression. This material reality we seek to change.

The direct action protests were meant to “raise consciousness” and inspire others to follow, thereby building a mass movement against “globalization” and bringing closer victory in the future. Who was to be inspired? For some, it was the representatives of “progressive” Third World countries at the FTAA negotiating table, e.g., the Brazilian and Venezuelan governments. A speaker from Venezuela at an anti-globalization conference on the University of Miami campus that Friday hailed Hugo Chávez for supposedly carrying forward the “Bolivarian Revolution” by refusing to sign on to an FTAA lacking human rights provisions and, above all, protections of national sovereignty. Stickers from the group Alternativa Bolivariana para América Latina (ALBA), an outfit with ties to the Venezuelan government, were popular. Mention of Lula likewise brought praise and admiration for his leading the walkout at the Cancún WTO meeting.

A Spartacus Youth Club supporter responded to the Venezuelan speaker in the discussion round, pointing out how the Chávez government is tied in a thousand ways to the imperialist system. She counterposed the blow to that system delivered by the working class in the 1917 Russian Revolution. Whether it is the social democrat Lula attacking the Brazilian pension system or the nationalist strongman Chávez deregulating the Venezuelan banks, these politicians protect and defend the capitalist order. Notwithstanding the differences in their countries, their backgrounds and their politics, both Lula and Chávez are openly servile to the IMF, enforcing economic austerity dictates to curry favor with the imperialist powers. As well, both have sought to bring powerful unions to heel and reneged on promises of agrarian reform. Lula went so far as to recently expel left-wing critics of his economic policy from his own Workers Party. As our comrades in the Grupo Espartaquista de México observed:

“The history of Latin American capitalism has been one of constant swings between populist protectionism and nationalist rhetoric on the one hand and ‘free market’ trade liberalization on the other. Alternatively, the bourgeoisie of these countries, frightened by the unrest of the masses, resorts to populism and protects its industry with tariff barriers and subsidies. Then, under the political pressure of imperialism and because of its own internal inefficacy, this model fails. The bourgeoisie, handing over the economy to the imperialists, resorts again to ‘free market’ liberalism, which in a few years fails, too, as it destroys the internal market and condemns the masses to even greater impoverishment, and then the cycle begins again. The rise of bourgeois rulers with populist rhetoric like Chávez in Venezuela and the social democrat Lula in Brazil points to the latter. The only constants in this inhuman wheel of fortune are imperialist subjugation and the human misery of millions of peasants and workers.”

— “¡Por movilizaciones obreras contra el TLC, el ALCA y las privatizaciones!” [For Workers Mobilizations Against NAFTA, FTAA and Privatizations!], Espartaco No. 20 (Spring-Summer 2003)

More consistent left-leaning anarchist youth had little affection for the capitalist governments of the Third World. One young woman observed how Lula put himself forward as a leftist candidate of the workers but was actually doing exactly what the U.S. demanded of him. Another “hoped to cause headaches” to the U.S. by arousing the Latin American masses.

Naomi Klein expressed a clearly reformist take on this position in her article on the Miami protests: “Despite the [Bush] brothers’ best efforts, the dream of a hemisphere united into a single free-market economy died last week—killed not by demonstrators in Miami but by the populations of Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia, who let their politicians know that if they sign away more power to foreign multinationals, they may as well not come home” (London Guardian, 25 November 2003). This perspective, too, is the dead end of seeking to pressure bourgeois governments, in this case those of Latin America, to stand up to the depredations of capital.

It was “the people” that the more radical youth wanted to inspire. But “the people” invariably consists of members of different classes that have their own distinct interests. Lula and the Brazilian bourgeoisie have some interests in opposition to the U.S. imperialists, but are dependent on imperialism to maintain their own class rule and are not going to challenge the system as a whole. The existence of imperialism has arrested the development of the Third World, as the imperialist countries have already divided up the vast majority of the wealth and power. The investment of imperialist capital in countries like Mexico has resulted in uneven and combined development; age-old conditions of subjugation in the countryside exist alongside modern industry and a powerful proletariat.

As our comrades in the GEM wrote: “The social, economic and cultural development of Mexico can only be achieved through a socialist revolution which puts the proletariat in power, leading the peasant and indigenous masses and all the oppressed, and establishes a planned, socialist economy. From its inception, a victorious workers state in a backward country—which also shares a border with the U.S.—would have to fight to promote proletarian revolution inside the American imperialist beast and on a world scale. A socialist revolution in Mexico would really have an electrifying effect on the workers in the U.S.”

Fighting the Imperialist Order

It is essential to understand what imperialism actually is in order to defeat it. Imperialism is a system, capitalism at its most developed stage, and is marked by the export of finance capital. What it is not is a series of belligerent government policies. The imperialist bourgeoisies, in pursuit of profits and spheres of economic influence, exploit the world’s backward countries for raw resources, cheap labor and new markets. The constant competition and conflict between nation-states over such influence is the impetus to war. War is therefore an inevitable characteristic of imperialism.

Although it is an agreement between governments, the FTAA is referenced as another case of “globalization,” supposedly a new world system in which sovereign nation-states are overtaken by transnational corporations. But these corporations do not and cannot operate without a national base. For example, many of the corporations involved in “rebuilding” Iraq today are multinational in the sense that they have capital invested in more than one country. Yet the corporations still retain their national base—it is ultimately the U.S. military and none other that enforces the property rights of these corporations.

Several groups claimed that “globalization” promotes war. Typical was the US Labor Against the War statement, which concludes: “Unfair trade policies destroy American jobs, impoverish workers around the globe, and lead to violence and military conflicts.” Likewise, in a leaflet it distributed, the UFPJ argued: “Globalization undermines the ability of governments to regulate and mitigate the damaging effects of the market, which leads to an intensification of all of the economic causes of war.” There is no fundamental separation of interests between the bourgeois state and its capitalist economy, whatever the particular policies of the government. The above views wrongly imply that the governments of capitalist states could betray the fundamental interests of their propertied class and that the imperialist system could be a peaceful one.

All the talk in recent years about “globalization” is a reflection not of any profound new economic transformation but rather of a tremendous political defeat, the collapse of the Soviet Union. As we noted in our pamphlet on “globalization”:

“A fundamental political condition for the present triumph of capitalist ‘globalization’ was the retreat of Soviet global power under Gorbachev, the disintegration of the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy and the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. It was no accident that the electoral overthrow of the [Nicaraguan] Sandinista regime in 1990, capping a contra war armed and organized by Washington, coincided with the beginning of a massive investment boom by U.S. banks and corporations in Mexico. At the same time, capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet sphere has opened up a new, huge sphere for exploitation, especially for German imperialism.”

— Imperialism, the “Global Economy” and Labor Reformism (September 1999)

We had several lengthy discussions with youth about the Soviet Union. One anarchist youth dismissed the USSR as a “statist” superpower; his attitude was one superpower down, one to go. To the contrary, the collapse of the bureaucratically degenerated Soviet workers state cleared the field for the hegemonic power of the U.S. The Soviet Union when it existed was a counterweight to U.S. imperialism.

A member of the North Eastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists argued that the precipitous drop in the standard of living in post-Soviet Russia was due not to the restoration of capitalism but rather to the defeat of the USSR at the hands of (and its subsequent economic trampling by) the U.S. He made a comparison to the economic devastation in Germany following the First World War. He considered the class character of the society and its form of economic organization to be subordinate to the degree to which the state “interfered” with people’s daily lives.

But the Soviet Union was not a capitalist country, in which production is for profit; it was a society based on the establishment of collectivized property and a planned economy, made possible by the expropriation of the capitalist class. Despite the degeneration of the Soviet workers state under Stalinist misrule, it was a measure of the power of the planned, collectivized economy that it provided jobs, housing, education and health care for all. Today, however, Russian life in all aspects is in drastic decline.

Opposition to imperialism requires defense of those gains the international working class has already won. We Trotskyists fought tooth and nail against capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union.

Treachery of the Labor Bureaucracy

The fundamental contradiction in capitalist society is the antagonism between labor and capital. Workers create the wealth of this society with their labor and can bring the capitalists to their knees by withholding that labor power. With its vast numbers, its location in the urban centers and its hands on the means of production in the factories, where the common experience of workers lays the basis for solidarity and organization, the proletariat is the key social force to bring about the shattering of the imperialist order.

More than one youth argued that the American proletariat no longer has any social power due to the disappearance of jobs and the transformation of the American economy from manufacturing to service-oriented industries. One pro-working-class anarchist youth argued that proletarian centrality is impossible today, essentially claiming that only by defeating the FTAA and other supranational economic institutions will the working class recapture its social power in this country and save the Third World proletariat from the ravages of the “multinationals.”

The decline of the American labor movement is not fundamentally caused by the objective effects of “globalization” but by the defeatist and treacherous policies of the AFL-CIO misleaders. The transfer of production to low-wage areas in semicolonial countries has led to a sharp decline in unionized manufacturing jobs here, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest. But instead of seeking to organize international class struggle against attacks on jobs and unions, the AFL-CIO bureaucracy limits union struggle to what is acceptable to the U.S. capitalist rulers.

The strength of the unions is not in their paid lobbyists on Capitol Hill but in their numbers, their militancy, their organization and discipline. What is crucial is the question of leadership. The existence of “multinationals” only underscores the historic need for an internationalist class-struggle perspective that transcends parochial, nationally limited trade unionism. We are for a class-struggle leadership in the trade unions. This is part of the fight to build a revolutionary workers party that mobilizes the working class and all the oppressed against imperialist rule.

In Miami, the labor tops worked to keep the radical youth separate from the union ranks and the working class away from radical politics. Union marshals wearing “Peacekeeper” badges forcibly kept any youth wearing black from entering the amphitheater where the union rally was held; security patted down those who were not in labor contingents and used metal detector wands on them. Youth were disgusted by this exclusion, and we found anger at the treatment of the leftist youth among the workers.

Given that the protest was to “raise consciousness” against globalization, the “unity of anti-FTAA forces” was very important for many youth, irrespective of the broader political program of any of those forces. Whether one was for or against capitalism did not so much matter; in fact, an “anti-corporate” attitude was sometimes what youth meant when they said they were against capitalism. By this they meant opposition to “large monopolistic” corporations, not capitalism per se. Others subscribed to an anti-technology attitude. Much of the resentment against the AFL-CIO bureaucrats was not so much for making anarchist youth persona non grata as for breaking this unity. But pleas for “unity” with those who alibi capitalist rule can only reduce what is fought for to the lowest common denominator, namely Democratic Party electoralism.

Many youth did make a distinction between the steel workers and the AFL-CIO apparatus. The steel workers were spoken of with admiration for standing down cops harassing youth activists and widely cheered when they first arrived on Thursday. Then, the steel workers were prevented from entering the union rally site by the cops and later marched together with the youth to the security fence, taking arrests. But the leadership of the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) is politically indistinguishable from that of the other AFL-CIO unions. Following the protests, the USWA tops called for a Congressional investigation into the police assaults, breeding illusions in supposed Congressional “impartiality” when the police repression had been paid for with money approved by Congress!

Central to the political outlook of the USWA officials is their protectionist “Stand Up For Steel” tariffs campaign, with its rhetoric of saving “American jobs” for “American workers.” This outlook is shared by liberal Democratic presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich, whose supporters mobilized widely for the demo. Protectionism is poison to the workers movement because it sets workers of one country against workers of another country, obscuring the reality that the enemy of both is the capitalist rulers at home. In his 11 November 2003 “anti-FTAA” campaign flyer laced with protectionism and patriotism, Kucinich intones: “NAFTA allows foreign owned companies to challenge our Constitution, our Congress, and our rights to enact American laws.”

Those youth who were pro-labor offered boycotts against particular companies as the best means of defending the interests of working people here and in other countries, citing campaigns against Taco Bell and Wal-Mart. Consumer boycotts were seen as the “practical” alternative to organizing the unorganized because residents of the U.S. “are not there” in the countries miserably exploited by sweatshop labor. Boycotts may occasionally serve a useful purpose in conjunction with a strike action, but behind timeless consumer boycotts is a liberal-moralist worldview positing that one corporation is more benevolent than another. This presupposes that capitalism can be made into a humane system and is counterposed to mobilizing the power of labor.

Defend Cuba, China Against Counterrevolution!

Che Guevara probably was the most highly regarded political figure among the youth, though the anarchists would distinguish between the Che before and the one after he was a part of the ruling state apparatus in Cuba. The adulation of Che generally came from a romantic identification with the guerrilla road, i.e., “armed direct action.” While opposing imperialism, Che’s program was fundamentally elitist, posing a band of intellectuals as leadership for the peasant masses—an isolated, parochial social layer whose primary aspiration is property holding. This program is an obstacle to workers taking power in their own name.

Some anarchist youth we talked to defended Cuba and the gains of its revolution (e.g., education, health care) but did not like Castro, whom they considered an authoritarian. A group of youth asked about the dollarization of Cuba out of justified concern over the threat to the Cuban Revolution. Indeed, making U.S. tender legal opened a breach in the state monopoly of foreign trade, a serious danger making the Cuban deformed workers state more susceptible to capitalist forces. This has sharply increased social divisions, particularly affecting women and black Cubans.

The Cuban Revolution has survived decades of CIA plots, a U.S. blockade and imperialist economic penetration. Miami itself is a haven for the gusanos, the counterrevolutionary Cubans who fled the 1959 Revolution. In fact, the stretch of Biscayne Boulevard where much of the anti-FTAA protests took place was renamed Jorge Mas Canosa Boulevard, after one of the more vicious historic gusano leaders.

Although the Cuban workers state was deformed from the outset by the rule of the nationalist Castro bureaucracy and the absence of the proletariat in the revolution, the smashing of capitalist class rule in 1960-61 has enabled the Cuban masses to make great strides forward in their living conditions. The restoration of capitalism would bring many horrors to the people of Cuba and would further embolden U.S. imperialism in exploiting the peoples of Latin America, more than any “free trade” agreement could ever do.

It is part of our struggle against imperialist capitalism that we stand for the unconditional military defense of Cuba, China, North Korea and Vietnam—the remaining deformed workers states—against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution. Simultaneously, we call for workers political revolution to oust the sellout Stalinist bureaucrats and fight to extend proletarian rule to the advanced capitalist countries.

World socialist revolution is the prerequisite to raising the productive forces of society to a level where material scarcity is eliminated. Opposition to trade between nations leads either to support for protectionism or to primitivist economic decentralization and isolation, programs that would exacerbate the differences between the industrial and the underdeveloped worlds. It is only through centralized planning on an international scale, based on global exchange terms favorable to underdeveloped nations, that the divide separating the impoverished of the world from the wealthy of this country can be overcome. The way forward is to build a revolutionary party that can infuse the working class with an understanding of its historic task to overturn the imperialist order and reorganize society on an egalitarian socialist basis.