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Tuesday, October 25, 2016
From Courage to Resist- Help support war objector Ryan Johnson
Help support war objector Ryan Johnson
Monday, October 24, 2016
A View From The Left- ISO on Syria-Pimps for U.S. Imperialism
Workers Vanguard No. 1097
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7 October 2016
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ISO on Syria-Pimps for U.S. Imperialism
For five years, the U.S. imperialists and a host of lesser powers have been stirring the Syrian cauldron, inflicting unspeakable suffering on the peoples of Syria. Today, much of the country is a wasteland, hundreds of thousands have been slaughtered and more than half the population has been driven from their homes, either as internally displaced persons or as refugees abroad.
As Marxists, we fight for a socialist federation of the Near East based on proletarian revolutions that sweep away the capitalist rulers of the region. We say the international proletariat has no side in the Syrian civil war between the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad, rooted in the Alawite religious minority, and the various rebel groups dominated by different Sunni Islamists, some of which are backed by the U.S. But working people have a side against the U.S. and other imperialist powers such as Britain and France. Thus, while implacable opponents of everything the reactionary cutthroats of the Islamic State (ISIS) stand for, we take a military side with ISIS when it aims its fire against the imperialist armed forces and their proxies in the region, including the Kurdish nationalist forces in Iraq and Syria. At the same time, we also oppose the other capitalist powers involved in Syria—such as Russia, Iran and Turkey—and demand that they get out.
Our political position is framed by the Marxist understanding that U.S. imperialism is the greatest enemy of the world’s workers and oppressed. In standing for the defense of ISIS against the blows of the imperialists, we recognize that any setback for Washington coincides with the interests of the international proletariat, both in the Near East and, crucially, here in the U.S. We aim to turn the multi-sided disillusionment and anger of working people in the U.S. into class struggle against their capitalist rulers. It is through such struggle that the proletariat can be won to the need to build a revolutionary workers party that will lead the fight for socialist revolution to destroy the imperialist beast from within.
This Marxist understanding is rejected by reformist groups like the Stalinoid Workers World Party (WWP) and Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). Denying the possibility of international proletarian revolution, both groups are virtually uncritical of Assad’s capitalist regime, falsely painting his dictatorship as progressive and anti-imperialist. For all their anti-imperialist posturing, both WWP and PSL have many times found themselves on the same side as U.S. imperialism. WWP celebrated the 2008 election of Barack Obama, who has continued and intensified U.S. military intervention in the Near East. More recently, both groups cheered on the Kurdish nationalists who in late 2014 were combating ISIS in Kobani, even as these nationalists were acting as the ground troops for the U.S.
And then there is the thoroughly wretched International Socialist Organization (ISO), historically allied with the international tendency led by the late Tony Cliff. The ISO recently ran an article by Ashley Smith titled “Anti-Imperialism and the Syrian Revolution” (socialistworker.org, 25 August), which is essentially an apologia for U.S. imperialism. Smith’s article criticizes, among others, WWP and PSL for their support to Assad. But what the ISO counterposes to this is support to the “democratic” rebels, and through them, to the U.S., the world’s foremost imperialist power.
While claiming to stand against U.S. intervention in Syria, the ISO, in fact, complains that the U.S. has not intervened enough. According to the ISO, Assad is still in power “thanks in no small measure to the fact that the U.S., while accepting some supplying of the rebels, denied these forces the heavy weaponry they pleaded for to stop the regime’s assault.” Later in the article, Smith bemoans the fact that early in the civil war “the U.S. blocked the shipment of heavy weaponry, such as anti-aircraft systems, that would have strengthened secular and democratic forces that have borne the brunt of the Assad regime’s terror.”
The ISO deceitfully paints the Sunni Islamist-dominated rebellion in Syria as a “popular struggle against dictatorship and for democracy.” To be sure, the Cliffites have long had a certain penchant for Islamic fundamentalism, having, for example, supported the coming to power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 2012 (only to then support the military coup against it a year later when its rule proved to be unpopular). In Syria, the ISO has embraced some deeply reactionary Islamic fundamentalist forces. One of the slogans of what the ISO calls the “Syrian Revolution” was: “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to their graves!”
For the ISO, the alpha and omega of all struggle is “democracy.” There is no such thing as abstract democracy, which always has a class content. Capitalist democracy is the dictatorship of the capitalist class over the working class and oppressed. For genuine Marxists, the starting point is the class line: what furthers the cause of the working class and the struggle for its rule, which on an international basis would lay the material groundwork for a classless, stateless communist society. This requires, first and foremost, the political independence of the working class from all agencies of the bourgeois order—such as the Assad regime and, most certainly, U.S. imperialism.
In his article on Syria, Smith attacks hawk Hillary Clinton from the right. He notes that “she calls for the U.S. to enforce a no-fly zone in Syria, and some of her advisers support air strikes against the Assad regime for the stated aiming [sic] of stopping attacks on civilians.” “But,” Smith then goes on to lament, “Clinton certainly does not support the original aspirations of the Syrian Revolution” because, “at most,” she and Obama advocate “a negotiated solution that preserves the core of the Syrian state.” The ISO’s article is essentially a call to arms for U.S. imperialism to increase its support of the rebels in Syria.
The ISO goes so far as to claim that “the U.S. retreated in general from outright regime change as its strategy in the Middle East after the failure of its invasion and occupation of Iraq.” Tell that to Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi! In 2011, in an operation heavily pushed by Clinton, the U.S. and NATO intervened in support of Libyan rebels against Qaddafi, resulting in his lynching that October. Like it does in Syria today, the ISO then supported the Libyan opposition, sundry forces that included Islamists, monarchists and CIA assets that from the beginning appealed for imperialist military intervention. We had no side in the Libyan civil war, but once the U.S. and European imperialists intervened we declared, “Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attack!”
Today, Libya is in the throes of chaos as Islamist and tribal factions compete for control of this oil-rich country. All these forces are hostile to the interests of working people and the oppressed. At the same time, the imperialist-installed Government of National Accord (GNA) and its current allies are acting as the proxy ground troops of U.S. imperialism as it pursues ISIS forces in Surt (Sirte), against which the U.S. has launched over 200 airstrikes since early August. The tribal forces that now claim adherence to ISIS truly stand in the tradition of these cutthroats, having carried out numerous atrocities, including the February 2015 beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic migrant laborers in Surt. But as opponents of U.S. imperialism, we stand for the military defense of ISIS forces in Surt against the U.S. and its GNA proxies.
Anti-Communism Is at the Root
In his article, Smith writes, “How could opponents of U.S. imperialism end up supporting a dictator [Assad].... The answer starts with the Stalinist left’s support of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China during the Cold War era. It supported those state capitalist dictatorships not only as opponents of U.S. imperialism, but as positive models of socialism.” Rather, one should ask, how could the supposed socialists of the ISO end up embracing U.S. imperialism? The answer starts with their abandonment of the defense of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states. The ISO was founded on virulent anti-Communist hostility to the Soviet Union, home of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the world’s first and only successful workers revolution. Rejecting defense of the workers states inevitably leads to embracing one’s “own” ruling class.
The October Revolution of 1917 was the shaping political event of the 20th century. The seizure of state power by the working class led to the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist exploiters, laying the basis for a planned collectivized economy. But in the context of unprecedented devastation caused by World War I followed by nearly four years of civil war, continued isolation and economic backwardness, a conservative bureaucratic caste under the leadership of Joseph Stalin was able to seize political power from Soviet workers beginning in 1923-24. This was a political, not a social, counterrevolution. The Stalinist bureaucracy continued to rest parasitically on the proletarian property forms created by the October Revolution. The bureaucracy’s false dogma of building “socialism in one country,” its conciliation of imperialism and its systematic erosion of the political consciousness of the Soviet working class ultimately paved the way for capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92.
Through all those years, genuine Trotskyists fought for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution. Based on our defense of the gains of the Russian Revolution and our program for new October Revolutions around the world, we fought for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and replace it with a regime based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism. This is the program we pursue today toward the remaining deformed workers states: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam.
For his part, the ISO’s political godfather, Tony Cliff, broke from the Trotskyist movement in 1950, opposing defense of North Korea and China against U.S. and British imperialism in their counterrevolutionary Korean War. Cliff would go on to found what later became the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which was allied with the ISO until the early 2000s. In the U.S., the ISO’s precursors emerged from the followers of Max Shachtman, who broke from Trotskyism in 1940 and would quickly go on to reject the Soviet Union as a workers state. Where Shachtman called the Soviet Union a “bureaucratic collectivist” state, Cliff labeled it “state capitalist.” But the aim was the same: to renounce defense of the October Revolution.
In his article, Smith writes that those who argue that “the U.S. government is pulling the strings in the rebellion in Syria” display an arrogant dismissal “of the capacity of exploited and oppressed people to fight for liberation.” In reality, it is the ISO and its forefathers that have a long history of not only dismissing but opposing the struggles of the exploited and oppressed for liberation. Following the peasant-based 1949 Chinese Revolution, which liberated that country from capitalist rule, Shachtman signed a declaration denouncing the Chinese Communists titled, “Stalinism Is Not Socialism,” which was translated into Chinese. His Labor Action (28 September 1953) proudly boasted: “This leaflet had been dropped over China by U.S. bombers in May 1950 presumably through the sponsorship of the State Department.”
The ISO was founded in 1977, when these descendents of Shachtman allied themselves to the British SWP and formally adopted Cliff’s “state capitalist” line. During the Cold War, the Cliffites claimed to be “third campist” against both the U.S. and Soviet Union. In reality, the “neither Washington nor Moscow” crowd has always found itself in the camp of Washington whenever there has been a hard counterposition between imperialism and the degenerated and deformed workers states.
The Cliffites supported all manner of reactionary forces opposed to the Stalinists in power—from the sadistic, CIA-backed Afghan mujahedin who butchered school teachers for teaching girls to read to the Vatican-backed, anti-Communist, anti-Jewish and anti-woman Solidarność movement in Poland. In August 1991, when Boris Yeltsin’s imperialist-backed forces of counterrevolution staged a coup in Moscow, the Cliffites triumphantly proclaimed: “Communism has collapsed.... It is a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 31 August 1991).
Today, the ISO paints Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a continuation of the Soviet Union, with Smith writing that “Russia—profoundly weakened since its defeat in the Cold War a quarter century ago—is reasserting its imperial power through its all-out support for the Assad regime.” Post-Soviet Russia is a capitalist state. That the ISO has joined the U.S. rulers’ current anti-Russia hysteria is predictable and fits neatly with the Democratic Party circles that they inhabit.
For Smith, the main enemy in Syria is Assad and “Russian imperialism.” Russia is not imperialist but rather a regional power that inherited the nuclear arsenal and industrial infrastructure of the former Soviet Union (see “Is Russia Imperialist?” WV No. 1071, 10 July 2015). Such is the ISO’s vitriol against Russia that Smith even attacks the presidential candidates of the bourgeois Green Party to whom the ISO is giving electoral support this November. He complains that Jill Stein and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka, “have appeared on Russia’s state-sponsored, English-language RT television network to speak in opposition to U.S. war crimes, while remaining silent about Putin’s and Assad’s atrocities.”
The Syrian civil war has seen plenty of atrocities committed against civilians from all sides, from minorities slaughtered or driven out of their villages and towns by various rebels to the bombing of Aleppo by Russian and Syrian forces. But the greatest enemy of the Syrian masses is U.S. imperialism, whose wars across the Near East, including airstrikes in Syria, have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people. As for the Green Party, it is hardly an opponent of U.S. imperialism. Stein’s election platform calls for cutting in half the U.S. military budget, which is many times more than the combined total of all its imperialist rivals. So Stein is for fewer bombs than Hillary, but is nonetheless dedicated to preserving an arsenal to enforce the predatory and murderous interests of America’s rulers abroad.
The ISO’s grotesque line on the Syrian civil war did not fall out of the sky. Its origins lie not in Syria or the Near East. Rather, it is the continuation of their repeated abject capitulation to and support for U.S. imperialism, originating in their unbridled hostility to the Soviet Union. Having time and again supported “democratic” imperialism against Soviet “totalitarianism,” it is hardly a stretch for the ISO to stand on the side of U.S. imperialism in Syria in the name of “democracy.”
*****Channeling The Grateful Dead Minus…
*****Channeling The Grateful Dead Minus…
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
No I was never a “Dead Head,” never would have accepted that designation in any case if somebody tried to lay that moniker on me, tried to tie me down with that crowd who lived and breathed (still do) for every tune the Grateful Dead ever produced. In the old days, the days of the 1960s mad dash to seek a newer world that got trashed about seven million ways before the deal went down and “the authorities,” as my mother used to say when speaking of the ruling class or its agents, pulled the hammer down and soured a whole generation, no, make that three generations now, working on a fourth recently born, since they are still furiously trying to keep us in lock-down mode, I went out in San Francisco by the moniker Prince of Love. So it wasn’t about the moniker, wasn’t about being type-cast, just wasn’t into the group, although half, more than half of whatever group I was travelling with at any particular time would have Dead-Heads and Dead music coming out the sound system to be heard in Afghanistan or some such place, personal musical preference is all.
By the way that "Prince Of Love" moniker was strictly among the brethren, those who were, literally, my mates on the yellow brick road converted school bus, Captain Crunch's bus purchased according to rumor never confirmed by me or admitted to by the Captain for obvious reasons, obvious legal reasons, by money made in a big dope deal, a marijuana/hash deal with some guys south of the border. Hell maybe I shouldn't be saying anything about the source now because who knows who is listening and looking and who knows if there isn't some infinite statute of no limitations on such transactions although I heard somewhere that murder was the only crime tagged with that designation. That old yellow brick road school bus converted into an itinerant home for wandering waywards and seekers was a mode of transportation which while not ubiquitous on the California roads, that distinction would go to Volkswagen mini-buses, they were not an infrequent sight and after a while were not remarked on by anybody but tourists averting their eyes and the eyes of their children aged five and up,and cops, the cops usually looking for that fatal violation, you know, the rear license plate light out, a sagging tire, too many people on the bus which allowed them to haul the beast to the side of the road and give some each dweller some hassle, some hassle man.( That "on the bus," our version of "on the bus" being an expression stolen from Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, our blessed mothers and fathers who had come on the road a few year before us to signify "cool," to signify that one had made the leap from square-dom, to signify until one "got off the bus," that the iterant life was worth pursuing for a while anyway until the dope, the road itself, or about six thousand other reasons to go home, or go stationary for a while.
A group of us sometimes sticking together for months like the Be-Bop Kid, Peter Markin, my closest friend since he hailed from North Adamsville about twenty miles north of my hometown of Carver, Tiny Slim Tim as you might suspect a giant whose real name was Dexter something and Butterfly Swirl (Catherine Clark) from down in Carlsbad who was “slumming” from the perfect wave surfer crowd she hung with in high school to see what the next best thing was in the frenetic California night until she she decided to "get off the bus" and go back to her perfect yellow-haired pruned surfer boy and who every guy on the bus took a shot at, including Be-Bop, and me stuck together longest. (Markin as it turned would stay out on the road for years after the rest of us "got off" the road since psychologically he had much more invested that most of the rest of us in seeing what he called the "new breeze coming through the land" before he ended up badly down in Mexico, all sister crazy, over a busted drug deal he was trying to put together with the cartel boys who were not pleased).
Others, Mustang Sally (you can figure that one out if you know the song by the same name which went over as a wild rock hit when Mustangs, the cars, became the "boss" vehicle replacing the '57 Chevy in the imaginations of the generation of '68), Reefer Jones (ditto on the figuring out the "reefer" part just throw yourselves back to any urban college dorm, student ghetto apartment, rock concert and high school boys’ or girls’ lav when it filtered down to the teenagers after say 1965, 66 and sniff the air for a second-hand high and you will be on the right track), Guy Fawkes (after the high holy Catholic Church English plotter against the Protestant King James I who has had a resurgence lately between the NSA and the young libertarians, at least for wearing anonymous masks), Digger Stewart (after the 17th century English communists led by Gerrard Winstanley up on Saint George’s Hill for a while anyway, a movement before its time which unfortunately depended on the good graces of Lord Fairfax who soon withheld his favor and the whole affair when tumbling down but communists even today I notice still pay homage to those efforts and there is even an appropriate modern folk song The World Turned Upside Down commemorating that struggle) stayed for shorter periods.
Others, Mustang Sally (you can figure that one out if you know the song by the same name which went over as a wild rock hit when Mustangs, the cars, became the "boss" vehicle replacing the '57 Chevy in the imaginations of the generation of '68), Reefer Jones (ditto on the figuring out the "reefer" part just throw yourselves back to any urban college dorm, student ghetto apartment, rock concert and high school boys’ or girls’ lav when it filtered down to the teenagers after say 1965, 66 and sniff the air for a second-hand high and you will be on the right track), Guy Fawkes (after the high holy Catholic Church English plotter against the Protestant King James I who has had a resurgence lately between the NSA and the young libertarians, at least for wearing anonymous masks), Digger Stewart (after the 17th century English communists led by Gerrard Winstanley up on Saint George’s Hill for a while anyway, a movement before its time which unfortunately depended on the good graces of Lord Fairfax who soon withheld his favor and the whole affair when tumbling down but communists even today I notice still pay homage to those efforts and there is even an appropriate modern folk song The World Turned Upside Down commemorating that struggle) stayed for shorter periods.
I called the Captain Crunch Express home for a couple of years as we went up and down the coast looking for the heart of Saturday night, looking for the great blue-pink American West night as the Be-Bop Kid described it and everybody kind of bought into that idea, hell, maybe just looking to turn the world upside down like those Diggers up on Saint George Hill just looking to be left along to wander although none of us at the time either wanted to work the land somewhere almost all being strictly urban dwellers or find some old broken down house and convert it into a wayward-driven commune, and see if that life was any better than the gruel that was on tap for us by "straight" society, the gruel force-fed to us for no known reason.
The “Express” named after the guy, Captain Crunch (real name Slade Stokes, Haverford College Class of 1958), an older guy of indeterminate means (nice way to put that dope-injected rumor, right) who actually knew Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, knew everybody who was anybody in the West Coast alternative cultural scene (for example could get “boss” tickets for 20 of us to the Fillmore to see the Jefferson Airplane when the Be-Bop Kid “married Butterfly Swirl, before she tired of the road, and after she tired of me, but that is a long story for another time), who bought and rigged the bus complete with outrageous high end sound system, or wink, wink, got it in some drug trade barter deal, and was some kind of father we never knew a la Jack Kerouac-Neal Cassady/drug lord/ philosopher king to us.
The “Express” named after the guy, Captain Crunch (real name Slade Stokes, Haverford College Class of 1958), an older guy of indeterminate means (nice way to put that dope-injected rumor, right) who actually knew Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, knew everybody who was anybody in the West Coast alternative cultural scene (for example could get “boss” tickets for 20 of us to the Fillmore to see the Jefferson Airplane when the Be-Bop Kid “married Butterfly Swirl, before she tired of the road, and after she tired of me, but that is a long story for another time), who bought and rigged the bus complete with outrageous high end sound system, or wink, wink, got it in some drug trade barter deal, and was some kind of father we never knew a la Jack Kerouac-Neal Cassady/drug lord/ philosopher king to us.
No, as well, I never went to one of the Dead’s sold-out stoned out concerts at the Fillmore (which the Captain also could get tickets for since he knew the Dead drummer whose name I forget and who I think passed away a few years ago), and something of a ceremonial rite of passage for those who did consider themselves “Dead Heads” and insisted that each and every time out they eat so much acid (LSD, blotter, and so on not battery acid or some such thing), smoke so many reefers (for the clueless see reference above to Reefer Jones, student ghettos, dorms and the like about 1965 and after), swallow some many bennies (speed my drug of choice then and later in law school where I used them just to get through the damn silly case studies we were required to know at the cost of being berated by some professor who had shark’s teeth and was not afraid to use them or leave incriminating slashes) just like the very first time they heard the Dead in order to get that same guitar rush that drove them to eternal fan-dom.
And taking something from sports figures and their superstitions like the baseball players who eat exactly the same thing every day they on some kind of streak, a positive streak, who wear the same outfit, the same faded denim, throng sandals, flowered shirt, male, granny dress, sandals, flowers in hair, female, each time to be washed clean by the Dead magic. Of course those who never gave up the tradition had pretty threadbare outfits something just south of tramp/bum/hobo before Jerry went over the top, went to see the “fixer” man to get well one more time, one time too many. (Jerry should have read Nelson Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm to know you can never mess with the fixer man, never trust him either especially if he is a junkie too, can never get washed clean no matter what they say).The fixer man no friend as the lyrics to The Pusher Man by Steppenwolf make perfectly clear, goddam. So like I say despite the voodoo macabre stuff I have any number of friends who were/are ardent fans and they seem to be, well, normal, normal except in those flashback moments where they see “colors, man, colors,” speak of having “far out” experiences when they would/will get ready for a Dead concert.
Remind me to tell you sometime about a friend of mine, a stone-cold Dead Head, from back in Carver, my growing up hometown about thirty miles south of Boston, who to give you an idea of the tenor of the times back then went from a foul-mouthed corner boy looking to do a nickel or dime in some state pen for armed robbery, or at least straight up robbery although if you are going to make a career of that you should probably be armed against the crazies out there, if the ‘60s hadn’t come along, actually using that moniker "foul-mouth" in high school, he said it turned the girls on, and maybe it did, to “Far-Out Phil” when he came West to join us. So even the best of them would succumb to the western winds and the ghost dance night until the wheels kind of fall off ….for a while.
And taking something from sports figures and their superstitions like the baseball players who eat exactly the same thing every day they on some kind of streak, a positive streak, who wear the same outfit, the same faded denim, throng sandals, flowered shirt, male, granny dress, sandals, flowers in hair, female, each time to be washed clean by the Dead magic. Of course those who never gave up the tradition had pretty threadbare outfits something just south of tramp/bum/hobo before Jerry went over the top, went to see the “fixer” man to get well one more time, one time too many. (Jerry should have read Nelson Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm to know you can never mess with the fixer man, never trust him either especially if he is a junkie too, can never get washed clean no matter what they say).The fixer man no friend as the lyrics to The Pusher Man by Steppenwolf make perfectly clear, goddam. So like I say despite the voodoo macabre stuff I have any number of friends who were/are ardent fans and they seem to be, well, normal, normal except in those flashback moments where they see “colors, man, colors,” speak of having “far out” experiences when they would/will get ready for a Dead concert.
Remind me to tell you sometime about a friend of mine, a stone-cold Dead Head, from back in Carver, my growing up hometown about thirty miles south of Boston, who to give you an idea of the tenor of the times back then went from a foul-mouthed corner boy looking to do a nickel or dime in some state pen for armed robbery, or at least straight up robbery although if you are going to make a career of that you should probably be armed against the crazies out there, if the ‘60s hadn’t come along, actually using that moniker "foul-mouth" in high school, he said it turned the girls on, and maybe it did, to “Far-Out Phil” when he came West to join us. So even the best of them would succumb to the western winds and the ghost dance night until the wheels kind of fall off ….for a while.
But here is my take on the Dead just to keep things in perspective, just to keep things right. I, after a couple of years on the road out there, and maybe not directly in the inner circle of the hippie/drug/literary scene but close enough to get tangled up in the new dispensation I liked to look at the connections, the West Coast connections, where a lot of the energy of the 1960s got its start or if started elsewhere got magnified there. Liked to draw the lines, if you will, from the wild boy alienated, there is no other word that says it so well, bikers over in Oakland and the edges of other working-class towns, mostly white, mostly with some kind of Okie/Arkie background roaring up the streets of Squaresville in search of the village daughters and putting the fear in the average citizen who thought Attila the Hun’s kin had descended, but remember that alienated part that is the hook-in to all the other stuff. Hot rod after midnight “chicken run” runners out in the valleys, alienated too but with a little dough and some swag and a hell-bend desire to go fast, go very fast, if for no other reason than to break out of valley ennui (although they would punch somebody out, fag bait somebody if they ever used such a word in their presence- if they knew what it meant) and surfer boys, coast boys and with a little more laid back approach in search of the perfect wave (read: Nirvana), maybe not quite so alienated because of that golden tan blonde dish sitting on the beach waiting to see if Sir Galahad finds the holy grail, golden tan blonde dishes like Butterfly Swirl who was a fox even when she wore a granny dress, to the “beat” guys Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg and friends running across America just to keep running, writing up a storm, wenching, whoring , pimping, white blue-eyed hipsters “speaking” be-bop to a jaded world, to sainted Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (and our Captain Crunch, leader of our own merry prankster psychedelic bus), the Hell’s Angels (bad dudes, bad dudes, no question), Fillmore with strobe light beams creating dreams, et. al and you have the skeleton for what went on then, right or wrong. Wasn’t that a time, yes, Lord, wasn’t that a time. And the Dead were right in the mix.
Honor An Historic Leader Of The American Abolitionist Movement-John Brown Late Of Harper's Ferry
Honor An Historic Leader Of The American Abolitionist Movement-John Brown Late Of Harper's Ferry
The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support G.I. Voice
The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support G.I. Voice
By Frank Jackman
The late Peter Paul Markin had gotten “religion” on the questions of war and peace the hard way. Had before that baptism accepted half-knowingly (his term) against his better judgment induction into the Army when his “friends and neighbors” at his local draft board in North Adamsville called him up for military service back in hard-shell hell-hole Vietnam War days when the country was coming asunder, was bleeding from all pores around 1968. Markin had had some qualms about going into the service not only because the reasoning given by the government and its civilian hangers-on for the tremendous waste of human and material resources had long seemed preposterous but because he had an abstract idea that war was bad, bad for individuals, bad for countries, bad for civilization in the late 20th century. Was a half-assed pacifist if he had though deeply about the question, which he had not.
But everything in his blessed forsaken scatter-shot life pushed and pushed hard against his joining the ranks of the draft resisters at the Boston sanctuary for that cohort, the Arlington Street Church, whom he would hear about and see every day then as he passed on his truck route which allowed him to pay his way through college. Markin had assumed that since he was not a Quaker, Shaker, Mennonite, Brethren of the Common Life adherent but rather a bloody high-nosed Roman Catholic with their slimy “just war” theory that seemed to justify every American war courtesy of their leading American Cardinal, France Spellman, that he could not qualify for conscientious objector status on that basis. And at the time that he entered the Army that was probably true even if he had attempted to do so. Later, as happened with his friend, Jack Callahan, he could at least made the case based on the common Catholic upbringing. Right then though he was not a total objector to war but only of what he saw in front of him, the unjustness of the Vietnam War.
That was not the least of his situation though. That half-knowingly mentioned above had been overridden by his whole college Joe lifestyle where he was more interested in sex, drink, and rock and roll (the drugs would not come until later), more interested in bedding women than thinking through what he half-knew would be his fate once he graduated from college as the war slowly dragged on and his number was coming up. Moreover there was not one damn thing in his background that would have given pause about his future course. A son of the working-class, really even lower than that the working poor a notch below, there was nobody if he had bothered to seek some support for resistance who would have done so. Certainly not his quiet but proud ex-World War II Marine father, not his mother whose brother was a rising career Army senior NCO, not his older brothers who had signed up as a way to get out of hell-hole North Adamsville, and certainly not his friends from high school half of whom had enlisted and a couple from his street who had been killed in action over there. So no way was an Acre boy with the years of Acre mentality cast like iron in his head about servicing if called going to tip the cart that way toward straight out resistance.
Maybe he should have, at least according to guys he met in college like Brad Fox and Fritz Taylor, or guys who he met on the hitchhike road going west like Josh Breslin and Captain Crunch (his moniker not real name which Josh could not remember). The way they heard the story from Markin after he got out of the Army, after he had done his hell-hole thirteen months in Vietnam as an infantryman, twice wounded, and after he had come back to the “real” world was that on about the third day in basis training down in Fort Jackson in South Carolina he knew that he had made a mistake by accepting induction. But maybe there was some fate-driven reason, maybe as he received training as an infantryman and he and a group of other trainees talked about but did not refuse to take machine-gun training, maybe once he received orders for Vietnam and maybe once he got “in-country” he sensed that something had gone wrong in his short, sweet life but he never attempted to get any help, put in any applications, sought any relief from what was to finally crack him. That, despite tons of barracks anti-war blather on his part from Fort Jackson to Danang.
Here’s the reason though why the late Peter Paul Markin’s story accompanies this information about G.I. rights even for those who nowadays enter the military voluntarily, as voluntarily as any such decision can be without direct governmental coercion. Markin, and this part is from Josh Breslin the guy he was closest to toward the end, the guy who had last seen him in the States before that fateful trip to Mexico, to Sonora when it all fell apart one day, had a very difficult time coming back to what all the returnees called the “real” world after Vietnam service. Had drifted to drug, sex and rock and roll out on the West Coast where Josh had first met him in San Francisco until he tired of that, had started to have some bad nights.
Despite the bad nights though he did have a real talent for writing, for journalism. Got caught up in writing a series about what would be later called the “brothers under the bridge” about guys like him down in Southern California who could not adjust to the real world after ‘Nam and had tried to keep body and soul together by banding together in the arroyos, along the railroad tracks and under the bridges and creating what would today be called a “safe space.”
Markin’s demons though were never far from the surface. Got worse when he sensed that the great wash that had come over the land during the counter-cultural 1960s that he had just caught the tail-end had run its course, had hit ebb tide. Then in the mid-1970s to relieve whatever inner pains were disturbing him he immersed himself in the cocaine culture that was just rearing its head in the States. That addiction would lead him into the drug trade, would eventually lead him as if by the fateful numbers to sunny Mexico, to lovely Sonora way where he met his end. Josh never found out all the details about Markin’s end although a few friends had raised money to send a detective down to investigate. Apparently Markin got mixed up with some local bad boys in the drug trade. Tried to cut corners, or cut into their market. One day he was found in a dusty back street with two slugs in his head. He lies down there in some unknown potter’s field mourned, moaned and missed until this very day.
Oh what might have been if he had sought out help in attempting to work out the better angels of his nature before all hell broke loose around his too futile head.
*****From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-Their Struggles To Build Communist Organizations-The Early Days
*****From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-Their Struggles To Build Communist Organizations-The Early Days
Click below to link to the Marx-Engels Internet Archives.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
Fritz Jasper comment:
History of the Paris Commune, Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, translated by Eleanor Marx, Black and Red Press, St. Petersburg, Florida, 2007
When one studies the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 one learns something new from it even though from the perspective of revolutionary strategy the Communards made virtually every mistake in the book. This book by a participant and survivor of the Commune has historically been the starting point for any pro-Commune analysis. The original English translation by Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx, has given the imprimatur of the Marx family to that view.
Through a close study of the Paris Commune one learn its lessons and measure it against the experience acquired by later revolutionary struggles and above all by later revolutions, not only the successful Russian Revolution of October 1917 but the failed German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese and Spanish revolutions in the immediate aftermath of World War I. More contemporaneously we have the experiences of the partial victories of the later Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.
Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of these later experiences, as if to show that history is not always totally a history of horrors against the fate of the masses we honor the Paris Commune as a beacon of the coming world proletarian revolution. It is just for that reason that Karl Marx fought tooth and nail in the First International to defend it against the rage of capitalist Europe. It is one of our peaks. The Commune also presented in embryo the first post-1848 Revolution instance of what was later characterized by Lenin at the beginning of World War I as the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement. So this question that after Lenin’s death preoccupied Trotsky for much of the later part of his life really has a much longer lineage that I had previously recognized. Unfortunately, as we are too painfully aware that question is still to be resolved. Therefore, even at this great remove, it is necessary to learn the lessons of that experience in facing today’s crisis of leadership in the international labor movement.
As a final thought, I note that in the preface to this edition that the editors have given their own view about the lessons to be learned from the experience of the Paris Commune. Although virtually every page of Lissagaray’s account drips with examples of the necessity of a vanguard party their view negates that necessity. While we can argue until hell freezes over, and should, about the form that a future socialist state will take one would think that there should be no dispute on that necessity of the vanguard party at this late date in history. In any case read this important work (including the above-mentioned provocative preface) as it tells the tale of an important part of our working class history.
Sam Eaton had to laugh, laugh a little anyway when he read something written by his old friend and longtime political accomplice Ralph Morris whom he had recently asked to write a little remembrance of the time in the 1970s when he first started to identify with the working class anthem, The Internationale, for an archival protest music blog that another friend of his Fritz Jasper ran. By the way don’t take that accomplice designation in a criminal way just because they had been arrested a number of times at various sit-ins, walk-ins, and the like, hell, once in Washington, D.C. on May Day 1971. That had been the day they first met just for being on the streets, although both would have to confess the reason for being in the streets was to shut down the government if it did not shut down the Vietnam War and maybe the government from its bastardly perspective had reason to sweep them up. Sam just didn’t want to use the word comrade these days when it had fallen out of favor as a term for working together politically.
Ralph had gone out of his way to note in that blog entry for Fritz that before he got “religion” on the anti-war and later social justice issues he held as many anti-communist prejudices as anybody else in Troy, New York where he hailed from, not excluding his rabidly right-wing father who never really believed until his dying days in 2005 that the United States had lost the war in Vietnam. Ralph had also expressed his feelings of trepidation when after a lot of things went south on the social justice front with damn little to show for all the arrests, deaths, and social cataclysm he and Sam had gotten into a study group in Cambridge run by a “Red October Collective” which focused on studying “Che” Guevara and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky after an introduction to the Marxist classics. Sam who was living in a commune in Cambridge at the time, the summer of 1972, had invited Ralph to come over from Troy to spent the summer in the study group trying to find out what had gone wrong (and right too, as Sam told him not to forget), why they were spinning their wheels trying to change the world for the better just then and to think about new strategies and tactics for the next big break-out of social activism. At the end of each meeting they would sing the Internationale before they broke up. At first Ralph had a hard time with the idea of singing a “commie” song (he didn’t put it that way but he might as well have according to Sam) unlike something like John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance, songs like that. As he, they got immersed in the group Ralph lightened up and would sing along if not with gusto then without a snicker.
That same apprehensive attitude had prevailed when after about three meetings they began to study what the group leader, Jeremy, called classic Marxism, the line from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. See Ralph, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war movement for personal reasons at first which had to do a lot with ending the war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking world” (Ralph’s term). Ralph, who had served in the military in Vietnam, had been a grunt, and who had even extended his tour to eighteen months to get out a little early from his enlistment, had become fed up with what the war had done to him, what he had had to do to survive, what his buddies had had to do to survive and what the American government had turned them all into, nothing but animals, nothing more, as he told everybody who would listen. When he was discharged in late 1969 he wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and taking part in a lot of their actions around Albany and New York City mainly but also the key one for this piece the May Day demonstrations down in Washington, D. C. on May Day 1971 when they attempted, massively unsuccessfully attempted, to shut down the government if it would not shut down the war.
That event is when Ralph and Sam met, Sam having come down to Washington with a group of Cambridge radicals and “reds” to do what he could to shut down the war. They met on the bizarre football field at RFK Stadium which was the main holding area for the thousands of people arrested that day (and throughout the week) when Ralph noticed Sam wearing a VVAW button and asked him if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little sheepishly, explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was the sole support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away of a massive heart attack in 1965. He then told Ralph the reason that he had joined the anti-war movement after years of relative indifference since he was not involved had been that his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in the Central Highlands and that made him question what was going on. At first he had worked with Quakers and other pacifist types doing acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, military bases and recruiting stations to try to get the word out to kids who might get hoodwinked in joining up in the slaughter. As the war dragged on though he started going to Cambridge meetings where more radical elements were trying to figure out actions that might stop the damn war cold and that appealed to him more than the “assuming the government was rational and would listen to reason” protest actions of those “gentile little old ladies in tennis sneakers.” Sam too at that point in 1971 was like Ralph just trying to get the war ended, maybe help out the Panthers a little but before May Day had no grandiose ideas about changing the “whole freaking world.”
So May Day was a watershed for both men, both sensing that even to end the war would take much more, and many more people, than they had previously expected. Ralph, in particular, had been carried away with the notion that what he and his fellow veterans who were going to try to symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as veterans would cause the government pause, would make them think twice about any retaliation to guys who had served and seen it all. Ralph got “smart” on that one fast when the National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it that day, treated them like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968, treated them like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and like anybody else who raised their voices against governmental policy in the streets.
They were thus searching for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those few days of detention in D.C. not only started what would be a lifelong personal friendship but an on-going conversation between them over the next several years about how to bring about the greater social change they sensed was needed before one could even think about stopping wars and stuff like that. Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red collectives” that were sprouting up them peopled by others who had the same kind of questions which they would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few years before both men sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s had ebbed.
But Ralph remained for a long time very unsure that studying with “reds,” studying Marx was the right thing to do, and Sam would confess later that he too had concerns based on his upbringing in Carver down in southeastern Massachusetts, the cranberry capital of the world then, and another working-class town like Troy, New York. Ralph had imbibed all the all the working class prejudices against reds (you know communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy), against blacks (stood there right next to his father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with him and his corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people sometimes to their faces), against gays and lesbians (you know fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where they spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other), against uppity woman (servile, domestic women like his good old mother and wanna-bes were okay). Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar. But mainly he had been a red, white and blue American patriotic guy who really did have ice picks for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around his hometown way).
Such thoughts even with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back of his brain crossed his mind when he thought of Marx, Lenin (he was not familiar very much with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes. Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told Ralph one night after a class and they were tossing down a few at Jack’s before heading home.
And the Marxism did not come easy, the theory part, maybe for Ralph a little more than Sam who had taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had been running since his father’s death (although for periods his old Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his campaigns). They got that the working-class, their class, should rule and be done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind Marxism, that impossible to read Das Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with seven seals for them both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976 when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see they hung around with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation struggles and political prisoner defense work.
After that time while they would periodically read the left press and participate any time somebody, some group needed bodied for a rally, demonstration, some street action they would be there in their respective hometowns that they both eventually filtered back to. Then 2002 came and the endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and seemingly a million other places drove them to drop their “armed truce” (Sam’s term picked up by Ralph) with society and return to the streets , return with an almost youthful vengeance. They would see young people at the rallies hocking their little Marxist papers, maybe buy one to read a home but that flame that had caused them to join study groups, to work with Marxist-oriented “red collectives,” to read books that were hard to fathom had passed, had passed just as socialism as a way to end humankind’s impasses had fallen out of favor once the Soviet Union and its satellites had gone up in a puff of smoke. Sam thought one time that maybe those earnest kids with their wafer-thin newspapers will study the classics and make more sense out of them than Sam and Ralph could. They would now just keep showing up to support the good old cause.
History of the Paris Commune, Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, translated by Eleanor Marx, Black and Red Press, St. Petersburg, Florida, 2007
When one studies the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 one learns something new from it even though from the perspective of revolutionary strategy the Communards made virtually every mistake in the book. This book by a participant and survivor of the Commune has historically been the starting point for any pro-Commune analysis. The original English translation by Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx, has given the imprimatur of the Marx family to that view.
Through a close study of the Paris Commune one learn its lessons and measure it against the experience acquired by later revolutionary struggles and above all by later revolutions, not only the successful Russian Revolution of October 1917 but the failed German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese and Spanish revolutions in the immediate aftermath of World War I. More contemporaneously we have the experiences of the partial victories of the later Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.
Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of these later experiences, as if to show that history is not always totally a history of horrors against the fate of the masses we honor the Paris Commune as a beacon of the coming world proletarian revolution. It is just for that reason that Karl Marx fought tooth and nail in the First International to defend it against the rage of capitalist Europe. It is one of our peaks. The Commune also presented in embryo the first post-1848 Revolution instance of what was later characterized by Lenin at the beginning of World War I as the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement. So this question that after Lenin’s death preoccupied Trotsky for much of the later part of his life really has a much longer lineage that I had previously recognized. Unfortunately, as we are too painfully aware that question is still to be resolved. Therefore, even at this great remove, it is necessary to learn the lessons of that experience in facing today’s crisis of leadership in the international labor movement.
As a final thought, I note that in the preface to this edition that the editors have given their own view about the lessons to be learned from the experience of the Paris Commune. Although virtually every page of Lissagaray’s account drips with examples of the necessity of a vanguard party their view negates that necessity. While we can argue until hell freezes over, and should, about the form that a future socialist state will take one would think that there should be no dispute on that necessity of the vanguard party at this late date in history. In any case read this important work (including the above-mentioned provocative preface) as it tells the tale of an important part of our working class history.
Free All The Class-War Prisoners-Help Those Behind The Walls
Free All The Class-War Prisoners-Help Those Behind The Walls
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