A View From The Left-On The Kurdish National Struggle

Workers Vanguard No. 1102	16 December 2016

Kurds Under the Gun

Massive Repression in Turkey

Over 125,000 people fired or suspended from their jobs, tens of thousands jailed and awaiting trial—that’s the toll exacted by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the months after his suppression of the July 15 military coup. In his drive to consolidate an authoritarian Islamist state in which he would wield dictatorial powers, Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) have gone after a host of opponents and critics, including Kurdish political leaders, teachers and unions. Some 150 media outlets have been closed, while more than a hundred journalists have been jailed, including a number from Cumhuriyet, one of Turkey’s oldest newspapers. Meanwhile, since last summer the military has been attacking Kurdish towns and cities in southeastern Turkey, bombarding them with artillery and tank fire and killing hundreds of Kurdish civilians.

Erdogan has also purged thousands of cops, soldiers, judges and other erstwhile representatives of the Turkish capitalist regime, accusing them of being in cahoots with the Muslim cleric and former Erdogan ally Fethullah Gulen, who has been living in the U.S. since 1999. For his part, Gulen denies any connection to the coup. As we wrote in “Turkey’s Failed Coup: Both Sides Bad for Workers” (WV No. 1093, 29 July): “We don’t know who the coup plotters were, but one thing is clear: the only position in the interest of workers was to oppose both the Erdogan regime and the coup.”

Even before the coup, the Erdogan government had been on the warpath against critics, arresting people for “insulting” the president, stripping members of parliament of immunity and detaining the leader of the leftist Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions (DISK). After the coup, the regime declared a state of emergency, allowing Erdogan to rule by decree. Continuing the oppression of the Kurds, it used these emergency powers in November to detain eleven Kurdish members of parliament. These included Selhattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, cochairmen of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a petty-bourgeois nationalist party that has considerable backing among secular Turks and leftists. Despite government intimidation, some 5,000 demonstrators mobilized in Istanbul on November 20 to protest these arrests. The government also detained many Kurdish mayors and muzzled at least 20 Kurdish media outlets.

The Erdogan government is now using a December 10 bombing claimed by the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) as a pretext to further escalate its war against the Kurdish people. The bombers targeted security personnel outside a soccer stadium in Istanbul, killing 36 riot cops (as well as eight civilians). The TAK says it is an offshoot of the nationalist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), though the PKK denies any links to it. As Marxists, we oppose the strategy of individual terrorism, which rejects the mass mobilization of the working class and oppressed against the capitalist regime. And, invariably, attacks like the one outside the soccer stadium kill innocent civilians, further driving the Turkish masses into the arms of their rulers. Since the bombing, the government has detained nearly 570 people, including politicians from the HDP, which condemned the attack, in operations spanning 28 cities, while the Turkish interior minister has vowed that Kurdish militants will be “wiped from this geography.”

As Marxists who stand for the political independence of the working class, we do not politically support the HDP, a petty-bourgeois party whose program is by definition hostile to the historic interests of the proletariat. However, we defend the HDP and its leaders from the assaults of the Turkish state. The Turkish workers movement must oppose Erdogan’s all-sided repression, fight for the immediate release of Kurdish victims of the government’s purges and demand: All Turkish forces out of Kurdistan!

The government has also suspended or fired 60,000 teachers, although some 6,000 were reinstated in November in the face of a massive teacher shortage. While the regime has accused many of the victimized teachers of alleged ties to Gulen, some 11,500 of them were accused of being supporters of the PKK. Most of these Kurdish teachers live in the Kurdish-majority southeast and belong to Egitim Sen, a teachers union that is part of the leftist public-sector workers union confederation KESK.

While Erdogan is popular among conservative and religious Turks as well as sections of the poor who have benefited from infrastructure improvements, he is widely hated by secular Turks for his growing crusade to extend the reach of Islam in public life. During his first term as prime minister, he unsuccessfully sought to criminalize adultery. In recent years, fundamentalist goons have taken to patrolling the streets and attacking bars and other establishments selling alcohol. A sign of the times was the attempt last month to pass a law that in effect would have given the state’s seal of approval to forced child marriages. Following a huge outcry and demonstrations around the country, the bill was eventually withdrawn. Nevertheless, it was emblematic of the deeply ingrained oppression of women in Turkish society, expressed in the prevalence of such vile acts of violence as “honor killings.”

The European imperialists are seizing on Erdogan’s massive wave of repression to posture as defenders of civil liberties and bring Erdogan to heel. On November 24, the European Parliament passed a nonbinding vote to suspend talks with Turkey on its membership in the European Union (EU), throwing a wrench in the country’s years-long (and unlikely) bid to join this consortium of imperialist brigands and the weaker countries they exploit. Among other things, the Parliament cited Erdogan’s outrageous threat to re-enact the death penalty, which Turkey abolished in 2004. Erdogan shot back that the EU decision had “no value” and threatened to terminate a deal with the imperialists to stanch the flow of refugees to Europe in exchange for billions of euros.

The imperialists’ “humanitarian” pretensions are utter cynicism. For more than two decades, EU boss Germany has banned the PKK and has joined the U.S. in arming the Turkish military to the teeth in its war against the Kurds. Across Europe, from Theresa May’s England to Angela Merkel’s Germany, the capitalist rulers have unleashed the furies of Islamophobia that embolden the fascists and other racist forces.

Turkey, the Kurds and the Syrian Quagmire

The Turkish government’s decades-long campaign to root out the PKK massively escalated last year, when the Turkish army launched a furious assault on Kurdish cities in southeastern Turkey. These attacks were partly in response to military gains in northern Syria by the PKK-affiliated Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its military wing, the People’s Protection Committees (YPG). They were also in retaliation for the HDP’s gains in the June 2015 parliamentary election, in which the HDP became the first Kurdish party in Turkish history to enter parliament, and Erdogan’s AKP lost its parliamentary majority.

Through years of struggle, the Kurds have clearly demonstrated their desire for independence. But far from fighting for self-determination, the petty-bourgeois nationalist PKK is using the military conflict to force the Turkish rulers to the bargaining table to achieve a negotiated settlement and expanded local control. Likewise, HDP leader Demirtas seeks a “political solution” in which the Kurds would supposedly be granted more rights within the framework of the oppressive Turkish state. Such a plan would simply renegotiate the terms of oppression of the Kurdish masses, who would remain under Turkish domination.

It is vital for the working class of Turkey to stand for the military defense of the PKK against the Turkish state. If the proletariat is to ever liberate itself from capitalist exploitation, it must oppose anti-Kurdish chauvinism and take up the struggle for Kurdish self-determination. We aim to win the Turkish working class, as well as the workers of the region, to the fight for a united, independent Kurdistan embracing the Kurds of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. That fight is part of the struggle for a socialist federation of the Near East, which would include a socialist republic of united Kurdistan.

We also support Kurdish independence from individual capitalist states—e.g., the right of Kurds in Turkey to secede. However, in Iraq and Syria, the Kurdish nationalists have currently subordinated the just fight for self-determination to their alliance with U.S. imperialism. This is a crime that will redound against the long-oppressed Kurdish people.

In Syria, the YPG is U.S. imperialism’s most reliable ally in the war against the Islamic State (ISIS). In acting as boots on the ground for the U.S., these Kurdish nationalists are betraying the interests of the Near East masses, not least the national aspirations of the Kurdish people. Washington’s occupations and interventions in the Near East have escalated communal tensions in the region, setting Shia against Sunni, Sunni against Alawite and Arab against Kurd.

We Marxists have no side in the reactionary and sectarian Syrian civil war, including in the clashes between the U.S.’s Turkish allies and its Kurdish tools. But we do have a side in resolutely opposing the U.S. and other imperialist powers. Thus, while we abhor and reject everything that the ISIS cutthroats represent, we stand for the military defense of ISIS against the U.S. and its proxies, including the YPG. Every blow struck against U.S. imperialism coincides with the interest of the working and oppressed masses of the world. At the same time, we also oppose the other capitalist powers involved in Syria, such as Turkey, Russia and Iran, and demand that they get out.

From the Armenian genocide during World War I to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Kurdish leaders have collaborated with regional powers or the imperialists. In a 2011 interview, former national security official Brent Scowcroft remarked: “The Kurds are pawns in great power politics...as they have been for a long time.” But pawns are dispensable, and imperialist tools are discarded after serving their reactionary purpose. This is a fact that many Kurds themselves know only too well, even if some leftists and Kurdish activists justify these treacherous blocs with imperialism as clever tactics. As Joost Hiltermann commented in “They Were Expendable” in the London Review of Books (17 November): “The history of the Kurds’ long struggle is therefore one of a series of fleeting alliances with more powerful states, and cries of betrayal once these alliances fall apart, each followed by atrocities from which it takes them a generation to recover.”

Notwithstanding its current relationship with the PYD/YPG, the U.S. is and has always been opposed to Kurdish independence. When Turkey entered Syria in August, ostensibly against ISIS, its main objective was to prevent PYD/YPG fighters from linking the two semiautonomous Kurdish regions in northeast and northwest Syria. The U.S. supported the Turkish intervention with stepped-up airstrikes and military advisers—as well as a forceful statement by Vice President Joe Biden during a visit to Ankara in which he ordered YPG forces to retreat to the east of the Euphrates River.

More recently, the 10,000-strong Turkish force has been backing fighters from the Free Syrian Army (FSA)—which is also supported by the U.S.—poised to take the Syrian town of al-Bab, ISIS’s last significant stronghold before its Syrian capital of Raqqa. Supported by Turkish armor and warplanes, FSA fighters have clashed with the YPG-dominated Syrian Defense Forces, again pitting the Turkish military against the Syrian Kurds. U.S. commanders struggling to coordinate the assault on Raqqa have been frustrated as their Kurdish proxies have insisted on attacking Arab-majority al-Bab. Meanwhile, Turkish troops continue to defy Washington by turning their fire on the YPG.

In Iraq, Turkish warplanes, with U.S. approval, have been bombing PKK positions for over a year. Now, the Erdogan regime, which has hundreds of Turkish soldiers stationed north of Mosul, is insisting on a Turkish role in the battle to retake the city from ISIS. That battle, which began in October, is being carried out by Kurdish pesh merga fighters, Shia militias and Iraqi government forces, backed by U.S. aerial power and Special Operations troops. Ankara’s maneuvers in this former region of the Ottoman Empire are heightening tensions with the Baghdad government.

The growing acrimony between the U.S. and its Turkish NATO ally has coincided with, and helped feed, a rapprochement between Ankara and Moscow, which has exercised NATO officials. As a result, Russian president Vladimir Putin has given tacit approval to Turkey’s actions in northern Syria. While Turkey and Russia have divergent interests in Syria, with the latter backing the regime of Bashar al-Assad, they agree with the U.S. on maintaining the “territorial integrity” of Syria—i.e., no independent Kurdish statelet.

For a Bi-National Revolutionary Workers Party in Turkey

Millions of Kurds—many of them victims of army terror, high unemployment rates and impoverishment—have migrated to such key western industrial centers as Istanbul, Izmir and Bursa. Despite the fierce discrimination they suffer, this migration has strengthened the objective basis for uniting the Turkish and Kurdish working masses. But because anti-Kurdish chauvinism is integral to the maintenance of bourgeois rule in Turkey, unity can only be sporadic unless the Turkish proletariat is won to the fight for Kurdish national independence.

As Leninists, we defend the national rights of all peoples and uphold the principle of national equality, including the equality of languages. In defending the right of nations to self-determination, our purpose is to tear down the barriers created by bourgeois class society to keep the working people of different nationalities at one another’s throats. By championing Kurdish self-determination, the working class in Turkey would place itself squarely in opposition to its “own” capitalist class enemy. It would also undercut U.S. imperialism’s capacity to manipulate the Kurds’ grievances in order to further dominate the region.

Erdogan has gone a long way toward consolidating his autocratic rule and strengthening the sway of Islam over Turkey. Nevertheless, the society he rules over remains a pressure cooker of social and political discontents. What is vital is the forging of a bi-national, Turkish-Kurdish workers party that would also draw in Turkey’s oppressed ethnic and religious minorities. Acting as a tribune of the people, such a party, section of a reforged Fourth International, would lead the proletariat in the struggle for its own rule. In power, the working class would expropriate the bourgeoisie and break the hold of the imperialist masters over the country; establish a collectivized, planned economy; lay the material basis for the emancipation of women; and fight to ensure Kurdish self-determination.

The struggle for proletarian power in Turkey, and more broadly in the Near East, must be linked to the fight for workers rule in the imperialist centers. Centrally important to this perspective is the presence of some two million ethnic Turks and a million Kurds in Germany, where they are heavily integrated into the working class. These workers can serve as a living bridge linking the fight for socialist revolution in the Near East to working-class struggle in the advanced capitalist countries of West Europe. In the U.S., the working class must be won to the understanding that the American ruling class is its enemy and that it must oppose imperialist aggression abroad. Our aim is a socialist revolution to overthrow U.S. imperialism, the greatest enemy of the world’s working and oppressed masses.

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 20^th 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/

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.               

Fritz Jasper comment:

The foundation article by Marx or Engels listed in the headline goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in other posts in this space. Just below is a thumbnail sketch of the first tentative proceedings to form a communist organization that would become a way-station on the road to building a Bolshevik-type organization in order fight for the socialist revolution we so desperately need and have since Marx and Engels first put pen to ink.

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

Marx/Engels Internet Archive-The Communist League

A congress of the League of the Just opened in London on June 2, 1847. Engels was in attendance as delegate for the League's Paris communities. (Marx couldn't attend for financial reasons.)

Engels had a significant impact throughout the congress -- which, as it turned out, was really the "inaugural Congress" of what became known as the Communist League. This organization stands as the first international proletarian organization. With the influence of Marx and Engels anti-utopian socialism, the League's motto changed from "All Men are Brothers" to "Working Men of All Countries, Unite!"

Engels: "In the summer of 1847, the first league congress took place in London, at which W. Wolff represented the Brussels and I the Paris communities. At this congress the reorganization of the League was carried through first of all. ...the League now consisted of communities, circles, leading circles, a central committee and a congress, and henceforth called itself the 'Communist League'."

The Rules were drawn up with the participation of Marx and Engels, examined at the First Congress of the Communist League, and approved at the League's Second Congress in December 1847.

Article 1 of the Rules of the Communist League: "The aim of the league is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes, and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property."

The first draft of the Communist League Programme was styled as a catechism -- in the form of questions and answers. Essentially, the draft was authored by Engels. The original manuscript is in Engels's hand.

The League's official paper was to be the Kommunistische Zeitschrift, but the only issue produced was in September 1847 by a resolution of the League's First Congress. It was First Congress prepared by the Central Authority of the Communist League based in London. Karl Schapper was its editor.

The Second Congress of the Communist League was held at the end of November 1847 at London's Red Lion Hotel. Marx attended as delegate of the Brussels Circle. He went to London in the company of Victor Tedesco, member of the Communist League and also a delegate to the Second Congress. Engels again represented the Paris communities. Schapper was elected chairman of the congress, and Engels its secretary.

Friedrich Lessner: "I was working in London then and was a member of the communist Workers' Educational Society at 191 Drury Lane. There, at the end of November and the beginning of December 1847, members of the Central Committee of the Communist League held a congress.Karl Marx and Frederick Engels came there from Brussels to present their views on modern communism and to speak about the Communists' attitude to the political and workers' movement. The meetings, which, naturally, were held in the evenings, were attended by delegates only... Soon we learned that after long debates, the congress had unanimously backed the principles of Marx and Engels..."

The Rules were officially adopted December 8, 1847.

Engels: "All contradiction and doubt were finally set at rest, the new basic principles were unanimously adopted, and Marx and I were commissioned to draw up the Manifesto." This would, of course, become the Communist Manifesto.

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Additional Fritz Jasper comment on this series:

No question that today at least the figures of 19th century communist revolutionaries, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, are honored more for their “academic” work than their efforts to build political organizations to fight for democratic and socialist revolutions, respectively, as part of their new worldview. Titles like Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, The Peasants Wars In Germany, and the like are more likely to be linked to their names than Cologne Communist League or Workingmen’s International (First International).

While the theoretical and historical materialist works have their honored place in the pantheon of revolutionary literature it would be wrong to neglect that hard fact that both Marx and Engels for most of their lives were not “arm chair" revolutionaries or, in Engels case, merely smitten by late Victorian fox hunts with the upper crust. These men were revolutionary politicians who worked at revolution in high times and low. Those of us who follow their traditions can, or should, understand that sometimes, a frustratingly long sometimes, the objective circumstances do not allow for fruitful revolutionary work. We push on as we can. Part of that pushing on is to become immersed in the work of our predecessors and in this series specifically the work of Marx and Engels to create a new form of revolutionary organization to fight the fights of their time, the time from about the Revolutions of 1848 to the founding of various socialist parties in Europe in the latter part of the 19th century.

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 

Bernie’s Revenge- With Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” In Mind

Bernie’s Revenge- With Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” In Mind  

By Seth Garth 

[Bernie, O., we will avoid his last name since he has recently retired from the force and we will let him enjoy his peace, after twenty-five of decent and honorable service. The “force” for those who are clueless any police department but here the Bay City Police Department a comfortable California seaside town as its name would indicate, although not as sleepy a town as the seaside designation would connote, That last phrase about Bernie, we can skip the “O” now that we can without rancor leave him to his peace was at one time up for grabs. Had been challenged back when he had been on the force maybe five years in the days before the war (World War II) when anything went in the fair city from gambling, dope, un-bonded booze and women, women who would take you around the world or around the block where a male confederate with a handy blackjack waited in earnest for any unsuspecting goof, not Kerouac’s unsuspecting holy saintly beaten down by the grind of modern society and left to rust along the empty roadside goof either but just some drunken wayward tourist who thought he still had that old sex appeal that his Martha used to brag to her friends about.

And that anything goes, the dope to girls action, especially that latter category since he had started out as a hustling jack-roller grabbing marks some whore he was working with was steering his way was strictly the bought and paid for territory of one Eddie Miles, Mister Edward Raymond Miles when they let him into the swanky Bay City Golf Club-or else- but plain run of the mill gangster Eddie now. We can use his last name since he is finishing up the last five years of a twenty-five year gaff at the Q for plenty of stuff-extortion, pandering, armed this and that,  everything except the one the jury couldn’t pin on him-murder one, murder for hire if you want the full kick. They had a raw assistant D.A. assigned to the case since everybody had the case down to a shoo-in for sure and the D.A. had his own set of problems having let a few Eddy non-murder crimes go under the sea (and “sponsoring” Eddie in that swanky club where he was ostracized after the rap sheet on Eddie became public- probably would have been worse except it is always good to have a D.A. sweating and forgetting stuff-criminal or country club).   

Bernie, Bernie O. when you think back about those days was the straightest rightest cop that ever put on shoe leather in Bay City. The problem back those twenty some years ago was that every other freaking cop on the force was “on the take” to Eddie, or knew guys on the take to Eddie which was the same thing. Somebody, without a shred of evidence had fingered Bernie as a bad cop in Eddie Miles hip pocket. Bought and paid for- a tough charge to defend against when everybody was on the take and wanted to cover their asses. Of course in those days a cop, a five year cop anyway, couldn’t pursuit a case on his own where he had been accused of corruption. Against Department policy. A great set-up for a set-up. So he clamped Phil Marlin, a guy who had been on the force with him, had gone through the academy with Bernie but had been fired for insubordination, fired good, when he wouldn’t tumble to looking the other way when one of Eddie’s boy took some underage girl into a backseat out on the back roads of the Pacific Coast Highway for a blow job and whatever else she was offering-or he was taking. Phil had turned private investigator, private dick, keyhole peeper to most cops. Took the case strictly as a favor to Bernie, no charge, you see, that was how tight they had been back when they had each other’s back in the days they were flat-footing beat cops down in the tough Five Points neighborhood.

Bernie had been in on the bust of Eddie Miles, after the Staties had taken over based on what Marlin had dug up from the sewer and they insisted that Bernie be in on the nab so he had some satisfaction that he was cleared by his own actions. The problem for Bernie and for Marlin came later when Marlin decided he wanted to tell the story to the general public-maybe as a cautionary tale, maybe to show how fragile a grip every human has on life, or maybe he just wanted his name up in lights in some fake private dick’s hall of fame. What Marlin did was get this writer, kind of well- known for writing racy pulp fiction crime detection novels, a guy named Raymond Chandler, to “ghost” the story for him. Between Marlin’s vivid imagination and Chandler’s excessive literary license they balled the whole story up, balled it up pretty bad. So Bernie with his own leisure time, his peace time, hired me to “ghost” his true version of the case-the Eddie Miles bust. The only thing that Bernie and Marlin, the late Phillip Marlin who had his check cashed down in sunny Mexico one back alley night when he was looking for a fugitive named Terry Manning, agreed on was that Bernie had handed him a private job for General Guy Sternwood. Yeah, Sternwood the guy who turned the La Brea tar pits into gold-for himself and his. He was having trouble with one of his wild daughters and needed a guy who could handle the fix he had been put in by her posing for raw, today they would say kinky, nude photographs and guys were looking for dough, serious dough for the negatives-or else. Here is how it really played out from that agreed point on.             

****

Marlin had shown up at the General’s mansion one sunny summer afternoon up in the hills of Bay City far from the humidity and dust and far from the sight of those still-producing oil pumps that got him the place on the hill. Before he could be invited into the General’s bedroom (the General would enumerate more health issues than seemed possible for a breathing human being and he had been under doctor’s to keep to his bed, his now bed-office) he was confronted by one of the wild daughters, the younger one Carol. She had asked him, once she had looked him up and down in a way usually reserved for guys and figured him for a tumbler, if once he had finished talking to her father he wanted a good time in her room. She also told him that she did not care what her father wanted she wanted those nude photos circulated, wanted to be a Hollywood starlet just like Eddie Miles had promised. Wanted all the boys to get big in the pants when they snuck a peak at her luscious body doing nasty little things (and it was luscious according to Marlin-Bernie rated her as a good afternoon fuck and then get the hell out of town).

Phil had told Bernie, and more importantly had told Chandler who retailed the story, that he never had gone into her room after speaking with the General with whom he had accepted the assignment to act as go-between to Eddie in order to get the freaking photos and negatives back to be burned. According to Norris, the trusty butler, a guy who had no ax to grind then, was the General’s eyes and ears in those days (and was stealing him blind since he had control of household checking accounts-like manna from heaven if a guy knew how to fudge the books just so and old Norris had the game down pat) told him that he had seen Marlin coming out of Carol’s room disheveled and glassy-eyed like she had taken him around the world.

That is the real reason Marlin never got anywhere trying to get those photographs back. He would always argue that the General was maybe hot to trot to get the pictures after all he could hardly face his social equals when his daughter was front and center in some low-rent “girlie” magazine (where in the end they would wind up courtesy of Carol sending an agent to one of those publications begging them to put them in the magazine). But the real reason he hired Marlin was he was looking to find out what had happened to his trusted confidante, Rex Randall, who had apparently run off with Eddie Miles’ girlfriend to parts unknown. (Phil had dismissed the run away and elope story as so much eyewash but Bernie knew, had reason to know that Eddie was carrying a big torch for the broad and who knows what he might have done with Rex). Rex a guy Phil knew from the days when Rex was managing a guy in Half Moon Bay dope operations and grapping all the ass he could from young things who were ready to do anything to get something for the head-anything. Bernie knew of him but even then knowing about Eddie’s big torch figured that Rex was sleeping out in the bay somewhere with a sack of rocks tied to him.                

So Phil went through the paces, went through the motions of trying to earn his big bonus-attached (not for the Rex part-for the fucking nude pics), and had met Laura the older daughter as he was leaving his sister’s room. He always claimed he never met her then but had been in the General’s bed-side office after having swigged a couple of high-shelf brandies to seal the deal and then left to pursue justice some such bullshit. Although she wasn’t as photograph pretty as her younger sister Carol she was just as wild, her lovely vices gambling and cases of scotched devoured. Needless to say the story gets jumbled up again when Marlin later denied that he tumbled to her bedroom eyes proposition but Norris once again put paid to that lie since early the next morning he had seen Marlin, disheveled, glassy-eyed and looking sexually-sated (how Norris knew that was the case in England where he had learned the butler trade he had had his fill of such meanderings from the nobility that he had been in service  to-said they had the morals of a great white shark-none). The worse part of that tryst with Laura was that he had spilled the beans about the General’s desire to see what had happened to Rex to Eddie Miles whom she was in hock to for gambling debts at his off-shore casino (and as it turned out had been trying to get out from under by fucking Eddie and a couple of his boys to death-yeah, the morals of a shark- a resourceful girl no question).

Marlin after having his fill of the Sternwood young women then “got to work,” hit the library to see about old rare books and their provences since he assumed that the photos of Carol would wind up in some high-end antique bookstore used as a front for select clientele to “borrow” such fare (some of them when the lists became public later friends of the General who must have gloated and a veritable who’s who at the Bay City Golf Club-yeah, the morals of a shark all the way around). (It was only later that Carol got that agent to hustle his photo-ass to the “girlies” once they had been used at Eddie’s trial since they “belonged” to her). Phil did a perfunctory search of all the old-timey bookstores in town, got nowhere and laid low for a few days before telling the General he was hot on the case and told him that he needed some walking around money to go to Eddies’ casino off-shore. Norris set him up with a cool thou-not bad for walking around money-then anyway. 

One night, the first night he ran into one Eddie Miles, he also ran into Laura losing a load at the tables but smiling about it as she gave him a come hither look that would snow (later when they were in closer proximity she offered to take him out to her car for a little off-hand tryst-which after he had finished up with Eddie he gladly took her up on funny how that time appeared on his bill when it came time to close up accounts with Norris. Services rendered. So another glassy-eyed night with a Sternwood sister. He had gotten nowhere asking Eddie Miles where his wife was and about the rumor that she had taken a powder with Rex-the General’s confidante.  Getting nowhere fast on this case. Getting nothing on Eddie either. 

Then the great break-through although it was really only Marlin falling into something after another guy, a guy he could have saved by all the evidence but he had gotten “cold feet” when the deal went down. It seems that one of the clerks, Iris, a comely female clerk that he had taken into the stockroom one rainy afternoon, at Ye Olde Bookstore had had a boyfriend who had been acting as an agent for Eddie Miles in trying to unload Carol’s sulky nude photos. Somehow he had had trouble moving the merchandise and Eddie dumped him-dumped him literally in the bay for some purpose-or np purpose. Oh, not Eddie personally-Edward Miles did not do his own dirty work but had his number one boy, The Camino Kid, a bad-ass no question throw a sack over the boyfriend’s head and put a few stones in the mix and let him sink and sleep with the fishes off the bow of  Eddie’s casino liner. Nice boy. The girlfriend after getting friendly with Phil that afternoon loosened up by a few drinks had spilled the beans about the boyfriend number one after she had got herself another beau. To even the score with Eddie though she was ready to tell Marlin where Eddie’s wife was-for a couple of hundred bucks to blow town with. Marlin agreed and was to meet the new beau, a square little guy who probably was too short for that ravishing clerk.        

                 

That boyfriend number two, Harry, wasn’t any luckier than number one since he was acting as go-between for Iris with Marlin (Iris a girl who had her charms apparently but who always left standing unlike her beaus). They were supposed to meet at Harry’s office but the Camino Kid got there first while Phil was hiding in an anteroom. The Kid’s chore that day to get Harry to clam up about Eddie’s wife’s whereabouts. The little guy held out though-Iris must have had something he had not noticed that afternoon in the stockroom. Yeah, paid with his life for protecting his honey while Marlin stood breathless in the next fucking room. Here is where the wheels turned though. The cops, Bernie and his partner, were tailing the Camino Kid since the Iris’ boyfriend number one washed up on shore tied up in a sack just the way the Camino Kid liked to finish up his handiwork. They were able to follow him to the backroads of Ocean City the next town over where he stopped at an old house set back from the road. Waiting at the door was Eddie Miles’ wife. No sign of Rex though.         

Earlier back at Harry’s office Marlin had gotten out of his deep freeze long enough to follow Bernie’s police vehicle to that lonely country road. That is why Marlin claimed he took the Camino Kid out. That the fire -power that did the Kid in when he resisted arrest and started ban-banging had come from his weapon. Claimed he “saved” Bernie’s partner who was a dead man if he hadn’t shot the Kid first. Since he was using a police special (he had never turned in his gun when he was fired from the cops figuring he would need a weapon as a private dick) who the hell would have known. Bernie knew for a fact that he had winged the Kid and then doubled-down on him. He had heard no additional shots. Chalk one bad guy gone up for Bernie if you are keeping score. That action is what got him in on the deal when the Staties went after Eddie Miles and his henchmen.

As for Rex, well, here is where things get weird, where what the rich or do not do gets sealed with seven seals. Carol, and Marlin should have seen this coming given his own experiences with the girls, had killed Rex one afternoon when he would not give her a tumble. Carol did not like not being obeyed when she had her wanting habits on. That is why Marlin got taken around the world that day he went into the General’s hire. Laura had covered up for her sister-also why he gotten taken around the world by her. They had him figured as a sex-addled guy and they knew their mark. Marlin out of respect for the old man and his troubles with those wild sisters let it ride. Let the old man fade into his endless sleep not knowing he had sired two monsters. Before he left that hillside mansion though he made sure he got his full rate and expenses. That’s the real “skinny” forget all that other self-serving stuff.