This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
The Immoralist, Andre Gide, Penguin Classics, New York, 2001
Andre Gide was always justly famous for writing tight little novels that presented unusual moral dilemmas that did not, as in real life, necessarily get resolved or resolved in a way that one would think. That is the case here with one of his early and perhaps most famous offerings. The story line centers on the bedraggled life of a consummate French bourgeois scholar who is going through a personal crisis after the death of his father and his unsought `shot gun' marriage in the early part of the 20th century. The newly weds travel to various exotic outposts of French imperialism, including the dry Northern African coast. Along the way he becomes sick with a life-threatening illness but by an act of will, and the extraordinary care of his new wife, overcomes that crisis. As a result of her loving efforts she in turn gets sick (during her pregnancy). He is decidedly inattentive to her illness. The scholar, in the final analysis, permits her to die by his self-centered actions.
Now, after his illness, and as a result of overcoming that experience the scholar begins to believes that he is `superman' a la Nietzsche and therefore consciously or unconsciously becomes the agent of his wife's descend into greater illness and eventually death. Quite a dilemma, to be sure, but he is not crying over it. The real question here is whether, in a hard and unforgiving world where each person is his or her own agent, that it was his duty to thoughtfully care for his wife or whether his need to take actions to `understand' himself was paramount.
Some other moral questions concerning his role as landlord in his inherited rural estate pop up along the way, as well. Also, just a hint of homosexual tension in his dealings with the young Arab boys in the neighborhood hovers in the background. This is a subject that then was almost always covered in discreet language so it is hard to tell the full extent of the attraction. And whether he did anything about it. This is a question that concerned Gide personally, as well.
I would note that this theme (and the sub theme of homosexuality) and the book itself at the start of the 20th century may have been somewhat scandalous but reading it after some of the harrowing events done by humankind in the last century has cut deeply into the impact that it was intended to have. Still it is a great book and a quick read. Any lessons to be drawn about the dark side of human nature, as it has evolved thus far, take a lot longer.
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's sentry for French writer and politician Andre Malraux.
Markin comment:
Leon Trotsky, early on, praised Malraux's literary talents in "The Conquerors" and "Man's Fate", tales of the Chinese Revolution. He was, and would have been, less enamored of Malraux's later career as Stalin admirer and subsequently in the post World II era a minister of culture under France's strongman Charles DeGaulle. Oh, well, everyone familiar with the biographic sketches of past literary figures knows that that milieu is replete with writers who cannot resist being in the circles of power-no matter the political cost. Still, in his prime Malraux could write thoughtful novels and write circles around most of his contemporaries. Trotsky was not wrong on that score, although he also seemed to be aware of certain moral flabbiness in Malraux. He was not wrong there either.
On the morning of 9 September 1971, nearly 1,300 inmates—predominantly black and Puerto Rican—took over the state prison at Attica, New York. Four days later 29 of them lay dead, cut down in a hail of bullets fired by New York State Police, sheriffs and corrections officers. Governor Nelson Rockefeller gave the order. President Richard Nixon cheered them on. In the aftermath, the surviving prisoners were subjected to hideous torture and later charged with a total of 1,300 crimes. Among these were kidnapping and, most obscenely, unlawful imprisonment based on taking prison guards hostage, ten of whom were gunned down by Rockefeller’s stormtroopers when they retook the prison.
For many years, Democratic and Republican administrations in Albany, along with the courts, have covered up much of the truth of what took place at Attica, assisted by the same capitalist press that peddled the lie that the prisoners shot the guards. A significant part of that shroud has been peeled back by Heather Ann Thompson in her recent book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Thompson’s book brings to life the dignity and humanity of the prisoners who were treated as little more than dirt by Rockefeller and his ilk. She describes in vivid detail the dehumanizing conditions that gave rise to the rebellion and the racist venom that ran from the governor’s mansion down to the cops and prison guards who hunted down the uprising’s leaders. Thompson got her own sampling of that venom for naming the prison guards who carried out assassinations and torture.
Thompson’s comprehensive history is a result of her many years of diligent archival research and a bit of good fortune in uncovering key sources that had been suppressed. As she notes, “The most important details of this story have been deliberately kept from the public. Literally thousands of boxes of documents relating to these events are sealed or next to impossible to access.” Regarding the most explosive documents she uncovered, Thompson says, “All of the Attica files that I saw in that dark room of the Erie County courthouse have now vanished.”
For millions around the world, Attica became a potent symbol of rebellion against brutal repression—and a stark emblem of racist state murder. To this day it continues to inspire struggles against the racist degradation of black people inside and outside of prison walls. The first issue of Workers Vanguard (October 1971) led with the headline “Massacre at Attica.” We stated bluntly: “The brutal, bloody murderers of Attica are none other than the ruling class of this society,” saying further:
“Rockefeller cut down the Attica prisoners in the manner of his father and grandfather before him—ruthlessly and to protect the system from which his profits spring. From the murder of the Ludlow miners to the present, this family has carried the policies of the armed fist over the entire globe.... The Rockefeller name and the Rockefeller practice symbolize, more than any other, the American capitalist class—a class that will stop at nothing to extend and protect its profitable holdings.”
Attica was an explosion waiting to happen. The 2,200 men warehoused in a facility built for 1,600 were routinely beaten by guards, locked in cells 16 hours a day, rationed one sheet of toilet paper daily, one bar of soap a month and one shower per week—even in the heat of summer. Among the main grievances was censorship of reading materials—no newspapers, very few books, and nothing at all to read in Spanish. It wasn’t an absolute ban—the prison authorities mocked the prisoners by supplying magazines such as Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, American Home and House Beautiful.
Hours after the revolt began, L.D. Barkley, a 21-year-old Black Panther Party member imprisoned for violating parole by driving without a license, read out the prisoners’ powerful declaration: “We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such.”
The prisoners called for the minimum wage for prison work (they were paid slave wages of between 20 cents and one dollar per day), accompanied by an end to censorship and restrictions on political activity, religious freedom, rehabilitation, education and decent medical care. They expressed solidarity with the Vietnamese workers and peasants as well as others fighting U.S. imperialism. The main demand was amnesty for participating in the rebellion, along with “speedy and safe transportation out of confinement, to a Non-Imperialist country.” Most likely in mind were Cuba, where the capitalist rulers had been overthrown and a bureaucratically deformed workers state led by Fidel Castro established, or Algeria, a capitalist state governed by left nationalists that had given refuge to Black Panthers in exile.
As Thompson points out, many of the prisoners at Attica were veterans of eruptions over similar conditions at Manhattan’s Tombs detention center and the prison in Auburn, New York, the prior year. The bitter anger that was about to explode at Attica was displayed 19 days earlier when word spread through the cells that prison authorities at California’s San Quentin prison had assassinated Black Panther Party member George Jackson on 21 August 1971. The next day, over 800 Attica inmates marched silently into breakfast wearing black armbands and held a fast in protest. California prison officials had targeted Jackson, along with W.L. Nolen and Hugo Pinell, for forging solidarity of black, Latino and white prisoners. New York officials were no less alarmed by the interracial unity growing among Attica’s inmates.
The prison revolt reflected the growing ferment and struggles taking place outside prison walls, not least the “black power” movement and radical protests against the war in Vietnam. Many of the black inmates identified with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) and Puerto Ricans looked to the Young Lords, which was inspired by the Panthers. Playing a leading role in the rebellion was Sam Melville, a white member of the Weather Underground who was serving 18 years for placing explosives in government buildings in protest against the war in Vietnam. As Thompson observes, the presence of such activists “offered Attica’s otherwise apolitical men—like [Frank] Big Black Smith—a new understanding of their discontents and a new language for articulating them.” Smith ended up leading the prisoners’ security force, made up largely of Black Muslims. His group treated the prison guards taken hostage with a humanity that the prisoners had been denied.
For a long time before Blood in the Water, the biggest window into what took place at Attica came from Tom Wicker’s A Time to Die. Wicker, a New York Times reporter, along with radical attorney William Kunstler, was among the outside observers whom the prisoners demanded to negotiate through rather than directly with prison and state authorities. Prison officials granted this one demand, intending to use the observers to convince the prisoners to release the hostages and surrender without amnesty. To his credit, BPP leader Bobby Seale, whom the prisoners also sought as an observer, uniquely refused to be involved in attempts to nudge the inmates toward surrender. Seale made clear the BPP position that “all political prisoners who want to be released to go to non-imperialistic countries should be complied with.”
The retaking of Attica began in the morning of September 13 with a cloud of CN and CS gas dropped from a helicopter that covered every prisoner with a nauseating, incapacitating powder and it ended with a bloodbath. The rebellion’s leadership paid dearly. Barkley, Melville and others were assassinated in the prison yard. Surviving prisoners, including the wounded, were stripped naked, made to crawl through the mud and the blood, then lined up to run a gantlet over broken glass and be beaten by cops and guards wielding what they called their “n----r sticks.” After being threatened with castration, Big Black Smith was forced to lie on a table for five hours with a football tucked under his chin, under threat of being shot if it rolled loose.
For the capitalist ruling class, Attica had to be crushed with particular vengeance because the rebels had begun to see their struggle in political and even revolutionary terms. One of Thompson’s discoveries is Nixon’s celebration of the bloodbath: “I think this is going to have a hell of a salutary effect on future prison riots.... Just like Kent State had a hell of a salutary effect” (referring to the 4 May 1970 National Guard killing of four students protesting the invasion of Cambodia—an extension of U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants). Nixon added, “They can talk all they want about force, but that is the purpose of force.”
Attica Nation
Thompson, a historian at the University of Michigan and expert on mass incarceration, is particularly motivated by prison reform. She notes that the immediate aftermath of the Attica revolt saw some improvements in food, medical care, clothing, mail censorship and number of showers permitted. However, as she points out, this was followed by an “unprecedented backlash against all efforts to humanize prison conditions in America.”
Inmates today continue to be used as slave labor, face censorship of political literature and conditions at least as dehumanizing and sadistic, including the increasing use of solitary confinement—universally recognized as a form of torture. Brutality by prison guards is a daily fact of life, especially for the black and Latino victims disproportionately singled out for discipline.
The backlash to which Thompson refers is one expression of the bipartisan rollback of the limited democratic gains for black people attained by the liberal-led civil rights movement. Its most glaring manifestation for the past three decades has been the mass incarceration of black people, largely a consequence of the “war on drugs.” This overt war on black people was accompanied by escalating cop terror against the ghettos and barrios.
Today’s plethora of drug laws is an outgrowth of the state repression under the “war on crime” kicked off by Democratic president Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 “Safe Streets Act” and Nixon’s 1970 “Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act” and carried on by Democratic and Republican administrations since. The number of people languishing in U.S. prisons and jails, 2.2 million, is six times what it was in 1971. The costs of maintaining this vast prison complex have led to calls for easing up on the war on drugs.
Prisons are the concentrated expression of the depravity of this society. They are a key instrument in coercing, torturing and brutalizing those who have been cast off as the useless residue of a system rooted in exploitation and racial oppression. The deindustrialization of much of the U.S. that began in the late 1960s drove millions of black people out of the workforce and into the ranks of the permanently outcast. In the calculations of the American bourgeoisie, a substantial part of the black population, who used to provide labor for the auto plants and steel mills, is simply written off as an expendable population. Having condemned black as well as Latino youth to desperate poverty, the rulers whipped up hysteria painting the ghettoized poor as criminal “superpredators,” whom cops can gun down with impunity, and for whom no sentence is too long, no prison conditions too harsh. This demonization of the black population has served to deepen the wedge between white and black workers in a period of virtually no class struggle.
Marxists support the struggle for any demand that meets the immediate needs of prisoners. But under capitalism no reforms can fundamentally alter the repressive nature of the prisons. Along with the cops, military and courts, prisons are a pillar of the capitalist state, whose basic function is to maintain, through force or threat of force, the rule of the capitalist class and its economic exploitation of the working class. In the U.S., where racial oppression is at the core of the capitalist system, any alleviation of prison conditions must be linked to the fight against black oppression in general. We fight to abolish the prison system, which will be done only when the capitalist order—with its barbaric state institutions—is shattered by a proletarian socialist revolution that establishes a planned, collectivized economy with jobs and quality, integrated housing and education for all.
Thompson’s sympathies clearly lie with the Attica prisoners. Yet she evinces a soft spot for the prison guards, whom she sees as victims as well. Her poster boy for humanizing the guards is Mike Smith, a 22-year-old former machinist apparently liked by the prisoners and sympathetic to their demands. Smith, after being taken hostage by the prisoners, was shot by the cops and grievously wounded. Thompson writes, “Like so many other small town boys who had grown up in rural New York Mike needed to make a living, and prisons were the going industry.” Thompson also gives voice to the guards taken hostage and the families of the ten of them whom Rockefeller’s assassins gunned down, who resent the fact that the surviving Attica prisoners won a paltry monetary settlement from the state after nearly three decades.
As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky pointed out 85 years ago, the worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state is a bourgeois cop, not a worker, an admonition no less applicable to prison guards. As we noted at the time of the Attica massacre, “These despicable racist guards are despised even by the ruling class that cynically uses them. The governor not only served notice on the prisoners that rebellion does not pay, and rebellion linked with revolutionary ideas means certain death, but he had a message for the guards too: Keep the upper hand or else!”
The basic function of the prisons is lost on the liberal academic Thompson, whose call for prison reform envisions a commonality of interests between inmates and prison guards—a relationship akin to that of slave and overseer. In a 2011 paper, “Rethinking Working-Class Struggle Through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards,” she declares, “It is time once again for the American working class to pay attention to penal facilities as sites of productive labor and wage competition and to recognize that its destiny is tied in subtle but important ways to the ability of inmates as well as prison guards to demand fair pay and safe working conditions.” Thompson lauds the return of prison guards to municipal unions, such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).
What, then, are “safe working conditions” for prison guards? In our 1971 article, we sharply criticized Jerry Wurf, the AFSCME president, as he threatened a “slowdown” by union guards after the Attica massacre:
“Wurf demanded more and better riot equipment—helmets, tear gas and masks, to be borrowed from police departments if necessary, and hiring of more guards. Yet he had the effrontery to maintain, ‘We’re not at war with the inmates; the state of New York is at war with them.’ What forces does the state of New York employ to make war on the inmates if not the cops and guards Wurf is happy to represent?... No union can represent both workers and the sworn servants of the capitalist class, the police and prison guards.”
The increasing prominence of cops and prison guards—workers’ class enemies—in the shrinking union movement underscores the need for ousting the pro-capitalist bureaucrats and forging a class-struggle leadership in the basic organs of workers struggle.
Three years before L.D. Barkley read out the Attica Brothers’ powerful declaration, striking black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, famously walked picket lines with signs declaring, “I am a man.” Today, the racist capitalist ruling class continues to treat black people as if they were less than human and their lives don’t matter. But there is a reservoir of social power in the organized working class, in which black workers, who make up the unions’ most loyal and militant sector, remain disproportionately represented. Under revolutionary leadership, black workers, who form an organic link to the anger of the oppressed ghetto poor, will play a vanguard role in the struggles of the entire U.S. working class. It is the purpose of the Spartacist League to build a workers party that links the fight for black freedom to the struggle for proletarian state power. Workers rule on a world scale will open the road to a communist future in which the modern instruments of incarceration and death will be discarded as relics of a decaying social order that deserved only to perish.
In Film Noir Dreamland-With The Black And White 1940s Film World In
Mind
By Lance Lawrence
Steve Roberts admittedly was a quirky guy, a guy known for an ironic turn of phrase but also for his eclectic taste in all things cultural, if his love of movies, old time black and white movies could qualify as cultural, a term he himself would not have used to describe his interests being an old working-class guy who would eschew such fancy terms of art. He just liked them, didn’t need a guy like Professor Jameson, a guy he read about recently in the newspaper, see I told you he was an old-fashioned working-class guy who the heck reads newspapers these day, who wrote a book of observations about the great crime novelist Raymond Chandler which went way overboard with the sociological and critical jargon. Tried to place old Chandler’s work, you know Phillip Marlowe mostly, in some high culture academic frame-work instead of just accepting the stuff as good story-telling about a time and place that was worthy of some play. Chandler himself would have roasted Jameson alive for his quirky interpretations of his work.
After viewing Allied Lana had asked Steve the inevitable question about what he thought of the film and naturally he mentioned that while he liked it Casablanca would kick the thing down the road and have time for lunch as a saga of wartime romance. Lana accepted that answer although as usual without good grace since she was thrilled by the whole period piece and begged the opinion that this Cottillard woman looked like a home-wrecker and had the full blush lips that Brad seemed to go for but such were their different takes on movies (and music) that she just let it go. (Although Steve would never know when his opinion might come back to haunt him in some future more serious argument as an example of how they were too different to breathe but he, they had been through enough of those spats they called them that he had long ago given up trying to curb his real opinion just to keep peace in the household.)
Steve that night though having a fitful night as always when he sees a current film that provoked some serious thoughts unlike the vast bulk which he would be glad to inform that Professor Jameson are just plebian entertainment, harmless and not worthy of the high culture treatment. Were written, directed, produced, acted strictly for the cash nexus-end of story. So he ran through the film in his mind again-and as he did he mixed in his tenth at least re-run through the plot of Casablanca. Something was gnawing at him and he could not quite figure out what. Finally he went to sleep with visions of Bogie telling Claude Rains not to do anything foolish like the Nazi officer had done trying to stop Victor Lazlo-with lovely Ilsa in tow-from leaving on the last plane out of Casablanca that night.
The next afternoon he went on to his computer to Google any reviews of Allied. Most of them were laudatory which would be his own estimate if for no other reason that the feel of the film as a 1940s period piece, including a party hosted by Max and Marianne in bombed-out London with Benny Goodman, the king of swing, holding forth in the background as the partiers jitterbugged away the night (before being curtailed by the inevitable German bombing raids) but one stuck out which caught the feeling that he was having about the town of Casablanca as backdrop for romances.
Sam Lowell, one of the fairly well-known reviewers for the American Film History blog whom Steve had read reviews by before although usually not current films but classics where they had a mutual interest, had mentioned that Casablanca was a tough town to have a romance blossom in. Maybe something about the desert air, maybe the decadent of the Casbah, hell, maybe the colonial atmosphere of the place in those days. That phrase that idea got Steve thinking back to the film Casablanca and how thwarted love was a big theme there when it came right down to it. Maybe the fate of three high-strung people didn’t mean much against all the craziness of the world at war, didn’t as Bogie said mean a hill of beans but he had let her go because a guy like Victor Lazlo whatever personal bravery he had could not face the nights alone and because Ilsa was made to keep such men intact.
He had written down a little something about the plotline and how things played out for his own purposes after finishing reading the other reviews which didn’t quite speak to his concerns the way Sam Lowell did, to show Jack Davis his friend that night when they would have a couple of drinks and catch up on each other’s week. That write-up trying to figure out what in Casablanca made things go awry in turn got him thinking about other classic love thwarted classics from the 1940s and that led inevitably to a humdinger of love thwarted, Billy Wilder’s film adaptation of James M. Cain’s potboiler Double Indemnity. Quirky guy, right.
Steve believed almost without question that the Billy Wilder-directed Double Indemnity was the greatest noir produced in the 1940s, better by far than Casablanca even in the romance department since it got down to the real nitty-gritty that mattered a hill of beans to the two twisted lovers. The grift in Double Indemnity is pure unbridled, unhinged passion gone amok leading to, well, pure murder, murder my sweet when you got right down to cases. Watch this one unfold from minute one when the gunshot- gutted insurance man grabs a Dictaphone to “confess” his crimes just for the record, just to get things straight. But our man had had sunnier days, did not always have the mark of Cain on his forehead.
Okay here’s the play, take a hustling insurance salesman Walter, played by Fred McMurray, out in the sunny slumming streets of pre-war Los Angeles before the hordes came out to infest the land looking for defense jobs, sunny weather, the end of the frontier and to get the damn dust out of their throats from the Okie dust storms (by the way the war is World War II again), looking to close an insurance deal walked right into lonely housewife man-trap Phyllis, played by alluring Barbara Stanwyck, with his eyes wide open, very wide. Wide open from that first moment he took his hat off as he feasted his eyes on her after sunbathing and moments later as she came walking down the stairs all sexy and swagger with an ankle bracelet he would not soon forget. And the smell of jasmine, honeysuckle, something like that which goes deep into a man’s sexual instincts honed over a millions years or however a man has hungered at the sight of good-looking if dangerous women.
Almost immediately they did the dance around each other for who knows what purpose she all coy and he all resistance, fast fading resistance. (There was great foreplay with her talking about the speed limit in the state as he rushed her and he countered with, well, false contriteness.) The unbridled passion took hold of each of them (at least he thought so and he after all is telling the story into that damn jittery Dictaphone) so quickly that they lost their moorings, or at least he did. She, a classic femme fatale to rival Jane Greer in Out Of The Past although not as handy with a gun when it came right down to it, as will be found out by Walter later had the morals of a great white shark. That is to say none but she kept him driving her chariot anyway.
So Walter, egged on by that jasmine, hell, maybe the ankle bracelet, maybe frontier fever, or strictly lust, in any case being led by the nose, or some such organ, with his great insurance man instincts for the main chance put together a “fool-proof” plan to murder her husband after getting him to unknowingly sign an accident policy with the fatal double indemnity clause of the title. Fatal for hubby meaning if he died of an accident the claimant would double up, or double down maybe a better way to put this delicate matter. He was a goner any way you cut it once that signature got inked on that contract (and the payment check handed over). Beautiful. Walter’s plan was simplicity itself, although it required too many moving parts in the end. Get her subsequently injured boorish stingy husband (the original plan had assumed that he would be healthy) to board the train to Palo Alto for his class reunion-or to appear like he was on the train and due to his injury had fallen off the back of the train. Accident-go straight to the cashier’s desk.
The real deal was that Walter was going to be in the back seat of their sedan when Phyllis drove her husband to the station for his well-deserved rest at his reunion, Walter would kill him there, dump the body and crutches along the railroad track after he had replaced the husband as the man with crutches on the train. Hey, I like it in theory, a little off-beat, shows a nice knowledge of the inside of the insurance scam. Our Walter on his good days with that scent driving him crazy was still a pretty smart guy. What Steve and his boys in the old hang-out days called “street smart,” which were the only kind of smarts that mattered around his way. Book smart got you pushed around and punched out for simply reading some freaking book (Steve something of a bookworm survived by doing the other guys’ homework and besides he had had an older tough guy brother who looked after him.) Probably in Walter’s neighborhood too.
Recently in a review of a film, Cassandra’ Dream, which Steve had read where two brothers wound up killing a guy who was ready to jam up the works for their rich uncle who had requested they do the deed so he could avoid jail (and go on providing very nicely for the family) Sam Lowell, as already mentioned the fairly well-known reviewer for the American Film History blog, noted there is a strong reason why most civilized societies put murder, murder most foul, beyond the pale and subject the act to harsh penalties. That little pearl of wisdom can be repeated here to advantage. This deed, this well-laid out plan even if expertly executed could have no happy ending. Helping that inevitable bad end was one Keyes, played by Edward G. Robinson, the chief fraudulent claims guy for Walter’s insurance company. Although it took him a while to figure something was not right in the end his tenacity made him believe that something was amiss-Phyllis’ husband had been murdered. The question was who beside the obvious murderous wife had done the evil deed, who had aided her in the dastardly deed.
That is when the panic and bad blood between our lovebirds set in. After the deed was done, after the insurance company was ready to pay out Keyes put the brakes on the whole scam with his, what did he call it, oh yeah, his “little man” gnawing at his suspicion. That meant that our two confederates had to keep away from each other, keep their torrid affair under wraps. And that hard fact, that no dough situation, amounted to the kiss of death for somebody-hell, for our boy Walter. See after the split up Walter started getting some small, very small doubts, about his paramour. Seems sweet sexy tantalizing Phyllis had been her late husband’s first wife’s nurse who died under some seemingly mysterious circumstances. Mysterious to her step-daughter, Lola who gave Walter a chilling earful one afternoon. He had to clam her up about that, about her suspicions which she wanted to take to the cops so lover boy Walter started taking Lola around town for a good time to keep an eye or three on her. This worked out okay for a while since she had broken up with her volatile boyfriend Nino.
Here is where any guy smitten or not, under the sway of that honeysuckle, jasmine or whatever the scent or not had to take stock for a minute anyway. When you run up against a real femme fatale or the on the screen kind watch your back, watch all of you if it comes to it. Keyes had what he thought was the whole thing wrapped up after all-the dame, the so-called grieving widow no doubt was the mastermind but through his snooping he found out that sweet Phyllis was keeping time with, get this Nino. Lola’s ex-beau. And the only reason that she was keeping company with her step-daughter’s ex-beau. Well you know why, who is kidding who here. Walter had become a loose cannon, had to take a fall. And if our Phyllis could wrap up a mature guy like Walter for cold-blooded murder with a simple ankle bracelet and a few whiffs of random perfume then it would be like taking candy from a baby to put the blast, the full court press on Nino. Then she would have had to gather up some poor sap to do the deed to Nino. It would never end.
Fortunately Walter got wind that Phyllis had been seeing Nino and Walter saw he had to put an end to the madness. So in their last go-round he left her with some famous last words when they met and she tried one last lie, one last lie plus a few gunshots aimed at him, just to keep in practice-no dice. He wasn’t buying, had gotten wised-up fast. “Good-bye baby,” were the final words she would ever hear as he put two in her right where it would hurt. Nice work Walter, nice work and Steve hoped they would not hang him too high. Steve had had to laugh though when he thought Casablanca was not the only town that was tough on the love racket.
Of course if Steve was a little cuckoo about old time movies his pal, his drinking partner of late, Jack Davis who has so far been a passive listener to everything Steve had to say while he was throwing down a few glasses of high-end whiskey (unlike the old days when he South Boston-born had to suffer through some terrible stuff that had probably been bonded the day before yesterday) was deep into such talk as well. Jack, although a contemporary of Steve’s who had logged in own his many Saturday matinee double-features at The Strand Theater, had been a late coming to an appreciation of the material he had seen when he was a kid. That say, when Steve made that remark about Los Angeles being as tough a town as Casablanca on frayed romances Jack automatically thought about another L.A. -based classic, another Billy Wilder-directed film which tells you how good he was, the classic jaded-eye view of Hollywood when that was the capital of the prime entertainment of the plebian masses, Sunset Boulevard.
Steve smiled a knowing smile, a smile to acknowledge that Jack was onto something, on to thwarted love, murder, murder my sweet and everything else you could find hidden in the slumming streets of L.A. Where he disagreed with Jack was in rating the pair of films against each other. Steve gave the nod by a hair to Double Indemnity. Steve also smiled because he knew that Jack was ready to spin his take on Sunset. Both men knew enough to keep silent when the play was on.
Jack who with his movie star good looks when he was younger (and was pretty well preserved even now although he had lost a step or two in the never-ending fight against a few extra pounds) had always been puzzled by the Bill Holden figure, by Joe Gillis, a budding screenwriter who was going down the wrong street in his career. Here was a guy that both Jack and Steve could relate to. A working class guy, a working stiff from Ohio who after serving in the Army during World War II (both Steve and Jack were veterans as well just a different war-Vietnam) grabbed a job as a journalist on the hometown newspaper. Probably like them had used the G.I. Bill to get ahead. But see a guy like Joe, maybe an average guy, but footloose after seeing his fill of war was dazed by the bright lights of Hollywood. Wanted to head west to the ocean, to the last frontier like a lot of people them who collectively changed L.A. from a small friendly insider town to what it is today-a megapolis. So that wanderlust got under his skin, got him shot six ways to Sunday when the deal went down and he wound up face down in some old has-been actress’ swimming pool.
Maybe Joe should have talked to his friend, his buddy Arnie, played by a young Jack Webb, who was happy as a clam to be an assistant director, had known that he would always have steady paydays. Had a great gal too-Betty, played by Nancy Olson, who Joe filched from him (and then threw back when she found out some seedy stuff about him-about him and that has-been actress). What Arnie could have told him, at least warned him about was to keep the hell away from the high numbers on Sunset Boulevard. Maybe it would have sunk in but probably not because by the time he hit that neighborhood he was strictly from hunger-strictly one bus ticket from heading back to the Buckeye state.
But as a later real journalist, the late and missed Hunter Thompson, Doctor Gonzo, said when things got a little crazy, or a little interesting-buy the ticket, take the ride. Joe, poor clueless Joe, landed up on the high numbers in Sunset and wound up knee-deep with the old time silent film star Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson. Yeah, Norma knew a guy who was from hunger, a guy who could re-write some film scripts she had been working on since who knows when, her last silent film probably getting ready to make her comeback (sorry Norma, “return”). So she snagged the boy, snagged him good despite their age differences. And despite the worshipful jaded eye of her man servant, Max, played by Erich von Stroheim, who turned out have been both her old time director and an ex-husband. WTF was Joe thinking when he got into that mess.
So Joe, come hell or high water turned from failed screenwriter to, well, take your choice, gigolo or “kept man” (more like kept pet like the monkey she had buried out in the back yard as Joe enters this new world). Norma came to rely on him in the process of falling hard for him-and preparing for her “return” to the bright klieg lights of Hollywood. Joe played along for a while but guys who have been around, seen time in war, had been in the glare of the bright lights needed some room. So he would sneak out and go to a studio and in the dead of night work with Arnie’s sweetie pie, Betty who was a screenwriter. One thing led to another and by that close proximity they fell in love.
Mistake Joe, bad mistake because an over the hill “boss” like Norma was not going to let things go-she wanted her man and no pretty young thing was going to deny her that. So she snitched on Joe, had Betty come to the high numbers on Sunset to see what her lover-boy was really all about. That frosted it for Joe and Betty. But Joe reared up and told Norma he was leaving. Another mistake. A woman like Norma, a bit unhinged probably since “talkies” came in was not likely to take well to the woman scorned. Bang! Bang! In the end there was Joe face down in that foolish swimming pool. Tough luck, brother, tough luck.
When Jack finished his take on the film even before he could say it Steve blurred out –“Yeah, L.A. was a tough town too on the love racket.”
Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive's copy of the chapter on "Dual Power" from Trotsky's "The History Of The Russian Revolution" mentioned below in today's entry.
Commentary
In two recent commentaries I have done my fair share of kicking Professor Irving Howe, the late social democratic editor of the intellectual quarterly magazine "Dissent", around. And I am not finished by any means. (See "The Retreat of the “Greatest Generation” Intellectuals" and "Who ‘Lost’ the Sixties?" in the May 2008 archives) But today, as this is as is oft-quoted a confessional age, I have a confession, or rather two confessions, to make about my connections to Irving Howe. So for the time that it takes to write this commentary up I will call an armed truce with the shades of the professor.
Confession #1- in the mist of time of my youth I actually used to like to read "Dissent". The articles were interesting, and as we were too poor for the family to afford a subscription, I spent many an hour reading through back issues at the local public library. I make no pretense that I understood all that was in each article and some that I re-read latter left me cold but there you have it.
Probably the most impressive article I read was Norman Mailer’s "White Negro". I could relate to the violence and sense of 'hipness' that was hidden just under the surface of the article, especially the violence as it was not that far removed from that in my own poor white working class neighborhood, although I probably would not have articulated it that way at the time. Interestingly, Professor Sorin in his Howe biography notes that Howe thought the article was a mistake for "Dissent" to publish for that very homage to violence implicit in the article. That now says it all.
The funny thing about reading "Dissent", at the time, thinking about it now, was that I was personally nothing more than a Kennedy liberal and thought that the magazine reflected that New Frontier liberalism. I was somewhat shocked when I found out later that it was suppose to be an independent 'socialist' magazine. Most of my political positions at the time were far to the left of what was being presented there editorially, especially on international issues. I might add that I also had an odd political dichotomy in those days toward those to the left of my own liberalism. I was very indulgent toward communists but really hated socialists, really social democrats. Go figure. Must have been something in the water.
Confession#2- Irving Howe actually acted, unintentionally, as my recruiting sergeant to the works of Leon Trotsky that eventually led to my embrace of a Trotskyist world view. As I noted last year I have been a Marxist since 1972. But after some 150 years of Marxism claiming to be a Marxist is only the beginning of wisdom. One has to find the modern thread that continues in the spirit of the founders. This year marks my 35th year as a follower of Leon Trotsky. Back in 1972, as part of trying to find a political path to modern Marxism I picked up a collection of socialist works edited by Professor Howe. In that compilation was an excerpt from Trotsky’s "History of the Russian Revolution", a section called "On Dual Power". I read it, and then re-read it. Next day I went out to scrounge up a copy of the whole work. And the rest is history. So, thanks, Professor Howe- now back to the polemical wars- the truce is over.
ORWELL IN TRIBUNE:"AS I PLEASE" AND OTHER WRITINGS 1943-7, COMPILED AND EDITED BY PAUL ANDERSON, POLITCO'S, 2006
The last review that I did on George Orwell’s work was Homage to Catalonia, his compelling story of his involvement in a Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) a left-wing militia regiment in the Spanish Civil War. I noted there that this is the Orwell that today’s militant leftists need to read. The current compilation of articles that he did during World War II and shortly thereafter are not in that same category although they are, as always with Orwell, well worth reading. No matter the subject matter the articles conform to the points that he made in Politics and the English Language about using precise, clear and rational political language. Unfortunately, at the time of the Tribune writings Orwell had already made his peace, even if critically, with British imperialism. This is obvious from the subject matter of some of the articles, particularly those in defense of holding on to the old empire or at least its prerogatives. The articles themselves vary from the topical and mundane under war time conditions to the speculative but as always written in a bit of a tongue and cheek manner. That said, although Orwell by this time was an anti-Stalinist socialist of some sort he preferred to outsource the fight against Stalinism to world imperialism. Apparently, as the recent furor over his naming names of British communists to British intelligence indicates, he had no such qualms about doing so. Certainly this was not his finest hour. He left that in Spain.
THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE, BERTAOLT BRECHT, UNIVERSTIY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, 1999
One of the master communist playwright Bertolt Brecht’s strengths as an artist was the ability to set up a moral dilemma and work it out to a conclusion, not always a satisfactory one, by play’s end. This is unusual in a seemingly orthodox follower of the old Stalinist 'socialist realist’ cultural program. This work nevertheless permitted Brecht to address an age-old question about the nature of property ownership, extending it from its natural and historic setting in land and chattels to the question of personal human ownership.
The question posed here is whether a child abandoned by its natural mother then found and raised by another women should go to the former or that latter. Nice dilemma, right? But Brecht, as seem in Mother Courage and other parables, is not above cutting right to the bone on moral questions. What makes this work a cut above some of Brecht’s more didactic plays is the way that he weaves the parable about the odd resolution of an ancient Chinese property dispute and places that ‘wisdom’ in context of a then current dispute between two Soviet-era communes.
In the ancient dispute the judge who is called upon to render judgment, using the circle as a medium to resolve the dispute, seems to be Solomonic but is really a buffoon. This is pure Brechtian irony. This says as much about Brecht's attitude toward property as it does about the old time Chinese justice system. The question of property rights as presented by Brecht and their value as a societal glue is also something the reader or viewer of this play should think about, as well.
THEY WERE NOT OUR PEOPLE-BUT, THEY WERE OUR PEOPLE
Eisenhower, Stalin, the Cold War, the Korean War, atomic bombs, atomic spies, air raid shelters, the “Red Scare”, McCarthyism and the Rosenbergs- in the mist of time these were early, if undigested terms, from my childhood. Ah, the Rosenbergs. That is what I want to write about today. Out of all of those undigested terms that name is the one that still evokes deep emotion in these old bones. For those who have forgotten, or those too young to remember, the controversy surrounding their convictions for espionage in passing information about the atomic bomb to the now defunct Soviet Union and their executions defined an essential part of the 1950’s, the hardening of the Cold War period in American history. Their controversial convictions and sentencing evoked widespread protests throughout the world. Thus, those who seek to learn the lessons of history, our working class history, and about justice American-style should take the time to carefully examine the case and come to some conclusions about it.
Frankly, I had not read, until recently when I read The Rosenberg File by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton (originally written in 1983 with a second edition in 1997 taking advantage of the opening of some archives in the post-Soviet period), any books on the case in a long while. Thus one of my tasks is to re-read the old material, read the new post-Soviet material, and make some suggestions about what to look for in trying to understand the history of the case. This commentary will thus express my own thoughts on the Rosenbergs more than answer the questions raised by the scholarship on the case.
And what questions drive the scholarship on the case? Was their trial a frame-up in classic American-style against leftist political opponents of the Cold War and American foreign policy? Were they, individually or collectively, “master spies” at the service of the Soviet Union? Were they innocent, if misguided, progressives caught up in the turmoil of the American “red scare” of the post-World War II period? Did the government through its FBI and other security agencies, its attorneys, its judges stumble into a case which would make many reputations? Did the American Communist Party, itself under severe scrutiny and persecution, betray the Rosenbergs? Did the various international campaigns on behalf of the couple work at cross purposes with their various demands for a new trial, reduction of sentence and clemency? What kind of people were these Rosenbergs? In short, were the Rosenbergs heroic Soviet spies, martyrs, dupes or innocents? Those are the questions thoughtful readers are confronted with and I will deal with at least some of them in due course in latter blogs.
My own evolution on the case goes something like this. In my young left-liberal and social democratic days I believed, based on my reading of the trial evidence and a belief then in the basic fairness of the American justice system, that unlike Sacco and Vanzetti the Rosenbergs were guilty of the charges but as an opponent of the death penalty they should not have been executed. As I moved left, closer to Marxist politics, I still believed they were ‘guilty’. However, I came to believe that the question of guilt or innocence was beside the point and their actions on behalf of the Soviet Union made them heroes of the international working class. That, dear reader, is still my basic position.
And what is the basis of that position. At one time I was ‘in the orbit’ of the American Communist party, a fellow traveler of Stalinism, if you will. One of the criteria posed by that position was the question of defending the gains of the Russian Revolution, as I then understood it. And that meant defense of the interests of the Soviet Union. I saw the Rosenberg case as part of that same continuum, those who could actively aid the Soviet cause, by any means necessary, were kindred spirits although other than spreading pro-Soviet propaganda I personally never did anything materially to aid the Soviet Union.
Those who have read this space over last year know that I am an ardent supporter of the work of Russian Bolshevik warrior Leon Trotsky. As one should also be aware there was, and is, a river of blood, including the physical destruction of the Trotskyist Left Opposition inside the Soviet Union and elsewhere and Trotsky’s own assassination by a Stalinist agent in 1940, between those two concepts of socialist society. Nevertheless to his dying breath Trotsky defended the Soviet Union against foreign and internal counterrevolution. Thus, despite that political divide the Rosenbergs’ action, according to their lights, was not affected by my change of political orientation. Nor should it have changed.
And who were the Rosenbergs? In the headline above I called them soldiers of the revolution and I would add here, as they saw it. I think that is a fair assessment and one that I hope they would have agreed with despite our divergence political perspectives. I like the picture in my mind of Julius Rosenberg standing up for the almost forgotten labor martyr Tom Mooney in the early 1930’s at City College of New York. I also like the picture of the ‘premature’ anti-fascist Ethel Rosenberg singing in Times Square in 1936 to raise money for the Spanish Republicans when damn few others raised their heads. They made, seemingly, every mistake in the spy book. They may have not been the natural leaders of a socialist revolution in America. However, no revolution can be made without such dedicated rank and filers, who stood up when it counted. They did not cry about their fate. And they did not turn into governmental informers to save their skins. Yes, my friends, those are indeed my kindred spirits. They were not our people-but, they were our people. And they should be yours. Some day when there is a lot most justice in the world than there is now a really fitting memorial to their memory will be in order in the socialist society of the future. In the meantime- Honor the Rosenbergs-Soldiers of the Revolution.
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*********
Reviews
Marshall S. Shatz, Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia, University of Pittsburg Press, Pittsburg, 1989, pp251, $29.95
Machajski and the group of ideas called Machaevism, which he brought together and defended from the turn of the century through into the Russian Revolution, played only a very minor rôle in the building of the Russian revolutionary movement. To this reviewer at any rate, the mention of his name merely stirred a vague memory of him being mentioned, although only briefly, by Trotsky in My Life when referring to some long forgotten debate among Tsardom’s Siberian exiles.
The book does not disguise the limitations of its subject matter. And yet ... this very fair and balanced history will undoubtedly leave many with an uneasy feeling. Even today, 64 years after his death, Machajski’s idea about the intelligentsia or middle strata, and its power to dominate the working class movement, will strike many as an advance warning of dangers which became only too real in the ruthless rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy. To others it will seem to explain the reason why the working class movement has, as they see it, been betrayed by so many of its political leaderships.
Machajski was concerned with the growing reformist trends in Social Democracy, and with the untrustworthiness of the Russian intelligentsia. He presented an original and even Marxist-sounding explanation. Just as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat pursued their own class interests, so it must also be regarded as natural and inevitable that the middle class strata, primarily composed of ‘intellectual workers’ would do likewise. Control by these groupings of the knowledge-ideas factors which are essential for commodity production and the administration of modern society, already gives them power and considerable rewards. How much better, however, to ensure that such power became ever more dominant and secure through a centrally planned society? Socialism or Social Democracy were not to be regarded as ideologies in the interests of the working class, but as ideologies founded on the interests of an already relatively favoured section of society, the middle strata or intelligentsia.
Such a theory immediately calls into question any possibility of ever formulating an ideology which conforms to objective reality. According to Machajski’s logic, all attempts at evolving such an ideology would be doomed to distortion by the sectional or class interests of those intellectual workers responsible for producing it. As Shatz points out, Machajski never faced up to this contradiction. His main conclusion was to set up a group called the Workers’ Conspiracy which, according to Shatz, played little practical rôle in its short existence. Presumably it was to contain some intellectuals such as Machajski, although how these were to be identified as trustworthy and unbiased was left unclear.
To this vague idea he added the equally vague concept of a self-led working class in an upsurge that would claim the entire surplus of society after inflicting a massive defeat on both bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. Oddly enough, he also pressed for one relatively simple and almost reformist demand. Workers should ensure that any surplus wealth they appropriated from society be used for the full-time advanced education of all workers’ children. This argument came close to being market based – if everyone were to be intellectually trained, no one would be able to claim the special privileges that the middle strata had always been able to command.
The question of how ideologies, and, in particular, Socialist ideologies do or can arise is not addressed by this book. Shatz is writing about Machaevism and not about such philosophical issues. What the book does do is to report on the debates in Russian society about the nature and functions of their middle strata.
Machajski’s ideas sprang from his analysis and experience of the specific Russian intelligentsia, expressing, as he saw it, the interests of the Russian middle class. This book brings out very well the need to be clear about the exact structures and the continually varying nature of the middle layers of society. The author outlines the diffuse nature of the Russian middle classes, stretching from the remains of the gentry who had been partially dispossessed by the earlier land reforms inaugurated by Tsardom, the small but growing industrial-based sector, to the expanding professions and the restless students. All these groupings were hemmed in by the autocracy. Politically they evolved few ideas of their own beyond the terrorist bomb and slavish legalism. Their incoherence and frustrations were compounded by the flooding in of Western ideologies whether appropriate or inappropriate to their society. Machajski himself, moved from a Polish nationalism tinged with Socialism, through a form of Marxism to a ‘workerist’ criticism of both European Social Democracy and Russia's intelligentsia – and finally moved on to his own anti-Socialist form of Socialist-Anarchism!
The book continually reasserts the Russian based starting point but tentatively explores how far such ideas can be applied to other times and other places. In fact one of Shatz’s most thought provoking sections deals with the near-extermination of the pre-1917 intelligentsia in the purges of the 1930s, and its replacement by a new ex-worker become apparatchik-intelligentsia. Khrushchev perhaps best embodied the nature of the changeover. His personal manners may well have identified his working class origins. They did not define the social function he was actually performing.
This book should be regarded as more than a specialist biography of an obscure Socialist responsible for an even more obscure sect. Marshall Shatz writes clearly and with very few preconceptions. The central ideas of Machajski may well prove to point to yet one more dead end, but in a period when the Marxist movement must face up to a massive self-questioning we have to check and recheck virtually all our ideas to see where the Socialist enterprise started to go so terribly wrong. We may have to go further back than we expect. It was not merely 1917 that was a blind turning. Revolutionary History must increasingly be a history of such ideas rather than of people and groupings.
Planning this review produced 10 pages of notes including a number of awkward questions still to be answered. How, indeed, do we avoid the distortion of Socialist theory by the unconscious bias of the intellectuals, who must of necessity be involved in its evolution? What are the intellectual disciplines needed constantly to check that Socialist ideology both accords with reality and is acceptable to a clear majority of the population? How should intellectual workers and manual workers (if this is a valid dividing line) relate to each other in existing labour movements? How do we break down the unconscious middle class arrogance of a very high proportion of the present labour movement?
This book presents a good starting point for asking some of the right questions and for asking them without the harsh polemical style which unfortunately came to dominate Socialist histories. Getting the answers, however, is going to be more difficult.
Frank Ward
Note
Name spelling and even people’s initials can vary when anglicised from the Polish or Russian. Machajski can appear as Makhaiski, Machajskii and his initials as KV as well as JW.
Click on title to link to the James P. Cannon Internet Archives copy of his tribute to, and political analysis of, the place of Eugene V. Debs in the pantheon of American and international labor movements.
BOOK REVIEW
Eugene V. Debs, Harold W. Currie, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1976
Every January militants of the left wing of the international labor movement, the European sections more than the American, honor the Three L’s, the key leaders of the movement in the early 20th century- Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Since opening this space in early 2006 I have paid individual honor to all three in successive years. In that same spirit for this year’s, and for future January observances, I will highlight some other lesser figures of the revolutionary pantheon or those who contributed in some way to the development of this movement, mainly American at first as befits the title of this blog but eventually others in the international movement as well. This year’s first honoree was the Trotskyist founder and organization leader James P. Cannon. Cannon represented that first American generation who formed the core of cadre directly influenced to the left by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Here I take a step back to the pre-World War I period and honor probably the most well-known socialist of that period, Eugene V. Debs.
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature o the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed ‘root and branch’ and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, as is very well described in this little book, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Professor Currie has here done the very valuable service of outlining the highlights of Debs’ political career and of his inner ideological turmoil for those who need a short course on what set Debs, above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. The professor makes clear that his is a political profile and not the extensive detailed informational one of traditional biography. For that, if one is so inclined in that direction after reading this primer, then it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests’ of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed. Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state.
For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). Professor Currie details this transformation very nicely, including the seemingly inevitable thrashing about that every political person does when a politically transformative experience occurs. In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the ‘hippie’ experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day. The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. Professor Currie goes into some detail here about the demands on these campaigns personally on the aging Debs and of the internal political oppositions to his candidacies. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially, as the good professor as noted, since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day. What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920. Professor Currie does a good job here giving the narrative of the basis of his conviction, the tenor of the times, the appeals process and his eventual release by President Harding.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, esoterica and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Professor Currie, and not he alone among academic students of Debs, has pointed out that Debs had a life long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialism movement have shown sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Professor Currie also has several sections at the end of his book on Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinism argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal page his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. That said, Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, gets a fair exposition here. And should get a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
