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
In response to President Trump’s outrageous budget proposal, including a $54 Billion increase for the Pentagon, VFP and other veterans groups will not be silent. Planning for this was started in response to VFP’s great statement about Trump’s Military Budget and our desire and responsibility as veterans, citizens and human beings to express our strong resistance to his policies and our commitment to find a better way to peace.
The following activist VFP members have been involved in the planning: Matt Hoh, Mike Marceau, Mike Tork, Nate Goldshlag, Nick Mottern, Paul Appell, Ray McGovern, Roger Ehrlich, Sam Adams, Will Thomas, Bill Perry, Doug Rawlings, Ellen Barfield, Ellen Davidson, Gene Marx, Ken Ashe, Mark Foreman, Mike Ferner, Mike Hearington, Gerry Condon, Barry Riesch, Ann Wright, Barry Ladendorf, Bill Creighton, Brian Trautman, Dan Shea, Doug Ryder, Elliott Adams, Ken Mayers, Monique Salhab, Patrick McCann, Paul Appell, Vicki Ryder, Ward Riley and Tarak Kauff.
Here’s the basic schedule:
Monday, May 29: Meeting at 9 AM at the Bell Tower, adjacent to the Wall for a briefing by Doug Rawlings and an opportunity to read some of this year’s letters; 10:30 AM, we deliver letters to The Wall; from 11:30-12 we proceed ½ mile to MLK Memorial; at 12:30 we begin a public reading of MLK’s Riverside Church address, his Beyond Vietnam speech. After the MLK event we gather back at the Bell Tower to engage with the public. At 6:30 PM we meet for a social gathering at Busboys & Poets.
Tuesday: May 30: 10 AM rally at Lafayette Park w/hour of short, uplifting speeches, then around 11 AM going to the White House fence to demand our meeting with the president. We will read the letter from Barry Ladendorf, President of VFP, who will have sent previously to the White House asking for a public meeting. We do not expect a response. The letter is very good.
We will have legal support and musical accompaniment.
Trump’s ever-expanding deportation threats continue to sow terror among immigrants, including those who follow the orders of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.). Juan Vivares, an electrician living in the Bronx who has been in the U.S. since 2011 after he fled paramilitary violence in Colombia, was instructed to attend a “check-in” appointment with I.C.E. on March 21. His wife, Yahaira Burgos, a U.S. citizen, accompanied him to what was supposed to be a routine update on Burgos’s permanent residency petition for her undocumented husband. Instead, Vivares was arrested and taken to a deportation center in Louisiana.
Burgos, a member of Local 32BJ SEIU, appealed to the union for help. Local 32BJ, a multiracial union that organizes service workers, including office cleaners and doormen, made sure that Vivares would not be just another nameless, faceless deportee. The union held a small protest outside I.C.E.’s Manhattan offices the afternoon of Vivares’s arrest and issued a call for his freedom and right to remain in the U.S., which garnered significant attention in the press. Last week, Vivares was granted a stay of removal and his case is now pending further review. Such union solidarity provides a small taste of what the labor movement must do to mobilize in defense of immigrant rights. Stop the deportation of Juan Vivares!
The persecution of Vivares comes amid an anti-immigrant blitzkrieg ordered by the Trump administration, which has notched hundreds of arrests from coast to coast in highly publicized, armed I.C.E. raids. In what many immigration attorneys describe as a new, Kafkaesque nightmare, immigrants are now being detained as they show up for scheduled meetings with immigration officials: fathers and mothers who are applying for Green Cards, others who are trying to regularize their status by attending the “check-in” meetings. If you show up, you risk arrest and deportation; if you don’t, you risk becoming a fugitive. According to the New York Times (21 March), Vivares had considered defying the “check-in” order, but decided against it, saying: “I would feel like an animal if I stay here and hide.”
Most immigrants lack union organizations that could mobilize in their defense. Take, for example, the case of 31 workers of the Tom Cat Bakery in Long Island City. Having worked there for over a decade, the immigrant workers were told by the company last month that Homeland Security gave them ten days to show proof of legal immigration status or else they would be fired without compensation. The workers and their supporters held a demonstration in protest, and I.C.E. has since postponed the day of reckoning to April 21. Defend the Tom Cat workers!
Mobilizing the unions in defense of immigrants is of vital importance to all working people. The same forces taking aim at immigrants also have their sights set on black people and the entire multiracial working class. Working-class unity, embodied in labor actions, can be a crucial force to push back the vicious, racist anti-immigrant campaign. What is needed is a class-struggle fight against deportations and a drive to organize immigrant workers into the unions with full rights and protection. A fighting labor movement would inscribe on its banner the calls: No deportations! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!
Trump’s ascent to the White House included playing the tried-and-true card of scapegoating immigrants. His racist rants and anti-immigrant raids are intended to both inculcate fear and poison the working class with the lie that foreign-born workers are stealing their jobs. But it was his predecessor, Barack Obama, who ensured that the deportation machine became more efficient and robust. Obama deported more than 2.5 million people, instituted programs to expedite deportations and allocated an annual budget of $18 billion to immigration enforcement, a 300 percent increase over the Bush years. The Homeland Security audit of the Tom Cat workers was initiated by the Obama administration. Even The Nation (27 June 2016), an ardent apologist for Obama, noted that he left behind “the most sophisticated and well-funded human-expulsion machine in the history of the country.”
The fight for immigrant rights will only go forward if it is in direct opposition to illusions in the Democratic Party. During the presidential campaign, Hector Figueroa, president of Local 32BJ SEIU and a member of the Democratic National Committee, advised that the Democrats “need to reconnect with working Americans, with the working families of this country.” In fact, the capitalist Democratic Party is the class enemy of working people and the oppressed. The Democrats are the other party of capitalism—the other party of war, exploitation and racist oppression.
If the unions are to be instruments of struggle, including in defense of immigrants and the oppressed, they must break the shackles chaining them to the capitalist parties. Our aim as Marxists is to advance the solidarity and consciousness of the entire working class—black, white, Latino; native-born and immigrant—through building a revolutionary internationalist workers party in opposition to both the Republicans and Democrats. Such a party is the necessary instrument to lead the working class in the fight for its own rule.
Meet at the Boston Common steps that lead to the State House on Saturday, April 29th at 11:45 am to gather and walk together with our peace flags, signs that make the links between the wars and the climate crisis, and banners to the climate crisis solidarity rally on Boston Common - if you are not going to DC.
This rally will be at the Parkman Bandstand beginning at 12 noon.
If you are able to make/bring some signs (some ideas below):
- Grace Ross, 2006 candidate for Governor and anti-foreclosure/social justice organizer - David Day, founder of the Together Boston music festival - JPat Brown, Executive Editor of Muckrock - Maya Shaffer, CoFounder of The Bay State Examiner - Sevan Chorluyan, Chief of BadMirror Broadcasting - Alex Marthews, President of Restore the Fourth, a national privacy organization
*Schedule:* TimeTalk/PanelSpeakers 10:00am Qualifying the integrity of Media Sources Kendra Moyer, Andrea Romig 10:50am Electoral Action Aaron James, Joseph Onoroski, Adam Friedman 11:40am Media & Liberation David Day, Sevan Chorluyan, Thom Dunn 12:30pm Lunch & Key Signing 1:30pm FOIA: Transparency by a Thousand Papercuts JPat Brown, Maya Shaffer 2:20pm Organizing for a Sustainable, Accountable Movement Grace Ross, Guillermo Hamlin, Jordan Pelovitz 3:10pm Lightning Talks 4:10pm State of Surveillance Alex Marthews, Steven Presser, Steve Revilak 5:00pm Pirate Policy Breakout Groups
*** 'A TERRIBLE BEAUTY WAS BORN' -HONOR JAMES CONNOLLY AND THE EASTER RISING, 1916
ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF JAMES CONNOLLY, COMMANDANT- IRISH CITIZEN ARMY- EXECUTED BY THE BLOODY BRITISH IMPERIALISTS MAY, 1916. ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF BOBBY SANDS, MP AND THE 10 MARTYRED LONG KESH HUNGER STRIKERS. ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF THE 99th ANNIVERSARY OF THE EASTER UPRISING, 1916. ALL BRITISH TROOPS OUT OF IRELAND.
A word on the Easter Uprising
In the old Irish working-class neighborhoods where I grew up the aborted Easter Uprising of 1916 was spoken of in mythical hushed reverent tones as the key symbol of the modern Irish liberation struggle from bloody England. The event itself provoked such memories of heroic “boyos”(and “girlos” not acknowledged) fighting to the end against great odds that a careful analysis of what could, and could not be, learned from the mistakes made at the time entered my head. That was then though in the glare of boyhood infatuations. Now is the time for a more sober assessment.
The easy part of analyzing the Irish Easter Uprising of 1916 is first and foremost the knowledge, in retrospect, that it was not widely supported by people in Ireland, especially by the “shawlies” in Dublin and the cities who received their sons’ military pay from the Imperial British Army for service in the bloody trenches of Europe which sustained them throughout the war. That factor and the relative ease with which the uprising had been militarily defeated by the British forces send in main force to crush it lead easily to the conclusion that the adventure was doomed to failure. Still easier is to criticize the timing and the strategy and tactics of the planned action and of the various actors, particularly in the leadership’s underestimating the British Empire’s frenzy to crush any opposition to its main task of victory in World War I. (Although, I think that frenzy on Mother England’s part would be a point in the uprising’s favor under the theory that England’s [or fill in the blank of your favorite later national liberation struggle] woes were Ireland’s [or fill in the blank ditto on the your favorite oppressed peoples struggle] opportunities.
The hard part is to draw any positive lessons of that national liberation struggle experience for the future. If nothing else remember this though, and unfortunately the Irish national liberation fighters (and other national liberation fighters later, including later Irish revolutionaries) failed to take this into account in their military calculations, the British (or fill in the blank) were savagely committed to defeating the uprising including burning that colonial country to the ground if need be in order to maintain control. In the final analysis, it was not part of their metropolitan homeland, so the hell with it. Needless to say, cowardly British Labor’s position was almost a carbon copy of His Imperial Majesty’s. Labor Party leader Arthur Henderson could barely contain himself when informed that James Connolly had been executed. That should, even today, make every British militant blush with shame. Unfortunately, the demand for British militants and others today is the same as then if somewhat attenuated- All British Troops Out of Ireland.
In various readings on national liberation struggles I have come across a theory that the Easter Uprising was the first socialist revolution in Europe, predating the Bolshevik Revolution by over a year. Unfortunately, there is little truth to that idea. Of the Uprising’s leaders only James Connolly was devoted to the socialist cause. Moreover, while the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army were prototypical models for urban- led national liberation forces such organizations, as we have witnessed in later history, are not inherently socialistic. The dominant mood among the leadership was in favor of political independence and/or fighting for a return to a separate traditional Irish cultural hegemony. (“Let poets rule the land”).
As outlined in the famous Proclamation of the Republic posted on the General Post Office in Dublin, Easter Monday, 1916 the goal of the leadership appeared to be something on the order of a society like those fought for in the European Revolutions of 1848, a left bourgeois republic. A formation on the order of the Paris Commune of 1871 where the working class momentarily took power or the Soviet Commune of 1917 which lasted for a longer period did not figure in the political calculations at that time. As noted above, James Connolly clearly was skeptical of his erstwhile comrades on the subject of the nature of the future state and apparently was prepared for an ensuing class struggle following the establishment of a republic.
That does not mean that revolutionary socialists could not support such an uprising. On the contrary, Lenin, who was an admirer of Connolly for his anti-war stance in World War I, and Trotsky stoutly defended the uprising against those who derided the Easter rising for involving bourgeois elements. Participation by bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements is in the nature of a national liberation struggle. The key, which must be learned by militants today, is who leads the national liberation struggle and on what program. As both Lenin and Trotsky made clear later in their own experiences in Russia revolutionary socialists have to lead other disaffected elements of society to overthrow the existing order. There is no other way in a heterogeneous class-divided society. Moreover, in Ireland, the anti-imperialist nature of the action against British imperialism during wartime on the socialist principle that the defeat of your own imperialist overlord in war as a way to open the road to the class struggle merited support on that basis alone. Chocky Ar La.
A word on James Connolly.
They tell a story about James Connolly that just before the start of action on Easter Monday, 1916 he told the members of the Irish Citizen’s Army (almost exclusively workers, by the way) that if the uprising was successful to keep their guns handy. More work with them might be necessary against the nationalist allies of the moment organized as the Irish Volunteers. The Volunteers were mainly a petty bourgeois formation that had no intention of fighting for Connolly's vision of a Socialist Republic. True story or not, I think that gives a pretty good example of the strategy and tactics to be used in colonial and third world struggles by the working class. Would that the Chinese Communists in the 1920’s and other colonial and third world liberation fighters since then have paid heed to that strategic concept.
James Connolly, June 5, 1868-May 12, 1916, was of Scottish Irish stock. He was born in Edinburgh of immigrant parents. The explicit English colonial policy of trying to drive the Irish out of Ireland and thus created the Irish diaspora produced many such immigrants from benighted Ireland to England, America, Australia and the far- flung parts of the world. Many of these immigrants left Ireland under compulsion of banishment. Deportation and executions were the standard English response in the history of the various “Troubles" from Cromwell’s time on.
Connolly, like many another Irish lad left school for a working life at age 11. The international working- class has produced many such self-taught and motivated leaders. Despite the lack of formal education he became one of the preeminent left-wing theorists of his day in the pre-World War I international labor movement. In the class struggle we do not ask for diplomas, although they help, but commitment to the cause of the laboring masses. Again, like many an Irish lad, Connolly joined the British Army at the age of 14. In those days the British Army provided one of the few ways of advancement for an Irishman who had some abilities. As fate would have it Connolly was stationed in Dublin. I believe the English must rue the day they let Brother Connolly near weapons and near Dublin. As a line in an old Irish song goes- ‘Won’t Old Mother England be Surprised’.
By 1892 Connolly was an important figure in the Scottish Socialist Federation which, by the way, tended to be more militant and more Celtic and less enamored of parliamentarianism than its English counterpart. Later, the failure to gather in the radical Celtic elements was a contributing factor in the early British Communist Party’s failure to break the working class from the Labor Party. Most of the great labor struggles of the period came from the leadership in Scotland and Ireland. Connolly became the secretary of the Federation in 1895. In 1896 he left the army and established the Irish Socialist Republican Party. The name itself tells the program. Ireland at that time was essentially a classic English colony so to take the honored name Republican was to spit in the eye of the English. Even today the English have not been able to rise to the political level of a republic. Despite Cromwell’s valiant attempt in the 1650's and no thanks to today's British Labor Party’s policies this is still sadly the case. All militants, of whatever nation, can and must support this call- Abolish the British monarchy, House of Lords and the state Church of England.
In England Connolly was active in the Socialist Labor Party that split from the moribund above-mentioned Social Democratic Federation in 1903. During the period before the Easter uprising he was heavily involved in the Irish labor movement and acted essentially as the right hand man to James Larkin in the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. In 1913 when Larkin led a huge strike in Dublin but was forced to leave due to English reprisals Connolly took over. It was at that time that Connolly founded the Irish Citizens Army as a defense organization of armed and trained laboring men against the brutality of the dreaded Dublin Metropolitan Police.
Although only numbering about 250 men at the time their political goal was to establish an independent and socialist Ireland.
Connolly stood aloof from the leadership of the Irish Volunteers, the nationalist formation based on the middle classes. He considered them too bourgeois and unconcerned with Ireland's economic independence. In 1916 thinking the Volunteers were merely posturing, and unwilling to take decisive action against England, he attempted to goad them into action by threatening to send his Irish Citizens Army against the British Empire alone, if necessary. This alarmed the members of the more militant faction -Irish Republican Brotherhood, who had already infiltrated the Volunteers and had plans for an insurrection as well. In order to talk Connolly out of any such action, the IRB leaders, including Tom Clarke and Patrick Pearse, met with Connolly to see if an agreement could be reached. During the meeting the IRB and the ICA agreed to act together at Easter of that year.
When the Easter Rising occurred on April 24, 1916, Connolly was Commandant of the Dublin Brigade, and as the Dublin brigade had the most substantial role in the rising, he was de facto Commander in Chief. Following the surrender he was executed by the British for his role in the uprising. Although he was so badly injured in the fighting that he was unable to stand for his execution and he was shot sitting in a chair. The Western labor movement, to its detriment, no longer produces enough such militants as Connolly (and Larkin, for that matter). Learn more about this important socialist thinker and fighter. ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF JAMES CONNOLLY
The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support G.I. Voice
By Frank Jackman
The late Peter Paul Markin had gotten “religion” on the questions of war and peace the hard way. Had before that baptism accepted half-knowingly (his term) against his better judgment induction into the Army when his “friends and neighbors” at his local draft board in North Adamsville called him up for military service back in hard-shell hell-hole Vietnam War days when the country was coming asunder, was bleeding from all pores around 1968. Markin had had some qualms about going into the service not only because the reasoning given by the government and its civilian hangers-on for the tremendous waste of human and material resources had long seemed preposterous but because he had an abstract idea that war was bad, bad for individuals, bad for countries, bad for civilization in the late 20th century. Was a half-assed pacifist if he had though deeply about the question, which he had not.
But everything in his blessed forsaken scatter-shot life pushed and pushed hard against his joining the ranks of the draft resisters at the Boston sanctuary for that cohort, the Arlington Street Church, whom he would hear about and see every day then as he passed on his truck route which allowed him to pay his way through college. Markin had assumed that since he was not a Quaker, Shaker, Mennonite, Brethren of the Common Life adherent but rather a bloody high-nosed Roman Catholic with their slimy “just war” theory that seemed to justify every American war courtesy of their leading American Cardinal, France Spellman, that he could not qualify for conscientious objector status on that basis. And at the time that he entered the Army that was probably true even if he had attempted to do so. Later, as happened with his friend, Jack Callahan, he could at least made the case based on the common Catholic upbringing. Right then though he was not a total objector to war but only of what he saw in front of him, the unjustness of the Vietnam War.
That was not the least of his situation though. That half-knowingly mentioned above had been overridden by his whole college Joe lifestyle where he was more interested in sex, drink, and rock and roll (the drugs would not come until later), more interested in bedding women than thinking through what he half-knew would be his fate once he graduated from college as the war slowly dragged on and his number was coming up. Moreover there was not one damn thing in his background that would have given pause about his future course. A son of the working-class, really even lower than that the working poor a notch below, there was nobody if he had bothered to seek some support for resistance who would have done so. Certainly not his quiet but proud ex-World War II Marine father, not his mother whose brother was a rising career Army senior NCO, not his older brothers who had signed up as a way to get out of hell-hole North Adamsville, and certainly not his friends from high school half of whom had enlisted and a couple from his street who had been killed in action over there. So no way was an Acre boy with the years of Acre mentality cast like iron in his head about servicing if called going to tip the cart that way toward straight out resistance.
Maybe he should have, at least according to guys he met in college like Brad Fox and Fritz Taylor, or guys who he met on the hitchhike road going west like Josh Breslin and Captain Crunch (his moniker not real name which Josh could not remember). The way they heard the story from Markin after he got out of the Army, after he had done his hell-hole thirteen months in Vietnam as an infantryman, twice wounded, and after he had come back to the “real” world was that on about the third day in basis training down in Fort Jackson in South Carolina he knew that he had made a mistake by accepting induction. But maybe there was some fate-driven reason, maybe as he received training as an infantryman and he and a group of other trainees talked about but did not refuse to take machine-gun training, maybe once he received orders for Vietnam and maybe once he got “in-country” he sensed that something had gone wrong in his short, sweet life but he never attempted to get any help, put in any applications, sought any relief from what was to finally crack him. That, despite tons of barracks anti-war blather on his part from Fort Jackson to Danang.
Here’s the reason though why the late Peter Paul Markin’s story accompanies this information about G.I. rights even for those who nowadays enter the military voluntarily, as voluntarily as any such decision can be without direct governmental coercion. Markin, and this part is from Josh Breslin the guy he was closest to toward the end, the guy who had last seen him in the States before that fateful trip to Mexico, to Sonora when it all fell apart one day, had a very difficult time coming back to what all the returnees called the “real” world after Vietnam service. Had drifted to drug, sex and rock and roll out on the West Coast where Josh had first met him in San Francisco until he tired of that, had started to have some bad nights.
Despite the bad nights though he did have a real talent for writing, for journalism. Got caught up in writing a series about what would be later called the “brothers under the bridge” about guys like him down in Southern California who could not adjust to the real world after ‘Nam and had tried to keep body and soul together by banding together in the arroyos, along the railroad tracks and under the bridges and creating what would today be called a “safe space.”
Markin’s demons though were never far from the surface. Got worse when he sensed that the great wash that had come over the land during the counter-cultural 1960s that he had just caught the tail-end had run its course, had hit ebb tide. Then in the mid-1970s to relieve whatever inner pains were disturbing him he immersed himself in the cocaine culture that was just rearing its head in the States. That addiction would lead him into the drug trade, would eventually lead him as if by the fateful numbers to sunny Mexico, to lovely Sonora way where he met his end. Josh never found out all the details about Markin’s end although a few friends had raised money to send a detective down to investigate. Apparently Markin got mixed up with some local bad boys in the drug trade. Tried to cut corners, or cut into their market. One day he was found in a dusty back street with two slugs in his head. He lies down there in some unknown potter’s field mourned, moaned and missed until this very day.
Oh what might have been if he had sought out help in attempting to work out the better angels of his nature before all hell broke loose around his too futile head.
In Boston-Join the Mass Protest Against Trump this May 1st!-Join The Resistance
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Stand Up for Immigrants on May 1st!
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Strike and Protest on May 1st in Boston!
An Injury to One is an Injury to All!
We need to disrupt “business as usual” to defeat Trump’s agenda. Working people have the potential power to strike a blow at Trump and his billionaire backers by shutting down their profits on May 1.
Alongside immigrant organizations and labor unions, we will take action against the deportations, Trump’s wall, the Muslim ban, anti-union laws and attacks on women’s reproductive rights. We will oppose any retaliation by employers or schools against workers or students who strike or walk out on May Day.
Join us for this powerful protest on May 1st in Boston!
On International Women’s Day in Petrograd in March 1917, a mass outpouring of working women sparked the revolutionary upheaval that culminated in the Russian October Revolution. The smashing of capitalist class rule brought unheard-of gains for women in all areas of public and private life. Despite economic backwardness and poverty, the young Soviet workers government sought to undermine the material foundations of women’s oppression, which is rooted in the institution of the family. The Bolsheviks understood that complete social equality could only be attained with the abolition of classes in a world socialist society. In a 1920 commemoration of International Working Women’s Day, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin underscored the fact that the fight for women’s liberation is inseparable from the fight for international socialist revolution.
Capitalism combines formal equality with economic and, consequently, social inequality. That is one of the principal features of capitalism, one that is deliberately obscured by the supporters of the bourgeoisie, the liberals, and is not understood by petty-bourgeois democrats. This feature of capitalism, incidentally, renders it necessary for us in our resolute fight for economic equality openly to admit capitalist inequality, and even, under certain conditions, to make this open admission of inequality the basis of the proletarian statehood (the Soviet Constitution).
But even in the matter of formal equality (equality before the law, the “equality” of the well-fed and the hungry, of the man of property and the propertyless), capitalism cannot be consistent. And one of the most glaring manifestations of this inconsistency is the inequality of women. Complete equality has not been granted even by the most progressive republican, and democratic bourgeois states.
The Soviet Republic of Russia, on the other hand, at once swept away all legislative traces of the inequality of women without exception, and immediately ensured their complete equality before the law.
It is said that the best criterion of the cultural level is the legal status of women. This aphorism contains a grain of profound truth. From this standpoint only the dictatorship of the proletariat, only the socialist state could attain, as it has attained, the highest cultural level. The new, mighty and unparalleled stimulus given to the working women’s movement is therefore inevitably associated with the foundation (and consolidation) of the first Soviet Republic—and, in addition to and in connection with this, with the Communist International.
Since mention has been made of those who were oppressed by capitalism, directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, it must be said that the Soviet system, and only the Soviet system, guarantees democracy. This is clearly shown by the position of the working class and the poor peasants. It is clearly shown by the position of women.
But the Soviet system is the last decisive struggle for the abolition of classes, for economic and social equality. Democracy, even democracy for those who were oppressed by capitalism, including the oppressed sex, is not enough for us.
It is the chief task of the working women’s movement to fight for economic and social equality, and not only formal equality, for women. The chief thing is to get women to take part in socially productive labour, to liberate them from “domestic slavery,” to free them from their stupefying and humiliating subjugation to the eternal drudgery of the kitchen and the nursery.
This struggle will be a long one, and it demands a radical reconstruction both of social technique and of morals. But it will end in the complete triumph of communism.
—V.I. Lenin, “International Working Women’s Day” (4 March 1920)
Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of The Capris performing their "doo wop" classic, "There's A Moon Out Tonight".
In Honor Of The Late Rocker Chuck Berry Who Helped Make It All Possible-*When Doo Wop Bopped- An Encore- The Music Of The 1950s CD Review
Old Town Doo Wop, Volume One, Ace Records, 1992 I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but now when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, moves away from ballady show tunes, rhymey Tin Pan Alley tunes and, most importantly, any and all music that your parents might have approved of, even liked, or at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room hit post World War II America like, well, like an atomic bomb. Now strictly speaking “Doo Wop” is not really rock and roll, but rather a second cousin to it coming out of the black-dominated rhythm and blues tradition. The fantastic harmonics, precise rhythmic patterns, and smooth lyrics reflect that tradition more than the over-heated, guitar-driven, solo-singer rock performances that drove most of us to the dance floor back in the day. The kind of rock and roll that most of us children of the genre listened to, went wild over and spent that precious disposable income on was the rockabilly, hillbilly, black country blues variation that Sam Phillips and Sun Records first produced in the early 1950s and that Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis came to be exemplars of. But some of us, when we had a little extra cash, definitely bopped “doo wop” as part of our coming of age, especially if some dreamy girl (or guy for shes) was falling all over herself to listen to. Remember to be young was to be ready. So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer and some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such 1950s compilations “speak” to. No one came out of the 1950s without having at least listened to “There’s A Moon Out Tonight” by the Capris. Or “Remember Then” by The Earls, “Message Of Love” by The Laurels, and “Walking Alone” by The Solitaires. Now this sub-genre is a very acquired taste, to be sure, but if you need a “doo wop” primer here is a place to start. There's A Moon Out Tonight
Artists: The Capris There's a (moon out tonight) whoa-oh-oh ooh Let's go strollin' There's a (girl in my heart) whoa-oh-oh ooh Whose heart I've stolen There's a moon out tonight (whoa-oh-oh ooh) Let's go strollin' through the park (ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh) There's a (glow in my heart) whoa-oh-oh ooh I never felt before There's a (girl at my side) whoa-oh-oh ooh That I adore There's a glow in my heart I never felt before (ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh) Oh darlin' Where have you been? I've been longin' for you all my life Whoa-uh-oh baby I never felt this way before I guess it's because there's a moon out tonight There's a (glow in my heart) whoa-oh-oh ooh I never felt before There's a (girl at my side) whoa-oh-oh ooh That I adore There's glow in my heart I guess it's because There's a moon out tonight Moon out tonight Moon out tonight Moon out tonight There's a moon out tonight
