When Be-Bop Be-Bopped The 1950s Night- Jerry Lee Lewis Or Elvis?

When Be-Bop Be-Bopped The 1950s Night- Jerry Lee Lewis Or Elvis?

Phil Larkin, Class of 1964, comment:

Jerry Lee Lewis or Elvis?

What is your choice? Here is mine.

DVD REVIEW

Last Man Standing, Jerry Lee Lewis in Concert, New York, 2006

Elvis, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Bo Diddley. Yes those are the men who created Rock 'n' Roll, as we know it. However in that list do not forget one Jerry Lee Lewis. Fate dealt him an uneven hand due to the foibles of his personal life (the subject of a movie, Great Balls of Fire, with Dennis Quaid) but his form of rockabilly/boogie-woogie piano-driven music and madman presentation must be placed in the mix of influences that drove the best of early rock.

If for no other reason that that he is one of the few 'still standing' from that generation it was nice to see what "The Killer" could do in his 71st year in concert in New York City in 2006 with a host of guests some old, some young. Clearly off these performances he has lost a couple of steps. Hell the kind of energy that Jerry Lee produced in the 1950's definitely had a short shelf life. There are some nice clips from that period interspersed with the concert, by the way. Think about that opening scene in High School Confidential of 1958 where he is playing like a madman on the back of a flatbed truck as he heads toward the local high school. Whoa.

Despite the lost of energy here Jerry Lee can still give out on some tunes like in the old days. Take his duo with R&B master Solomon Burke on Who Will the Next Fool Be. How about Tom Jones on Green, Green Grass of Home. Or Norah Jones on Hank Williams' Your Cheating Heart. Or Jerry cover on Chuck Berry's Roll Over Beethoven. Or his classic Crazy Arms. And on and on. In fact the covers of his old material and some Hank Williams material highlight this concert. If you have a couple of hours better take advantage of it. Then you will know what it was like when men (and women) played rock and roll for keeps.

CD REVIEW

Last Man Standing, Jerry Lee Lewis and other artists, Shangri-la Records, 2006

The last time we heard the name Jerry Lee Lewis in this space (see above) was in connection with a rave review of his star-studded concert in New York City in 2006 also entitled The Last Man Standing. I was not aware at the time I wrote that review that there was a CD connected with the DVD (silly me). This CD also gets a rave review from these quarters. The last paragraph details some of the highlights of this CD. However, I can tell you right now to save your old eyes- get this thing. It is not the fire-balling of Jerry Lee's youth but virtually from start to finish it is some very nice work. If you need to go back to the Fifties and hear his original work there are plenty of his greatest compilations elsewhere (or on YouTube). Here are a couple of words on this one:

Apparently in putting together this album every musical artist who has ever been anything, ever wanted to be anything or who will be in the various musical Halls of Fame signed on to play with "The Killer". Let's make this clear though- Jerry Lee is in charge here- the other artists are basking off of his reflected glory. Ya, he is an old man and he has lost a step, and maybe he has not learned all of life's lessons but he still rocks & rolls, does rockabilly and can country rock with the best of them.

Highlights here concerning some of life's lessons that old Jerry Lee has learned, as reflected in some of the lyrics, are his duo with Willie Nelson on Couple More Years, his duo with Keith Richards on That Kind of Fool (a take-off on his old classic- Who Will The Next Fool Be) and his duo with Eric Clapton on Trouble In Mind. To show that he can still rock-listen to the duo with Kid Rock (yes, that Kid Rock of rapper fame) on Honky Tonk Woman. If you need to hear rockabilly and boogie-woogie then the classic Hadacol Boogie with Buddy Guy will keep you moving. Enough said, except the production values on this CD are very good, as well.
*************
Here Are Some Lyrics For Jerry Lee and Elvis So You Can Make An Informed Decision On These Burning Questions Of The Day.

High School Confidental lyrics-Jerry Lee Lewis

You better open up honey it's your lover boy me that's a knockin'
You better listen to me sugar all the cats are at the High School rockin'
Honey get your boppin' shoes Before the juke box blows a fuse
Got everbody hoppin' everybody boppin'
Boppin' at the High School Hop
Boppin' at the High School Hop
Shakin' at the High School Hop
I've rollin' at the High School Hop
I've been movin' at the High School Hop
Everybodys hoppin' Everybody's boppin'
Boppin' at the High School Hop
Come on little baby gonna rock a little bit tonight
Woooh I got get with you sugar gonna shake things up tonight
Check out the heart beatin' rhythm cause my feet are moving smooth and
Light
Boppin' at the High School Hop
Shakin' at the High School Hop
Rollin' at the High School Hop
Movin' at the High School Hop
Everybodys hoppin' just a boppin' just a boppin'
Piano Solo!
Come on little baby let me give a piece good news good news good news
Jerry Lee is going to rock away all his blues
My hearts beatin' rhythm and my soul is singin' the blues
Oooooh Boppin' at the High School Hop
Shakin' at the High School Hop
Rollin' at the High School Hop
Gettin' it at the High School Hop
Everybodys hoppin' Everybody's boppin'
Boppin' at the High School Hop

Hound Dog lyrics-Elvis Presley

You ain't nothin' but a hound dog
cryin' all the time.
You ain't nothin' but a hound dog
cryin' all the time.
Well, you ain't never caught a rabbit
and you ain't no friend of mine.

When they said you was high classed,
well, that was just a lie.
When they said you was high classed,
well, that was just a lie.
You ain't never caught a rabbit
and you ain't no friend of mine.

Once Again, What The Stuff Of Dreams Are Made Of-With The Film Adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon In Mind

Once Again, What The Stuff Of Dreams Are Made Of-With The Film Adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon In Mind

By Crime Novelist Paul Marlon

Joel Cairo shed no tears, not even crocodile tears when he had heard that his old time private dick nemesis who had almost had put a noose around his neck Sam Spade, Samuel Lewis Spade, his full moniker according to the obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, had cashed his check. Had departed this wicked old world that he seemingly worked overtime in order to prevent honest non-violent criminals (except when a little off-hand violence was necessary to save the play) like Joel from plying their trade. Joel almost smiled a sincere, not ironic or sarcastic, smile when he read the details of how Sam had gone down in a blaze of gunfire when in the year of our lord, 1957 he had stumbled onto a “safe house” for the production of high-grade heroin, H, horse, or any other name you may know that variation of the stuff of dreams by way down away from his comfort zone home, San Francisco. Took the gaff in sunny Mexico, somewhere around Cuernavaca, down where the ‘red bishop fought a losing battle against the batos locos who were infesting the place as a way-station from further south, further down Columbia way. Seems that Sam, with more guts than brains this time, thought he was dealing with guys like Joel, like the Fat Man, like a guy named Sydney Greenstreet that Joel had pulled a few cons with over in the Levant when he was moving up the food chain in the con artist rackets, or a fire-eater woman like Brigid O’Shaughnessy, whose real name when they finally got around to hanging her in the great state of California back in the late 1920s was Mary Louise Astor (that full moniker too provided via that Chronicle obit when mentioning Sam’s most famous case, the Maltese Falcon case) for killing Sam’s partner, a two-bit second-rate gumshoe named Miles Archer. 

The dope boys play rough from the start and have no con in them like Brigid had along with that itchy trigger finger though and when Sam had tried to single-handedly break up Lester Lannon’s West Coast dope ring he got nothing but a few coughs after taking about six slugs to various parts of his body. He left a wife, an ex-wife really, Vivian, one of California high roller oil man General Sternwood’s high strung daughters, divorced for about a decade prior to his death and three adult children, all girls. None detectives. [There was more to that divorce from Vivian than we have time for here but one of the reasons for the divorce was that Sam was sleeping with her younger, wilder, and sexually more adventurous sister Carmen once she got out of the drug treatment center at San Luis Obispo. Another reason though was that Sam when not under the sheets with one or the other took too many risks for Vivian’s liking as the girls were growing up. Given Sam’s end she was probably right to cut loose from the bastard before he bled all over the carpet. That was Joel’s savage take on the matter when he heard many years before that Sam had landed in the clover with all that all oil money and more and more cars needed the lifeline.]    

Thinking about Sam, about the Fat Man, about Brigid, and a few others like the gunsel she tied up with, Floyd Thursby, a crooked as they come sea captain who was saleable to the highest bidder, Jacoby, and the West End Kid, the Fat Man’s gunsel after Thursby went awry with Brigid, got Joel to thinking about how very close he had come to sharing that necktie party with Brigid. It was only the quick action of the Fat Man flashing a couple of thousand dollar bills before a “from hunger” cop on the take that allowed him and the Fat Man to escape to Istanbul to look for the jeweled bird they had travelled to the United States following once that fucking Thursby let Brigid under his skin.

[That crooked cop, a “friend” of Sam’s from when he was on the San Francisco force himself named Ward Bond, could have been bought and paid for with just one thou but his partner, a tough as nails cop named Barton McLane, needed to get his hush money as well. Money worth spending in any case since that “freedom” allowed the Fat Man and him to finally track down the real jeweled bird. By the way nobody ever called the Fat Man anything but the Fat Man and to this day nobody knew what his real name was, not even Joel who worked with his for several years off and on. Didn’t know much about him except his was a history buff, not just vague schoolboy stuff either but deep thinkers about trends and currents of analysis like H.G. Wells whom the Fat Man claimed to know but when he was interviewed following the Fat Man’s death said he had never known anybody with the moniker Fat Man, was some kind of downwardly mobile European aristocrat, maybe German from his slight accent, and was as treacherous a bastard as Joel had ever worked with-and survived.

They would eventually find the antique dealer in Athens who had created the fake bird that had led them on that wild goose chase in America and allow the late Fat Man and him to retire in splendor in Corfu. (That search for the antique dealer was one of those unfortunate cases where a little off-hand violence was necessary for the bloody bastard to see reason which he did not had in great supply when the deal went down and his body was found a few months after their confrontation floating to shore in the Aegean).   

As Joel sat smoking his rich Turkish blend pipe watching the sun go down on another day he began to recall at first with trepidation and then with relish that whole black bird caper (that Maltese Falcon stuff was all made up for successively Brigid’s, Thursby’s and Sam’s edification. Pure bullshit on the part of the master, the Fat Man in all his sublime glory. [That hashish dreamland was not some aberration on Joel’s part. He had been born and raised in the Levant, in the time of the Ottoman Empire, around Tripoli in present day Lebanon and had taken to the pipe early as was the custom among men from his village and when he finally had enough money to seriously indulge the habit after the big black bird cash out he did so to the exclusion of much else.]

Joel thought it was funny how the name Sam Spade had played so big a part in his life back then although their paths had crossed only for a few days. At first the Fat Man, Brigid, that gunsel Thursby who was the Fat Man’s bodyguard, enforcer, tough guy before he fell down under Brigid’s spell. (Joel chuckled that if he had been into women then Brigid’s considerable charms and that fresh jasmine scent that got to even hard-boiled detectives like Spade would had been the end of him too. A couple of moves toward him on her part would perhaps had turned the trick. Tough luck lady that way with men maybe she should have taken up with women.) The odd part was that Brigid when she had gone on her own under Thursby’s guard after finding out that the bird hard left the Asian continent and was heading to the United States under Captain Jacoby’s guidance and was looking for some new help after  Thursby caught her fucking some guy in Frisco who had a little dough to fund her search for a while had panicked and went looking for a private detective to help her she had picked the firm of Archer & Spade out of the telephone book since it was the first operation listed under “private detectives” in the phone book. She happened in the end to pick the wrong guy for the job, a guy who ultimately talked, acted, and looked like he would not be made a pasty of when everything got sifted out.

Once the Fat Man and Joel had found out where Brigid was through that Captain Jacoby against Joel’s advice the Fat Man had set them sailing for America. A bad mistake which beyond almost costing them their freedom seemed an unlikely move on the part of that perfidious Greek antique dealer who like Joel had grown up under the devious Ottoman Empire manner of double-dealing, and double-crossing. Joel did not know all the details of what Brigid had told Sam and this Miles Archer about what she wanted their services for but he could guess the effect of that jasmine scent of hers on both men because this Archer fell down for her, fell hard.

[No question a lot of the animosity between Joel and Brigid were their feuds over various men who came on board the Fat Man’s ventures. The immediate cause of bad blood between them had been over Thursby. Before he fell all over himself once Brigid made her play for his loyalties Thursby and Joe had been having an affair. Joel had ever since he was a kid in Tripoli been partial to boys, tough boys, gunsels who he had found out many times would use their cover of toughness to deny who they were, to deny that they were “fairies” like him. Before the West End Kid split when the heat was coming down in the Maltese Falcon adventure and the Fat Man was ready to make a deal with Spade to have the Kid play the fall guy for the various unsolved murders that were accumulating Joel felt he was making headway with that tough young man. As he aged and retreated to his smoked-filled villa in Corfu though he tended toward more feminine youngsters whom he had an agent procure for him. That agent, the clever and discrete Violet Venable, had been highly recommended by the playwright Tennessee Williams when he stayed at Joel’s villa one summer.]           

Brigid was not the only one who made a mistake by hiring the firm of Archer & Spade for Joel had miscalculated as well. He assumed that when the news that both Thursby and Archer had been murdered and that there was a possible link between the two closely times murders had  been splashed all over the Chronicle which ran with the story for days that Brigid and/or Spade had the bird. He decided to do an end around, possibly cutting out the Fat Man if things worked out that way, and shake down Spade for what he knew, and maybe gain possession of the vaunted bird. He went, armed as a precaution not for killing he did not think, to Spade’s seedy run down office in an off-street downtown where a quick look at the building directory listed lots services that seemed like scams and stuff for small time con artists to work out of without much scrutiny. If worse came to worse he figured he could buy Spade off for say five thousand and he, Spade, probably would think that it was money found on the ground.           

When he got to Spade’s sixth floor office with the name Archer already banished from every recognition Joel was surprised that the firm had a receptionist, secretary or kept woman covering all bases, called herself Lee something, a good looking woman if that was your thing, not beautiful like Brigid but something handy to have around. He gave her his “hook”, some knowledge about what had happened to Miles Archer. That got him in the door to Sam’s shabby down at the heels office. When he entered he was surprised (and delighted) to see a guy who was short, had a couple of days stubble, and had the distinct look of something who spent most of his life one or two steps ahead of the “repo” man.

He sat down in a crooked misshapen chair and gave Spade his proposition, or started to, when he realized that he had a gun which would make things easier if the bird was in the office. That was his mistake, pulling the gun on a guy who looked like he could not take care of himself. The minute he pulled it out Spade moved toward the chair and started to slap him around, punched him out, and when he awoke he found that Spade had rifled through his effects including his scented handkerchief which he made a snide remark about (Joel was inured to that “fairy-baiting” since he had put up with it since he was a kid, had used it a couple of times to turn things around and bed the guy who did the baiting. He had half-figured that like Thursby Spade, a seemingly tough guy after all, might be a switch-hitter. Wrong on that count too.) Spade also said that all he saw in Joel’s wallet was a few hundred bucks and air. Joel explained that of course he would not have the dough on him but could get access the next day if things worked out. Sam seemed to agree to that proposition but Joel still figured to short-cut the whole process if the bird was in the office and he could save the five thou. And keep the fabled bird for himself.  (As turned out the Fat Man was working his own solo idea and had sent the West End Kid to dog Spade which Spade got hip to in about five minutes and told the Kid to tell the Fat Man if he wanted to deal then they had to meet. From that point on Joel went back to working as an agent of the Fat Man).                          

Spade and the Fat Man were to meet the next day to size each other up.  Meanwhile Brigid was working her own scented magic on Spade and getting plenty of places with it. That night they slept together for the first time even after Sam told her that he was in contact with the Fat Man. (Brigid was one of those never give up woman who figured that at some point, with some sexual trick when she found out what made a man tick, usually some form of oral sex, Spade would fully come under her sway and side with her against all-comers. That too was a mistake in the end but made sense just then when everybody was jockeying for Sam’s favor.)   

At the first meeting, Joel in attendance, Sam seemed to be impressed by the Fat Man’s spiel, by his knowledge of the history of the bird (supposedly lost on the way to be given to some king from the Knight of Malta, shorthand for a bunch of cut-throat brigands as tribute but that was all bullshit made up by the Greek to enhance its value to whoever was fool enough to go for the story-and a fake bird and retailed by the Fat Man who was beginning to believe the story himself) and his offer of ten thou for its delivery. No go. Twenty-five thou. In (or seemingly in).   Joel was out as an independent agent once the Fat Man gave out that number so he tacitly decided that for now he would side with the Fat Man.     

All these monetary offers at that point were so much manure since Spade did not have the bird, not then anyway. That is where Brigid comes back into the picture. She had entrusted, if that is the right word, Captain Jacoby to deliver the bird to her in Frisco town. His ship was scheduled to come in the day that Spade was meeting the Fat Man. It did come in but somehow the Fat Man got wind of Jacoby’s arrival and sent the Kid to get the bird, or else. The Kid shot the place up and set fire to the ship but still no bird. As Joel found out later Jacoby, bleeding like a sieve after the Kid’s handiwork took effect had managed to contact Brigid and the bird was delivered to Sam’s office by the dying Jacoby. Another guy who went to the end of the road for Brigid. Yeah, Sam finally started big time to get the idea that this dame was dangerous.      

Everybody met at the Fat Man’s suite in the Fairmont for the final showdown. Sam had stashed the bird in a safe place until the negotiations were complete. They went back and forth for a bit but the Fat Man agreed to terms. Then things went awry, awry from Joel’s perspective. The bird as everybody knows now was a fake, the Fat man and Joel went berserk for a bit before they blew with the wind out of the place. That is when Sam called in the coppers. Called them in to sweep up the lot once he figured that Brigid had killed Miles Archer in order to have that killing laid off on Thursby. Yeah, dealing with her was like sealing with some slithering snake. Yeah, he sent her over, sent that pretty neck into a short noose. Fortunately cash had saved him and the Fat Man from that fate. Joel chuckled to himself “like hell would he let Sam Spade rest in peace.” Fuck that.       

When Be-Bop Be-Bopped The 1950s Night- Jerry Lee Lewis Or Elvis?

When Be-Bop Be-Bopped The 1950s Night- Jerry Lee Lewis Or Elvis?

Phil Larkin, Class of 1964, comment:

Jerry Lee Lewis or Elvis?

What is your choice? Here is mine.

DVD REVIEW

Last Man Standing, Jerry Lee Lewis in Concert, New York, 2006 
Elvis, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Bo Diddley. Yes those are the men who created Rock 'n' Roll, as we know it. However in that list do not forget one Jerry Lee Lewis. Fate dealt him an uneven hand due to the foibles of his personal life (the subject of a movie, Great Balls of Fire, with Dennis Quaid) but his form of rockabilly/boogie-woogie piano-driven music and madman presentation must be placed in the mix of influences that drove the best of early rock.

If for no other reason that that he is one of the few 'still standing' from that generation it was nice to see what "The Killer" could do in his 71st year in concert in New York City in 2006 with a host of guests some old, some young. Clearly off these performances he has lost a couple of steps. Hell the kind of energy that Jerry Lee produced in the 1950's definitely had a short shelf life. There are some nice clips from that period interspersed with the concert, by the way. Think about that opening scene in High School Confidential of 1958 where he is playing like a madman on the back of a flatbed truck as he heads toward the local high school. Whoa.

Despite the lost of energy here Jerry Lee can still give out on some tunes like in the old days. Take his duo with R&B master Solomon Burke on Who Will the Next Fool Be. How about Tom Jones on Green, Green Grass of Home. Or Norah Jones on Hank Williams' Your Cheating Heart. Or Jerry cover on Chuck Berry's Roll Over Beethoven. Or his classic Crazy Arms. And on and on. In fact the covers of his old material and some Hank Williams material highlight this concert. If you have a couple of hours better take advantage of it. Then you will know what it was like when men (and women) played rock and roll for keeps.

CD REVIEW

Last Man Standing, Jerry Lee Lewis and other artists, Shangri-la Records, 2006
The last time we heard the name Jerry Lee Lewis in this space (see above) was in connection with a rave review of his star-studded concert in New York City in 2006 also entitled The Last Man Standing. I was not aware at the time I wrote that review that there was a CD connected with the DVD (silly me). This CD also gets a rave review from these quarters. The last paragraph details some of the highlights of this CD. However, I can tell you right now to save your old eyes- get this thing. It is not the fire-balling of Jerry Lee's youth but virtually from start to finish it is some very nice work. If you need to go back to the Fifties and hear his original work there are plenty of his greatest compilations elsewhere (or on YouTube). Here are a couple of words on this one:

Apparently in putting together this album every musical artist who has ever been anything, ever wanted to be anything or who will be in the various musical Halls of Fame signed on to play with "The Killer". Let's make this clear though- Jerry Lee is in charge here- the other artists are basking off of his reflected glory. Ya, he is an old man and he has lost a step, and maybe he has not learned all of life's lessons but he still rocks & rolls, does rockabilly and can country rock with the best of them.

Highlights here concerning some of life's lessons that old Jerry Lee has learned, as reflected in some of the lyrics, are his duo with Willie Nelson on Couple More Years, his duo with Keith Richards on That Kind of Fool (a take-off on his old classic- Who Will The Next Fool Be) and his duo with Eric Clapton on Trouble In Mind. To show that he can still rock-listen to the duo with Kid Rock (yes, that Kid Rock of rapper fame) on Honky Tonk Woman. If you need to hear rockabilly and boogie-woogie then the classic Hadacol Boogie with Buddy Guy will keep you moving. Enough said, except the production values on this CD are very good, as well.
*************
Here Are Some Lyrics For Jerry Lee and Elvis So You Can Make An Informed Decision On These Burning Questions Of The Day.

High School Confidental lyrics-Jerry Lee Lewis

You better open up honey it's your lover boy me that's a knockin'
You better listen to me sugar all the cats are at the High School rockin'
Honey get your boppin' shoes Before the juke box blows a fuse
Got everbody hoppin' everybody boppin'
Boppin' at the High School Hop
Boppin' at the High School Hop
Shakin' at the High School Hop
I've rollin' at the High School Hop
I've been movin' at the High School Hop
Everybodys hoppin' Everybody's boppin'
Boppin' at the High School Hop
Come on little baby gonna rock a little bit tonight
Woooh I got get with you sugar gonna shake things up tonight
Check out the heart beatin' rhythm cause my feet are moving smooth and
Light
Boppin' at the High School Hop
Shakin' at the High School Hop
Rollin' at the High School Hop
Movin' at the High School Hop
Everybodys hoppin' just a boppin' just a boppin'
Piano Solo!
Come on little baby let me give a piece good news good news good news
Jerry Lee is going to rock away all his blues
My hearts beatin' rhythm and my soul is singin' the blues
Oooooh Boppin' at the High School Hop
Shakin' at the High School Hop
Rollin' at the High School Hop
Gettin' it at the High School Hop
Everybodys hoppin' Everybody's boppin'
Boppin' at the High School Hop

Hound Dog lyrics-Elvis Presley

You ain't nothin' but a hound dog
cryin' all the time.
You ain't nothin' but a hound dog
cryin' all the time.
Well, you ain't never caught a rabbit
and you ain't no friend of mine.

When they said you was high classed,
well, that was just a lie.
When they said you was high classed,
well, that was just a lie.
You ain't never caught a rabbit
and you ain't no friend of mine.

We Are In A Cold Civil War-Join The Anti-Fascist Resistance-For Labor/Black Action to Stop Fascists!

We Are In A Cold Civil War-Join The Anti-Fascist Resistance-For Labor/Black Action to Stop Fascists!

By Frank Jackman

Usually I place articles and announcement from various left-wing and progressive groupings that I do not necessarily agree with but think that the general radical-left liberal milieu might find of interest in a blog site dedicated to American Left History (and its complement cultural component) past and present. I have noted more than once that I usually do not comment on the views expressed and if I do have differences I can either write my own comments or if the differences are severe or reflect bad taste not post the item. Occasionally in the struggle against the ugly forces that have reared their heads in the age of Donald J. Trump, President of the United States and apparently nothing but a common criminal and maybe a sociopath, have felt the wind at their backs under his tenure I find some article or statement which I am in general agreement with and will as here take the time to express general if not total solidarity with the views expressed by others.  

The most important point made in the article belong which deals with an analysis and program to defeat the emergent serious extra-parliamentary right-wing threat is that we must learn the hard lessons of history on the question of stopping the fascist and fascistic elements in the egg. If that had been done in Germany at any point up to and including 1933 the history of the Western world could very well have taken a different trajectory and we would today probably not be faced with what looks like yet again a global right-wing counter-revolutionary movement baring its knuckles. Closer to home we have to nip the small but growing fascist threat which seemingly is turning the cold civil war we have been facing for a while now and which is getting more heated in the bud- and in the streets.

A second point to note is knowing what period we are in and who is and who is not going to benefit from the rise of the fascists (call them as they call themselves “the alt-right” it is the same damn thing that has been with us since post-World War I times). The rise of Trump was by parliamentary means-by regular bourgeois norms elections and does not represent a fascist take-over as some claim. The ruling class at this moment has not been defeated anyplace in the world militarily, at least where it would fatally hurt, as it did in Germany after their World War I defeat and that ruling class here is not now, and I emphasize not now, confronted by any militant mass left-wing movements that would threaten their power necessitating the need to go beyond their normal military/police forces to curb.   

As this cold civil war heats up there will be plenty of those in the opposition, on our side, who want to call on the government to stop the fascists, or better yet, call on the opposition party, the Democrats, to do something about the matter. Wrong. While we may unite with all who want to oppose the fascist threat on the streets, including democrats, to rely on the good offices of any establishment political organization to do our work for us is fool-hardy and in the end dangerous. We must rely centrally on our ability to gather masses of working people and the oppressed to stop these sewer rats. History shows no other way but a straight up fight to the finish or else these scumbags, excuse my vulgar usage but we are in a fierce fight and the niceties of everyday politics are not called for, will be further emboldened. Those who profess some “rational” and “reasoned” approach to deal with this life-threatening menace are doomed to the scrap heap.

Finally there is no room for being “liberal” in this fight. These fascists are not a literary/political club movement we can debate with or permit to spew their trash talk under the banner of “free speech.” Those who thought that approach might work in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and early 1930s either had to flee into exile or found themselves in some death camp. We can give no quarter here. Period. 

So yes, for once, on this issue of fighting the emerging fascist threat I stand in solidarity with the views expressed below with its sober analysis and program to fight the menace right now.  

********

Workers Vanguard No. 1110	21 April 2017

For Labor/Black Action to Stop Fascists!

Fascists Fueled by Trump Election

Hundreds of Jewish headstones desecrated. Women wearing the headscarf attacked on the streets. Two software engineers from India shot, one fatally, in Kansas in February by a Navy vet who howled, “Get out of my country.” A Sikh American shot in his driveway in Kent, Washington, last month by a masked white man screaming, “Go back to your own country.” Timothy Caughman, a 66-year-old black man, murdered on the streets of Manhattan on March 20 by a white-supremacist who had come to New York City from Baltimore with the express purpose of killing black men.

The race-terrorists have been emboldened by the campaign and victory of the right-wing demagogue Donald Trump, and are taking their cue from the unabashed racism and anti-immigrant vitriol emanating from the White House. The ultimate aim of the fascists, including those who congregate around the “alt-right,” is racial genocide and the destruction of workers organizations, including unions and the left.

The race-terrorists have played on the racist backlash against Barack Obama, America’s first black president. Obama’s eight years in office offered nothing to black and working people; the Democratic Party no less than the Republicans represents the very capitalist order that breeds fascism. During the Obama administration, conditions for black people and workers continued to worsen while cops wantonly gunned down black people on the streets. More industrial areas turned into rust bowls, while strongholds of union power continued their steep decline. Obama rigorously pursued U.S. imperialism’s war aims abroad, while ramping up the “war on terror” at home, which targets Muslims in particular. The fascist thugs feed off anger and frustration arising from economic devastation; they scapegoat black people, immigrants and minorities for the misery inflicted on the population by the capitalist rulers.

On April 15, when hundreds of “protesters” descended on downtown Berkeley for a pro-Trump rally, the fascists infesting the crowd made clear that they were out for blood. Chanting “Hitler did nothing wrong” and giving Nazi salutes, they viciously attacked antifa activists and leftists with clubs, flagpoles and knives. One viral video shows Nathan Damigo, head of the fascist group Identity Evropa, punching a woman in the face. Last June, in Sacramento, white-supremacists of the Traditionalist Workers Party and the Golden Gate Skinheads stabbed and slashed at least seven anti-fascists, sending them to the hospital. In Berkeley, anti-fascists were able to defend themselves from fascist violence but a number were injured.

Individual acts of courage are not enough to smash the fascist threat. What is needed are massive, integrated, disciplined mobilizations based on the social power of the multiracial working class. The workplace is the only real point of integration in American society, providing the potential basis for unity in struggle to defend working people and the oppressed. Black workers in particular can be the living link that unites the power of the working class with the anger of the ghettos.

The union movement has been flat on its back for many years under a misleadership that is committed to capitalism and has shackled the unions to the Democratic Party. A fight by militant unionists to organize labor/black power to crush the fascists can give the working class a taste of its social power. It is the fascists—not black people, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, leftists and others—who must be made to feel the sting of fear.

Who Are These Scum?

Today, many fascist groups in the “alt-right” claim that they are something different from the Klan and Nazis. They dress in “respectable” suits and ties and promote themselves as intellectuals. One of their leading voices is Richard Spencer, führer of the innocuously named National Policy Institute (NPI). When the NPI held a conference in Washington, D.C., shortly after Trump’s election, Spencer responded to the audience’s stiff-armed Nazi salutes by declaring: “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” (the latter a translation of the Nazi slogan “Sieg Heil”).

Allied with Spencer is Identity Evropa, which describes itself as an organization of “awakened Europeans” and requires that its members be of “European, non-Semitic heritage.” Its leader, Damigo, is a former Marine who was twice deployed to Iraq. After returning, he held up an immigrant taxi driver at gunpoint in San Diego in 2007, believing the man was Iraqi. While in prison for four years, he immersed himself in the writings of “former” Klansman David Duke. Before founding Identity Evropa in March 2016, Damigo—who describes black people as “inferior to whites, genetically”—was a leader of the now-defunct National Youth Front, the youth arm of the white-supremacist American Freedom Party.

Identity Evropa is currently waging a campaign, called “Project Siege,” to recruit from College Republicans. Its members have appeared at colleges and its posters and stickers have been spotted on campuses around the country. These posters consist of Greco-Roman images with slogans like, “Protect Your Heritage.” Their slick website serves as a portal for those who claim racial superiority and who deny the Holocaust. As part of their recruitment drive, Damigo, Spencer and others held a rally on 6 May 2016 at UC Berkeley, the former bastion of left-wing student protest.

Today, outfits like Identity Evropa, the Traditionalist Workers Party and others are still small. But they will strike with force, as seen in Sacramento and Berkeley. It is vital that they be crushed in the egg before they grow. Against those who call for bans on “hate speech” or who argue for “free speech” for fascists, we say that when these race-terrorists rear their heads they must be repulsed through mass protest. Fascism is not about speech or ideas; it is about racist terror. “Anti-extremism” bans, whether instituted by campus administrations or government forces, will always be used to silence leftists, anti-racists and minority activists.

Fascism in the U.S. is rooted in the defeat of the Confederacy by the Union Army in the Civil War, when 200,000 black soldiers and sailors played a key role in destroying slavery. The Klan and other race-terrorists came into being after that victory and bloodily suppressed the newly freed slaves. No less than the KKK, the fascist vermin in the “alt-right” represent a threat to the very right of black people to exist. They aim to reverse the verdict of the Civil War.

Prepare to Fight!

Unlike Germany in the 1930s, when the Nazis rose to power and went on to carry out the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, America’s capitalist rulers do not at this time feel the need to resort to fascism. The U.S. is not a defeated imperialist power, as Germany was after World War I, nor does the U.S. bourgeoisie currently face a challenge to its rule from the working class. The daily terror meted out by the cops against black people and minorities is today deemed sufficient to keep the oppressed in check. At the same time, the capitalist rulers hold the fascist shock troops in reserve, to be unleashed at times of social crisis in order to spike any prospect of revolutionary struggle by the working class.

The Trump administration is not fascist, but the fascists sure as hell have a lot of friends in high places. Trump appointed as his chief strategist Stephen Bannon, a well-known “white nationalist” who took over Breitbart News and turned it into “the platform of the alt-right,” as he boasted. Trump’s top counter-terrorism advisor, Sebastian Gorka, is reportedly a member of the Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian organization that harks back to the fascistic interwar dictatorship of Admiral Horthy—Gorka wore its medal at Trump’s inauguration ball. Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s senior advisors, joined Richard Spencer in organizing an anti-immigrant event at Duke University in 2007. He went on to work for notorious racist and defender of the Confederacy, Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general. One could go on.

Bolstered by their high-ranking friends, the fascists have put the left in their deadly sights. We of the Spartacist League were targeted earlier this year, when a fascist secretly videoed one of our comrades distributing Workers Vanguard at the D.C. inauguration protests. The fascist posted the video on YouTube and vowed to “infiltrate” our organization. In Berkeley, the fascists made it clear that they are targeting leftists by chanting “commies, off our street!” It is a matter of life and death for the left to fight for united-front actions, based on the power of the unions, to beat back the fascist threat. In such united fronts, every organization must be free to put forward its political program in the course of struggle. As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky put it: “March separately, but strike together!”

During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, much like today, the official racism of the White House encouraged the Klan and Nazis. When the fascists tried to hold rallies in major urban centers, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee initiated and organized labor/black mobilizations. From Washington, D.C., where the Klan threatened to stage an anti-immigrant provocation, to Chicago, where the Nazis took aim at a Gay Pride demonstration, and elsewhere, we succeeded in sparking protests of thousands to stop the fascists. At the core of these actions were contingents of determined workers from the multiracial unions standing at the head of the black poor, immigrants and all the intended victims of fascist terror.

These mobilizations required a constant political struggle—against the cops, courts and other forces of the capitalist state, as well as capitalist politicians. Fearing the specter of labor/black power, Democratic mayors and other officials preached “tolerance” and “peace.” They called diversionary rallies far from where the fascists intended to march while violence-baiting those who wanted to stop fascist violence. And time and again, they were joined by reformist leftists who promoted reliance on the Democrats. When, in October 1999, we issued a call to stop the Klan from marching in New York City, the International Socialist Organization refused to endorse and instead joined a diversion organized by the Democrats where they shared the platform with a Latino police association. It should be an elementary understanding for leftists that the cops are the enemy. Historically, the policeman and the Klansman have often been the same man.

What is needed is a fight to finish the Civil War through an American workers revolution that achieves the promise of black equality, the liberation of all the exploited and oppressed and puts the last nail in the coffin of the fascist killers. The labor/black mobilizations we initiated are a small example of the leadership and forces needed to build a party of our class in struggle against the capitalist enemy. In the face of the growing fascist menace, we must be prepared to mobilize.  

We Are In A Cold Civil War-Join The Anti-Fascist Resistance-For Labor/Black Action to Stop Fascists!

We Are In A Cold Civil War-Join The Anti-Fascist Resistance-For Labor/Black Action to Stop Fascists!

By Frank Jackman

Usually I place articles and announcement from various left-wing and progressive groupings that I do not necessarily agree with but think that the general radical-left liberal milieu might find of interest in a blog site dedicated to American Left History (and its complement cultural component) past and present. I have noted more than once that I usually do not comment on the views expressed and if I do have differences I can either write my own comments or if the differences are severe or reflect bad taste not post the item. Occasionally in the struggle against the ugly forces that have reared their heads in the age of Donald J. Trump, President of the United States and apparently nothing but a common criminal and maybe a sociopath, have felt the wind at their backs under his tenure I find some article or statement which I am in general agreement with and will as here take the time to express general if not total solidarity with the views expressed by others.  

The most important point made in the article belong which deals with an analysis and program to defeat the emergent serious extra-parliamentary right-wing threat is that we must learn the hard lessons of history on the question of stopping the fascist and fascistic elements in the egg. If that had been done in Germany at any point up to and including 1933 the history of the Western world could very well have taken a different trajectory and we would today probably not be faced with what looks like yet again a global right-wing counter-revolutionary movement baring its knuckles. Closer to home we have to nip the small but growing fascist threat which seemingly is turning the cold civil war we have been facing for a while now and which is getting more heated in the bud- and in the streets.

A second point to note is knowing what period we are in and who is and who is not going to benefit from the rise of the fascists (call them as they call themselves “the alt-right” it is the same damn thing that has been with us since post-World War I times). The rise of Trump was by parliamentary means-by regular bourgeois norms elections and does not represent a fascist take-over as some claim. The ruling class at this moment has not been defeated anyplace in the world militarily, at least where it would fatally hurt, as it did in Germany after their World War I defeat and that ruling class here is not now, and I emphasize not now, confronted by any militant mass left-wing movements that would threaten their power necessitating the need to go beyond their normal military/police forces to curb.   

As this cold civil war heats up there will be plenty of those in the opposition, on our side, who want to call on the government to stop the fascists, or better yet, call on the opposition party, the Democrats, to do something about the matter. Wrong. While we may unite with all who want to oppose the fascist threat on the streets, including democrats, to rely on the good offices of any establishment political organization to do our work for us is fool-hardy and in the end dangerous. We must rely centrally on our ability to gather masses of working people and the oppressed to stop these sewer rats. History shows no other way but a straight up fight to the finish or else these scumbags, excuse my vulgar usage but we are in a fierce fight and the niceties of everyday politics are not called for, will be further emboldened. Those who profess some “rational” and “reasoned” approach to deal with this life-threatening menace are doomed to the scrap heap.

Finally there is no room for being “liberal” in this fight. These fascists are not a literary/political club movement we can debate with or permit to spew their trash talk under the banner of “free speech.” Those who thought that approach might work in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and early 1930s either had to flee into exile or found themselves in some death camp. We can give no quarter here. Period. 

So yes, for once, on this issue of fighting the emerging fascist threat I stand in solidarity with the views expressed below with its sober analysis and program to fight the menace right now.  

********

Workers Vanguard No. 1110	21 April 2017

For Labor/Black Action to Stop Fascists!

Fascists Fueled by Trump Election

Hundreds of Jewish headstones desecrated. Women wearing the headscarf attacked on the streets. Two software engineers from India shot, one fatally, in Kansas in February by a Navy vet who howled, “Get out of my country.” A Sikh American shot in his driveway in Kent, Washington, last month by a masked white man screaming, “Go back to your own country.” Timothy Caughman, a 66-year-old black man, murdered on the streets of Manhattan on March 20 by a white-supremacist who had come to New York City from Baltimore with the express purpose of killing black men.

The race-terrorists have been emboldened by the campaign and victory of the right-wing demagogue Donald Trump, and are taking their cue from the unabashed racism and anti-immigrant vitriol emanating from the White House. The ultimate aim of the fascists, including those who congregate around the “alt-right,” is racial genocide and the destruction of workers organizations, including unions and the left.

The race-terrorists have played on the racist backlash against Barack Obama, America’s first black president. Obama’s eight years in office offered nothing to black and working people; the Democratic Party no less than the Republicans represents the very capitalist order that breeds fascism. During the Obama administration, conditions for black people and workers continued to worsen while cops wantonly gunned down black people on the streets. More industrial areas turned into rust bowls, while strongholds of union power continued their steep decline. Obama rigorously pursued U.S. imperialism’s war aims abroad, while ramping up the “war on terror” at home, which targets Muslims in particular. The fascist thugs feed off anger and frustration arising from economic devastation; they scapegoat black people, immigrants and minorities for the misery inflicted on the population by the capitalist rulers.

On April 15, when hundreds of “protesters” descended on downtown Berkeley for a pro-Trump rally, the fascists infesting the crowd made clear that they were out for blood. Chanting “Hitler did nothing wrong” and giving Nazi salutes, they viciously attacked antifa activists and leftists with clubs, flagpoles and knives. One viral video shows Nathan Damigo, head of the fascist group Identity Evropa, punching a woman in the face. Last June, in Sacramento, white-supremacists of the Traditionalist Workers Party and the Golden Gate Skinheads stabbed and slashed at least seven anti-fascists, sending them to the hospital. In Berkeley, anti-fascists were able to defend themselves from fascist violence but a number were injured.

Individual acts of courage are not enough to smash the fascist threat. What is needed are massive, integrated, disciplined mobilizations based on the social power of the multiracial working class. The workplace is the only real point of integration in American society, providing the potential basis for unity in struggle to defend working people and the oppressed. Black workers in particular can be the living link that unites the power of the working class with the anger of the ghettos.

The union movement has been flat on its back for many years under a misleadership that is committed to capitalism and has shackled the unions to the Democratic Party. A fight by militant unionists to organize labor/black power to crush the fascists can give the working class a taste of its social power. It is the fascists—not black people, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, leftists and others—who must be made to feel the sting of fear.

Who Are These Scum?

Today, many fascist groups in the “alt-right” claim that they are something different from the Klan and Nazis. They dress in “respectable” suits and ties and promote themselves as intellectuals. One of their leading voices is Richard Spencer, führer of the innocuously named National Policy Institute (NPI). When the NPI held a conference in Washington, D.C., shortly after Trump’s election, Spencer responded to the audience’s stiff-armed Nazi salutes by declaring: “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” (the latter a translation of the Nazi slogan “Sieg Heil”).

Allied with Spencer is Identity Evropa, which describes itself as an organization of “awakened Europeans” and requires that its members be of “European, non-Semitic heritage.” Its leader, Damigo, is a former Marine who was twice deployed to Iraq. After returning, he held up an immigrant taxi driver at gunpoint in San Diego in 2007, believing the man was Iraqi. While in prison for four years, he immersed himself in the writings of “former” Klansman David Duke. Before founding Identity Evropa in March 2016, Damigo—who describes black people as “inferior to whites, genetically”—was a leader of the now-defunct National Youth Front, the youth arm of the white-supremacist American Freedom Party.

Identity Evropa is currently waging a campaign, called “Project Siege,” to recruit from College Republicans. Its members have appeared at colleges and its posters and stickers have been spotted on campuses around the country. These posters consist of Greco-Roman images with slogans like, “Protect Your Heritage.” Their slick website serves as a portal for those who claim racial superiority and who deny the Holocaust. As part of their recruitment drive, Damigo, Spencer and others held a rally on 6 May 2016 at UC Berkeley, the former bastion of left-wing student protest.

Today, outfits like Identity Evropa, the Traditionalist Workers Party and others are still small. But they will strike with force, as seen in Sacramento and Berkeley. It is vital that they be crushed in the egg before they grow. Against those who call for bans on “hate speech” or who argue for “free speech” for fascists, we say that when these race-terrorists rear their heads they must be repulsed through mass protest. Fascism is not about speech or ideas; it is about racist terror. “Anti-extremism” bans, whether instituted by campus administrations or government forces, will always be used to silence leftists, anti-racists and minority activists.

Fascism in the U.S. is rooted in the defeat of the Confederacy by the Union Army in the Civil War, when 200,000 black soldiers and sailors played a key role in destroying slavery. The Klan and other race-terrorists came into being after that victory and bloodily suppressed the newly freed slaves. No less than the KKK, the fascist vermin in the “alt-right” represent a threat to the very right of black people to exist. They aim to reverse the verdict of the Civil War.

Prepare to Fight!

Unlike Germany in the 1930s, when the Nazis rose to power and went on to carry out the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, America’s capitalist rulers do not at this time feel the need to resort to fascism. The U.S. is not a defeated imperialist power, as Germany was after World War I, nor does the U.S. bourgeoisie currently face a challenge to its rule from the working class. The daily terror meted out by the cops against black people and minorities is today deemed sufficient to keep the oppressed in check. At the same time, the capitalist rulers hold the fascist shock troops in reserve, to be unleashed at times of social crisis in order to spike any prospect of revolutionary struggle by the working class.

The Trump administration is not fascist, but the fascists sure as hell have a lot of friends in high places. Trump appointed as his chief strategist Stephen Bannon, a well-known “white nationalist” who took over Breitbart News and turned it into “the platform of the alt-right,” as he boasted. Trump’s top counter-terrorism advisor, Sebastian Gorka, is reportedly a member of the Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian organization that harks back to the fascistic interwar dictatorship of Admiral Horthy—Gorka wore its medal at Trump’s inauguration ball. Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s senior advisors, joined Richard Spencer in organizing an anti-immigrant event at Duke University in 2007. He went on to work for notorious racist and defender of the Confederacy, Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general. One could go on.

Bolstered by their high-ranking friends, the fascists have put the left in their deadly sights. We of the Spartacist League were targeted earlier this year, when a fascist secretly videoed one of our comrades distributing Workers Vanguard at the D.C. inauguration protests. The fascist posted the video on YouTube and vowed to “infiltrate” our organization. In Berkeley, the fascists made it clear that they are targeting leftists by chanting “commies, off our street!” It is a matter of life and death for the left to fight for united-front actions, based on the power of the unions, to beat back the fascist threat. In such united fronts, every organization must be free to put forward its political program in the course of struggle. As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky put it: “March separately, but strike together!”

During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, much like today, the official racism of the White House encouraged the Klan and Nazis. When the fascists tried to hold rallies in major urban centers, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee initiated and organized labor/black mobilizations. From Washington, D.C., where the Klan threatened to stage an anti-immigrant provocation, to Chicago, where the Nazis took aim at a Gay Pride demonstration, and elsewhere, we succeeded in sparking protests of thousands to stop the fascists. At the core of these actions were contingents of determined workers from the multiracial unions standing at the head of the black poor, immigrants and all the intended victims of fascist terror.

These mobilizations required a constant political struggle—against the cops, courts and other forces of the capitalist state, as well as capitalist politicians. Fearing the specter of labor/black power, Democratic mayors and other officials preached “tolerance” and “peace.” They called diversionary rallies far from where the fascists intended to march while violence-baiting those who wanted to stop fascist violence. And time and again, they were joined by reformist leftists who promoted reliance on the Democrats. When, in October 1999, we issued a call to stop the Klan from marching in New York City, the International Socialist Organization refused to endorse and instead joined a diversion organized by the Democrats where they shared the platform with a Latino police association. It should be an elementary understanding for leftists that the cops are the enemy. Historically, the policeman and the Klansman have often been the same man.

What is needed is a fight to finish the Civil War through an American workers revolution that achieves the promise of black equality, the liberation of all the exploited and oppressed and puts the last nail in the coffin of the fascist killers. The labor/black mobilizations we initiated are a small example of the leadership and forces needed to build a party of our class in struggle against the capitalist enemy. In the face of the growing fascist menace, we must be prepared to mobilize.  

From the Archives of Marxism-Friedrich Engels' “From the Kingdom of Necessity to the Kingdom of Freedom”

Workers Vanguard No. 1096	23 September 2016

From the Archives of Marxism-Friedrich Engels' “From the Kingdom of Necessity to the Kingdom of Freedom”

We publish below excerpts from Friedrich Engels’ 1880 work Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. In explaining scientific socialism, Engels makes clear that only through the conquest of power by the working class and the expropriation of the capitalist class can the benefits of science, technology and education be available to all, laying the material basis for the full liberation of humanity. The excerpts below are taken from the Marx and Engels Selected Works (Progress Publishers, 1976).

The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become unreason and right wrong, is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have silently taken place with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented by deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in the stubborn facts of the existing system of production.

What is, then, the position of modern socialism in this connection?

The present structure of society—this is now pretty generally conceded—is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie. The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, known, since Marx, as the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the feudal system, with the privileges it conferred upon individuals, entire social ranks and local corporations, as well as with the hereditary ties of subordination which constituted the framework of its social organisation. The bourgeoisie broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of society, the kingdom of free competition, of personal liberty, of the equality, before the law, of all commodity owners, of all the rest of the capitalist blessings. Thenceforward the capitalist mode of production could develop in freedom. Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines by machinery transformed the older manufacture into modern industry, the productive forces evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie developed with a rapidity and in degree unheard of before. But just as the older manufacture, in its time, and handicraft, becoming more developed under its influence, had come into collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in its more complete development, comes into collision with the bounds within which the capitalistic mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of the men that have brought it on. Modern socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class....

The perfecting of machinery is making human labour superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage-workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845, available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead weight upon the limbs of the working class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for the keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital. Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class; that the instruments of labour constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the labourer; that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation. Thus it comes about that the economising of the instruments of labour becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labour power, and robbery based upon the normal conditions under which labour functions; that machinery, the most powerful instrument for shortening labour time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time and that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital. Thus it comes about that the overwork of some becomes the preliminary condition for the idleness of others, and that modern industry, which hunts after new consumers over the whole world, forces the consumption of the masses at home down to a starvation minimum, and in doing thus destroys its own home market. “The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time, accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.” (Marx’s Capital, p. 671)....

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers—proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.

This solution can only consist in the practical recognition of the social nature of the modern forces of production, and therefore in the harmonising of the modes of production, appropriation, and exchange with the socialised character of the means of production. And this can only come about by society openly and directly taking possession of the productive forces which have outgrown all control except that of society as a whole. The social character of the means of production and of the products today reacts against the producers, periodically disrupts all production and exchange, acts only like a law of Nature working blindly, forcibly, destructively. But with the taking over by society of the productive forces, the social character of the means of production and of the products will be utilised by the producers with a perfect understanding of its nature, and instead of being a source of disturbance and periodical collapse, will become the most powerful lever of production itself....

Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, the appropriation by society of all the means of production has often been dreamed of, more or less vaguely, by individuals, as well as by sects, as the ideal of the future. But it could become possible, could become a historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realisation were there. Like every other social advance, it becomes practicable, not by men understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice, equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by virtue of certain new economic conditions. The separation of society into an exploiting and an exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed class, was the necessary consequence of the deficient and restricted development of production in former times....

Division into classes has a certain historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only under given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production. It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces. And, in fact, the abolition of classes in society presupposes a degree of historical evolution at which the existence, not simply of this or that particular ruling class, but of any ruling class at all, and, therefore, the existence of class distinction itself has become an obsolete anachronism. It presupposes, therefore, the development of production carried out to a degree at which appropriation of the means of production and of the products, and, with this, of political domination, of the monopoly of culture, and of intellectual leadership by a particular class of society, has become not only superfluous but economically, politically, intellectually, a hindrance to development.

This point is now reached. Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless, face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them. Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself. Nor is this all. The socialised appropriation of the means of production does away, not only with the present artificial restrictions upon production, but also with the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products that are at the present time the inevitable concomitants of production, and that reach their height in the crises. Further, it sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and of products, by doing away with the senseless extravagance of the ruling classes of today and their political representatives. The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialised production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties—this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here.

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of Nature, because he has now become master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history—only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom....

To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.