In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Free The Ohio 7's Jaan Laaman!

In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Free The Ohio 7's Jaan Laaman!



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaan_Laaman



A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment

In “surfing” the “National Jericho Movement” Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a “The Rag Blog” post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matter here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!

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

Thursday, January 31, 2008
*Free The Last of the Ohio Seven-They Must Not Die In Jail

Click on title to link to the Partisan Defense Committee (an organization whose goals I support) to learn more about the Manning and Laaman cases(and other political prisoners supported by the organization)

COMMENTARY

ONE OF THE OHIO SEVEN -RICHARD WILLIAMS- RECENTLY DIED IN PRISON (2006). THAT LEAVES JAAN LAAMAN AND TOM MANNING STILL IN PRISON. IT IS AN URGENT DUTY FOR THE INTERNATIONAL LABOR MOVEMENT AND OTHERS TO RAISE THE CALL FOR THEIR FREEDOM. FREE ALL CLASS WAR PRISONERS.

I have added a link to Tom Manning's site that can provide a link to Jaan Laaman's site. For convenience I have labelled this link the Ohio Seven Defense Committee site. Free the last of the Seven. Below is a commentary written in 2006 arguing for their freedom.

Below is a repost of a commentary I made in 2007 to support of freedom for the last of the Ohio Seven

The Ohio Seven, like many other subjective revolutionaries, coming out of the turbulent anti-Vietnam War and anti-imperialist movements, were committed to social change. The different is that this organization included mainly working class militants, some of whose political consciousness was formed by participation as soldiers in the Vietnam War itself. Various members were convicted for carrying out robberies, apparently to raise money for their struggles, and bombings of imperialist targets. Without going into their particular personal and political biographies I note that these were the kind of subjective revolutionaries that must be recruited to a working class vanguard party if there ever is to be a chance of bringing off a socialist revolution. In the absence of a viable revolutionary labor party in the 1970’s and 1980’s the politics of the Ohio Seven, like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, were borne of despair at the immensity of the task and also by desperation to do something concrete in aid of the Vietnamese Revolution and other Third World struggles . Their actions in trying to open up a second front militarily in the United States in aid of Third World struggles without a mass base proved to be mistaken but, as the Partisan Defense Committee which I support has noted, their actions were no crime in the eyes of the international working class.

The lack of a revolutionary vanguard to attract such working class elements away from adventurism is rendered even more tragic in the case of the Ohio Seven. Leon Trotsky, a leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution of 1917, noted in a political obituary for his fallen comrade and fellow Left Oppositionist Kote Tsintadze that the West has not produced such fighters as Kote. Kote, who went through all the phases of struggle for the Russian Revolution, including imprisonment and exile under both the Czar and Stalin benefited from solidarity in a mass revolutionary vanguard party to sustain him through the hard times. What a revolutionary party could have done with the evident capacity and continuing commitment of subjective revolutionaries like the Ohio Seven poses that question point blank. This is the central problem and task of cadre development in the West in resolving the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

Finally, I would like to note that except for the Partisan Defense Committee and their own defense organizations – the Ohio 7 Defense Committee and the Jaan Laaman Defense Fund- the Ohio Seven have long ago been abandoned by those New Left elements and others, who as noted, at one time had very similar politics. At least part of this can be attributed to the rightward drift to liberal pacifist politics by many of them, but some must be attributed to class. Although the Ohio Seven were not our people- they are our people. All honor to them. As James P Cannon, a founding leader of the International Labor Defense, forerunner of the Partisan Defense Committee, pointed out long ago –Solidarity with class war prisoners is not charity- it is a duty. Their fight is our fight! LET US DO OUR DUTY HERE. RAISE THE CALL FOR THE FREEDOM OF LAAMAN AND MANNING. MAKE MOTIONS OF SOLIDARITY IN YOUR POLITICAL ORGANIZATION, SCHOOL OR UNION.

YOU CAN GOOGLE THE ORGANIZATIONS MENTIONED ABOVE- THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE OHIO 7 DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE JAAN LAAMAN DEFENSE FUND.



*Once Again, Free Laaman And Manning- The Last Of The Ohio Seven In Jail- An Update



http://nightslantern.ca/prison/seven.htm

Link above to a little off-hand information about the Ohio 7.

Markin comment:

Needless to say, the organization that I support, the Partisan Defense Committee, has over the years supported the last two imprisoned members of the group, Jan Laaman and Tom Manning, in their struggles for freedom. While we spent time on this site recording and remembering various events from our youth, the 1960s, we should not forget those who are behind the walls of the class enemy. I will repeat what I have mentioned on previous occasions, and the PDC has as well in their publicity on the case; the Ohio did nothing that can be considered a crime by the international working class movement. Moreover, the roll call of crimes, great and small, from war to torture by the American imperial state in that time since Vietnam remain to be opposed, including today's Obamian war policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Free Laaman and Manning- Do Not Let Them Die In Prison!

LAAMAN, JAAN KARL

A View From The Left-An Appreciation of Chuck Berry-By Ruth Ryan

A View From The Left-An Appreciation of Chuck Berry-By Ruth Ryan

Workers Vanguard No. 1112	19 May 2017

An Appreciation of Chuck Berry

(Letter)

23 April 2017

To Workers Vanguard,

Chuck Berry (1926-2017) was very nearly the last of the black pioneers of rock’n roll from the 1940s and 50s including Little Richard, Ike Turner, Howlin Wolf and more, who lived, performed and innovated from the time of Jim Crow segregation and lynch law until well into the 21st Century. Chuck’s parents and grandparents on both sides knew their slave-born ancestors and passed on to him their names, relationships and stories.

Like others before him, Chuck bucked his Baptist parents’ opposition to play “the devil’s music”. Consigned to the category of “race music”, he and his fellow rockers were exploited by promoters and recording companies, cheated of the rights to their songs, and later saw their songs covered with far greater commercial success by admiring white American performers and British invaders (Roll Over Beethoven, Sweet Little Sixteen). John Lennon was quoted as saying, “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry.’”

Unable to make a living from their recordings, these musicians toured at an exhausting pace, staying in segregated accommodations and playing to segregated audiences. Where there were no hotels for blacks, they slept in their cars and ducked the police. They were virulently hated by politicians and law enforcement when white kids, especially white girls, began to literally dance across the color line, touching the explosive intersection of sex and race under capitalism. From Billie Holiday to Ray Charles, black musicians were targeted for beatings, confiscation of earnings, arrest and imprisonment, typically for sex, drugs and taxes. Chuck was hounded under the Mann Act, once for travelling with a married 17-year old and once with a teen prostitute. He was imprisoned for tax evasion (i.e., failure to set aside money to pay outrageously regressive self-employment taxes).

Chuck built on previous musical advances, including those of Johnny Johnson, T-Bone Walker and Bob Wills, melding blues and country swing with his own style. He was a vivid story teller of the poor man’s experience (Nadine, No Money Down, Memphis Tennessee). He combined his slyly provocative lyrics, signature duck walk and a hard-driving rhythm, “the backbeat, you can’t lose it”. He made the crossover to biracial and teenage audiences, shedding his exploitive managers, signing with Chess Records, and getting a grip on the rights to his songs.

Chuck was prominent among the musicians who boldly broke the color line in performance venues. He was unapologetic, and an icon for the 1960s generation who rebelled against the strictures of family and religion, imperialist war and racial oppression. The Freedom Riders, those who sat in at lunch counters, those who marched against the Vietnam War grew up on his music, knew his songs and his story. The life and hard times of Chuck Berry exemplified the fact that there is no original American music or culture without black music and culture. Beating all odds, Chuck Berry died in bed at his home at the age of 90.

Ruth Ryan

Before The Deluge-Robin Williams’ Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)-A Film Review

Before The Deluge-Robin Williams’ Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell,

Good Morning, Vietnam, starring Robin Williams, Forrest Whittaker, 1987   

Frankly before I first saw Robin Williams in Good Moring, Vietnam I was not particularly a fan of his, didn’t see what all the uproar was about as he gained a widespread audience based, I think, on his uncanny ability to improvise as he went along which showed up on the screen when the deal went down. After watching Williams’ go through his paces in the tragi-comic film (we will get to the tragic part in a second) though and learning as well that he had improvised many of the signature radio broadcasts which dot the film I found myself laughing like crazy. Laughing like crazy almost as much the second time around even though I knew where the thing was going. With Forrest Whittaker playing the straight man Private Eddie Garlick to Williams’ zany radio personality character Adrian Cronauer the thing worked like a charm. That was the funny part, the part that a 1987 audience I think would be happy to see.

Now to the tragic part, the part that Adrian got himself dragged into by his friendship with a young Vietnamese man whom he was trying to get close to so that he could in turn get close to his beautiful sister. As it turned out, not surprisingly, with what we later painfully found out after a decade of in your face war was that the young man was a Vietnamese patriot meaning a National Liberation Front fighter, an “enemy” who used Adrian as cover for his actions against the then beginning to burgeon American military presence in Vietnam which would not end until those graphic scenes of helicopters taking fleeing Vietnamese and Americans off of the American Embassy in April 1975. But in 1965 all was fresh so to speak as even the wary GIs heading to the boondocks and other tough spots who Adrian was gathering around his broadcasts could laugh a little when he did his magic. A kind of age of innocence before the deluge. Nice juxtapositions. Nice work Robin Williams whatever else was eating you inside. Watch this one.               

    

A 'Gonzo' Bibliography- The Works Of Hunter S. Thompson At A Glance

 A 'Gonzo' Bibliography- The Works Of Hunter S. Thompson At A Glance



Click on title to link to something like a complete list of works (as of 2009) of the late Hunter S. Thompson.

Zack James’ comment June, 2017:

Sometimes you just have to follow the bouncing ball like in those old time sing along cartoons they used to have back in say the 1950s,the time I remember them from, on Saturday afternoon matinees at the old now long gone Stand Theater in my growing up town of North Adamsville. Follow me for a minute here I won’t be long. Earlier this spring my oldest brother, Alex, took attended a conference in San Francisco which he has done periodically for years. While there he noticed an advertisement on a bus for something called the Summer of Love Experience at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. That ad immediately caught his attention he had been out there that year and had participated in those events at the urging of his friend Peter Paul Markin who was something of a holy goof (a Jack Kerouac term of art), a low rent prophet, and a street criminal all in one. When Alex got back to the East after having attended the exhibition he got in contact with me to help him, and the still standing corner boys who also had gone out West at Markin’s urging to put together a tribute booklet honoring Markin and the whole experience.

After completing that project, or maybe while completing it I kept on thinking about the late Hunter S. Thompson who at one time was the driving force behind gonzo journalism and had before his suicide about a decade ago been something of a muse to me. At first my thoughts were about how Thompson would have taken the exhibition at the de Young since a lot of what he wrote about in the 1960s and 1970s was where the various counter-cultural trends were, or were not, going. But then as the current national political situation in America in the Trump Age has turned to crap, to craziness and straight out weirdness I began to think about how Thompson would have handled the 24/7/365 craziness these days since he had been an unremitting searing critic of another President of the United States who also had low-life instincts, one Richard Milhous Nixon.

The intertwining of the two stands came to head recently over the fired FBI director James Comey hearings where he essentially said that the emperor had no clothes. So I have been inserting various Thompson-like comments in an occasional series I am running in various on-line publications-Even The President Of The United States Sometimes Must Have To Stand Naked-Tales From The White House Bunker. And will continue to overlap the two-Summer of Love and Age of Trump for as long as it seems relevant. So there you are caught up. Ifs not then I have included hopefully for the last time the latest cross-over Thompson idea.           

************      

Zack James comment, Summer of 2017                

Maybe it says something about the times we live in, or maybe in this instance happenstance or, hell maybe something in the water but certain things sort of dovetail every now and again. I initially started this commentary segment after having written a longest piece for my brother and his friends as part of a small tribute booklet they were putting together about my and their takes on the Summer of Love, 1967. That event that my brother, Alex, had been knee deep in had always interested me from afar since I was way too young to have appreciated what was happening in San Francisco in those Wild West days. What got him motivated to do the booklet had been an exhibit at the de Young Art Museum in Golden Gate Park where they were celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the events of that summer with a look at the music, fashion, photography and exquisite poster art which was created then just as vivid advertising for concerts and “happenings” but which now is legitimate artful expression.

That project subsequently got me started thinking about the late Hunter Thompson, Doctor Gonzo, the driving force behind a new way of looking at and presenting journalism which was really much closer to the nub of what real reporting was about. Initially I was interested in some of Thompson’s reportage on what was what in San Francisco as he touched the elbows of those times having spent a fair amount of time working on his seminal book on the Hell’s Angels while all hell was breaking out in Frisco town. Delved into with all hands and legs the high points and the low, the ebb which he located somewhere between the Chicago Democratic Convention fiasco of the summer of 1968 and the hellish Rollins Stones Altamont concert of 1969.     

Here is what is important today though, about how the dots get connected out of seemingly random occurrences. Hunter Thompson also made his mark as a searing no holds barred mano y mano reporter of the rise and fall, of the worthy demise of one Richard Milhous Nixon at one time President of the United States and a common low-life criminal of ill-repute. Needless to say today, the summer of 2107, in the age of one Donald Trump, another President of the United States and common low-life criminal begs the obvious question of what the sorely missed Doctor Gonzo would have made of the whole process of the self-destruction of another American presidency, or a damn good run at self-destruction. So today and maybe occasionally in the future there will be some intertwining of commentary about events fifty years ago and today. Below to catch readers up to speed is the most recent “homage” to Hunter Thompson. And you too I hope will ask the pertinent question. Hunter where are you when we need, desperately need, you.       

*******

Zack James comment, Summer of 2017 

You know it is in a way too bad that “Doctor Gonzo”-Hunter S Thompson, the late legendary journalist who broke the back, hell broke the neck, legs, arms of so-called objective journalism in a drug-blazed frenzy back in the 1970s when he “walked with the king”’ is not with us in these times. (Walking with the king not about walking with any king or Doctor King but being so high on drugs, your choice, that commin clay experiences fall by the way side. In the times of this 50^th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he worked the edges of while he was doing research (live and in your face research by the way) on the notorious West Coast-based Hell’s Angels. His “hook” through Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down in Kesey’s place in La Honda where many an “acid test” took place, where many walked with the king, if you prefer, and where for a time the Angels, Hunter in tow, were welcomed. He had been there in the high tide, when it looked like we had the night-takers on the run and later as well when he saw the ebb tide of the 1960s coming a year or so later although that did not stop him from developing the quintessential “gonzo” journalism fine-tuned with plenty of dope for which he would become famous before the end, before he took his aging life and left Johnny Depp and company to fling his ashes over this good green planet. He would have “dug” the exhibition, maybe smoked a joint for old times’ sake (oh no, no that is not done in proper society, in high art society these days) at the de Young Museum at the Golden Gate Park highlighting the events of the period showing until August 20^th of this year.   

Better yet he would have had this Trump thug bizarre weirdness wrapped up and bleeding from all pores just like he regaled us with the tales from the White House bunker back in the days when Trump’s kindred one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal was running the same low rent trip before he was run out of town by his own like some rabid rat. He would have gone crazy seeing all the crew deserting the sinking U.S.S. Trump with guys like fired FBI Director Comey going to Capitol Hill and saying out loud the emperor has no clothes and would not know the truth if it grabbed him by the throat. Every day would be a feast day. But perhaps the road to truth these days, in the days of “alternate facts” and assorted other bullshit would have been bumpier than in those more “civilized” times when simple burglaries and silly tape-recorders ruled the roost. Hunter did not make the Nixon “hit list” (to his everlasting regret for which he could hardly hold his head up in public) but these days he surely would find himself in the top echelon. Maybe too though with these thugs who like their forbears would stop at nothing he might have found himself in some back alley bleeding from all pores. Hunter Thompson wherever you are –help. Selah. Enough said-for now  

Markin comment:

Anytime you need to read something funny about late 20th-early 21st century American bourgeois politics and culture grab some Hunter. He got me through many a tough night. He, and his savage wit, are missed by this writer, for sure.

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love- BETTER THAN SEX-NOT! Hunter Thompson Toward The End

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love- BETTER THAN SEX-NOT! Hunter Thompson Toward The End  

Zack James’ comment June, 2017:

Sometimes you just have to follow the bouncing ball like in those old time sing along cartoons they used to have back in say the 1950s,the time I remember them from, on Saturday afternoon matinees at the old now long gone Stand Theater in my growing up town of North Adamsville. Follow me for a minute here I won’t be long. Earlier this spring my oldest brother, Alex, took attended a conference in San Francisco which he has done periodically for years. While there he noticed an advertisement on a bus for something called the Summer of Love Experience at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. That ad immediately caught his attention he had been out there that year and had participated in those events at the urging of his friend Peter Paul Markin who was something of a holy goof (a Jack Kerouac term of art), a low rent prophet, and a street criminal all in one. When Alex got back to the East after having attended the exhibition he got in contact with me to help him, and the still standing corner boys who also had gone out West at Markin’s urging to put together a tribute booklet honoring Markin and the whole experience.

After completing that project, or maybe while completing it I kept on thinking about the late Hunter S. Thompson who at one time was the driving force behind gonzo journalism and had before his suicide about a decade ago been something of a muse to me. At first my thoughts were about how Thompson would have taken the exhibition at the de Young since a lot of what he wrote about in the 1960s and 1970s was where the various counter-cultural trends were, or were not, going. But then as the current national political situation in America in the Trump Age has turned to crap, to craziness and straight out weirdness I began to think about how Thompson would have handled the 24/7/365 craziness these days since he had been an unremitting searing critic of another President of the United States who also had low-life instincts, one Richard Milhous Nixon.

The intertwining of the two stands came to head recently over the fired FBI director James Comey hearings where he essentially said that the emperor had no clothes. So I have been inserting various Thompson-like comments in an occasional series I am running in various on-line publications-Even The President Of The United States Sometimes Must Have To Stand Naked-Tales From The White House Bunker. And will continue to overlap the two-Summer of Love and Age of Trump for as long as it seems relevant. So there you are caught up. Ifs not then I have included hopefully for the last time the latest cross-over Thompson idea.           

************      

Zack James comment, Summer of 2017                

Maybe it says something about the times we live in, or maybe in this instance happenstance or, hell maybe something in the water but certain things sort of dovetail every now and again. I initially started this commentary segment after having written a longest piece for my brother and his friends as part of a small tribute booklet they were putting together about my and their takes on the Summer of Love, 1967. That event that my brother, Alex, had been knee deep in had always interested me from afar since I was way too young to have appreciated what was happening in San Francisco in those Wild West days. What got him motivated to do the booklet had been an exhibit at the de Young Art Museum in Golden Gate Park where they were celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the events of that summer with a look at the music, fashion, photography and exquisite poster art which was created then just as vivid advertising for concerts and “happenings” but which now is legitimate artful expression.

That project subsequently got me started thinking about the late Hunter Thompson, Doctor Gonzo, the driving force behind a new way of looking at and presenting journalism which was really much closer to the nub of what real reporting was about. Initially I was interested in some of Thompson’s reportage on what was what in San Francisco as he touched the elbows of those times having spent a fair amount of time working on his seminal book on the Hell’s Angels while all hell was breaking out in Frisco town. Delved into with all hands and legs the high points and the low, the ebb which he located somewhere between the Chicago Democratic Convention fiasco of the summer of 1968 and the hellish Rollins Stones Altamont concert of 1969.     

Here is what is important today though, about how the dots get connected out of seemingly random occurrences. Hunter Thompson also made his mark as a searing no holds barred mano y mano reporter of the rise and fall, of the worthy demise of one Richard Milhous Nixon at one time President of the United States and a common low-life criminal of ill-repute. Needless to say today, the summer of 2107, in the age of one Donald Trump, another President of the United States and common low-life criminal begs the obvious question of what the sorely missed Doctor Gonzo would have made of the whole process of the self-destruction of another American presidency, or a damn good run at self-destruction. So today and maybe occasionally in the future there will be some intertwining of commentary about events fifty years ago and today. Below to catch readers up to speed is the most recent “homage” to Hunter Thompson. And you too I hope will ask the pertinent question. Hunter where are you when we need, desperately need, you.       

*******

Zack James comment, Summer of 2017 

You know it is in a way too bad that “Doctor Gonzo”-Hunter S Thompson, the late legendary journalist who broke the back, hell broke the neck, legs, arms of so-called objective journalism in a drug-blazed frenzy back in the 1970s when he “walked with the king”’ is not with us in these times. (Walking with the king not about walking with any king or Doctor King but being so high on drugs, your choice, that commin clay experiences fall by the way side. In the times of this 50^th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he worked the edges of while he was doing research (live and in your face research by the way) on the notorious West Coast-based Hell’s Angels. His “hook” through Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down in Kesey’s place in La Honda where many an “acid test” took place, where many walked with the king, if you prefer, and where for a time the Angels, Hunter in tow, were welcomed. He had been there in the high tide, when it looked like we had the night-takers on the run and later as well when he saw the ebb tide of the 1960s coming a year or so later although that did not stop him from developing the quintessential “gonzo” journalism fine-tuned with plenty of dope for which he would become famous before the end, before he took his aging life and left Johnny Depp and company to fling his ashes over this good green planet. He would have “dug” the exhibition, maybe smoked a joint for old times’ sake (oh no, no that is not done in proper society, in high art society these days) at the de Young Museum at the Golden Gate Park highlighting the events of the period showing until August 20^th of this year.   

Better yet he would have had this Trump thug bizarre weirdness wrapped up and bleeding from all pores just like he regaled us with the tales from the White House bunker back in the days when Trump’s kindred one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal was running the same low rent trip before he was run out of town by his own like some rabid rat. He would have gone crazy seeing all the crew deserting the sinking U.S.S. Trump with guys like fired FBI Director Comey going to Capitol Hill and saying out loud the emperor has no clothes and would not know the truth if it grabbed him by the throat. Every day would be a feast day. But perhaps the road to truth these days, in the days of “alternate facts” and assorted other bullshit would have been bumpier than in those more “civilized” times when simple burglaries and silly tape-recorders ruled the roost. Hunter did not make the Nixon “hit list” (to his everlasting regret for which he could hardly hold his head up in public) but these days he surely would find himself in the top echelon. Maybe too though with these thugs who like their forbears would stop at nothing he might have found himself in some back alley bleeding from all pores. Hunter Thompson wherever you are –help. Selah. Enough said-for now  

BOOK REVIEW

BETTER THAN SEX, HUNTER S. THOMPSON, BALLANTINE BOOKS, NEW YORK, 1994

Know this. The late Hunter Thompson, Doctor Gonzo, was something of a muse for me although our politics, in the final analysis, were light years apart. In the end he never found a Democratic Party presidential candidate that he, even if grudgingly, could not support. I have read everything of his that I could get my hands on. During many a troubled time when I got down on the seemingly hopeless struggle in the fight for socialism his savage humor aimed at the inanities of bourgeois politics and politicians carried me through. That said, the book under review Better Than Sex about the trials and tribulations of covering the ill-starred 1992 presidential campaign eventually ‘won’ by Bill Clinton is not one of his better efforts and even with his vast journalistic skills must have been a chore rather than something to really dig into. I will tell you my take on the matter.

Hunter Thompson started making a name for himself as a political journalist in his first efforts at trying to understand presidential campaigns during the ill-fated Democratic campaign of George McGovern against one Richard M. Nixon in 1972. His Fear and Loathing on Campaign Trail 1972 stands as a classic of ‘alternative’ journalism on the issue. He stated then that a political junkie, and by any definition he was one, could only really stand in the vortex of one such campaign before burning out. Nevertheless he pressed his luck. Unfortunately, Thompson found himself in the place where Teddy White found himself after his seminal ‘straight’ reporting on the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon campaign, The Making of President. White too, went on to write more such books and not to his benefit. In short, pigeon-holed. Take that lesson for what it is worth.

The problem with Better Than Sex is that Thompson had written it all before, and to better effect. The writing seems frantic and tired, very tired. It did not help that his cast of main characters- one President George H. W. Bush, William Jefferson Clinton and the genuine dingo bat Ross Perot- would make even a political junkie get him or herself to the nearest rehabilitation center. The book reflects that hollowness in many ways not the least is the extraordinary amount of filler (literally with ‘draft’ notes, letters, etc.) that clutters the book. If these reasons do not convince you then a three star rating on a genuine five star journalistic hero of mine tells the tale. Still, there is more than enough savagely funny analysis and humor for a real Thompson junkie to get by on during those lonely political nights. Enough said.

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Pete Seeger's "Oh, Had I A Golden Thread"

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Pete Seeger's "Oh, Had I  A Golden Thread"

Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of Pete Seeger (with Judy Collins) performing "Oh, Had I A Golden Thread."


In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.

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

Oh, Had I A Golden Thread(Pete Seeger)


Oh, had I a golden thread
And needle so fine
I'd weave a tapestry
Of rainbow design
Of rainbow design

Far over the water
I'd weave my magic strand
To every city
Through every single land
Through every land

And in it I would weave the bravery
Of women giving birth
In it I would weave the innocence
Of children over all the earth
Children of all earth

Show my brothers and my sisters
My rainbow design
And bind up this sorry world
With hand and heart and mind
Hand and heart and mind

O had I a golden thread
And needle so fine
I'd weave a tapestry
Of rainbow design
Of rainbow design

Rally And March In Cambridge-Monday June 12th-Defend The Palestinians!

Support Military Resisters -REFUSING TO KILL IS NOT A CRIME! INVEST IN CARING NOT KILLING!-Payday Newsletter - JUNE 2017

Payday Newsletter - JUNE 2017

6/5/2017 5:13 PM

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Payday An international network of men                   Newsletter June 2017 working with the Global Women's Strike      More on www.refusingtokill.net
	Ex military intelligence analyst Rowan McAllan who deployed to Iraq will be voting for Jeremy Corbyn because his foreign policy will make Britain safer.  Watch the video.
	Chelsea Manning was freed on 17 May. Celebrations took place in at least 22 towns and cities in nine countries. Read Payday and Queer Strike’s statement Her and our victory.
	Palestinian prisoners won “80% of their demands” to improve their detention conditions after a 40-day hunger strike.
	Join the weekly picket of the Israeli Embassy every Friday in London, 4-4.30pm, to demand the release of conscientious objectorAtalia Ben-Abba, 19, repeatedly imprisoned for refusing to serve.
	Mothers and other carers protest outside Holborn family court against the increasing numbers of children taken into care, court secrecy and cuts to legal aid on the first Wednesday of every month.  Next protest 7 June 12.30pm.
REFUSING TO KILL IS NOT A CRIME! INVEST IN CARING NOT KILLING! More news on www.refusingtokill.net

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The International Labor Defense- The Unexpected Afterlife of American Communism

The International Labor Defense- The Unexpected Afterlife of American Communism  

The Unexpected Afterlife of American Communism   Sarah Jaffe June 6, 2017 New York Times The Communist Party U.S.A. had its greatest successes as the country reeled from the Depression. Today, as we are still picking our way out of the rubble left by the crash of 2008, left-wing ideas have gained new purchase. Claudia Jones arriving for a court date in 1951., George Alexanderson / New York Times , The Communist, in the American imagination, has always been the ultimate outside agitator. No matter how homegrown a resistance movement was, or how local the organizers were, the first response from those facing protest has always been to blame an outsider. This was as true for town hall protests during the February 2017 congressional recess as it was for anti-lynching struggles more than 80 years ago during the Great Depression. For much of the past century in this country, this undesirable alien — seen as being from someplace foreign and in need of deportation back there — stood accused of invading to stir up trouble where there was none, where previously the locals had been docile and willing to accept whatever everyday inequality was their lot. Though many Communists were indeed immigrants, who would be targeted for harassment and deportation for as long as the party existed, many, too, were homegrown, born and raised in the same cities and towns as their persecutors. The Communist Party U.S.A., founded in 1919, was closely tied to what emerged as the Soviet Union after the 1917 October Revolution, but the American party also drew on decades of local radical organizing. Many of its members came out of the Socialist Party, the labor movement and even anarchist activism, but the party also found a base among African-Americans when Communists proved willing to take on their struggles for self-determination. In short, American Communism was a movement that grew out of what the historian Robin D. G. Kelley, the author of “Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression,” calls “the most despised and dispossessed elements of American society.” It was the black workers drawn to the party, Professor Kelley argues, who shaped its political choices as much as the varying dictates that came from the Communist International, Moscow’s directorate for foreign parties. During the Depression, the party took on fights not just for better wages and working conditions but also against evictions by landlords and abuses of the criminal punishment system. In the Deep South, the battle for freedom for the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers falsely accused of rape in 1931, was led by the International Labor Defense, a legal arm of the Communist Party U.S.A. That stand still inspires activists today. The Scottsboro case was what drew the organizer and educator Mariame Kaba, who runs the blog Prison Culture, to learn more about the Communist Party U.S.A. “They were helping nine young black men,” she said, “and preventing their state-sanctioned murder for a crime they didn’t commit.” The party inspired loyalty for reasons beyond simply an affinity for Marxist ideas. It was the campaigns Communists ran against police brutality, the practice of lynching and the Jim Crow laws that made their politics relevant to the lives of ordinary people. In the North as well as the South, on soapboxes on the streets of Harlem as well as on plots of sharecropped land in Alabama, Communist organizing addressed the bread-and-butter concerns of black people. Communists believed that organizing the working class would work only if white workers realized that their liberation, too, was bound up with the fate of black workers. Facing this threat, anti-Communists and segregationists worked hard to sustain the fractures. They blamed Communists for fomenting “race mixing,” evoking sexualized fears that social equality would mean black men having sex with white women — the very fears that put the Scottsboro Boys on trial. In turn, when black people agitated for civil rights, the Bull Connors of the world called such demands Communist-inspired, returning to the same narrative of dangerous outsiders. Such an argument said, in effect, that black people had to be whipped up by radical foreigners in order to challenge the remnants of slavery in the Jim Crow South, and that without those outsiders, America was, to steal a phrase from the 2016 election, already great. The view also ignores that it was the black members of the Communist Party U.S.A., raised in such circumstances, who made it clear that their struggles for economic independence were bound up with the racist violence they faced from both the police and white supremacist groups. Those black Communists often had to fight to hold their party accountable to its professed ideals when the party shifted its strategy toward courting white liberals. The debates that resurfaced during the 2016 election cycle, about the primacy of race or class in left-wing organizing, particularly around the primary campaign of Bernie Sanders, echoed these past battles. In the 1930s, the party taught its members to discuss their problems using the language of exploitation. This language meant that people “understood that racism and what they called male chauvinism wasn’t simply people acting badly or being psychologically controlled or being ignorant,” Professor Kelley said. “It was about the benefits that they derived from exploitative relationships.” That framework, which has been revisited today in platform documents like “A Vision for Black Lives,” argues that racism, at root, is not about hate between groups, but about the way power is held in society. And class, according to this analysis, is created by relationships of exploitation. These arguments were championed by organizers like Claudia Jones, a black leader within the Communist Party U.S.A. and a journalist for its newspaper, The Daily Worker. According to Charlene Carruthers, the national director of Black Youth Project 100, Ms. Jones expounded the idea now known as intersectionality decades before that term became so ubiquitous that Hillary Clinton used it in a tweet on the campaign trail. For Ms. Jones, understanding the lives of black women and the economic and social position they occupied would create a better understanding of the system of capitalism as a whole. It followed, Ms. Carruthers explains, that black women’s work was central in the struggle to replace the system. Within organized labor, particularly the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1940s, the Communist-led unions were consistently the leaders on racial and gender equality. Sometimes this clashed with the wishes of white male members, who occasionally went on strike against the inclusion of black members. With the eventual purge of such so-called red unions from the federation, the cause of antiracism slipped to the sidelines. Only in the past decade or so has it returned as a priority for some unions. The Communist Party U.S.A.’s support for the nonaggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II — a seeming betrayal of its strong anti-fascist stance — splintered the party’s membership. Revelations after the war about Stalin’s crimes further damaged the party’s international prestige. For the most part, in the West, Communist parties never recovered from those blows. At the same time, the end of the war hastened the demise of the old European empires, and Communists often took leading roles in the new anticolonial movements. The story of Claudia Jones is instructive here, also. Born in Trinidad in 1915, she moved to New York with her family in the 1920s. In 1948, she was arrested for her political activism, tried under the McCarran and Smith Acts, imprisoned for several years and eventually deported, settling in London. She was one of many victims of the Red Scare that crushed American Communism and spurred purges, blacklists, deportations and a few high-profile executions. Whipped-up fear of foreign terror around outsider Communists like Ms. Jones finds an echo today in the rhetoric of criminal immigrants and the scaremongering about “radical Islamic terror.” The techniques of McCarthyism have resurfaced, this time to evoke the threat of terrorism rather than Communism. Yet for all the work that went into killing the idea that another system was possible, the specter of Communism haunts us still. The Communist Party U.S.A. had its greatest successes as the country reeled from the Depression. Today, as we are still picking our way out of the rubble left by the crash of 2008, left-wing ideas have gained new purchase. It was the material conditions of people’s lives, Ms. Kaba points out, that made them willing to listen to something radically different during the 1930s and ’40s. It was that economic reality that drove millions of people to pay attention to both the nationalist bombast of Mr. Trump and the democratic socialist message of Bernie Sanders. That same reality drove organizers like Will Emmons of Lexington, Ky., to found new groups like the Kentucky Workers League, which Mr. Emmons says draws inspiration explicitly from the Communist Party of the ’30s and the work of the Black Panthers in the ’60s. The group has organized direct actions to defend people being evicted and offers community programs such as homework assistance at a local library. It ran a solidarity campaign with workers at a factory owned by Lexington-based Lexmark, contacting the workers in Mexico and pressuring the company locally to come to the table and bargain with the workers’ union. Since Mr. Trump’s victory, the group has turned to protecting immigrants in the community from deportation. The year 2016 saw a revolt against politics as usual, with the mainstream parties’ failing to offer much in the way of solutions to struggling people across the United States. In the wake of the election, Ms. Carruthers said, organizations like Black Youth Project 100 have to broaden the scope of their work while cleaving to their political vision. Courting the supposed white mainstream while ignoring the material needs of black people, immigrants, transgender people and other marginalized communities will not placate Trumpian efforts to foment fear of the un-American outsider. The power of the radical agitator — homegrown as well as outsider — has always been the ability to expose the gap between the narrative of American greatness and the realities of people’s lives. What American Communists, at their best, pioneered was to show how effectively grass-roots movements can challenge the racism, state violence and economic exploitation that people face in their daily lives, and connect those fights to a broader vision of a just world. Sarah Jaffe (@sarahljaffe) is a Nation Institute fellow and the author of “Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt.” This is an essay in the series Red Century, about the history and legacy of Communism 100 years after the Russian Revolution.	VIEW ONLINE PRINT SUBSCRIBE VISIT PORTSIDE.ORG TWITTER FACEBOOK

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