This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Diplomacy, Domestic Politics & the Fate of South Vietnam
The Joiner Speaker Series & UMB History Department invite you to a lecture by
SEAN FEAR
Wednesday, Nov. 8th 2:00-4:00
Campus Center
Room 2540 (2nd Floor)
Sean Fear's talk will explore the unheralded showdown between Saigon's military junta, and civil society groups including journalists, students and religious and ethnic minority groups during the Vietnam War.
Join us as Sean Fear challenges conventional views of the Cold War as a bipolar clash between great powers and their proxies.
Co-sponsored by the UMass Boston History Department
Sean Fear is a lecturer in Modern International History at the University of Leeds. He holds a Ph.D in History from Cornell University. His research focuses on U.S. - South Vietnamese relations, and the impact of domestic politics and transnational relations on diplomacy. He has conducted research at several archives in the United States and Vietnam, drawing heavily on Vietnamese-language official records and print media.
No War on North Korea! Save the Iran peace deal! End the Endless Wars
November 8 @ 5:15 pm - 6:15 pm
Rally at Park Street downtown Boston
Followed by forum with Tim Shorrock:
How Diplomacy Can Prevent War in Korea @ 7pm
(at E5, 9A Hamilton Place across from Park Street Station)
Local peace and antiwar groups will rally to protest the war policies of President Trump. Speakers will include South Korean born journalist Tim Shorrock who will describe how diplomacy with North Korea can work.
In addition, activists will address how Congress must stop Trump’s reckless effort to destroy the Iran peace deal, threatening yet another war. Ending the endless wars will require cuts in the huge military budget and justice at home.
Trump’s belligerent rhetoric continues to inflame the tense situation in the Korean peninsula as he even belittled the negotiating efforts of his own secretary of state, Rex Tillerson. The US military buildup continues with joint maritime exercises with South Korea and plans to evacuate US personnel in case of a North Korean attack. Meanwhile, China, Russia and most other countries call for lessening of tension
This has to stop! What can you do?
Sponsored by United for Justice with Peace, American Friends Service Committee – northeast region, Massachusetts Peace Action, local peace groups.
Caught In A Cold War
Moment-Sean Connery’s 007-“From Russia With Love” (1963)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Guest Film Critic Si
Lannon
From Russia With Love,
starring Sean Connery, Lotte Lenya, based on the character by spy thriller
novelist Ian Fleming, 1963
Okay, okay I won’t bore
the reader with yet another mea culpa
about how I have gotten myself ensnared in what my old high school friend Sam
Lowell called a “run.” That is going
through some subject, here a frontal attack on the first series of spy thriller
novelist Ian Fleming’s’ British secret agent James Bond, 007, played by Sean
Connery (covering other later players of the role in the now seemingly endless
series I will hold judgement on-for now), and finding a common thread to hang
my hat on. This film, the third now (although in sequence the second after the
initial Doctor No offering), From Russia, With Love has given me
pause as to the why of my grabbing on to this particular series other that the
obvious fact that these early Bond films meshed with Connery’s portrayal still
hold up as well-done spy thrillers that one can come away thinking positively
about.
Naturally, naturally for
those of us elders who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s the underlying subject of
these films, beyond the patented Hollywood script of getting the bad guys, was
a tip of the hat to the Cold War red scare exemplified by the Chinese in Doctor No (the then sleeping giant to
worry about now turned behemoth) and here with the real villain of the
times-the Russians who were uppermost on the average Western citizen’s mind
when thinking about existential threats. Add in a nefarious shadowy SPECTRE
organization of international criminals to off-set the political threats and
you had the making of some serious subconscious associations to draw you to the
themes of the films.
That subconscious
political stuff is okay, makes for a nice “think piece” atmosphere, to think
through now some fifty plus years later but that is really all hogwash. All
hogwash for the real reason that a bunch of kids, a bunch of working class
kids, guys, were enthralled
by the Bond character or
at least showing up to see the film came from elsewhere. I have already mentioned in that very first
review and paid a mention in the second to the place where we saw these vaunted
shows-the North Adamsville Drive-In Theater in the heyday of that now most forgotten
way to view films. I have gone chapter and verse over the scam we pulled on the
unwary ticket-seller in the entrance booth by showing three guys and hiding
three on backseat floors and in trunks in the days before the theater owners
got wise and started charging by the carload rather than individual admission.
I have also mentioned more than once that the reason for this scam was to get
to the area in back of the refreshment stand where all the high school kids hung
out away from those infernal eternal families with young kids (the single date
lovers had their own section way up back and no one not in that category it was
understood was to approach that area under severe penalty). And “connect” with
the carloads of girls, young women, who also for the most part also had pulled
the scam. So while we were as spoon-feed worried about the red menace and such
we were hedging our bets against some grim future by “hooking” up with a stray damsel
or too to while away the time.
For any given film seen
at that revered drive-in theater it was an open question whether a person had
actually seen the production depending on whether you got “lucky” that night
and wound up fogging up some windshields or not. I clearly remember the plot
line of Doctor No but after re-watching
this film I don’t really remember the details so I probably got lucky that
night. For those who were similarly situation back then or for the too young to
have been there I give a few highlights. Our man Bond having already won his
spurs knocking off Doctor No’s SPECTRE-funded operation down in the Caribbean
was called up by his superiors to squelch this latest attempt by that nefarious
operation to steal a Russian cryptograph-apparently then the top shelf tech
instrument of its kind and thus valuable to both British intelligence and the
Russians who were to be dealt in by being ready to buy back the damn thing.
The whole treacherous SPECTRE
plan revolves around getting Bond to steal the item and then kill him off as revenge
for the Doctor No caper. The lynchpin of the plan is put in place by a ruthless
female Soviet counter-intelligence office who has defected to SPECTRE played by
the legendary German movie star Lotte Lenya (think Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Three Penny Opera, etc.). The plan is to
entice Bond with, what else, a beautiful Russian woman from the Soviet Embassy
in Turkey. And dear James bites to a degree, beds her, and then the caper takes
off. From the consulate to the Orient Express to a gypsy camp and finally to
Venice all along the way there is plenty of duplicity and plenty of bodies of
failed agents, some Bond allies, some sworn enemies, working for every side and
for every reason. In the end Bond gets to keep the instrument and hand it over to
his paymasters-and have a nice little tryst with that comely Russian woman who
decided in the end to change sides and in the process saved his bacon from that
relentlessly determined Soviet intelligence defector. Yeah, not as clever a plot
as Doctor No, and filled with more up
to date then improbable techno-gizmos, but a good tongue-in-cheek look at fantasy
spy-craft which is what has always been attractive about this whole series.
Maybe that is the ultimate reason that I am on a “run” on this Sean Connery-driven
James Bond part of the series.
The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons-Films To While Away The Class Struggle By- With Serge Eisenstein’s “Strike” (1925) In Mind
DVD Review
By Political Commentator Frank Jackman
Strike, starring a cast of hundreds of working people and others, directed by Serge Eisenstein, 1925
No question, no question at all that some political films whether they were intended as propaganda for a certain viewpoint as with the film under review, Russian mad man filmmaker Serge Eisenstein’s 1925 classic Strike, or because as the story line developed everybody was compelled to think through the implications of the cover-up and preclude to coup in a film like Costa-Garvas’ Z remain in our consciousness long after mere entertainment films have faded from view. Here is the beauty of Eisenstein’s work whether with Strike or in an effort like Potemkin, the one with the famous baby carriage scene on the Odessa Steps. The medium is the message to steal a phrase from an old-time social media commentator like Marshall McLuhan. The whole thing is done, powerfully done, with nothing but absolutely stunning cinematography, a few signboards (in Russian with English subtitles), and some very interesting and varied mood music which if I am not mistaken included some jazz theme stuff from Duke Ellington, and if not him then definitely some jazz riffs along with that inevitable classical music that one would have expected from a Russian filmmaker who grabbed what he could from the Russian Five.
Now the question of who a film is directed at is usually pretty much just to lure in general audiences, maybe if it is cartoonish then kids but usually general audiences. Eisenstein in this film though is directing his efforts to working people in order for them to draw some important lessons about the class struggle. Of course Eisenstein was working shortly after the October Revolution of 1917 in his country and so he probably was more or less committed to this type of film in the interests of the Soviet government and of the world revolution that was still formally what the Bolsheviks and their international allies were all about. (I might add though that a later film about Ivan the Terrible had the same fine cinematic qualities and that was not particularly directed at the world’s working classes but to ancient Russian patriotic fervor as the smell of war, war on the doorstep became apparent.) That drawing of lessons about what happened during the strike is the force that drives the film.
Here is how this one played out in all its glory and infamy. The workers at a Russian factory of unknown location and for that matter of unknown production had been beaten down by the greedy capitalists and stockholders, had had no say in what they made and how much dough they made. (The scenes with the greedy capitalists are a treasure, something out of any leftist’s caricature of the old time robber barons complete with fat bellies, cigars and top hats). Like any situation where tensions are strung out to the limit it did not take a lot to produce a reason for a strike for a better shake in this wicked old world. Here it was an honest workman’s being accused of a theft which he couldn’t defend himself against and so in shame he committed suicide. After have previously spent several weeks talking about taking an action to better their conditions the leaders of the underground “strike committee” decided to have everybody “down tools.” (The scene of this action with a rolling shutdown as section after section left their benches was breathtaking.)
Of course in turn of the century (20th century) Russia (and elsewhere) the capitalists were as vicious as one would expect of a new class of exploiters dealing here with people, men and women, just off the farm and so in no mood to grant such things as an eight-hour day (a struggle that we in America are very familiar with from the Haymarket Martyrs whose chief demand a couple of decades before the time of this film was for that same eight hour day) and a big wage increase. So the committee of capitalists and their hangers-on gave a blanket “no.” Said the hell with you to the strikers.
The aftermath of this refusal is where the real lessons of this film are to drawn. Needless to say the capitalists were willing, more than willing to starve the workers into submission (the scenes of some workers pawning off their worldly possession for food for the kids, for themselves are quite moving).But not only were they willing to starve the mass of workers back to the factory but did everything in their power to break the strike by other means. First and foremost to send spies out to stir up trouble in order to get the class unity broken, then tried to get some weak-links to betray the movement from within, and if that didn’t work then try might and main to round up by any way possible the leaders of the strike in order to behead the movement. In the end though they were not above using their “Pharaohs,” their mounted cops and troops to suppress the whole thing. In the final scene after the cops and troops have done their murderous assaults on unarmed strikers the corpses spread out widely on the massacre field tell anybody who wasn’t sure about the role of the cops and troops in preserving the social order of the rulers all they need to know about the way the strike was defeated.
From what I could gather from the last signboard (one which mentioned the Lena gold strike which was I believe was suppressed in 1912) the time period of this strike was between the 1905 revolution that went down in flames and the victorious revolution in 1917. The implications of the failure of the strike, of the need to take the state power, were thus through Eisenstein’s big lenses there for all to see. Hey, even if you don’t draw any political conclusions from this film just watch to see what they mean they say a picture sometimes is worth a thousand words. Eisenstein has a thousand such pictures that will fascinate and repel you.
Click on the headline to link to a "Workers Vanguard" article, dated November 7, 2008, concerning the struggle to create a revolutionary labor party in America.
Markin comment:
I will "steal" the quote from Bertolt Brecht used in the above-linked article. It fits better than any commentary that I could provide about the nature of the times, and the tasks ahead.
**********
Taking my cue from Workers Vanguard No. 921 (26 September), I am going to start with a quote from Bertolt Brecht. This is from a poem called “Those Who Take the Meat from the Table,” written in the 1930s in the midst of the Great Depression:
Those who take the meat from the table
Teach contentment.
Those for whom the taxes are destined
Demand sacrifice.
Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry
Of wonderful times to come.
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.
The Girl With The Bette
Davis Eyes- Before The Deluge-Bette Davis’ “Jezebel” (1938)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Senior Film Critic
Sandy Salmon
Jezebel, starring Bette
Davis, Henry Fonda, George Brent, 1938
No today I am not going
to bemoan the fact that once again I have started on something like my old
friend and fellow film critic Sam Lowell called a “run,” a run meaning jumping
on a subject, here the films of the girl with the Bette Davis eyes Bette Davis
herself, and running it into the ground if that is where it would finally lead.
No today I have a bigger idea, an idea about what could and could not be
cinematically produced today in quite the same way that it was yesterday as in
the case of this film under review Jezebel
(a topic which could equally include the role Ms. Davis did not get the classic
Gone With The Wind as well). What I
am talking about, although I will have to temper this with the recent
happenings ostensibly around the issue of preservation of Confederate memorials,
is the way the so-called gentile ante-bellum South was portrayed in the film from
the cotton is king gentry to the fate of lowly blacks slaves whether in the house
or in the field. I won’t belabor the point further since this film passes for a
romantic drama of the times except to note that this subject is worthy of some
kind of doctoral dissertation if it hasn’t already sparked one.
Of course you can lead a
guy, even an ante-bellum member of the Southern gentry on that merry chase only
so far before he sends you to the big step-off. The actual event if you can
believe this that triggered the adios from Pres was when Miss Julie decided for
spite to wear a red dress to some silly cotillion and received nothing but the
cold shoulder and humiliation from the assembled guests who were shocked beyond
belief that an unmarried woman would break the code and not wear white. That is
only the most egregious example of how the gentile slow slavery-drive customary
code Southern way of life differed from the Northern busy building factories
shoulder to the wheel way of life. The sporting life complete with mint juleps
and an off-hand duel when somebody, some man, thought he was being insulted
were others. Old Buck Cantrell was the epitome of the old ways that were
crumbling a bit even then.
But back to the core
romance. Or rather failed romance once Pres gave Julie the heave-ho and she
refused out of vanity, spite, ill-humor or some combination of them all to go
after him. That finishes the prologue here. The big deal, the way the coming
civil war gets noticed and is played out is when Pres, having gone North to
forget Julie and learn some capitalist business skills, comes back after a year
with a fresh as a daisy Northern wife a happening which was treated by some of
the gentry around Julie, notably Buck, as an affront to Southern womanhood. Of
course Miss Julie having pined away for Pres for her transgression is both
frantic and bitter when she finds out she has been thrown over for another
woman. But this hussy will seek her revenge-seek to make Pres jealous of Buck
when she starts playing court to him. No go. Pres is all in for his wife as he
makes clear to her constantly. (Here is where a scene that I think would be cut
today comes in when now knowing she has lost Pres Miss Julie gathers around her
a coterie of slaves and has a sing-along with them dancing and prancing “all
the darkies are gay” style as Stephen Foster would put it in a song.) Moreover dear old Buck knowing that he has
been used by Miss Julie in her scheme winds up under a winding sheet having
lost a duel to Pres’ younger brother when the lad called him out for his
ill-mannered behavior toward his sister-in-law.
Now Ms. Davis may have
done an Oscar-worthy performance in this film although I think she was robbed
when she played the tart/waitress in the film adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and failed to get the
coveted award but apparently those who directed and produced the film could not
leave her as a fallen sullen Jezebel. They needed some redemption for her. The
way Miss Julie was able to rehabilitate herself was by nursing Pres when he
came down with the yellow fever that periodically swept the city and
surrounding areas of New Orleans when the authorities, mimicking today’s
climate change deniers, failed to drain the swamps and take other precautions. Not
only did she nurse him but arguing with Pres’ wife that she should accompany him
to the deserted island where the known yellow fever cases were dumped. That
wife relented and Miss Julie got to pay penance. Not Ms. Davis’ best picture
despite her performance but good. You can think through how such an ante-bellum
scenario it would be set up today.
Click on title to link to the John Reed Internet Archives. BOOK REVIEW This is the Anniversary of the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution. It is fitting that I review a book that did much to give Westerners a bird's-eye view of what happened during that tumultuous year. Forward To New Octobers! Ten Days That Shook The World, John Reed, New American Library Edition, New York, 1967 I, on more than one occasion, have mentioned that for a detailed history of the ebb and flow of the Russian Revolution of 1917 from February to October of that year your man is the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky’s "History of the Russian Revolution" is partisan history at its best. One does not and should not, at least in this day in age, ask historians to be ‘objective’. One simply asks that the historian present his or her narrative and analysis and get out of the way. Trotsky meets that criterion. I have also mentioned in that same context that there are other excellent sources on this subject, depending on your needs. If you are looking for a general history of the revolution or want an analysis of what the revolution meant for the fate of various nations after World War I or its affect on world geopolitics look elsewhere. E.H. Carr’s "History of the Bolshevik Revolution" offers an excellent multi-volume set that tells that story through the 1920’s. Or if you want to know what the various parliamentary leaders, both bourgeois and Soviet, were thinking and doing from a moderately leftist viewpoint read Sukhanov’s "Notes on the Russian Revolution". If you need a more journalistic account for the period of the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks and the immediate aftermath, the book under review, John Reed’s classic "Ten Days That Shook the World" is invaluable. If we do not, as mentioned above, expect our historians to be ‘objective’ then we have a lesser expectation of those journalists who write the ‘first draft of history’. Reed makes no bones about the fact that that he is a partisan of the Bolshevik-led social revolution that he was witnessing. He, nevertheless, tells his story reasonably well for those who are not partisans. Moreover, Reed seems to have been everywhere in Petersburg during those days. He is as likely to have been reporting from Petersburg’s Winter Palace, the seat of the Kerensky's Provisional Government, as Smolny, the seat of the insurgent Soviets. We can find him among the bourgeois politicians of the City Duma or at the Russian Army General Staff headquarters. Hell, he was also in Moscow when things were hot there as the Soviet forces tried to seize the Kremlin. He is at meetings large-Peasant Soviet size- or in some back room at Smolny with Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee that directed the uprising. To that extent, as a free lancer on the move, he covers physically during this period much more territory than Trotsky could as central director of the action and thus has more first hand observations. Reed’s style tends toward straight forward reportage with little obvious sense of irony in the various situations that he is witnessing. Of course, against Trotsky’s masterly ironic sense he is bound to suffer by comparison. Nevertheless Reed gets us into places like the City Duma and into the heads of various characters like the Mayor of Petersburg that Trotsky, frankly, displayed no interest in dealing with. Probably the greatest compliment that one could pay Reed is that he is widely quoted as a reliable source in many historical accounts from Trotsky on the winning side to someone like Kerensky on the losing side. For those who want a quick but serious overview of the dynamic of the October Revolution then here is your man. Add in his companion Louise Bryant’s separate account, "Six Month In Red Russia" (if you can find it), and some very good primary source poster, pamphlet and newspaper material in the appendices of Reed’s book and you are on your way.
LENIN- LIFE AND LEGACY, D.A. VOLKGANOV, HARPER BOOKS, NEW YORK, 1995 In my political life I have read numerous biographies, sketches and essays on the Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, none of them recently. Thus, in looking for a new book on Lenin’s life I was searching for one that would reflect the latest information from the various archives opened up by the demise of the Soviet state in 1991-92. With that in mind I happened upon this biography by a Soviet historian who had intimate access to and control of the Soviet archives. However, even with that imprimatur this hostile biography could easily have been written in 1955 by any number of former communist turned anti-communist Western writers during the heart of the Cold War under the influence of the ‘god that failed’ theory of anti-communism. So much for the virtue of access to the new files! Moreover, after reading the biography I found that it told more about the author than the subject. He was a good Khrushchevite when Khrushchev was in power. He was a good Brezhnevite when Brezhnev was in power. He was a good Gorbachevite when Gorbachev was in power. Finally, after the demise of the Soviet Union and the capitalist counter-revolution under Yeltsin he was a good Yeltstinite. No one can deny that he knew how to trim his sails to determine which way the political winds blew. Whether such a checkered personal biography permits him then to write a critique of a revolutionary leader, any revolutionary leader, apparently without the least embarrassment is another question. Well, such is the literary life. And so what is the latest in Soviet historiography on Lenin? The author retails every ‘horror’ story about Lenin that has sifted through the anti-communist milieu since Lenin first came on the political scene at the turn of the 20th century Russia. Of course, the author starts with the Bolshevik-Menshevik split in 1903- that is the ‘original sin’ for all anti-Leninists who claim to stand in any tendency of the international social democratic tradition. He then goes through the litany of later sins; the anti-nationalist, anti-war Bolshevik propaganda of the First World War; the hoary tales of ‘German’ gold to the Bolsheviks in the wake of the February Revolution in Russia; the ‘sealed train’ through Germany bringing Lenin and other Social Democrats back to Russia; the defeatism toward the Provisional Government; the Bolshevik ‘coup’ in October; the outrage to the author’s nationalist sentiments of the Brest Litovsk Treaty with Germany; the horrors of the Civil War, lightly passing over the White internal and foreign counterrevolutionary actions and placing the onus on the Bolsheviks; and the 'Moscow' gold provided to foreign Communist parties by the Communist International. And much more in that same vane. The real point of the documentation presented throughout the book, however, is to buttress the author’s central argument that bad old Stalinism was not some sort of distortion of Bolshevism and Leninist thought but the true and natural heir of Leninism. Others have argued that position far more persuasively with far less access to the archives. The fact of the matter, at least based on this exposition, is that the archives provide little new hard material about Lenin and the early Bolshevik regime that has not already been in circulation for a long time. Take one example, the ‘relationship’ between the Bolsheviks and the German High Command during World War I that has been speculated on in reams of material. Volkganov sets up his argument for such an alliance using the time worn innuendoes of secret meetings, use of intermediaries, etc. However, if an author is using this argument in the post-Soviet period then one would expect some new information that definitely links Lenin to German ‘gold’ or let it rest. Where is the smoking gun? As there is nothing new the author lets us off with some dubious circumstantial evidence and lots and lots of conjecture. It goes on and on like that throughout most of the book. The author has personal axes to grind here and the archives only marginally help him in those efforts. Finally, what of the counterfactual argument that every historian makes to argue that an alternative situation to the one that occurred was possible? Here the author argues that in 1917 some form of Menshevik/Social Revolutionary government or a more stable Kerensky government i.e. some kind of bourgeois government could have brought Russia out of its impasse and into the Western democratic parliamentary tradition. He even has a kind word for the Czar in retrospect, at least as a battering ram against the Bolsheviks. This hardened Stalinist who has since found ‘religion’ attempts to argue a very, very improbable position. Kerensky was the best, and I do mean best, those bourgeois democratic forces had at their command in 1917. No more need be said. We do not always get the revolutions in the pristine condition that we would like and this is not the place to argue extensively about the author’s politics but both by their actions and by the crush of events the possibility of some kind of stable bourgeois democracy in 1917 Russia was the least likely outcome. In short, like in other such revolutionary periods, it was the Bolsheviks or the counterrevolutionary Whites. And one had to take sides accordingly. I will stand with Lenin and Trotsky.
Staying The Course In Tough Political Times-Organizing Cadre-On The 100th Anniversary Of The Russian October Revolution
Frank Jackman comment:
No question we, those of us who adhere to a radical or revolutionary, hell, even a liberal political perspective, are living in tough times here in America (hey, make that the world, or a lot of it). The monsters who have previously been in the shadows have come out with their bloody fangs on full display. Someone recently mentioned to me that we of the left, particularly the pro-socialist left, should wake up every day bending in prayer to the East for one Donald Trump who has been the catalyst for the current wave of people interested in fighting back, in building the resistance mostly right now from a liberal political perspective. But as life, the real everyday political life of the times, showed us back in the 1960s when I for one went from a pretty straight forward liberal who was crazy for Robert Kennedy to more radical assumptions about the way we have to move to bring serious social change that we can live with things can change rapidly in socially turbulent times. A whole slew of people, mostly young but with a smattering of older folks, shared that same trajectory with me.
Once you get the “masses” in motion the question, as we also learned from the 1960s experience as the Vietnam War wound down or people retreated to “identity” politics is keeping them in motion, keep them interested in “staying the course.” And that is the simple point I want to make today in commenting on this article posted below I found in one of the left-wing presses that find their way to my door.
Now over the years I have read quite a few articles from the socialist and communist press just to keep informed about what is going on out on the edges of rational politics and most of the time I let the articles pass into cyberspace. A few I will have the site moderator, Peter Paul Markin, post which may be of interest to the radical public without comment by since I am entirely capable of making comments if necessary under my own name in my own space. Those occasions for my comment tend to be significantly fewer but this one got me thinking, kept me up late one night in fact. What kept me up was the idea of staying the course, the mass of people who have been politicized recently staying the course, unlike Markin, myself and mighty few others over the years who have held the socially progressive banner as high as possible in good times and bad. We are rare political animals for sure.
What struck me in this tribute by the speaker to a fallen comrade who “stayed the course” in support of her political perspectives was the comment about how Leon Trotsky, a certified revolutionary for all of his adult life, some forty years, mentioned that revolutionaries, and here we can add radicals and hopefully liberals as well, live for the future. Stay the course and don’t let get beaten down at any particular point which might drive them back into the mud. Stick with the idea that even if we are small, relatively small, today in terms of active cadre who have been through some experiences, good and bad, we can take heart that politics at certain times and the state of cold civil war we are in here in America right now is one such time will galvanize the masses. But people who know something, who are or want to be cadre, who can organize have to be around. Enough said for now.
******
Workers Vanguard No. 1106
24 February 2017
In Memory of Martha Phillips
1948–1992
The following remarks were delivered by Jon Bride, member of the International Executive Committee of the International Communist League, at a February 12 meeting in the Bay Area.
Twenty-five years ago, our comrade Martha Phillips was murdered in Moscow. She died in the front lines of the fight against counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. The ICL waged an international campaign to press for an investigation into this heinous crime, but it remains unsolved.
Russia was the birthplace of the communist program. Martha understood that Soviet Russia belonged to the workers of the whole world and that we were coming home to defend the gains of the October Revolution. For Trotskyists the USSR had never been a foreign country, and we can say truly that Martha died in her homeland.
Before joining our tendency, Martha had been a member of the American SWP [Socialist Workers Party]. There she took on the “pint-sized Kautskyites,” as she called them, who were seeking to build a “peaceful, legal” anti-Vietnam War movement. This was a gigantic popular front with liberal Democrats, whose purpose was to prevent a defeat for U.S. imperialism. Martha was won to Spartacism and fought for “Military Victory to the NLF” [National Liberation Front] and “All Indochina Must Go Communist!” She died in Moscow fighting for the same revolutionary internationalist program she defended against the renegades in the SWP who had reconciled themselves with their own bourgeoisie.
Martha did not have an easy life. She had a handicapped child. In midlife, she began a serious study of the Russian language. Later, she got a job teaching in a Soviet school. Her Soviet friends were astounded that any foreigner would live like that. She could have found an easier way to survive, but Martha wanted to get a better sense of how Soviet working people lived.
Martha was the leader and principal spokesman of the ICL group in Moscow. This job was not made easier for her, as a Jewish woman communist, in a period when anti-Jewish bigotry and backward social attitudes were proliferating in the final days of the Soviet Union. She was one of several outstanding women leaders in the ICL; her interview with Soviet women in Women and Revolution [No. 40, Winter 1991-92] is testimony to Martha’s conviction that a Leninist party must be a tribune of the people.
Trotsky once said that all genuine revolutionaries live for the future; that is, they refuse to sacrifice principle for temporary expedient. Martha refused to allow herself to be daunted by the temporary setbacks of today or yesterday. When asked by skeptics how many members we had, she always replied: “A few less than Lenin had at the time of Zimmerwald.” She often made the point that at the time of the February Revolution, the Mensheviks had larger numbers, more writers, etc. But Lenin had a hard cadre trained in a revolutionary program. That is what made the difference. For her entire political life, Martha was a party person from head to toe, understanding that it was the subjective element that was indispensable to proletarian victory.
Songs
To While Away The Resistance By-Back When We Tried To Turn The World Upside
Down-From The Doors
Frank Jackman comment September 2017:
A while back, maybe a half a decade ago
now, I started a series in this space that I presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By
where I posted some songs, you know, The
Internationale, Which Side Are You On?, Viva La Quince Brigada, Solidarity
Forever and others like Deportee,
Where Have All The Flowers Gone, Blowin’ In The Wind, This Land Is Your Land
while not as directly political had their hearts in the right place, that I
thought would help get us through the “dog days” of the struggle for our
socialist future. Those “dog days” in America anyway, depending on what leftist
political perspective drove your imagination could have gone back as far as the
late 1960s and early 1970s when all things were possible and the smell of
revolution could be whiffed in the air for a while before we were defeated, or
maybe later when all abandoned hope for the least bit of social justice in the
lean, vicious, downtrodden Reagan years of unblessed memory or later still
around the time of the great world- historic defeats of the international
working class in East Europe and the former Soviet Union which left us with an
unmatched arrogant unipolar imperialist world. That one pole being the United
States, the “heart of the beast” from which we work. Whatever your personal
benchmark they were nevertheless if you had the least bit of political savvy
clearly dog days.
I began posting these songs at a time,
2009, when it was touch and go whether there would be some kind of massive
uprising against the economic royalists (later chastised under the popular
sobriquet “the one-percent”) who had just dealt the world a blow to the head
through their economic machinations in what is now called the Great Recession
of 2008. Subsequently, while there were momentary uprisings, the Arab Spring
which got its start in Tunisia and Egypt and enflamed most of the Middle East
one way or another, here in America the defensive uprising of the public
workers in Wisconsin and later the quick-moving although ephemeral Occupy
movement, and the uprising in Greece, Spain and elsewhere in Europe in response
to the “belt-tightening demanded by international financial institutions to
name a few, the response from the American and world working classes has for
lots of reasons if anything further entrenched those interests.
So as the “dog days” continue now under
the extreme retro Trump administration I have resumed the series. I do not
vouch for the political thrust of the songs selected; 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 kind of formation
would mean political death for any serious revolutionary upheaval and would not
be acceptable for our political prospects it will suffice for our purposes
here. I like to invite others to make additional comments on certain pivotal
songs, groups and artists and here is one by my old friend Josh Breslin, whom I
met out in California during the heyday of the summer of love 1967, that
reflects those many possibilities to “turn the world upside down” back in the
1960s and early 1970s before the “night of the long knives” set in:
WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin
My old friend from the Summer of Love,
1967 days, Peter Paul Markin, always used to make a point then of answering, or
rather arguing which tells a lot about the kind of guy he was when he got his
political hind legs up with anybody who tried to tell him back in the day that
“music is the revolution.” Strangely when I first met him in San
Francisco that summer you would have been hard-pressed to tell him that was not
the case but after a few hit on the head by the coppers, a tour of duty in the
military at the height of the Vietnam War, and what was happening to other
political types trying to change the world for the better like the Black
Panthers he got “religion,” or at least he got that music as the agency of
social change idea out of his head. Me, well, I was (and am not) as
political as Markin was so that I neither got drowned in the counter-culture
where music was a central cementing act, nor did I have anything that
happened subsequently that would have given me Markin’s epiphany.
I would listen half-attentively (a
condition aided by being “stoned” a lot of the time) when such conversations
erupted and Markin drilled his position. That position meaning, of course that
contrary to the proponents (including many mutual friends who acted out on that
idea and got burned by the flame, some dropping out, some going back to
academia, some left by the wayside and who are maybe still wandering) that
eight or ten Give Peace A Chance, Kumbaya, Woodstock songs would not do
the trick, would not change this nasty, brutish, old short-life world into the
garden, into some pre-lapsarian Eden.
Meaning that the gathering of youth nation unto itself out in places like
Woodstock, Golden Gate Park, Monterrey, hell, the Boston Common, or even once
word trickled down the way the word has always trickled down to the sticks once
the next new thing gets a workout, Olde Saco Park, in the town up in Maine
where I grew up would not feed on itself and grow to such a critical
mass that the quite nameable enemies of good, kindness starting with one
Lyndon Johnson and one Richard M. Nixon and working down to the go-fers and
hangers-on, and leave us alone would sulk off somewhere, defeated or at least
defanged.
Many a night, many a dope-blistered
night before some seawall ocean front Pacific Coast campfire I would listen to
Markin blast forth against that stuff, against that silliness. As for me, I was
too “into the moment,” too into finding weed, hemp, mary jane and too into
finding some fetching women to share it with to get caught up in some nebulous
ideological struggle. It was only later, after the music died, after rock and
roll turned in on itself, turned into some exotic fad of the exiles on Main
Street that I began to think through the implications of what Markin, and the
guys on the other side, were arguing about.
Now it makes perfect sense that music,
or any mere cultural expression standing alone, would be unable to carry enough
weight to turn us back to the garden (I won’t use that “pre-lapsarian’ again to
avoid showing my, and Markin’s, high Roman Catholic up-bringing and muddy what
I want to say which is quite secular). I guess that I would err on the side of
the “angels” and at least wish that we could have carried the day against the
monsters of the American imperium we confronted back in the day. (Although
I had a draft deferment due to a serious physical condition, not helped by the
“street” dope I was consuming by the way, I supported, and something vehemently
and with some sense of organization, a lot of the political stuff Markin was
knee deep into, especially Panther defense when we lived in Oakland and all
hell was raining down on the brothers and sisters.)
Thinking about what a big deal was made
of such arguments recently (arguments carried deep into the night, deep in
smoke dream nights, and sometimes as the blue–pink dawn came rising up to smite
our dreams) I thought back to my own musical appreciations. In my jaded youth
(if one could be jaded in Podunk Olde Saco, although more than one parent and
more than one teacher called me “beatnik” back then whatever that meant to
them) I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact
or not. Perhaps it was some off-shoot DNA thing since my people on my mother’s
side (nee LeBlanc) were French-Canadian which had a deep folk heritage both up
north and here although such music was not played in the house, a house like a
lot of other ethnics where in the 1950s everybody wanted to be vanilla American
(Markin mentioned that same thing about his Irish-etched parents). So it
initially started as a reaction to my parents’ music, the music that got them
through the Great Depression of the 1930s and later waiting for other shoe to
drop (either in Normandy where my father first went to Europe under some very
trying conditions or at home waiting in Olde Saco), and that became a habit, a
wafting through the radio of my childhood home habit. You know who I mean Frank
(Sinatra for the heathens), Harry James, the Andrews Sisters, Peggy Lee, Doris
Day and the like. Or, maybe, and this is something that I have come closer to
believing was the catalyst along with the DNA stuff I already mentioned, my
father’s very real roots in the Saturday night mountain barn dance, fiddles blazing,
music of his growing up poor down in Appalachia. (Again such music except every
once in a while Hank Williams who I didn’t know about at the time was not
played in the house either. Too “square” I guess.)
The origin of my immersion
into roots music first centered on the blues, country and city with the
likes of Son House(and that raspy, boozy country voice on Death Letter Blues), Skip James ( I went nuts over that voice first
heard after he had been “discovered” at the Newport Folk Festival I think in
1963 when he sang I’d Rather Be The Devil
Than Be That Woman’s Man on the radio after I had just broken up with some
devil woman, read girl), Mississippi John Hurt (that clear guitar, simple
lyrics on Creole Belle), Muddy Waters
(yes, Mannish-Boy ), Howlin’ Wolf ( I
again went nuts when I heard his righteous Little
Red Rooster although I had heard the Stones version first, a version
originally banned in Boston) and Elmore James ( his Dust My Broom version of the old Robert Johnson tune I used to
argue was the “beginning” of rock and roll to anybody who would listen). Then
early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis (stuff
like One Night With You, Jailhouse Rock and
the like before he died in about 1958 or whatever happened to him when he
started making stupid movies that mocked his great talent making him look
foolish and which various girlfriends of the time forced me to go see at the
old Majestic Theater in downtown Olde Saco), Jerry Lee (his High School Confidential, the film song,
with him flailing away at the piano in the back of a flat-bed truck blew me
away although the film was a bust, as was the girl I saw it with), Chuck
(yeah, when he declared to a candid world that while we all gave due
homage to classical music in school Mister Beethoven better move on over with Roll Over Beethoven), Roy (Roy the boy
with that big falsetto voice crooning out Running
Scared, whoa), Big Joe (and that Shake,
Rattle and Roll which I at one point also argued was the “beginning” of
rock and roll, okay, I liked to argue those fine points) and Ike
Turner (who I ultimately settled on with his Rocket 88 as that mythical beginning of rock and roll) Then later,
with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, the folk music minute before the
British invasion took a lot of the air out of that kind of music, especially
the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan (even a so-so political guy like me,
maybe less than so-so then before all hell broke loose and we had to choose
sides loved Blowin’ in the Wind), Dave
Von Ronk (and that raspy old voice, although was that old then sing Fair And Tender Ladies one of the
first folk songs I remember hearing) Joan Baez (and that long ironed-hair
singing that big soprano on those Child ballads), etc.
I am, and have always been after that
Podunk growing up experience a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that.
Meaning rootless or not meaningfully or consciously rooted in any of the niches
mentioned above. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more
forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl
ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton
Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music (paying final conscious tribute to
the mountain DNA in my bones) and so on.
All those genres are easily classified
as roots music but I recall one time driving Markin crazy, driving him to
closet me with the “music is the revolution” heads he fretfully argued against
when I mentioned in passing that The Doors, then in their high holy mantra
shamanic phase with The End and When The Music’s Over epitomized roots
music. That hurt me to the quick, a momentary hurt then, but thinking about it
more recently Markin was totally off base in his remarks.
The Doors are roots music? Well, yes,
in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derived from early
rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of The Doors,
the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American
Native- American culture that drove the beat of many of his trance-like songs
like The End. More than one rock
critic, professional rock critic, has argued that on their good nights when the
dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired
up The Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will
get no argument here, and it is not a far stretch to classify their efforts as
in the great American roots tradition. I argued then and will argue here
almost fifty years later when that original statement of mine was more
prophetic The Doors put together all the stuff rock critics in one hundred
years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men
(and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll,
played the people’s music, played to respond to a deep-seeded need of the
people before them, for keeps.
So where does Jim Morrison fit in an
icon of the 1960s if he was not some new age latter day cultural Lenin/Trotsky.
Some icon that Markin could have latched onto. Jim was part of the
trinity, the “J” trinity for the superstitious – Morrison, Janis Joplin, and
Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young. The slogan of
the day (or hour) – “Drugs, sex, and rock and roll.” And we liked that idea however
you wanted to mix it up. Then.
Their deaths were part of the price we
felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most
political among us, including Markin in his higher moments (you figure out what
that “higher,” means since you are bright people) felt those cultural winds
blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative
vision as part of the chosen. The righteous headed to the “promise land.”
Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive
cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political
change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.
[It is rather simplistic
in hindsight to overly lambast those who thought that “music was the revolution”
end of story and left the distasteful political struggle to others. No, that is
not right those who argued that position gave as good as they got as I know
from man y a drugged-infested night arguing with them, arguing with my friends
swayed by those notions so that is not the point I want to make. Rather in the
great scheme of things that those who argued as I did eventually after having
worked under every possible other idea, including as I have mentioned before
elsewhere adherence to the “music is the revolution” thought the political struggle
was the way forward to that “newer world” as Alfred Lord Tennyson spoke of in one
of his poems should come in for closer scrutiny as agents who led us down some garden
path when the deal went down and the other side, those who I call the night-takers
for short, launched their still continuing counter-offensive some forty plus years
ago.
Whether it was the burgeoning
identity politics (blacks, Latinos, women gays and whoever else subscribed to
the notion) which meant we would all meet up together in some great by and by
or going underground to fight as a second front in support of various national
liberation struggles or that we all had to attain some kind of high-end individual
socialist/communist consciousness before we were worthy to lead the sweaty
masses there were enough half-baked ideas to fill a universal basket. Just
thinking about the various ideas, many of which I tipped my hat to before moving
on, makes me realize that in end the gals
and guys who thought we could rock and roll music our way to the next best
thing were much less harmful to the struggle than I thought for many years. But
don’t tell them that I don’t want guys like Alex James and Bart Webber from the
old days e-mailing about some 21st century Be-In in Golden Gate Park
commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, 1967. Jesus
that would be the end. ]
