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
Remember 1979 Greensboro Massacre!-Built The Anti-Fascist United Front!
Emboldened by the overt racism of the Trump administration, fascists have stepped up their provocations and deadly attacks. Their murderous intent was clearly seen in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, when hundreds of fascists mobilized in defense of the Confederacy. Heather Heyer was murdered by a Nazi-lover who drove his car at high speed into a group of anti-fascist protesters. The goal of today’s fascists is no different than that of their Nazi and Klan forebears: racial genocide, of black people in particular, and the destruction of working-class organizations, including unions and the left.
Today, “Charlottesville” is a byword for fascist terror, just as “Greensboro” has been for 38 years. On 3 November 1979, Ku Klux Klan and Nazi fascists murdered five union organizers and anti-racist activists, supporters of the Communist Workers Party, in broad daylight in Greensboro, North Carolina. The fascist killers did not work alone; they were aided and abetted by the government. Dozens of Klansmen and Nazis in a nine-car caravan drove up to the black housing project of Morningside Homes, the assembly point for an anti-Klan rally. With calculated deliberation, they took their shotguns and semiautomatic weapons out of their trunks, aimed and opened fire directly at the 100 protesters. Then they calmly packed up and drove away. The whole massacre was shown live on TV and recorded by the Greensboro cops.
In less than 90 seconds, five demonstrators lay dead: César Cauce, Michael Nathan, William Sampson, Sandra Smith and James Waller. Ten more were wounded, one of them paralyzed for life. As soon as the attack ended, the cops swooped in and arrested survivors. Liberals, black Democrats and the trade-union bureaucracy reacted with the same lies as the bourgeois media, implying that the dead got what they deserved. Grotesquely, the New York Times described the carnage in Greensboro as a “shootout” between two “fringe groups.”
Many of the anti-Klan activists who survived were fired from their jobs, jailed and hounded by the FBI and local police. These courageous people—black and white, men and women—were targeted because they acted to oppose the fascists’ vicious campaign against blacks, Jews, unionists and leftists. Many of them had a long and honorable history in the Southern civil rights movement and as union militants in North Carolina, where Klan terror has historically been used by the bosses to keep unions out.
The Greensboro Massacre was the product of collusion between the fascists and the capitalist state. A Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent helped train the killers and plot the assassinations; a police/FBI informer rode shotgun in the lead car; a Greensboro cop brought up the rear. The killers literally got away with murder. They were acquitted by all-white juries, affirming once again the meaning of “justice” in this racist, capitalist system.
The fascists announced they would “celebrate” the Greensboro Massacre a week later in Detroit. In response to this provocation in a black proletarian center, the Spartacist League built a labor/black mobilization at the same place and time that the Klan threatened to rally. Over 500 people, including black and white auto workers, turned out to make sure that the Klan did not ride in the Motor City. In organizing the protest, we had to overcome sabotage from the trade-union misleaders (especially UAW bureaucrats), who refused to endorse and build the rally, and from black Democratic Party mayor Coleman Young, who threatened to arrest the anti-Klan protesters. In an exemplary way, this mobilization showed that the working class, marching at the head of all the fascists’ intended victims, has the power to sweep the race-terrorists off the street.
The fascists must and can be stopped. Greensboro showed that the fascist killers can’t be effectively fought by individual direct action, no matter how courageous. What is necessary is to mobilize the strength of the working class. As we wrote in the immediate aftermath of Greensboro:
“Every successful cross burning, every fascist parade through a Jewish or black neighborhood, every courtroom victory in the liberals’ campaign for ‘free speech for fascists’ whets the murderers’ appetite for more violence.... This campaign of terror must be stopped. Socialists and militants in the labor movement must call on organized labor to mobilize its tremendous social power, in alliance with black and other minority organizations and the left to stop the Klan in its tracks.”
— “For Labor/Black Mass Mobilizations: Smash KKK Killers!” WV No. 243, 9 November 1979
Such mobilizations can give the working class a sense of its social power and of the class nature of the capitalist state and the Democrats. They also point to the need to forge a workers party to lead the fight for a socialist revolution. That is the only way to get rid of the fascist murderers once and for all—by doing away with the racist capitalist system that breeds them. In fighting for a workers America, we honor the memory of the Greensboro martyrs.
On The 150th Anniversary Of Marx's "Das Capital"(1867)-Economic Crisis: Karl Marx Was Right-Guest Commentary
Guest Commentary
Workers Vanguard No. 937 22 May 2009
New Spartacist Pamphlet
Economic Crisis: Karl Marx Was Right We reprint below the introduction to the just-released Spartacist pamphlet, Capitalist Anarchy and the Immiseration of the Working Class. The anarchy and brutality of the capitalist system has been revealed again in a global economic crisis, which threatens to reach the proportions of the Great Depression. As millions are thrown out of work, as massive numbers of foreclosures throw people out of their homes, as hunger stalks the poor, black people and other minorities, the sick and vulnerable, the U.S. has seen a bitter winter of deprivation. The impact of this crisis extends far beyond the U.S., threatening the lives and livelihoods of the working class and oppressed internationally. It is left to revolutionary Marxists both to explain the roots of the current crisis and to provide the program necessary to put an end to this barbaric, irrational system through the emancipation of the proletariat and establishment of its class rule, thus laying the basis for the construction of a socialist planned economy as a transition to a classless, egalitarian and harmonious society on a global scale. That is the purpose of this pamphlet, composed of articles previously published in Workers Vanguard. Leon Trotsky’s The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (also known as the Transitional Program), adopted as the basic programmatic document of the founding conference of the Fourth International in September 1938, is particularly relevant and urgent today. The political situation of the late 1930s and that of the post-Soviet world in which we live today are quite different, to be sure. But Trotsky’s declaration that “under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the impoverished life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism” could have been written about conditions in Detroit and elsewhere today. The same is the case with the call in the Transitional Program that: “The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists, which to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crises, the disorganization of the monetary system, and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all” (emphasis in original). Such transitional demands, as Trotsky wrote, stemmed “from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class” and unalterably led “to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.” Against the tried and failed stratagems pushed by liberals and fake socialists—from the Keynesian project of “benevolent” intervention by the capitalist state to the British Labour Party’s bourgeois nationalizations in the post-World War II period—we Marxists understand that no amount of tinkering with the existing system can wrench it into serving the needs of the proletariat and the oppressed. The 1997-98 Workers Vanguard series “Wall Street and the War Against Labor,” reprinted here, takes this up in the U.S. context. It also deals with the labor movement in the U.S. and the roots of its historic economic militancy and political backwardness—a backwardness due not least to the continuing oppression of black people as a race-color caste, integrated into the industrial proletariat but at the same time forcibly segregated at the bottom of society. The more recent articles reprinted in this pamphlet put forward our revolutionary program against those who purvey illusions in the Democratic Party and its current Obama administration as well as for class-struggle opposition to the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy. Part and parcel of such a struggle is a fight against nationalist, chauvinist protectionism, anti-immigrant racism and the anti-Communist poison spread by the union tops against those states where capitalism has been overthrown, centrally China but also the other deformed workers states of North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam. Our program is that of unconditional military defense of those states against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution and for proletarian political revolution to replace the nationalist bureaucratic regimes that undermine their defense. Our model remains that of the victorious October Revolution of 1917 led by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party. For class against class! For new October Revolutions
In Boston –The Latest
From RefuseFascism-Stop The Fascists In Their Tracks November 18th
on Boston Common
Frank Jackman comment:
I have mentioned on more
than one occasion that we have been for a while in a state of cold civil war in
America that has only had fuel to the fire added to it, make it tend toward a
hot civil war, by the massive frauds, midnight rip-off actions, and general
ignorance promoted by the Trump Administration. This rightly, and I think most
thankfully, has gotten the previously moribund left, the bewildered and the
oppressed up in arms enough to slowly begin a counter-attack against the
night-takers from corrupt and venal right-wing bourgeois politicians like Trump
and his ilk to the more dangerous extra-parliamentary forces-call them
alt-right, fascist, KKK, etc. that have been unleashed-have been given fresh
wind in their sails.
Not everything the left
and its allies argue for in counter-attack either makes senses or provides a
road forward in the anti-fascist struggle for example this call by RefuseFascism
to identify the Trump-Pence regime as fascist and to call for a parliamentary
impeachment process to get rid of the bums. But for now as we sort things out,
or as they get sorted for us which is as likely and has actually been the case
over the past several months, let’s keep to the united front idea going until
further notice. In short Saturday November 18th in Boston be on the
Boston Common to stop the Nazis, fascists and their ilk in their tracks
whatever anti-fascist ideas you march under.
The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Barbara Payton’s “Bad Blonde” (1953)
DVD Review
By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell
Bad Blonde (released in England unbelievably as The Flanagan Boy), starring tragedy-filled blonde bombshell Barbara Payton, Tony Wright, Belinda Lee, Hammer Productions, 1953
I am done, finished, ended, kaput, vaya con dios, adios, out of here or whatever expression you like to indicate that before I blow my top I will go no further with this series of B-noirs (noirs not to die for unlike the lead-ins expression on each DVD intro). Part, the lesser part now, of that reason is based on getting tired, very tired, of the razing I have been receiving from my fellows here on this site after an irate reader called me out as essentially a “penny a word” buffoon “padding” my reviews with extra stuff that she believed didn’t need to be included in order to get the gist of what each film was about. The greater reason now is rather more simple one of B-noir exhaustion after struggling through trying to find any reason for watching the latest film in the series Bad Blonde which had many ways to go, had many possibilities to reach high B-noir almost A-level but sank into its own funk and never rose from the mud again.
To give one very germane example of what I should have expected since I have already reviewed a half dozen or so in the series is that in England the film was released under the totally boorish title The Flanagan Boy making me think of the old-time Boys’ Town out in Nebraska I think run by Father Flanagan from which every Christmas I would get some kind of Christmas stamps was supposed to send dough for the wayward boys as a result. Being wise to the world a little even then I never sent nothing since I had nothing to send although that did not stop me from using the stamps as cheap Christmas wrapping for presents. Yeah, times were that hard for us, for my family back then. But this Flanagan is nothing but an up and coming prize fighter, you know a boxer who spends his eye time eying like any good-looking young guy blondes, good or bad, or any other color around should. To name the film after him when this bad blonde dish comes hither and yon his way seemed like such a travesty along with the dialogue that I, like a used up prize fighter threw in the towel, or will after this excursion is over.
Here’s the beauty of a last review though. I don’t have to give, as we used to say in the old neighborhood, a rat’s ass about that irate reader who tagged me with that “penny a word” designation that will probably hang around my neck until they put me under the ground if my dear colleagues, led by Sandy Salmon, Alden Riley, and Pete Markin have anything to say about it. So I will “pad” this baby with whatever comes into my head.
This is what I started with in my last review as a lead in for this dog’s tail, a review of has-been (hell he did three of these Hammer films not to his subsequent film career advantage I don’t believe) Dane Clark’s Blackout (released in England under the quizzical title Murder by Proxy so this latest title travesty was hardly the first):
“Wouldn’t you want a long-time film reviewer like me, or my colleagues in this space who are the regular reviewers, Sandy Salmon and Alden Riley, to draw a map for you, let you know what is what about any particular film in relationship to others in the genre. As the headline to this review notes (and has on other occasions in this ten film series) I am reviewing a series of B-film noirs from the 1950s produced by the Robert Lippert Hollywood-based organization in conjunction with Hammer Productions in England. The idea, at least this is what I have been able to gather from various readings and speculations after now having reviewed scads of these efforts, by Lippert was to grab some faded Hollywood star who either needed the dough or was looking for some film, any film, to satisfy whatever stardust lust drove him or her to the studio lots in the first place and back him or her up with an English cast, do the production in England and get away with costs on the cheap. If you knew that and then somebody, me, came along and told you that these efforts didn’t compare, didn’t compare at all with classic noirs, you know Out Of The Past, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, The Last Man Standing and others that you almost know all the lines from by heart since you have seen the films so many times, wouldn’t you appreciate that knowledge
“You would think so but you would at least in one case, actually more, but the reader I am thinking of as I write this has become something of a thorn in my side, my efforts to draw comparisons have given me nothing but grief, and had hung on me the title of “penny a word” writer as a joke by my colleagues.
“I noted in my last review in this series, The House Across The Lake, another has-been title that in my long career in the film reviewing racket, a profession if you will which is overall pretty subjective when you think about it, I have run up against all kind of readerships and readers but my recent escapade with one reader takes the cake as they used to say in the old days. That is the person I am thinking of right now as I write yet another screed against the injustice done to me by that person. To cut to the chase a B-grade film noir is one that is rather thin on plotline and maybe film quality usually made on the cheap although some of the classics with B-film noir queen Gloria Grahame have withstood the test of time despite that quality. I have contrasted those with the classics like The Maltese Falcon, Out Of The Past, The Big Sleep, and The Last Man Standing to give the knowledgeable reader an idea of the different.
“I have as already noted done a bunch of these (excluding a couple which I refused to review since they were so thin I couldn’t justify the time and effort to even give the “skinny” on them) using a kind of standard format discussing the difference between the classics and Bs in some detail and then as has been my wont throughout my career giving a short summary of the film’s storyline and maybe a couple of off-hand comments so that the readership has something to hang its hat on when choosing to see, or not see, the film. All well and good until about my fifth review when a reader wrote in complaining about my use of that standard form to introduce each film. Moreover and this is the heart of the issue she mentioned that perhaps I was getting paid per word, a “penny a word” in her own words and so was padding my reviews with plenty that didn’t directly relate to the specific film I was reviewing.
“Of course other than to cut me to the quick “penny a word” went out with the dime store novel and I had a chuckle over that expression since I have had various types of contracts for work over the years but not that one since nobody does that anymore. The long and short of it was that the next review was a stripped down version of the previous reviews which I assumed would satisfy her complaint. Not so. Using the name Nora Charles, the well-known distaff side of the Dashiell Hammett-inspired film series The Thin Man from the 1930s and early 1940s starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, she still taunted me with that odious expression of hers. (I also mentioned there as an aside that one of the pitfalls of citizen journalism, citizen commentary on-line is that one can use whatever moniker one wants to say the most unsavory things and not flame any blow-back). Now Sandy, Alden, Pete Markin, the administrator of this space and a few others have started to call me that as well-‘hey, penny a word.” That has made my blood boil on more than one occasion but I have calmly put up with it rather than blow-up and threaten murder and mayhem to them-and to Nora…..”
As I pointed out in that review enough of this or Nora will really have case about me “padding” my reviews. Here is the “skinny” on the film under review Bad Blonde in any case as is my wont and let dear sweet Nora suffer through another review-if she dares. A lot could have been done with this plotline, no question, and no matter dear Nora now that I have flamed out I will explain a little by comparison why this damn film is a B and not a classic. Hey this one has the eternal dilemma at its heart. A young, bored, beautiful, 1950s standard beautiful blonde, which meant very blonde and very well aware of that hard fact to the sorrows of all the brunettes, red-heads and raven-haired beauties who took back benches to goddess blonde starting with Marilyn and working down to the bad blonde in this one, Barbara Payton, playing Lorna, the unhappy young trophy wife, of an older man, a wealthy man who seemingly made his dough in some kind of rackets, but who nevertheless seems to believe that everybody in the world was his friend. And maybe they were-except that young, bored, very blonde wife who nevertheless knew that she had tagged into the next best thing-grabbing a fistful of gold in her cheapjack tank dancer life. She was not about to give up the gravy train but she was also fed up with the old man’s pawing and grabbing. And she was savvy enough once her change came to have that action stop-stopped cold.
Enter as if manna from heaven a young prize-fighter, a young handsome Johnny, played rather woodenly and distractedly by Tony Wright, with plenty of muscle and a fatal attraction to everything that wore a skirt. Enter her life through his manager’s connection with her husband whom he knew previously and who could provide the backing necessary to get this Johnny boy, this, huh, Flanagan boy to the top of the fight racket. Once the husband sees handsome bulging Johnny, but more importantly once Lorna see him in action in the ring, her lips pursed, teeth bared, sexually aroused by the sight of him she gets her act into high gear. That husband is headed for an early grave and that is that. Of course Lorna played her Johnny like a yo-yo ignoring him at first and making little of his manhood and then letting him steam up. Easy work. So easy that when she springs the deal, the real deal, although he isn’t bright enough to see her devilish play, he is all ears. Figures that he will sweep her and the dough up. Needless to say while the murder was rather tiresome, supposedly by drowning hubby, drowning him good and dead Johnny was put on the spot, would be the fall guy, would face the big step-off for his misdeeds.
That is all in a day’s work as far as this film goes. A hard day’s work since while Lorna (Barbara Payton) played her role pretty well as the, well, bad blonde, this muscle-bound Johnny, this Tony Wright is an airhead. Now for comparisons. Look the theme of the bored younger wife, although not always a blonde, trying to get rid of an older husband for dough, for another man, hell, just to have him stop mauling her no matter what the money situation is as old as Adam and Eve, maybe older. In film think about Lana Turner leading John Garfield right up to the big step-off after putting her old curmudgeon cheapie diner chef husband to the big sleep and he still smiling at the thought of her right before the lord high executioner is ready to do his work in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Think about Fred MacMurry once he sees that ankle bracelet walking down the stairs and even before he sees Barbara Standwycks’ face he is a goner-and so is her older cheapskate engineer stay-at home husband in Double Indemnity. Think, oh forget it, those classics should not even be mentioned in the same paragraph as they interplay between Johnny and Lorna here. Do you see now why I no longer give a rat’s ass about this Hammer Production material.
Unlike a few other films in this series this film never took turns like a real thriller but the lifeless dialogue and the wooden acting by the Brits (and by faded Barbara in spots too too) made this thing a holy goof. As I have mentioned before in other reviews where things actually looked promising at the beginning here despite the come hither title (in America anyway) and the titillating advertisement poster (see above) for the film this one faded away on its own dead weight. B-noir but seriously B not heading to classics-no way. I am done.
Yes, no question, I am
belatedly recognizing the passing of the legendary New Orleans piano man Antoine
“Fats” Domino. Not out of any ignorance of his passing as has happened in some cases
like that of Etta James several years ago when somehow her passing fell through
the cracks in this space. Rather in the case of Fats I was for a time unsure of
how I wanted to place him in my growing up pantheon of pioneer rock and roll
artists and legends.
Here is my dilemma. No question
that massively crazy piano men Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard had a great
deal of influence on me during my growing up days in hard-pressed Carver down
in
cranberry country where I
would listen to the Boston rock radio station WMEX and hear Little Richard
rolling his eyes toward heaven on Lucille
and Good Golly Miss Molly . Even
better a little
later when I saw Jerry
Lee doing High School Confidential on
the back of a flatbed truck heading down the road to the local high school in the
film of the same name and I flipped out, went crazy despite the silly cautionary
tale about the dangers of drugs portrayed in the film.
But in the Fats case I
was pretty non-plussed by his classic Blueberry
Hill and others performed by him. So call it coming of age, call it a matter
of taste, call it hormones but Fats did not “speak” to me then. Now I can see
how he deserved all his fame although he still does not speak to me. I was in
great sorrow when I heard that Hurricane Katrina destroyed a lot of his record
holdings which I assume were invaluable to the history of rock and roll. Let’s
leave it at this the Fat Man had the goods to push rock and roll forward for my
growing up generation. RIP, Antoine “Fats” Domino, RIP
For The Frontline Defenders Of The
Working Class!-Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up!”-Build The Resistance-A Program
By the American Left History blog staff
[Sometimes and the period we are in
of late, over the last several years, a period of cold civil war in the United
States, is one of those times, we have to come up with some programmatic
statements in order to help the process of clarification about the immediate
and future tasks of the Left. To what
the later Peter Paul Markin, forever known as the Scribe, called in his old
hard-core working class growing up neighborhood days “seeking the newer world”
which he unfortunately by his untimely early death was not able to help create
although for a while he tried, tried like hell to do in his best days and which
a number of us, his old comrades both from corner boy days and later have been
trying to continue. The following is a draft, and only a draft, of what we
collectively have come up with to help orient the newfound and promising
Resistance that has sprung up in the era of one Donald J. Trump, his henchmen
and his hangers-on to reverse the one-sided class war we have been on the brunt
side of and of the cultural wars we have been fighting rear-guard action
against for about the last forty years. Josh Breslin for the American Left History blog staff. ]
An Injury To One Is An Injury To
All!-Defend The International Working Class Everywhere! ******** Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The
Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
******** A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to
the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment,
and those who have just plain quit looking for work was as high in the American
labor force as it is just tentatively recovering from of late, although it is
admittedly down from the Great Recession 2008 highs. Thirty hours work for
forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. Socially
productive work not make-shift stuff although we would support an vast expansion
of public works to fix the broken down infrastructure in need of serious and immediate
repair. his is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more
equitable distribution of available work.
The
basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and
maritime unions’ plans as a result of battles like the General Strike in San
Francisco in the 1934, is that the work would be divided up through local
representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a
giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler
task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast
increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers,
target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.
Without
the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social
surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work
at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The
only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no
capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40”
–with the no reduction in pay proviso, although many low –end employers are
even now under the “cover” of the flawed Obamacare reducing hours WITH loss of
pay-so that to establish this work system as a norm it will, in the end, be
necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the
unorganized
is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of
the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows,
just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some
of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as
new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a
massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to
globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that
desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the
service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that
have become a dominant aspect of the American economy. Support the recent
militant efforts, including the old tactic of civil disobedience, by service
unions and groups of fast-food workers to increase the minimum socially
acceptable wage in their Fight For 15.
Organize the South-this low wage area,
this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading
off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among
black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A
corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to
keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being
resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments.
Hey, nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of
workers, thousands of company-owned trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A
victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement
just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. The
key here is to organize the truckers and distribution workers the place where
the whole thing comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of individual
retail stores. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone
once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that
organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of
public and private workers to unionize.
Simple-No
more defeats like in Wisconsin in 2011, no more attacks on collective
bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards,
arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections like the unsuccessful one
against Governor Scoot Walker in Wisconsin in the aftermath of the huge defeat
of public workers in Wisconsin funds and talents which could have been used to
reorganize the public workers for union struggles ahead. Unions must keep their
independent from government interference. Period.
*
Defend the independence of the working
classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates.
In 2008, 2012, and 2016 labor, organized labor, spent over well over 700 million
dollars respectively trying to elect Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other Democrats
(mainly). The “no show, no go” results speak for themselves as the gap between
the rich and poor has risen even more in this period. For those bogus efforts rather
than the serious labor organizing among low wage workers, the unorganized, the
South and Wal-Mart the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The
idea in those elections was that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of
labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the-back give backs should put
paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that
is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement since they
have been very generous with own paychecks. The old norm in need of revival is that
the bureaucrats at all levels should receive no more than the pay of the average
skilled worker they represent.
The
hard reality today is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class
struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration,
arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife,
strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. One of most egregious recent examples
that we can recall- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks
in the summer of 2011 when they had the company on the run and the subsequent
announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have
worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the
1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war.
The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments for
bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor when
the deal went down from Bush to Obama to Trump on down.
This
does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the
contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead.
Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing
Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on
the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio (also think,
think hard, about having to go that far back to get a positive example). That
type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not
on recall elections against individual reactionaries, like the Scoot-Walker
recall effort in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle (and which was
overwhelmingly unsuccessful to boot-while the number of unionized public
workers has dwindled to a precious few).
*End the endless
wars!-
As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reached its
final stages back in 2011, the draw- down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we
argued that we must recognize that we anti-warriors had failed, and failed
rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our
opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006).As the endless
American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in previously in Libya and now
in Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Chad and other proxy wars) continue now with a new
stage against ISIS (Islamic State) in Iraq and other Middle East states we had
better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to
have any effect on the U.S. troop escalation we know is coming before that
fight is over. No War With North Korea, Iran!
Out of Syria! Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East! Stop The Bombing
Campaigns! Defend The Palestinian People! And as always after 16 long years, since
2001 for the forgetful Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied
Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran! Hands
Off North Korea!-
American (and world) imperialists have periodically ratcheted up their
propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude
to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq
and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import.
We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on
other occasions, and call for the defense of North Korea and Iran against the
American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior
partners on this issue, Israel and Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea) in North Korea
or Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially
here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for
non-intervention but for defense of North Korea and Iran. We will, believe me
we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic
fundamentalists in Iran and the Kim regime in North Korea in our own way in our
own time.
U.S. Hands Off The
World! And Keep Them Off!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American
imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in
this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War
Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I
German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that in 1915
in the heat of war and paid the price unlike other party leaders who were
pledged to stop the war budgets and reneged on that promise by going to prison.
The jailhouse the only play for an honest representative of the working class
under those conditions. The litmus test for every political candidate must be
first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now no new funding in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea preparations, Iran preparations, China
preparations, etc. you get our drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn
imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution
may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working
people! Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any
rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is
the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of
the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political
problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to
provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education
for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of
Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections
central to their programs. Be clear Obamacare is not our program and has been
shown to be totally inadequate and wasteful however we will defend that program
against those like Trump and the majority of his Republican ilk r his who wish
to dismantle it and leave millions once again uninsured and denied basic health
benefits.
Free, quality higher
education for all!
Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker
control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This
would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to
increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the
simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being
placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is
getting tough for the middle-class as well.
Moreover
the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have
better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students from
broken homes and minority homes in the wilderness. Take the resources of the
private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from
the government (take from the military budget if you want to find the money
quickly to do the job right), get rid of the top heavy and useless college
administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus
workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports
indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion plus dollars,
give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses
has gone up dramatically while low-cost aid has not kept pace. What has
happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society,
and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in
some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for
much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing
foreclosures and aid underwater mortgages now! Although the worst
of the 2008 crunch has abated there are still plenty of problems and so this
demand is still timely if not desperately timely like in the recent past. Hey,
everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe,
clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of
the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing
crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble had also
burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot
application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as
well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back.
Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value,
the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists.
Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of
society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that
at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and
other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a
fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show
there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out
fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take
the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda.
Socialism is the only
serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally
and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one
of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that
we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build
a workers’ party that fights for a workers government to unite all the
oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without
as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent
working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our
leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers
party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government
to begin the transition to socialism, to the next level of human progress on a
world-wide scale.
As
Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We
do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human
race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of
man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for
instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man.
Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken
on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are
convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with
these.”
Emblazon on our red
banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
********
Bob Marley Get Up, Stand Up Lyrics
Get up, stand up: stand up for your
rights!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your
rights!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your
rights!
Get up, stand up: don't give up the
fight!
Preacher man, don't tell me,
Heaven is under the earth.
I know you don't know
What life is really worth.
It's not all that glitters is gold;
'Alf the story has never been told:
So now you see the light, eh!
Stand up for your rights. come on!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your
rights!
Get up, stand up: don't give up the
fight!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your
rights!
Get up, stand up: don't give up the
fight!
Most people think, Great god will
come from the skies,
Take away everything
And make everybody feel high.
But if you know what life is worth,
You will look for yours on earth:
And now you see the light,
You stand up for your rights. jah!
Get up, stand up! (jah, jah! )
Stand up for your rights! (oh-hoo! )
Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up!
)
Don't give up the fight! (life is
your right! )
Get up, stand up! (so we can't give
up the fight! )
Stand up for your rights! (lord,
lord! )
Get up, stand up! (keep on
struggling on! )
Don't give up the fight! (yeah! )
We sick an' tired of-a your
ism-skism game -
Dyin' 'n' goin' to heaven in-a
Jesus' name, lord.
We know when we understand:
Almighty god is a living man.
You can fool some people sometimes,
But you can't fool all the people
all the time.
So now we see the light (what you
gonna do?),
We gonna stand up for our rights!
(yeah, yeah, yeah! )
So you better: Get up, stand up! (in
the morning! git it up! )
Stand up for your rights! (stand up
for our rights! )
Get up, stand up!
Don't give up the fight! (don't give
it up, don't give it up! )
Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up!
)
Stand up for your rights! (get up,
stand up! )
Get up, stand up! (... )
Don't give up the fight! (get up,
stand up! )
*************
A special word about Bob Marley whose song above
inspired us to update and present out programmatic ideas:
We Don’t Want Your Ism-Skism Thing- Dreadlocks
Delight- “One Love: The Very Best of Bob Marley And The Wailers”- A CD Review
One Love: The Very Best of Bob
Marley And The Wailers, Bob Marley And The Wailers, UTV Records, 2001
Admit it, back in the late seventies
and early eighties we all had our reggae minutes, at least a minute anyway. And
the center of that minute, almost of necessity, had to be a run-in with the
world of Bob Marley and the Wailers, probably I Shot The Sheriff. Some
of us stuck with that music and moved on to its step-child be-bop, hip-hop when
that moved on the scene. Others like me just took it as a world music cultural
moment and put the records (you know records, those black vinyl things, right?)
away after a while. And that was that.
Well not quite. A few year back, back in 2011 the Occupy movement, the people
risen, had done a very funny musical thing, at least funny to my ears when I
heard it. They, along with the old labor song, Solidarity Forever, and,
of course Brother Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land , had resurrected
Bob Marley’s up-from-under fight song, Get Up, Stand Up to fortify the
sisters and brothers against the American imperial monster beating down on all
of us and most directly under the police baton and tear gas canister. And that
seems, somehow, eminently right in the monster age of one Donald J. Trump, his
henchman, and his hangers-on. More germane here it has gotten me to dust off
those old records and give Brother Marley another hear. And you should too if
you have been remiss of late with such great songs as (aside from those
mentioned already) No Woman, No Cry, Jamming, One Love/People Get Ready
(ya, the old Chambers Brother tune), and Buffalo Soldier. And stand up
and fight too.
Mark Rothko Dwellth At The Museum Of Fine Arts In Boston This Fall (2017)
Zack James comment: I have always been interested since I first saw Mark Rothko’s work at a Harvard University location (the location of which did great damage to those works and required much work to restore) long ago. While he is not my favorite modern artist who thought outside (Robert Motherwell probably has that designation) you cannot understand the drift away from pure abstraction for its own sake without tipping your hat to Rothko (and Frank Stella). If you are in Boston this fall check this exhibition out.
