Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx- On The 150th Anniversary Of "Das Capital" From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Karl Marx Was Right!-World Economic Crisis—Workers Must Fight for Power

On The 150th Anniversary Of  The Publication Of "Das Capital" (1867)-Karl Marx Was Right!-World Economic Crisis—Workers Must Fight for Power

Frank Jackman comment:


This is a very good, very nicely pedagogic introduction to basic Marxist economics for today's younger readers not versed in the old time (ouch!)1960s studies of his economic theories that were de riguer for leftists then.
***************
Workers Vanguard No. 997
2 March 2012

Karl Marx Was Right!

World Economic Crisis—Workers Must Fight for Power

(Young Spartacus pages)

We reprint below a presentation on Marxist economics given by Tynan Maddalena, editor of Spartacist Canada’s Young Spartacus pages. The presentation was originally given to a 24 September 2011 Trotskyist League of Canada/Spartacus Youth Club day school in Toronto and published in Spartacist Canada No. 171 (Winter 2011/2012).

As the economic crisis that began in 2007-2008 continues around the globe, the post-Cold War myth that capitalism is the final stage in human progress and can continue to grow without limit is shattering before our eyes. In the United States, millions of workers have been thrown into the ranks of the unemployed, millions have lost their homes, hundreds of thousands of immigrants are deported every year, and youth are burdened with huge student debt with dwindling prospects of getting a job. For those who see no future under capitalism, Marx’s analysis is an essential tool to understand the world we live in today—and change it.

Since this presentation was given, populist Occupy Wall Street protests against inequality and austerity spread further around the country. The Occupy organizers have argued that they have no clear political agenda, affiliation or even a fixed set of demands, but in fact they do have a program: liberal reform, especially of the financial sector, and “democratization” of capitalism. But capitalism cannot be fundamentally reformed. There is a fundamental class divide in society between the capitalists—the tiny number of families that own industry and the banks—and the working class, whose labor is the source of the capitalists’ profits.

In this election year, Occupy protesters and others will be told to swallow the poison pill of “lesser evilism,” as attempts will be made to corral them into support for Obama and the capitalist Democratic Party. Posturing as the “friends” of labor and the oppressed, the Democrats are in reality no less committed than the Republicans to the maintenance of capitalist exploitation and pursuit of bloody imperialist wars.

To students and young workers seeking a revolutionary program for the destruction of capitalism, as opposed to seeking only liberal reform, Young Spartacus offers Marxism. The Spartacus Youth Clubs train the next generation of revolutionary socialists—the future cadre of a multiracial workers party built in opposition to all capitalist parties and their sycophants. Led by such a party and armed with a revolutionary program, the working class can vanquish this system of exploitation and war, laying the basis for a global communist society of abundance and human freedom.

*   *    *

As stock markets crash and the world economy stands on the precipice of a second “Great Recession,” consider that the collapse of 2008-09, the worst global economic crisis since the 1930s, added 130 million people to the ranks of the chronically malnourished and hungry. That brings the total number to over one billion. In so many words, one-seventh of the human race is starving. One-seventh and counting.

Across the European Union, 23 million workers are out of work. In Spain, which was recently rocked by general strikes and enormous protest movements, youth unemployment is over 44 percent. In Greece, hundreds of thousands of jobs are gone, homelessness is through the roof, and many people, especially pensioners, line up at soup kitchens in order to survive.

Every so-called bailout for every financial crisis across the eurozone—from Greece to Ireland to Portugal—brings with it unrelenting attacks on the living standards of the masses, who seethe with discontent. The IMF, the European Central Bank, the governments of Germany, France and the United States all chauvinistically chastise the peoples of these countries in crisis as living beyond their means or lazy. In reality, the financial powers are only bailing out themselves—their own failed banking systems—on the backs of workers and the poor.

Here in North America, we hear a lot of talk about an economic recovery. It is a jobless recovery, a wageless recovery, a fragile recovery, a “still nascent” recovery. At the end of July, the American government revised its statistics: the 2008 recession was deeper than reported, and the “recovery” was even more dubious than reported. As for the Canadian economy, we recently learned that it shrank by 0.4 percent in the second quarter of this year. Scotiabank released a report two weeks ago forecasting another drop in the third quarter which could be as great as 2.5 percent. “Canada could be among the first of the world’s advanced economies to fall into a technical recession,” warned the CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation]. That’s rich. We’ve had a jobless, wageless, fragile, still nascent recovery, but don’t worry, the coming recession is going to be only a “technical” one!

In human terms, one in six Americans is now unemployed, with the average time out of work close to ten months. Forty-five million people are on food stamps, and that has increased more than 30 percent during the two years of this specious recovery. Since the housing bubble burst in the U.S., there have been over seven million home foreclosures. Enforcing them is a brutal act of state repression: the police come to a home, haul the furniture and other possessions onto the street and lock the family out. The bourgeois media would have you believe that the worst was over by 2008. The truth is that 932,000 of those foreclosures came in the first quarter of 2010, and that was an increase of 16 percent over the previous year. And under racist American capitalism, blacks and Latinos, one-third of whose households have no net worth, always suffer disproportionately. In some largely black and Latino neighbourhoods of South Chicago, as well as across the Detroit metropolitan area, one of every 20 households was in foreclosure.

In Canada, well over a quarter million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2002. This underscores the decades-long deindustrialization of North America, represented in the rusted wreckage of steel mills and the shells of auto plants. As Karl Marx put it: “Thus the forest of uplifted arms demanding work becomes ever thicker, while the arms themselves become ever thinner.”

At the same time, corporate profits have reached record levels. Ed Clark, chief executive officer of the Toronto-Dominion Bank, whose profits recently rose to a staggering $1.45 billion, recently joined billionaire capitalist parasites Warren Buffett and George Soros in advocating higher taxes for the rich. Their only concern, of course, is to better preserve the capitalist system, including by giving it a facelift—though that did not prevent right-wing demagogues from labeling Buffett and Soros “socialists.” As they say, truth is stranger than fiction.

It should come as no surprise that the Conservatives, now with a majority government, are moving rapidly against the unions. The government ended a lockout by Canada Post [the postal service] this spring by legislating wage levels that were even lower than the employer’s final offer. Recently, two different unions at Air Canada were threatened with strikebreaking legislation.

The bailouts of the banks—in some cases to the tune of trillions of dollars—were enacted uniformly by every government in the imperialist West and Japan at the expense of the working class. These measures point to an elementary truth of Marxism-Leninism: that the executive of the modern state is but a committee for deciding the common affairs of the ruling class as a whole. Or look at Export Development Canada’s agreement to lend $1 billion to the Vale mining conglomerate. This came after a year-long strike at Vale’s Sudbury nickel mines, during which the company claimed that funds simply weren’t available to meet the union’s modest demands.

Various reformists and even self-professed Marxists claim that the way forward is to look for “concrete” solutions “in the here and now,” i.e., liberal palliatives. The problem is that any reform wrested from the capitalists today will only be taken away tomorrow—and today the rulers aren’t even offering the pretense of reform. The reformists especially drag out their cant about “real world” solutions when they want to express disdain for the theory and program of revolutionary Marxism, which they dismiss as “abstract.”

In fact, the reformists’ perspective is counterposed to the only road that can end the hunger, poverty and social degradation that are intrinsic to capitalism. Vladimir Lenin, who along with Leon Trotsky led the October Revolution of 1917, warned: “Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes” (“The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” 1913). Lenin stressed that “there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and, owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle.” As scientific socialists, we fight for workers revolution to establish an international, centrally planned economy based on satisfying human want.

Marxist Theory and the Class Struggle

Lenin called Marxist theory the “granite foundation” of the Bolshevik Party. Without revolutionary theory, he explained, there can be no revolutionary movement. The core of Marxism is the labour theory of value, elaborated by Marx in the first volume of Capital. Not a breeze to read. But when it comes to the theory that all value in a capitalist economy derives solely from, or is indeed synonymous with, labour, whether or not someone wants to learn this hinges to a great extent on their sympathies for the working class. It was Marx’s commitment to the modern industrial proletariat that allowed him to unlock the secret of value that underlies commodity circulation. As we Spartacists say, program generates theory.

Capitalist production developed from commodity circulation. People have always had to come together to produce for their needs. However, as the techniques of production developed and diversified, people no longer produced goods solely for their own groups, but for trade with others through the medium of exchange. Thus Marx called commodities a relationship between people expressed as a relationship between things.

Obviously, there would be no need for someone to trade their product for something they already had. In order to be exchanged, two commodities must have different uses to satisfy different wants. At the same time, they must on some level be equivalent: they must possess equal value, otherwise there would be no basis for each person to voluntarily give up their product for someone else’s. The great discovery of Karl Marx was that the basis for this equivalence is that all commodities are the product of labour, labour in the most abstract and general sense.

Go to an economics lecture at a university and you may learn that people exchange things solely because they have different uses. But why not just get it yourself? The answer is that it has to be produced: it takes work to acquire it. A slightly more sophisticated version of the same bourgeois argument is that you can’t get it yourself because it is scarce. That reflects a certain truth. However, it is a rigid, static view of the truth that is conditioned by the values of the bourgeoisie, which is an idle class. Anyone who works readily understands that all commodities are scarce until they are brought into existence by labour.

It has never been the case that people have produced commodities on a level playing field. Capitalism did not begin with a clean slate, but was built up on the previously existing systems of feudalism and slavery. Large sections of the ruling classes of these societies capitalized their wealth, whereas the slaves remained dispossessed and the peasants were often brutally robbed of what little they had. Through market competition, the larger, more efficient producers drove the smaller, weaker ones out of business, bought out their capital and conquered their share of the market. Those who were amassing the wealth became capitalists—the bourgeoisie. Those who had nothing left to sell but their own sweat and blood were the workers—the proletariat.

It’s often said that workers sell their labour. In fact, they are not permitted to do even that. The prerequisites for labour in an industrial society—machines and factories, the core of which can be scientifically termed the means of production—belong to the capitalist. The worker cannot work without first receiving permission from the capitalist. What the worker actually sells is therefore not his labour, but rather his potential to labour. That is what Marxists call labour power.

Labour power is bought, sold and consumed. It is a commodity, but there is something peculiar about it. The price of any commodity is based roughly on its value, or the amount of labour necessary for its reproduction. What is the value of labour power? The cost of reproducing the ability of the worker to perform his labour. That consists of food, shelter, clothing, some means of relaxation and of acquiring the skills necessary for doing the job. And finally, enough to support a family so that the working class can continue to exist from one generation to the next.

Taken together, the labour required for these measures constitutes the value of labour power. The gist of capitalist exploitation is that the proletariat generates far more value than is required for the production and reproduction of its labour power. In other words, the peculiarity of the commodity of labour power, its unique attribute, is that it is a source of value. The difference between the total value the worker adds to the product and the value of labour power is called surplus value. Exactly how much of the total value goes to the capitalist and how much goes back to the labourer? This is determined by living factors, by a contest of forces—in other words, by the class struggle.

Take Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold. Their operation in Indonesia faced a strike last July. Reuters news agency, which is anything but Marxist, made the following calculation: the workers’ wages were $1.50 an hour, the price of gold, $1,500 an ounce; therefore, the gold output lost during the eight-day strike could have covered three times the workers’ annual wages.

To begin to determine the rate of exploitation of these miners—otherwise known as the rate of surplus value—you would need to know the value of the machinery and fuel used up during production and subtract it from the total product. Otherwise, you could not verify the total amount of value the workers add to the product through their labour. However, the fact stands that these gold mines yield 137 times the workers’ annual wages each year, and Indonesian mines are not famous for being high-tech. Since based on our present knowledge we are confined to being somewhat less than scientific, let’s just say that someone is being taken advantage of here, and it’s not the capitalist.

There can be no fair division of the social product between the worker and the capitalist. As Trotsky explained: “The class struggle is nothing else than the struggle for surplus-product. He who owns surplus-product is master of the situation—owns wealth, owns the state, has the key to the church, to the courts, to the sciences and to the arts” (“Marxism in Our Time,” 1939). There can be no such thing as equality, fairness, freedom or democracy between the slaves and the slave masters.

Exploitation and Capitalist Crisis

So what are social classes? Lenin defined them as “large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently”—only consequently—“by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it” (“A Great Beginning,” 1919).

Social class does not derive from a state of mind, nor is it even fundamentally a question of the rich and the poor. For example, a skilled unionized worker in a modern factory in an imperialist country may under exceptional cases make over $100,000 per year. Yet because labour productivity is so high, his or her rate of exploitation is likely much higher than that of far more oppressed and impoverished labourers in a semicolonial country. Moreover, a unionized worker in the trades may make as much as or more than a yuppie supervisor in an office. Nevertheless, the worker still has an economic interest in overthrowing his capitalist exploiter, while the supervisor is an accessory to capitalist production and thus bound to it materially and, you could say, spiritually.

Just about anyone can criticize capitalism from the standpoint of reason or morality. Yet Marx criticized capitalism from the standpoint of maximizing labour productivity, which is generally promoted by capitalism’s ideological defenders as its strong point. Marx proved that capitalist production increasingly puts the brakes on historical development, at the same time as it creates its own gravedigger, the proletariat.

Day in and day out, the proletariat continues to produce. It cannot use its own labour to get ahead as a class, because it is only paid what is necessary to allow it to continue producing. Everything necessary to get ahead goes to the capitalists. As Marx put it: “If the silk worm were to spin in order to continue its existence as a caterpillar, it would be a complete wage-worker.”

As capitalism develops, the bourgeoisie amasses more and more capital. Technology advances. Machinery becomes more and more sophisticated and extensive and labour productivity rises. The capitalist devotes an increasingly large ratio of his wealth toward acquiring machinery, and a correspondingly declining ratio toward employing workers. In Marx’s words, the organic composition of capital increases. The effect of this is contradictory. On one hand, the rate of exploitation increases. On the other hand, the rate of profit decreases. That’s the dilemma the capitalist faces. Even if he ratchets up the rate of exploitation, the rate of profit still tends to go down. That is why the capitalist has no future. Let’s take a closer look.

Say you’ve got your engineering degree and you’re looking for a job in your field. Off you go to the Celestica factory at Don Mills and Eglinton to pave the information superhighway, one transistor at a time, for $11.75 an hour on six-month contracts with no benefits. (And your boss can call you a few hours before your shift starts to tell you to stay home without pay.)

So there you are with your co-workers paving the information superhighway with these transistors; array enough together in the right way and you get a flip-flop, an edifice of the binary logic used on a grand scale in computers. It’s nowhere near as glamorous as it sounds in Wired magazine or those trendy post-Marxist academic seminars. Away you work. Eventually, the company replaces the soldering irons that each of you uses with a wave solder machine. A chunk of your co-workers gets laid off. You’re producing way more circuit boards than before, only your wage is the same. Since most of your friends were laid off, the company’s spending on wages has gone way down. The rate of exploitation overall has increased astronomically. Good times for the capitalist, right? Not so fast.

At first, the company will have an advantage over its competitors. Soon, however, that new machinery will become the standard across the industry. Even though the rate of exploitation has gone up, the rate of profit will go down. It all comes back to labour being the sole source of value. One capitalist can sell another capitalist a machine, but that exchange does not increase the total amount of value in the economy. The value just changes hands. It’s only once the capitalist purchases labour power, and consumes it by having the worker do his job, that any new value is added to the economy. The lower the ratio of the capitalist’s wealth that is spent on wage labour, the lower is the ratio of surplus value to his total expenses. More and more of his wealth gets tied up in replacing and maintaining machinery—what Marx evocatively termed “dead labour.”

As I said, the rate of exploitation is going up, but the rate of profit is going down. The capitalist does not resign himself to that fate peacefully, however. He panics and slashes wages like a madman, doing whatever he can to transfer the burden of his decaying system onto the backs of the people he exploits. When that capitalist can no longer produce at a competitive rate of profit, he simply ceases to produce. He throws his workers onto the street. Like Malcolm X said of the slave master, he worked them like dogs and dropped them in the mud. Production is in chaos. The empty factories rust.

Once the slave escapes his master, he is no longer a slave; once the serf gets his plot of land, he is no longer a serf. But even after the proletarian punches his time card for the final time and quits (or loses) his job, he remains a proletarian. The modern slave, the wage slave, is slave to the entire capitalist class. The proletariat cannot escape this exploiting class but must overthrow it in its entirety, worldwide, and in so doing liberate everyone who is oppressed by capitalism.

For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

What has been placed on the agenda is proletarian revolution, even if this seems far off today. We look above all to the legacy of the Russian Revolution. As Trotsky noted about the early years of the Soviet Union:

“Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth’s surface—not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity. Even if the Soviet Union, as a result of internal difficulties, external blows and the mistakes of its leadership, were to collapse—which we firmly hope will not happen—there would remain as an earnest of the future this indestructible fact, that thanks solely to a proletarian revolution a backward country has achieved in less than ten years successes unexampled in history.”

—The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

We Trotskyists fought against the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR, and against its final counterrevolutionary collapse in 1991-92. Nevertheless, that collapse did occur, and the ideologues of the bourgeoisie have done everything they can to bury the lessons of the October Revolution, which remains our model.

The key political instrument for victory is the revolutionary vanguard party as developed by Lenin. Trotsky explained: “The class, taken by itself, is only material for exploitation. The proletariat assumes an independent role only at that moment when from a social class in itself it becomes a political class for itself. This cannot take place otherwise than through the medium of a party. The party is that historical organ by means of which the class becomes class conscious” (“What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat,” 1932). We seek to win the working class, starting with its most advanced layers, to understand the necessity of sweeping away capitalist rule and establishing what Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is the only road to communism, a global high-tech society of material abundance where classes, the state and family no longer exist, and where thereby social inequality based on sex is eradicated and the social significance of race, nation and ethnicity abolished.

Where to get started? We come full circle to the question of what to do concretely in the here and now. We can now approach that question scientifically, from the standpoint of the historic interest of the proletariat as a class. We can avoid the pitfall of do-gooder moralism, of becoming, as Lenin warned, “the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics,” whether in the form of right-wing religious demagogy or social-democratic opportunism.

The class consciousness of the proletariat and its will to struggle have been greatly undermined by the social-democratic misleadership of the labour movement, exemplified by the New Democratic Party. Three years ago, the now-deceased NDP leader Jack Layton—who, unlike the reformist left, we do not eulogize—called on workers to have the “courage” to “take a pay cut so your friends at the plant can keep their job.” This is one of many reasons why we said “No vote to the NDP” in the May federal election, and we say so again for the upcoming Ontario election.

The NDP is based not merely on a bad set of ideas. It is rooted materially in the trade-union bureaucracy of English Canada. That bureaucracy expresses the interests of a stratum of the working class that Marxists term the labour aristocracy. Where does the labour aristocracy come from? It lives off scraps from the superprofits the capitalists in imperialist countries tear out of the semicolonial countries. Thus, to Marxists, it was no surprise that the NDP voted with both hands for NATO’s war on Libya. The NDP is what Marx’s close collaborator Friedrich Engels called a bourgeois workers party: it may be linked to the organizations of the working class, but it is thoroughly pro-capitalist in its leadership and outlook.

What is needed is something completely different: a class-struggle workers party that understands that the interests of the capitalists and the workers have nothing in common. Such a party would be, in Lenin’s words, a tribune of the people, which understands that the working class can only emancipate itself by ultimately abolishing all forms of oppression.

A revolutionary workers party would intervene into the class struggle as the most historically conscious and advanced element of the proletariat. It would advocate Quebec independence to oppose the dominant Anglo chauvinism and get the stifling national question off the agenda, making way for a higher level of class struggle. It would champion free abortion on demand and fight for the perspective of women’s liberation through socialist revolution, including among the more backward layers of the proletariat. To combat mass unemployment, it would demand the sharing of available work, with no loss of pay, and a massive program of public works.

To unmask the exploitation, robbery and fraud of the capitalist owners and the swindles of the banks, a class-struggle workers party would demand that the capitalists open their books. Raising the call for the expropriation of branches of industry vital for national existence, it would explain that this must be linked to the fight for the seizure of power by the working class, as against the reformist misleaders for whom the call for nationalization is merely a prescription for bailing out bankrupt capitalist enterprises. As Trotsky argued in opposition to the capitalists and their reformist agents in the Transitional Program (1938):

“If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. ‘Realizability’ or ‘unrealizability’ is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what its immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.”

That is the task to which we of the Trotskyist League and the Spartacus Youth Clubs are dedicated. In the trough of the reactionary political period following the destruction of the Soviet Union, it’s a task with few immediate rewards. But let’s be sober and scientific about this—there is an overhead to historical progress. And on the grounds of that necessity, we urge you to join us in that struggle.

On The 50th Anniversary Of The May Days In France-A Leaflet From From The Workers International League-All Support to Public Employees! For a Workers'Solution to the Crisis- A One Day General Strike Is Posed

All Support to Public Employees! For a Workers'Solution to the Crisis

This leaflet is being distributed by the Workers International League and Socialist Appeal magazine. We believe that the working class is the only force in society that can bring about fundamental change. We believe that the crisis of the capitalist system should be paid for by the capitalists, not the workers and youth. We believe that both the Republicans and Democrats are bought and paid for by the billionaires and therefore cannot serve the interests of the working class majority. We believe the unions need to break with these parties and build a party of, by, and for the working class: a mass party of labor based on the unions. We believe that everyone living in the U.S. has a right to quality jobs, health care, education and housing. We believe we need a society that is truly democratic, with leaders that are directly elected and directly accountable to their constituents. But it is clear that this is not possible under capitalism. This is why we fight for socialism, and we invite you to join us in this struggle! For more information visit www.socialistappeal.org or contact us at wil@socialistappeal.org / (612) 293-9247
Wisconsin is on the front lines of the nationwide battle against cuts and austerity. Most public sector workers in the state belong to unions that collectively negotiate their wages, benefits, and pensions. It has been that way for over 60 years. Now Governor Walker wants to make Wisconsin a ''right to work" state, make it illegal for state employees to bargain collectively, and limit wage increases to the consumer price index. The result is that 175,000 teachers, government employees, prison guards, etc. will be at the mercy of the Wisconsin state legislature every year to determine how much they will get in benefits and pensions, with wage increases limited to adjustment for inflation.

Governor Walker's vicious attack against organized workers is part of an ongoing assault that is picking up steam as the crisis of the system continues. If he succeeds in smashing Wisconsin's public sector unions, other states and the private sector will follow. This will mean an even lower standard of living for all workers in the United States. What happens in Wisconsin does not stay in Wisconsin!

Just six weeks after he was elected with the backing of the Tea Party, Walker said that anyone who could not see he was preparing an assault against the unions "must have been in a coma." But the Governor, like the rest of the Big Business politicians and the corporate media, seems to have gone into a sort of self-induced coma, believing their own hype about the Tea Party having a real mass base in the American population. His assault is being made from a false sense of strength on his part. Walker came to power not because Wisconsin's voters gave him a mandate for these policies, but because they were disillusioned by the Democrats and influenced by the millions of dollars spent by billionaires like the Koch brothers on his campaign. These are the real interests behind his election and his policies.

Walker blames the budget deficit and says we need to make "hard choices." But this has nothing to do with balancing the budget. It has everything to do with making life even easier for the wealthy, while the majority of us see our quality of life driven to new lows. Two thirds of of Wisconsin's corporations pay no corporate tax whatsoever. Corporate America is sitting on $2 trillion, but are not investing in creating new jobs because they want even higher profits than they are already getting and can get fewer workers to do more work as the millions of unemployed compete for fewer jobs. And yet we are told that we are the ones that have to make sacrifices! For Walker and those like him, corporations are more important than people. Profits are more important than jobs that pay decent wages and quality services for the state's citizens.

However, the reaction of Wisconsin's workers and young people to the implementation of the Tea Party's anti-worker program has quickly shown the real state of affairs! The solidarity from private sector union members and the unorganized has been tremendous. Organized contingents of hundreds of firefighters and other unions have marched on the Capitol. Hundreds of students have staged walkouts. Thousands of workers have descended on the Capitol ever)' evening after work. Thousands of ordinary workers and young people have camped out overnight. As many as 45,000 have surrounded the Capitol at one time and many schools have been shut down, a vivid reminder of the power of the working class. This can't help but remind us of the inspiring scenes in Egypt's Tahrir Square, which as we know, led to an important victory! We have the numbers. But we also need the organization and coordination.

So far, the response has been largely spontaneous. What we need is a coordinated fight back against these attacks. There is talk of a recall of Governor Walker, but this will take time. On March 13, public employee contracts will be torn up. Therefore, more concerted action must be organized. A one day general strike of public sector workers, with solidarity strikes, pickets and actions from private sector unions and the unorganized would bring the state to a halt and make clear the real "will of the people." To prepare for this we must urgently organize a city-wide assembly of Madison's workers and young people, a kind of mass "town hall" meeting, and extend an invitation to workers and youth from around the state to join us. The union leaders and coordinating bodies like SCFL must take the lead on this. They were elected to lead, and this is the time to do it!

At such a mass meeting we could democratically and concretely discuss proposals and dates for a general strike. To build for this we should form coordination committees in every fac¬tory, school, and workplace, linked up centrally and governed by elected delegates. This is a fight we can and must win! We, the people have the power! Contact us for more information!

OnThe 50th Annivesary Of The May Days In France-May 1968, Student Power and the Working Class- A "Generation Of '68" Commentary

Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the Students For a Democratic Society (SDS), Old Believers edition.

Commentary

I just recently posted a note passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee concerning some student activity at Evergreen State College in Washington (Defend the Evergreen State College 6, June 7, 2008). There a number of students have been charged with offenses stemming from an incident last winter. Those charges, brought after what appears to be a police riot on that small out-of-the-way liberal campus, should be dropped. Moreover, ominously, the Evergreen State College administration has banned a chapter of the Students For A Democratic Society (SDS) from campus. The details are fuzzy but some students have staged an occupation (shades of Columbia 1968?). Any more up-to-date information is welcome here. Again, all militants must call for the defense of the right of leftist political organizations to exist on campus. Those are the minimum demands we pose today around this case.

This case, however, also brings to this old militant’s mind some reflections on the student movement of forty years ago, the campus struggles of the Generation of ’68 that I am seemingly endlessly commenting on this year. One of the slogans that the Evergreen State students have been putting forth is the notion of ‘student power’. I am not quite sure what that entails in the minds of the students out there but I assume that it is some variation of students having more input into the day-to-day operations of the campus. That my friends, in any case, is usually always a good democratic propaganda point to fight around- on the road to socialism. And that combination will, in the end, be the point that I want to make here.

It is rather a truism that politics abhors a vacuum. In a proper political universe the Evergreen struggle would be taken up, as a matter of course, by any workers party worth its salt. Today, in the absence of any other social force committed to speaking in alliance with them the students have correctly moved on their own. Thus, confronted with a non-responsive campus administration the beginning of wisdom for leftist student activists is to demand more say in what is going on, and to be left alone while doing it. However, it is also true that one should try, as previous student generations,in some individual cases willfully so, have not, to learn the lessons of history.

The question of 'student power' is hardly a new one and that is where references to the 1960’s are very germane. The 1960’s on campuses throughout the world represented the highest expression of the fight for student power. There were more theories about students as the ‘new’ working class and about the inviolability of the ‘red’ university than one could shake a stick at. Moreover, many of the early anti-Vietnam War struggles in this country were focused on the campus. The right of students to more say in the university furthermore got fully explored in the famous Columbia occupations led by Mark Rudd and SDS in 1968. In the end, however, power flowed back to the university administration. In Europe, that same year, another student uprising culminating in the May General Strike in France even more dramatically highlighted the struggle for student power. Again, power flowed back to the French capitalist state. Some ‘uppity’ students also ignited earlier struggles in France and other parts of Europe going back to the early 19th century revolutionary movements, and those effort, for the most part, failed as well.

Now that I have paid proper respect to the vices and virtues of student activism we have to come to the question of power. In short, do students control the life of the campuses today? It is almost silly to pose that question at this point. So what is the road forward? For this the May General Strike in France is illustrative. The students led the initial actions but until the social power of the working class was thrown into the balance the students were spinning their wheels. And that is the question of power in a nutshell. Until the issues that engaged the students got linked up to the social power of the working class they could not fundamentally get resolved. Although we know that the French Communist Party, in the end, sold out both workers and students the notion that students, by themselves, could fundamental change society took a beating.

The world-wide impact of the May events in France were moreover reflected in this country. SDS and the bulk radical student movement, including this son of the working class, had previously contemptuously written off the working class as hopelessly bought off or organically incapable of using its social power to change society. Sound familiar? After May the more serious student elements started dusting off their old text books that contained some words about the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx, Lenin, the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution. And they were not wrong to do so.

That is what is missing in today’s student analysis of the way to obtain social power, the obviously limitation of the student power slogan. With the demise of the Soviet Union and other workers states the crying need for socialist solutions to the world’s problems, Marxism, communism and the like have been written off as failed experiments. That is why those Evergreen students, as sincere as they are in their struggles, can resurrect the student power slogan without embarrassment.

Let me make a point that shows this problem in graphic detail. Long ago, in the late 1960's, ostensible revolutionaries brought up the slogan on the campuses for worker/student/ teacher control of educational institutions(I believe that it was first brought up by Progressive Labor but I may be wrong). That is, in fact, a correct and worthy slogan. But here is the reality. Under what conditions would that slogan make more than propaganda sense? The answer- in a situation where the campuses were being nationalized under workers control.

Let’s me just present a concrete example, for now, though by way of illustration. Make a call for the nationalization of Harvard, as the young revolutionaries of the Spartacus Youth Clubs do today. But do not link that call with the struggle for a workers party and a workers government. Now, I hope, you get the point. The bourgeoisie will no more voluntarily nationalize its Harvards, its traditional sacred stomping grounds for creating its administrative elite than it will do any other progressive things. To challenge their exclusive 'right' to do so sounds to these ears like something that, in the end, can only be resolved by civil war. Under those conditions can students struggle for power by themselves? To pose the question is to give the answer. Students, right now, today make the leap and link up your struggles with those of the working class. Or, and I will play the role of professor now- at least think about it. Meanwhile- Defend the Evergreen State College 6!

In Boston May 8th -Fight For $15 And Paid Family Medical Leave-Fight As If Your Life Depended On It !

In Boston May 8th -Fight For $15 And Paid Family Medical Leave-Fight As If Your Life Depended On It !

A View From The American Left-Imperialist Strikes and Anti-Russia Provocations U.S. Out of Syria Now!

Workers Vanguard No. 1132	20 April 2018

Imperialist Strikes and Anti-Russia Provocations

U.S. Out of Syria Now!

APRIL 16—Having bled Syria for years, stoking the fires of a civil war that has claimed the lives of half a million people and devastated much of the country, the U.S., with the support of the British and French imperialists, launched more than 100 missiles at Syrian government installations on the night of April 13. The targets included a scientific research facility in Damascus, one of the few Syrian cities with a semblance of normalcy. The pretext for the strikes was an alleged April 7 chemical weapons attack in Douma by the Bashar al-Assad regime. The imperialists claim that the Syrian military killed dozens of people and wounded hundreds with chlorine or sarin gas (or a combination of both). The Syrian government and Russia, its main ally, deny the accusation.

While the imperialists have avoided directly hitting Russian military targets (so far), the missile strikes represent a naked act of aggression aimed at asserting Washington’s power in the Near East, most centrally against Moscow. And it is the Democratic Party that has been spearheading the crazed anti-Russia drive in the U.S.

Following the alleged chemical weapons attack, Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi declared that Russian president Vladimir Putin “must be held accountable.” In an April 10 editorial, the New York Times complained that a statement by Trump indicating that he wanted to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria reinforced “Russia’s reprehensible behavior.” The bluster from Democrats and the Times for a “coherent strategy” in Syria is aimed at goading the scandal-prone Trump administration into a more aggressive posture against Putin’s Russia, a nuclear-armed regional power. Indeed, the White House recently expelled 60 Russian diplomats and imposed sanctions on seven of Putin’s associates, a dozen of their companies and 17 Russian officials.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is also gearing up to impose harsh new sanctions on Iran, the Assad regime’s other key ally. John Bolton, the hawkish new national security adviser, has called for bombing Iran and has declared that the U.S. will bring about “regime change” before the Islamic Republic’s 40th anniversary next February. For its part, the Israeli military has stepped up its attacks in Syria—including by targeting Iranian bases in the country—having launched over 100 airstrikes since 2012.

When it comes to slaughtering civilians, the U.S. imperialists are second to none. According to the Airwars website, the U.S.-led coalition has butchered nearly 10,000 civilians in Syria and Iraq since 2014, having carried out some 30,000 airstrikes. From the 1991 Gulf War and the United Nations-imposed sanctions to the 2003 invasion and its aftermath, the U.S. and its “democratic” allies are responsible for snuffing out nearly three million lives in Iraq alone.

It takes some chutzpah for the U.S. to shed tears over the supposed use of chemical weapons. Napalm was unleashed on the masses of Korea and those of Vietnam, where millions were also exposed to Agent Orange, during U.S. imperialism’s counterrevolutionary wars in those countries. More recently, the U.S. used white phosphorus in Iraq during the 2004 assault on Falluja and the 2016 attack on Mosul. It has acknowledged using depleted uranium in Syria in 2015 in the war against the Islamic State. And, of course, no howls of outrage are heard from America’s politicians and media when U.S. allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia employ these weapons against defenseless populations in Gaza and Yemen.

As Marxists, we have no side in the Syrian civil war, which is reactionary and communal on all sides. But we do have a side against the U.S. and other imperialists. It is in the vital interest of the international proletariat, not least in the U.S., to oppose the depredations of U.S. imperialism and demand: All imperialist forces out of Syria and the Near East now! We also oppose the regional powers that have become involved in the Syrian conflict—including Russia, Iran, Israel and Turkey—and demand that they also get out.

On Saturday, Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, threatened that the U.S. military is “locked and loaded” for further attacks. In the event of a full-on war against the Assad regime, Marxists would have a military side with Assad’s forces while maintaining our political opposition to his brutal capitalist government.

Imperialist Deceptions

We do not know what happened in Douma on April 7, although there is every reason to suspect that the imperialists’ account is “fake news.” In an article in the London Independent (16 April), Robert Fisk, one of the few Western journalists in Douma, quotes a local doctor who told him that the video of panicked residents “is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia [oxygen starvation amid the suffocating rubble]—not gas poisoning.” The U.S. imperialists have a long track record of fabricating evidence to justify war: from the lies about the sinking of the USS Maine, which paved the way for the 1898 Spanish-American War; to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was used as a pretext to escalate U.S. forces in Vietnam; to the claims that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” and was complicit in the September 11 attacks, which served to beat the drums of war against Iraq.

Last year’s alleged chemical weapons attack at Khan Sheikhoun, which was also blamed on the Syrian government, took place days after Trump announced that his administration accepted that Assad would remain in power. It was followed by the U.S. bombing of a Syrian air base. This year’s attack took place shortly after Trump stated his intention to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria and cut off funding to opposition rebels. In both cases, the main source of information regarding the purported chemical attacks was the “White Helmets.” The media presents this group as being made up of dedicated, impartial rescue volunteers. In fact, this outfit was set up and financed by, among others, the U.S. and Britain, and is allied with the Islamist rebels (see “Syrian ‘White Helmets’: Tools of U.S. Imperialism,” WV No. 1103, 13 January 2017).

As demonstrated by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the imperialists’ stories around the Khan Sheikhoun attack are highly dubious. After the New Yorker and London Review of Books (which commissioned his investigation) refused to publish his account, the German newspaper Die Welt (25 June 2017) printed a report by Hersh revealing that U.S. intelligence services knew that the Khan Sheikhoun site was hit by a conventional bomb. Russia had told the U.S. in advance of the attack, which targeted a meeting of high-level jihadists. According to Hersh’s sources, the conventional bomb triggered secondary explosions from the weapons cache in the building that could have generated a toxic cloud. Even Secretary of Defense James Mattis acknowledged this February that there was “no evidence” that Assad had used sarin gas in Khan Sheikhoun.

The struggle against imperialist militarism and war must be linked to a program for the overthrow of the world imperialist order by the working class. The same ruling class that rains down bombs on the masses of the Near East also wages class war on the working people at home. When the U.S. feigns outrage over Assad killing his “own people,” remember that cops in this country gun down over 1,000 people every year, many of them black and Latino. As we wrote after last year’s missile strikes on Syrian forces (“Defend North Korea! U.S. Out of Syria!” WV No. 1110, 21 April 2017):

“What is desperately needed is class struggle against the capitalist rulers, both to defend the interests of workers and the oppressed at home and to oppose U.S. imperialism abroad. The Spartacist League and our comrades in the International Communist League aim to win the most conscious layers of the working class to the understanding that what is necessary to put an end to exploitation, racial oppression and imperialist slaughter is the overturn of the capitalist order in the U.S. and internationally through socialist revolution.”

On The 50th Anniversary of the May Days in France in 1968

On The 50^th Anniversary of the May Days in France in 1968

By Frank Jackman

Allan Jackson labeled the post-World War II generation that came of age in the 1960s the “Generation of ’68.” A lot of things happened that year (including our respective draft call notices for induction which we both in retrospect which we had refused to do but you learn a few things in this wicked old world) and this publication has publicized a fair part of them from Tet 1968 in January on.

A lot of the reason that Allan tagged us as the Generation of ’68 though was in homage to the events in France in May and June of 1968. There the students first and then the students and workers came within a hair’s breathe of turning the world upside, of making the newer world we were all looking for. Unfortunately “almost” is usually not good enough and the moment which might have shifted Western history a little bit differently on its axis. That is history in the conditional of course but a definite possibility. We now know two things about that event. Revolutionary moments are few and far between and, at least in the United States, defeat has put us in a forty plus year cultural war which we have not won and are still fighting almost daily.

The Paris days though have a more personal frame of reference since at the time neither Allan nor I were anything but maybe left liberals and not much interested in revolutions and the like. We come by our “Generation of ’68” credentials by a more roundabout way although the events in Paris play a role later. As mentioned above both Allan and I accepted induction into the Army at different points in 1969 (which puts us in a different class of ’69 which I won’t go into now). We both came out of the Vietnam experience very changed in many ways but most directly by a shift in our political perspectives. Neither of us whatever our feelings about the war in Vietnam while students were active in the anti-war movement. Mostly after the Summer of Love experiences out in California in 1967 we were what might be called life-style hippies or some such. Like I said the Army experience changed that. Mainly before that we cared about girls and getting an occasional drug connection.     

When we got our respective discharges we were all over the place both as to life style and political seriousness. That is where the Paris days in 1968 came into play. It was obvious by 1971 that massive, mostly student-led, peace marches were not going to end the war. What to do next preoccupied the minds of many of the better elements of that movement. That is where 1968 came in. A cohort of radicals and others started thinking about something like a united front between students and workers strange as that sounded then, and now come to think of it, like what almost brought the French government down. Maybe because we were from the working class, really a notch below, the working poor, this idea sounded good to us although knowing what working class life was really like unlike many of the middle class students we had our doubts about the viability of the strategy. As it turned out not only are revolutionary moments fleeting but mass action moments short of that are as well and so nothing really ever came of that idea. Still if you think about it today if you could get the kids to join up with some radical workers we could shake things up. History doesn’t really repeat itself but if something rises up looking back at the Paris days, 1968 would not be a bad idea.   

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

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

By Crime Novelist Paul Marlon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Honor Of International Workers’ Day- May Day 2017 -Ancient dreams, dreamed-The Risen People?-Frank Jackman’s War-Take Three

In Honor Of International Workers’ Day- May Day 2017 -Ancient dreams, dreamed-The Risen People?-Frank Jackman’s War-Take Three 

From The American Left History Blog Archives –May Day 1971

Endless, dusty, truck heavy, asphalt steaming hitchhike roads travelled, Route 6, 66, maybe 666 and perdition for all I know, every back road, every Connecticut highway avoiding back road from Massachusetts south to the capital for one last winner-take-all, no prisoners taken show-down to end all show-downs. And maybe, just maybe, finally some peace and a new world a-borning, a world we had been talking about for at least a decade (clueless, as all youth nations are clueless, that that road was well-travelled, very well- travelled, before us). No Jack Kerouac dharma bum easy road (although there were dharma bums, or at least faux dharma bums, aplenty on those 1971 roads south, and west too) let- her-rip cosmic brakeman Neal Cassady at the wheel flying through some Iowa/Kansas wheat field night fantasy this trip.

No this trip was not about securing some cultural enclave in post-war America (post-World War II so as not to confuse the reader) in break-out factory town Lowell or cold water tenement Greenwich Village/Soho New Jack City or Shangri-La West out in the Bay area, east or west, but about mucking up the works, the whole freaking governmental/societal/economic/cultural/personal/godhead world (that last one, the godhead one, not thrown in just for show, no way) and maybe, just maybe sneaking away with the prize. But a total absolute, absolutist, big karma sky fight out, no question. And we, I, am ready. On that dusty road ready.

More. See all roads head south as we, my girlfriend of the day, maybe more, maybe more than a day, Joyell, but along this time more for ease of travelling for those blessed truck driver eye rides, than lust or dream wish and my sainted wise-guy amigo (and shades of Gregory Corso, sainted, okay), Matty, who had more than a passing love or dream wish in her and if you had seen her you would not have wondered why. Not have wondered why if your “type” was Botticelli painted and thoughts of butterfly swirls just then or were all-type sleepy-eyed benny-addled teamster half-visioned out of some forlorn rear view mirror.

Yah, head south, in ones, twos, and threes (no more, too menacing even for hefty ex-crack back truckers to stop for) travelling down to D.C. for what many of us figure will be the last, finally, push back against the war, the Vietnam War, for those who have forgotten, or stopped watching television and the news, but THEY, and you knew (know) who they were (are), had their antennae out too, they KNEW we were coming, even high-ball fixed (or whiskey neat she had the face for them) looking out from lonely balconies Martha Mitchell knew that much. They were, especially in mad max robot-cop Connecticut, out to pick off the stray or seven who got into their mitts as a contribution to law and order, law and order one Richard Milhous Nixon-style (and in front of him, leading some off-key, off-human key chorus some banshee guy from Maryland, another watch out hitchhike trail spot, although not as bad as Ct, nothing except Arizona is). And thus those dusty, steamy, truck heavy (remind me to tell you about hitchhiking stuff, and the good guy truckers you wanted, desperately wanted, to ride with in those days, if I ever get a chance sometime).

The idea behind this hitchhiked road, or maybe, better, the why. Simple, too simple when you, I, thought about it later in lonely celled night but those were hard trying times, desperate times really, and just free, free from another set of steel-barred rooms this jailbird was ready to bring down heaven, hell, hell if it came down to it to stop that furious war (Vietnam, for the later reader) and start creating something recognizable for humans to live in. So youth nation, then somewhat long in the tooth, and long on bad karma-driven bloody defeats too, decided to risk all with the throw of the dice and bring a massive presence to D.C. on May Day 1971.

And not just any massed presence like the then familiar seasonal peace crawl that nobody paid attention too anymore except the organizers, although the May Day action was wrapped around that year’s spring peace crawl, (wrapped up, cozily wrapped up, in their utopian reformist dream that more and more passive masses, more and more suburban housewives from New Jersey, okay, okay not just Jersey, more and more high school freshman, more and more barbers, more and more truck driver stop waitresses, for that matter, would bring the b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s-i-e (just in case there are sensitive souls in the room) to their knees. No, we were going to stop the government, flat. Big scheme, big scheme no question and if anybody, any “real” youth nation refugee, excepting, of course, always infernal always, those cozy peace crawl organizers, tried to interject that perhaps there were wiser courses nobody mentioned them out loud in my presence and I was at every meeting, high or low. Moreover I had my ears closed, flapped shut closed, to any lesser argument. I, rightly or wrongly, silly me thought “cop.”

So onward anti-war soldiers from late night too little sleep Sunday night before Monday May Day dawn in some vagrant student apartment around DuPont Circle (I think) but it may have been further up off 14th Street, Christ after eight million marches for seven million causes who can remember that much. No question though on the student ghetto apartment locale; bed helter-skelter on the floor, telephone wire spool for a table, orange crates for book shelves, unmistakably, and the clincher, seventeen posters, mainly Che, Mao, Ho, Malcolm etc., the first name only necessary for identification pantheon just then, a smattering of Lenin and Trotsky but they were old guys from old revolutions and so, well, discounted to early rise (or early stay up cigarette chain-smoking and coffee slurping to keep the juices flowing). Out into the streets, out into the small collectives coming out of other vagrant apartments streets (filled with other posters of Huey Newton , George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, etc. from the two names needed pantheon) joining up to make a cohorted mass (nice way to put it, right?). And then dawn darkness surrounded, coffee spilled out, cigarette bogarted, AND out of nowhere, or everywhere, bang, bang, bang of governmental steel, of baton, of chemical dust, of whatever latest technology they had come up with they came at us (pre-tested in Vietnam, naturally, as I found out later). Jesus, bedlam, mad house, insane asylum, beat, beat like gongs, defeated.

Through bloodless bloodied streets (this, after all, was not Chicago, hog butcher to the world), may day tear down the government days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. One arrested, two, three, many, endless thousands as if there was an endless capacity to arrest, and be arrested, arrest the world, and put it all in one great big Robert F. Kennedy stadium home to autumn gladiators on Sunday and sacrificial lambs this spring maypole may day basket druid day.

And, as I was being led away by one of D.C.’s finest, I turned around and saw that some early Sunday morning voice, some “cop” voice who advised caution and went on and on about getting some workers out to join us before we perished in an isolated blast of arrests and bad hubris also being led away all trussed up, metal hand-cuffs seemingly entwined around her whole slight body. She said she would stick with us even though she disagreed with the strategy that day and I had scoffed, less than twenty-four hours before, that she made it sound like she had to protect her erring children from themselves. And she, maybe, the only hero of the day. Righteous anonymous sister, forgive me. (Not so anonymous actually since I saw her many times later in Boston, almost would have traded in lust for her but I was still painted Botticelli-bewitched and so I, we, let the moment passed, and worked on about six million marches for about five millions causes with her but that was later. I saw no more of her in D.C. that week.)

Stop. Brain start. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove, these were not such times even with all our unforced errors, and no flame-flecked phoenix raising but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva came a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ would take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart road tramp acting in god’s place could even dream of. But that was later. Just then, just that screwed-up martyr moment, I was longing for the hot, dusty, truck driver stop meat loaf special, dishwater coffee on the side, road back home even ready to chance Connecticut highway dragnets to get there.

********

Frank Jackman, after scrounging around for some food to sate his hunger and after finding some, the “movement” food de jure, brown rice and beans, at a make-shift kitchen set up to feed the hungry like him he ambled back to the comfort of that still blazing campfire. As he sat down on one of the anonymous scattered friendly blankets (this time not an Army blanket) he noticed across the fire from him a young man, younger than he, wearing an obvious real GI-issued Army jacket (not Army-Navy store gear then popular about the street protestors). That brother had the look, the short hair, the haphazard mustache, the posture of someone who either was still in the service or who had like him also just gotten out. That fresh vision before him of what he himself looked like got Frank to thinking again about the last year of his “military service,” most of that time spent in the jug, in the Fort Devens stockade.

Frank, after having his conscientious objector application rejected by the military, had decided to pursue one avenue of appeal, to the federal courts. He was able through civilian counsel to get his case before a federal judge in Boston who had furthermore issued a restraining order on the military to not remove him from the jurisdiction of the court. That, however, Frank felt was a long and cumbersome course and not necessarily a successful route if the judge decided that the recent civilian decisions on CO status did not apply to the military. Frank was the first to admit that he had not been a vociferous and outspoken public opponent of the seemingly never-ending war but he had, as he would quip “gotten religion.” As part of his work with the Quakers and others down in Cambridge he had come to see that if the war was to be ended sooner rather than later then strategies based on massive, if ill-formed, public demonstrations or the pressuring of federal politicians was not going to get it done.

Frank knew, knew in his bones, from talks with guys who had been to ‘Nam, guy who knew how bad it was, guys who knew the score, and who also knew that lots of guys were disgruntled that to close down the war you had to get to the foot soldier, to the grunt. And so he determined that he would try to do that, or at least his small part. The Quakers he knew and other Cambridge radical also had the same idea that anti-war actions should be directed toward the military bases in order to try to reach the soldiers. A group of them had decided that one day, one weekday around the end of the base workday that they would make an anti-war protest in front of Fort Devens to drive home the issue. Frank was intrigued by the idea, saw a role for himself in the action, and suggested that he would join them, in uniform, on the appointed day.

After some discussion with his civilian supporters (who he was told later were secretly thrilled to have a uniformed soldier in their anti-war midst) and a period of thought about what his actions would entail (and whether he could do stockade time which would surely come out of his actions) he decided to cast his lot with the ant-warriors.  On a Wednesday afternoon in late October 1970 a small group of protestors (maybe fifty people) gathered for about an hour in the triangle in front of the entrance to the main gate of the fort. Among those in attendance was Frank Jackman in full private’s military uniform carrying a sign calling for the American government to “Bring The Troops Home.” That night upon returning to his barracks he was arrested and brought to the Provost Marshal’s Office for transport to the stockade for pre-trial confinement. And that was the start of Private Francis Alan Jackman’s war against the military.        

A lot of Frank’s thinking at the time was that he would further his efforts at getting that discharge from the Army by personally actively opposing the war from the inside. That is what was appealing to him about taking part in the civilian action in front of the fort. Call it a martyr’s complex or just show-boating he was determined to perform acts of personal resistance to show others the way out of the war. And the military was more than happy to comply giving him a mandatory six months sentence for his action under the rubric of disobeying lawful orders at his Special Court-Martial.

Frank had assumed that such a sentence would be the end of it. Either the federal judge would rule in his favor or the Army seeing an obvious malcontent would discharge him in some administrative way. So Frank was surprised when neither happened. He did his six months (minus good time) and then was released back to a replacement detachment without any word from Boston. He was in a bind, a political bind by his lights. He could not knuckle under to the military and return to serve good military time doing some job (meaning serving non-stockade time) yet he was hesitant to do another stretch in the stockade. The issue weighed on him until he came up with another idea- a surefire stockade-inducing action.      

Each Monday morning there is in probably every military post a general formation to see who is where they are supposed to be (not AWOL) which he later found out was called the morning report. That general formation took place at a large central field where all the base’s units gathered to take account of their personnel. Frank decided that he would  make a big person anti-war statement on that occasion by wearing  civilian clothes and carrying a large sign calling for “Immediate U.S. Withdrawal from Vietnam” One Monday morning in the summer of 1970 Private Jackman walked out onto the parade field carrying that sign. He was immediately tackled by a couple of lifer-sergeants and transported once again to the Provost Marshal’s Office and from there to pre-trial stockade confinement. Once again he was giving a Special Court-Martial for, what else, disobeying lawful orders, and sentenced to serve another six month sentence. It was during the latter part of that sentence that word came from Boston (through his lawyer) that the federal judge had granted his writ of habeas corpus. He was released from confinement a few days later on February 18, 1971

Frank once again became drowsy as the fire started to flicker and he nodded off still thinking about that year’s worth of time in the stockade and the chances of him having to do more time with the impeding street action set for early May Day morning in order to break down the war effort…          

I Hear The Noise Of Wings-Cary Grant And Jean Arthur’s Only Angels Have Wings (1939)- A Film Review

I Hear The Noise Of Wings-Cary Grant And Jean Arthur’s Only Angels Have Wings (1939)- A Film Review    

DVD Review

By Associate Film Critic Alden Riley 

Only Angels Have Wings, starring Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Rita Hayworth, from a story written by and directed by Howard Hawks, 1939

You know damn well that old Greek legend had it that Icarus a mere mortal had deep aspirations to fly but was the first manned flight failure which nevertheless didn’t keep subsequent humankind from dreaming the dream of flight, to soar above the clouds, to take flight with the angels if you want to get literarily romantic about the quest. As we all know today that quest was conquered in the early part of the last century and now even the little ones can fly anywhere they, or rather their parents, can afford the airfare to. But the film under review, Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings, despite its romantic, boy-girl romantic if not literary romantic, subplot tells a true story of how near a thing it was in the early days of flying especially in the outposts necessary to make a global aviation market. After viewing this film I was reminded how every fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants sky jockey must have remembered the words from the old hymn Angel Band about “real” angels coming around and the listener heard “the noise of wings” every time she or she went up, just before their number was called.           

Here’s the play. Geoff, played by Cary Grant complete with elegant sombrero, a hard-boiled, take every risk, and don’t ask your pilots to do what you wouldn’t do pilot-manager running an outpost operation in the boondocks of South America is trying to establish a permanent route through the mountainous regions of that Podunk place where he is operating out of. Operating the whole thing on plane smoke, dreams and little else. As you can figure the attrition rate is pretty high under such horrible conditions. That is the main story, the story that will have you thinking about angel thoughts despite yourself. Enter one seen-it-all Bonnie Lee, play by Jean Arthur, just off the boat and seemingly down on her uppers. She is the cause of plenty of competition among the women-starved pilots and their associates on the airfields. Including one barnstormer who didn’t make it back once he got sight of her and forgot a few things about flying. But as becomes very clear very early old Bonnie is taking dead aim come hell or high water for Geoff. Geoff, on the rebound from a lost love wants no part of any woman, wouldn’t ask anything of a woman after he had been stung by that old flame. Tough luck Bonnie.    

Tough luck for a while as she goes through her paces. And as Geoff short of help and running out of time on a big contract has hired a new guy to fly those treacherous mountain passes. Problem is that the Kid, Geoff best pal and the spirit of the venture had a brother who was died while this new pilot bailed out of a crashing plane. Bad blood all the way around. Bad luck too for Geoff since that old flame of his, Judy played by a young Rita Hayworth which made it entirely understandable why Geoff was in a tailspin over women once she came through the door (and frankly I would have urged him to make up with Judy one way or another since she really was a fox, foxier by far that Bonnie but back to the story) had gotten tied up with this new pilot.    

Bad blood or not Geoff needed a pilot, the new guy won his spurs on a couple of runs and things looked pretty good until Geoff  who was going to take a last run before the contract deadline himself was accidently wounded by a gunshot from smitten unto death Bonnie. In the end that new pilot and the Kid had to team up to try to make the run. No soap. The plane they were testing didn’t make the grade and the plane came in on a crash landing after the new guy did not, I repeat, did not bail out. But the Kid was mortally wounded on that trip. Didn’t make it in the end. Geoff and Bonnie did of course (as did the new guy and his Judy). But I wonder, I really wonder, if the Kid heard the noise of wings just before his passed on.

A great, underrated film with a fine performance by Grant, great looks by Hayworth, great idea by Hawks to highlight the rigors of flying when the machines were held together by spit and nerves.