Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts
A link to NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s Open Source 2018 program on the meaning of Karl Marx in the 21st century on the 200th anniversary of his birth:
http://radioopensource.org/marx-at-200/
By Seth Garth
Normally Frank Jackman would be the natural person to do his take on the name, the role, the legacy of one German revolutionary exiled to London after the revolutions of 1848 faded away, Karl Marx, on the 200th anniversary of his birth in 1818. And Frank at first fought me a little, said he had grabbed a bunch of Marx’s books and pamphlets like the Communist Manifesto and the abridged Das Capital abetted by his friend and colleague Engels’ The Peasant Wars In Germany and Scientific Socialism. No question heavy lifting, heavy reading which our respective youths would have been read until early in the morning page turners but now would seemingly act as a sedative, a sleep aid, at least for me since Frank said it had made him more alert although agreeing that the works were not “read until early in the morning page turners.” Frank’s argument to me at least for his grabbing the assignment was that he had of the two of us been more influenced by Marx’s works and programs and had actually been a supporter of the old time Trotskyist organization the Socialist Workers Party for a while back in the early 1970s after he got out of the Vietnam blood bath American army and was ready to “storm heaven” (his words) to right the wrongs of this wicked old world (my words grabbed via Sam Lowell take) and as well had been doing leftwing commentary since Hector was a pup (somebody unknown’s expression).
Frank then went chapter and verse at me with what he remembered (both from long ago and the recent re-readings) about how he had all his life, all his early life looking for something, some movement to move him, to move us who grew up with him poor as church mice, maybe poorer to a more just world. Had made me laugh, since on some of the stuff I have been right alongside him, when he mentioned the old Student Union for World Goals which a bunch of us had put together in high school. A grouping with a program that was inundated with all the anti-communist, red scare, Cold War platitudes we could find. We basically were a little to the left of Ike, Grandpa Ike, Dwight D. Eisenhower who was President of the United States (POTUS in twitter-speak) in our youth filled with bauble about the virtues of capitalism, although I think we would have been hard pressed to make that word connection and probably said something like prosperity which we had garnered very little of in the now remembered golden age of the 1950s.
Then as the thaw came, or as people, young people mostly broke the spell of the red scare Cold War night, after we have sown our oats out in the Summer of Love, 1967 and saw some writing on the wall that we were ‘raw meat” for the draft come college graduation day getting hopped up about Robert Kennedy’s ill-fated, ill-starred bid for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 1968. I already mentioned the Army experiences which did both of us in for a while but which frankly drove Frank outside bourgeois politics (he had expected that he would tie his wagon to Robert Kennedy and when that idea fell apart with Kennedy’s assassination offering Hubert H. Humphrey his services against the main villain of the ear Richard M. Nixon in the expectation that he would ride that train out of the draft and/or begin the road to a nice sinecure via Democratic Party politics). I am not sure if he began serious reading on Marx in the Army or not but when he got out in 1971 he certainly was doing the “read until the early morning” routine. I grabbed some of his tidbits, associated with some of the radical circles in Cambridge he started to frequent, went down the line with him in Washington on May Day, 1971 where we both got busted but soon after withdrew a bit from both him and serious leftwing politics. I was crazy, still am, for films, for seeking some kind of career as a film critic and so spent more of my time in the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square than protesting on Boston Common. He can address sometime his own withdrawal from left-wing organizational politics and moving on to journalism, political commentary on his own dime.
That is enough of the political justification for Frank’s fighting me on this assignment. Frank, however, took the unusual step, for him anyway, of mentioning his being pissed off about losing the Marx assignment and mentioned it to site manager Greg Green. The guy who gives out the assignment and who has had more than one person, me included, scratching their heads both in the assignments they have gotten of late or like Frank not have gotten. Whatever Frank laid out for Greg he had both of us come in to his office to discuss the issue. You know as much as you need to about Franks’ “cred.”
My frame of reference and what amounted to the winning argument was that I had been Peter Paul Markin’s closest friend in high school. Markin, forever known as Scribe for the obvious reason that he always carried a notebook and pen or pencil in his shirt pocket AND always, always had two thousand facts ready to throw at anybody who would listen, mainly girls, which drove more that one of our corner boy crowd to threaten grievous bodily is the real primary source for whatever we knew about Karl Marx before we went crazy later and started to seriously read the stuff. So I knew the details of how Frank, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon and maybe a couple of others first heard about the name and ideas of one Karl Marx and who would later act on them a little. This is where I was a little ahead of Frank knowing that Greg, after taking over as site manager when Allan Jackson was purged from that position, was interested much more in “”human interest” stories than the “tiresome” (his words) esoteric left-wing jargon that he knew Frank would meandering into, no, would get in knee deep.
(For the record some of the other guys who hung around with Scribe and the rest of us like Ricky Rizzo and Dave Whiting, both who would lay their heads down in hellhole Vietnam and wound up on the town monument and Washington black granite, Red Riley and even Frank Jackman when he was hopped up on that Student Union thing almost lynched him when he started talking favorably about Karl Marx and the idea of red revolution in those dead ass red scare Cold War nights. All they wanted to hear about was whatever intelligence Scribe had on some girl they were interested in of which he somehow almost incongruously had been plenty of information about or what his next plan was for the “midnight creep” which I assume needs no further explanation except he planned the capers but no way would Frankie Riley or the rest of us let him lead the expeditions-hell we would still be in jail.)
Others, including Frank Jackman, have now seemingly endlessly gone over the effect Scribe had on them a little later when the turbulent 1960s we all got caught up in, blew a gasket, in the Summer of Love, 1967 as the culmination of what he also had been talking about for years on those lonely forlorn weekend nights when we hung around good guy Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in the growing up Acre section of North Adamsville. What most of the guys did not know, or did not want to know, was that a little of what Scribe was thinking at the time, was that maybe Karl Marx might be proven to be right, might have been onto something when he spoke about the working classes, us, getting a big jump ahead in the world once things turned upside down. He held those views pretty closely then, especially when he was practically red-baited into silence by those guys who were even more hung up, as was Scribe in many ways, on the new normal American negative propaganda about Russia, Communism, and Karl Marx. Nobody, this from later Scribe once he flamed red, was born a radical, a revolutionary, and certainly not a Marxist but certain conditions, among them being as poor as church mice, gave a clue to where some people might go. The intellectuals, although Scribe did not call them that, would come to their Marxism more through books and rational thought than as prime victims of the usually one-sided class struggle of the rich against the poor. That was about as far as Scribe would go, wanted to go, because in many ways, although maybe a little less fulsomely, he wanted to go the same bourgeois politics path as Frank in politics.
Like I say Scribe described to some of us a glimmer, a faux Marxist primer, then in high school, not at all thought out like it would be by him or us later in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we got back respectively from our tours to the “real” world from ‘Nam and knew we had been fucked over by our government. That the “reds” in Vietnam were poor folk, peasants, with whom we had no quarrel. But that was later.
Here is a better example of the glimmer Scribe shined on us back in the day. I remember one night, it had to be one high school night given the teacher and class he was descripting, Scribe had told me that he had had to stay after school one day for Mr. Donovan, the World History teacher and football coach which tells you what he was about, when Scribe had given a surly answer about some question Mr. Donovan had asked. That surliness coming from two sources, one Donovan having members of the class endlessly reading aloud the freaking book boring everybody within a mile of the room and that he really believed he already knew more about history than Donovan and so was personally bored as well. The question had not been about Marxism but something else and during that afternoon detention Donovan had asked him if he was a “Bolshevik.” Scribe recoiled in horror he said knowing that to say yes would get him in some trouble (probably more after school time at least) and for the simple fact that he could not say truthfully whatever teen angst and alienation he was feeling was driven by that kind of understanding of the world-then.
What this history teacher confrontation did do was get Scribe looking again, and this tells as much about him as any other anecdote, at his dog-eared copy of Karl Marx’s (and his co-thinker and financial “angel” Friedrich Engels) classic statement of his views The Communist Manifesto to confirm whether he was a “Marxist,” “Communist,” whatever and he came away from that re-reading knowing that he was not one of those guys, a red. That was the kind of guy Scribe was when he was confronted with something he didn’t understand. The rest of us would have said “fuck it” and let it go at that or have challenged old Donovan with a spurious “yeah, what about it.” Maybe some silly remark like “better red than dead” or “my mommy is a commie,” expressions making the rounds in that dead air time.
So this little sketch really is a “human interest” story and not all that much about Marx in any political sense and that is also why I think that Greg bought my argument over Frank’s. Whatever Marx, Marxism, hell, just general radical non-parliamentary socialism held for the 19th devotees (and bloodthirsty enemies too) extending into the greater part of the 20th century fell down, went to ground, with the demise of the Soviet Union back in 1991-92, and whatever intellectual curiosity Marx and Marxism held fell down too so other than as an exotic utopian scheme today there is no reason to go chapter and verse on the details of what Marx was programmatically projecting.
To finish up on this sketch though I should like to mention the way Scribe, which again will tell something about the mad monk when he was in his flower, got his copy of the Manifesto back when he was fourteen or fifteen. He had heard for some source, maybe some “beat” over in Harvard Square when he used to go there after a particularly bad day in the mother wars, it was a cool document or something, who knows with Scribe was kind of strange. He couldn’t find the book in either the school or town libraries for the simple fact that neither had the document nor did when he inquired they want to have it in circulation. Yeah it was that kind of time. A friendly young librarian suggested that he try the Government Printing Office which might have a copy if somebody in Congress (like the red-baiter par excellence Senator Joseph McCarthy) or some governmental agency had ordered it printed for whatever reason as part of an investigation or just to put it in the record for some reason. He got the address in Washington and the GPO sent back a brochure with their publications for sale. And there it was. He ordered a copy and a few weeks alter it came in the mail. Here’s the funnier part, funnier that the government providing copies on the cheap (or maybe free I forget what he said on that point) of such a notorious document the document had been placed on the publication list because it was part of the record for the raucous House Un-American Activities Committee meeting in San Francisco in 1960 when they were practically run out of town by protestors as the Cold War began to thaw in certain places. Of course that was a recollection by Scribe later when we were deep into the Summer of Love out in that very town and he had asked some older people what that protest was all about.
Yeah, Scribe was a piece of work and he would eventually drag some of us along with him in his good days like the Summer of Love and later after Vietnam time running around with radical students in Cambridge when checking out Mark and Marxism was all the rage. Like I said old Marx has had his up and downs, has taken his beatings but some things Scribe said he said and which we later read about like the poor getting a better shake because they provided the value provided by their cheap labor were spot on. Worse, in a way when I looked, re-read, for this assignment some of the stuff reads like it could have been written today. How about that.
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Click on the headline to link to the Socialist Alternative (CWI) website.
Spanish Miners light up Madrid and show workers the way to struggle! — For a 48 hour general strike to bring down Rajoy government
Jul 22, 2012
By John Hird, CWI Spain
Thousands of coal miners arrived in Madrid, last week, completing another march on the capital as part of the struggle to defend their jobs. They were greeted by thousands of workers and youth from Madrid who poured onto the streets to express their solidarity. Fire-fighters escorted the miners through Madrid, stripping off in front of the parliament to show their solidarity.
On the same day that the miners arrived, Rajoy and the right wing PP government announced a revised budget. According to commentators, this will include the worst cuts since 1956 when Spain was under Franco’s fascist dictatorship.
The cover of the Spanish satirical magazine, EL JUEVES (http://www.eljueves.es/articulo/revista/el_archivo/crisis_campeones_3.html)
shows President Mariano Rajoy giving a massive wet sloppy kiss to the national soccer goalkeeper Iker Casillas, reprising a famous kiss Iker planted on his interviewer/girlfriend when Spain won the World Cup two years ago. Rajoy has tried to milk everything he can from the Spain’s recent Euro Cup win, attending Spain’s matches and being pictured celebrating next to the Prince of Asturias. Before the tournament Rajoy even appealed to the coach Vincente Del Bosque to “win the cup for Spain to help us forget the crisis”. Del Bosque said his team would do their best but victory would not solve the socio-economic problems of the country. Wise man and great coach that Del Bosque is!
The miners of Asturias and other regions brought the class struggle to Rajoy’s door and cut short his ’Euro Cup’ feel good factor. Indeed, David Villa, Barcelona and Spanish footballer striker is tweeting his support for the miners and their struggle.
As the miners marched past the President’s Palace, Madrid workers chanted: "Esta es nuestra selección" (“This is our team”.) A miner commented that he had expected a great reception in Madrid but with the incredible reception he truly felt like ’La selección’.
The arrival of the miners in Madrid has been like a catharsis for other groups of workers under attack, like fire fighters, teachers and local government workers. “Miners, you are the dog’s bollocks! Our pride!” The shouts of encouragement by these workers show that this miner’s movement is acting as a catalyst in Spain. The miners themselves chanted; “Fix it or its war, war, war…” They sang their adopted hymn “Santa Barbara” from the civil war.
Even El Pais admits that the idea of “lucha obrera” (worker’s struggle) is taking hold. But generally the Spanish media continues to play a lamentable role. Posters on social media complained that as thousands of workers demonstrated in Madrid the TV served up its usual turgid menu of sport, US films and TV shows and scandalous gossip shows.
Lies and misinformation
The government press publishes lies and misinformation about the miners. According to ABC, the mines are so safe that female miners can go to work in high heels and that miners have salaries of €2,100 a month! They have also wasted the millions in subsidies they have received and, of course, the old chestnut, the miners are violent.
In fact, miners receive an average salary of between €1,000 and €1,500 a month for what is still very dangerous job. The police get about €1,900.
All industry is subsidised in Spain, including transport and agriculture. Why single out the miners whose industry has only received about 1% of the total paid out in subsidies? Spanish banks recently got €100,000 – where is that money now? The subsidies paid to the mining industry have been misspent by the private mining companies and local and regional governments. They should have been investing in improved infrastructure and job creation. No-one can really account for where the money has gone although undoubtedly some of it has been syphoned-off corruptly.
The miners are precisely being singled out for what they represent, including their history and tradition, as many Spanish workers instinctively understand.
As far as violence is concerned, what is more violent than the destruction of 8,000 direct mining jobs and another 30,000 indirectly and whole communities destroyed?
Rajoy’s only response to the demands of the miners has been to mobilise National Police and Civil Guard which is a provocation to the mining communities. Miners and their families have already suffered brutal repression. In Ciñera, León, rubber bullets have been used by police and school playgrounds tear gassed.
Women miners also marched from Asturias to Madrid. Miners’ wives have also started to get organised. Thousands took part in the massive demonstration outside the Ministry of Industry; miners, their families and all sectors of workers in Madrid, including the ’Green Tide’ of Madrid education workers.
The demonstrations passed off mainly peacefully despite a provocative show of strength by the police. Riot police provoked the miners when they filmed the miners’ columns as the protesters reached the Ministry of Industry. Pitched battles took place. The PP HQ was protected by 11 armed police vehicles.
The politicians are living in denial. Esperanza Aguirre, the President of Madrid, denied the miner’s march was large! Rajoy has not said anything about the miners. In Los Cortes, only the IU (United Left) leader reflected a little of the anger in the country, saying that the budget measures were ’throwing petrol onto the streets of Spain.’
Battle lines
As the miners were demonstrating, Rajoy announced an increase in VAT of 3% and a reduction in unemployment pay to 50% of what unemployed workers have paid into the social security system. Rajoy said this should “encourage” the unemployed to find work! Some hope with 5 million on the dole. The overall cuts are a further €65,000 million on top of previous cuts. The pro-big business government is also proposing to reduce the number of full time union officials in an attempt to make it more difficult for unions to defend workers. Spontaneous protests from workers in the public sector including civil servants, teachers, street cleaners, police and even sections of the civil guard have taken to the streets. According to El Pais, at one point some of the riot police took off their helmets! This is an anticipation of the massive social explosion and struggle which is now likely to erupt in Spain in the coming months.
Last Saturday, Rajoy had to cancel public appearances due to protests. Former prime ministers, such as Aznar and Zapatero, have had the same experience. However, as El Pais pointed out, they faced this after 5 years in power. Rajoy has to limit his appearances in public after 6 months!
The battle lines are now clearer. The government is acting exclusively for big business. Their only policy is to make the poor and working class pay for the capitalist crisis. Yesterday many workers were angry at this prospect but did not have the confidence or know the way to fight back. That was yesterday. Today the Spanish miners have shone a light and shown the whole of the working class the way to struggle.
The trade unions were compelled to called national protests on Thursday 19th July. However, this will not be enough. A general strike of 48 hours needs to be convened, as the next step in the struggle to bring down the Rajoy government and fight for a workers’ alternative.
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