An Anniversary- Of Sorts-With Anti-Fascist Activist Fritz Taylor’s Worldview In Mind
By Frank Jackman
My old late lamented growing up friend Peter Markin (not the moderator of this site and of others as well who also had been a growing up friend and who had taken the moniker Peter Paul Markin in honor of our still lamented lost brother but the real mad man Markin known to one and all in the old neighborhood as “the Scribe”) would have said the then equivalent of WTF if he had seen this little screed about my publicly announcing the forty-fifth anniversary of Fritz Taylor’s introduction and adherence the Marxist worldview, the view that the centrality of the class struggle is the prime mover, although let’s be clear given the over one century and a half obfuscation on the matter not the sole mover, of the human historical drama. (The ghost of the departed Markin is still so strong among the surviving brethren of the working poor Acre section of North Adamsville the place where Markin and I grew up that I dare not put my above-stated intention in the headline to this piece.)
Let me be clear Pete Markin and no other was the pivotal character in Fritz’s life who drew him to the study of some Marxist literature and attending study group classes in Marxist doctrine so it is not a question of the subject matter which he did, and still would I believe, object to but his hatred for what was even then a skyrocketing increase in the number of anniversaries of various events. Worse, worst of all, was the commemoration of odd-ball events in say their fortieth or sixtieth anniversary years instead of the reasonable tenth, twenty-fifth and fiftieth which we grew up with and made a certain amount of sense. Who knows what ballistic missiles, verbal or written, he would have launched if he could see some of the events and some of the year designations today. You know the thirtieth anniversary of Janis Joplin’s premier album with Big Brother and the Holding Company or the 65th anniversary of the landing of man on the moon. Odd years like that drove him crazy. Make him want to retch from what he told me one night when we were in our cups.
It wasn’t like Markin had always gone off the deep end about the commemoration of all odd-ball events. He drew a distinction though between certain world-historic events and run-of-the-mill stuff like an album’s anniversary and events important to the lives of the people he was trying to reach out to think about a radical restructuring of society. Events like the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution (before the demise of the Soviet Union which would have shocked him to his core), the commemoration of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (the recent commemoration of which noted the 90th anniversary which Markin would have been happy to have seen organized-an earlier one he had dragged me to in high school). But the others would have him in a rage, no doubt.
When I started out thinking about honoring Fritz Taylor’s commitment to the Marxist doctrine, his underlying worldview, although really to forty-five years of left-wing political activism under that activist imperative which is much more important than merely noting his ideological underpinnings, important as those are, I had intended to just tell his story, how he came to his views. That idea, once I actually started writing a first draft, soon proved to be short-sighted. It is impossible to chart how Fritz “got religion” without explaining how Markin came to his, for the short time that he actually actively adhered to the doctrine before the demons in his head led him down a different path, down a still mysterious drug-strewn death down in the dusty back streets of Sonora, Mexico after what was apparently a busted drug deal. Like I said before Markin, forever the Scribe, was a growing up friend so I can fill in some of that seemingly inevitable trajectory before he ever met Fritz after they had both gotten out of the Army and found that they had both hated with a passion their blood on their hands involvements in the then-raging Vietnam War.
Of all the North Adamsville corner boys (guys who due to lack of dough, serious lack of dough, successively hung out at Harry Variety Store, Doc’s Drugstore and Tonio’s Pizza Parlor as we grew up and took our time-honored, age-appropriate designated corner spots) Pete was the quirkiest of us all. While the rest of us were mainly, make that solely, interested in girls, cars, money, money for dates, so girls again, and actually the car thing played into the girl quest as well Markin was always into some new idea or trend he would read about. Bored us to tears reading some fucking Allen Ginsburg’s “faggot” (term used by us at the time) poem Howl or Jack Kerouac’s On The Road when he was crazy for the beatniks. Later too when the whole hippie-world turned upside down Summer of Love, 1967 he got everybody looking at different stuff. Or fucking folk music when that was big and he would try to drag us, me, over to Harvard Square to again be bored to tears (until we found out that some very foxy “chicks” were into the damn thing and we faked an interest for that sole reason. I still hate to hear folk music to this day, especially Bob Dylan). That stuff was bad enough but then he had his freaking political causes, stuff that made us all think he was some kind of pinko commie and which would have gotten him more than one fucking beating if he had not been our best friend, and a guy who also figured out a lot of very illegal ways for us to get dough for those girl-related necessities. Quirky yeah. I remember he went to some nuclear disarmament with the freaking Quakers when we were in the ninth grade after he made some probably ill-advised bet with our leader, Frankie Riley, who claimed that he would not go through with it. Later the black civil rights movement down South which was very touchy in our lily-white neighborhood and caused some bad blood even with his corner boys when he went off on a tangent about it. (Yes we used the “n” word then in referring to black people, worse than that sometimes).
Frankly though as Markin was growing up, as he developed his style in high school he could have given a “rat’s ass” (a term of art used in the old neighborhood genesis unknown) about Marxism, hated, despite our pinko commie comments, Communists almost as much as the rest of us did except he was not for jailing every last one of the them or shipping them all to Moscow. He had dreams of being a serious politician, serious let’s say social democratic politician on the right side of the angels in public anyway. Not a candidate type like his hero Robert Kennedy but a guy right beside some aspiring candidate guiding him along the way.
What changed him? What drove him over the edge away from that dream and maybe some normal day success? One word: Vietnam. Even that crooked path could have been different if he wasn’t so quirky and curious. In the spring of 1967 he had caught a sense that things were changing, that maybe that new world he was always yakking to us about, something about a new wave coming over the land and we had better be ready, might come to something. He made a fateful, and wrong, decision to drop out of his sophomore year in college in Boston and head out to San Francisco to grab onto the tailwinds of the Summer of Love. He was right at home, even got some of us out there for a while. Of course not being a male student with a student deferment in 1967 when the major escalations of the war in Vietnam were still piling up requiring more troops, more “cannon fodder” he would call it even then long before he ever though he would be caught in its web meant he was a prime candidate for the draft. He was rather casual about the matter whenever I mentioned it always assuming that the damn war would end before he number came up.
Like I said wrong move. I guess now I would say that I would have thought that certainly of all the old crowd Pete would have been the first one to have refused, or even thought about refusing, induction given his past history and his strong views about being in Vietnam, a place and a people whom he said he had no cause to hate since they had never done anything to him but maybe that was later after he got back from that hellhole. But no when he got his draft notice and passed the physical he said he had no strong reasons not to go unlike some of the increasing number of students and other young men who were refusing induction (or heading to Canada or figuring some other way to avoid military service at a time when that only meant Vietnam was beckoning). So he went when called like every other corner boy we knew who was eligible if they hadn’t already enlisted beforehand. I got out of military service by having had a crippling knee injury as a kid and thereafter had walked with a pronounced limp especially on rainy days.
That acceptance of induction another mistake. Pete never talked about it all that much but he went through the wringer in Vietnam. Had been an 11 Bravo Army speak for an infantryman, a grunt, that cannon fodder always he was always yelling about. The only place that needed 11Bravos just then, and lots of them, was in Vietnam so it was inevitable he would wind up there. Said he did and was made to do stuff that would forever haunt him the few times he did let on that the whole experience had screwed up his life. (How deeply it did so to him we would not know for several years and even then we could only surmise what demons had driven him to dope deals and dirty back streets to an early grave down in Mexico once we lost contact with him).
The minute he got out of the Army Pete began a political trajectory through his associations with the then growing Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) that would lead him to a study of Marxism and a short whirling dervish period of left-wing activity before he descended into hell. (I have heard from old corner boy leader Frankie Riley, a Vietnam veteran himself that Pete had been politically active even before he got out of the Army so let’s just say when he got back to what he called the “real world”). Through the VVAW link he had, after a whirlwind run around the country attending probably every anti-war demonstration that drew more than five people, landed back in Cambridge in the early spring of 1971 where he had run into a group of radicals who were heading to Washington to try to shut down the government (the Nixon government at that time) if it did not end the fucking war (“fucking” my term at that point and now too when I think about how it fucked up one of the best of our whole generation long before his time was up). All Pete, they and their cohorts got for their efforts was massive police and military repression, tear gas and a huge number of arrests. The war would linger on in one form or another for the next few years (and dominate the psyche of the best part of the generation for many years).
As a result of that Mau Day experience Pete, and others back in Cambridge as well, took note that a few brave but marginal students, radicals, do-gooders had no shot at effective governmental change based on some ill-advised if heroic individual acts of political bravery. Who or what force could do so. He, they thought through lots of scenarios but came up empty based on who had enough power to switch things around. I don’t remember all the details but I do remember for a time Markin was very excited after he had found a copy of Karl Marx’s tribute and defense of the fallen at the Paris Commune. He had read, and discarded, Marx’s Communist Manifesto as so much old time bullshit in high school when he would rail against the commies with a lot more knowledge than our knee-jerk 1950s red scare Cold War attitudes. Now he took what was said there on a re-reading in a whole new light. That document helped, he once told me, explain a little, not all, of what growing up poor had done to him, his family, to us his friends and fellow poor proletarians (his new found word). Naturally Markin being Markin once he got hot on the trail of an idea, maybe anything that interested him, went into overdrive and hunkered down in the Cambridge library and read everything he could by Marx or his co-thinker Friedrich Engels. Classic Markin.
I have not said much about Fritz yet who after all is the center of this anniversary business. Like I said just after his discharge from the Army Markin went all over attending anti-war rallies and events. One time down in Washington Pete was marching with VVAW in a silent procession through the streets (it may have been the time a whole slew of Vietnam veterans threw their medals back over the fence at the Supreme Court building and if not that then around that time) when after the event was over he introduced himself to Fritz who had been marching beside him. Fritz had been in the Army too, had been a mortar man, 11 C, 11 Charlie I think was the designation meaning he was just as much in the thick of things as Pete. Fritz was from down South, down in Georgia, Fulton County, and had volunteered like a million guys from Georgia had done, and as their grandfathers and fathers had done without thinking a thing about it. Fritz, not nearly as well educated as Pete, but a true son of the working class, the Southern poor working class just as the Acre meant Northern poor working class had something about him that was attractive to Pete. Maybe the shared Army connection, maybe the class part or maybe because Fritz was like the corner boys of his youth a stand-up guy. They became good friends in Washington and a couple of weeks later Pete, back in Cambridge, invited Fritz up to stay at a commune where he had been living with a few post-graduate student radical activist.
Fritz came up and while it took him a while to figure out how to deal with communal life having been pretty straight before Vietnam once he got a girlfriend (Leslie, whom he would eventually marry and is still married to) he was as inquisitive as Pete about what the hell they could do to stop the fucking wars (that “fucking” Fritz’s who to this day can seldom complete a sentence without that expletive). That Cambridge commune is where I first met Fritz and that girlfriend. Once Pete “got religion” on the Marxist stuff Fritz got carried along. It was an infinitely harder task for Fritz to slog through the readings, has always said that he never did really figure out what dialectical materialism was all about and a few other things too but he got the main drift, got that without a revolutionary overturn of society that same old, same old would rise to the top again. Pete and Fritz had a million conversations before Pete left for his last hurrah in California. (Fritz wouldn’t go because Leslie was still in school and he was even then smitten by her charms to not leave her behind). You know the long lamented Pete Markin’s fate so you know that even the strong ideological of Marxism then could not conquer the demons in his head (what I began calling several years ago when I was having my own demon problems of a different sort “putting out the fire in your head”)
Fritz though despite all the ups and downs of leftwing political life in America and the shattering and in some ways decisive shattering of the old Soviet Union has stayed the course. Had no illusions about that place but also knew that a bad wind had drifted over the planet once that experiment had run its course and created a serious defeat for his beloved international working class. That wind still very much in play some quarter of a century later. Said that old curmudgeon Marx had lots of things right and still had something to say today, maybe especially today when everybody and their sister knows that the scales are tipped against working people almost everywhere. Told me when I showed him the second draft of this piece that although much has been apparently mistaken in the Marxist worldview the idea that if you don’t “turn the world upside down” (a favored Markin expression), change what class is in charge doing the stuff to benefit the whole world then you are stuck with what we have today or the old stuff just rises to the top again. Get this though Fritz who knew Markin only as an adult and with some of the shine worn off and not like us when he would charge into a room and dazzle you with some new idea that just had to work said old Pete Markin in his time had something to say too. Yeah, Fritz, yeah.
