A View From The Left- BlacKkKlansman Spike Lee Says Racist Cops Can “Do the Right Thing”

Workers Vanguard No. 1139 7 September 2018 BlacKkKlansman Spike Lee Says Racist Cops Can “Do the Right Thing” Spike Lee’s movie BlacKkKlansman opens with powerful images of racist terror and violence in the United States, from the Confederate slavocracy to Klan lynchings, as well as white-supremacist nostalgia depicted in Gone with the Wind. Timed for release on the anniversary of the 2017 fascist rampage in Charlottesville, the film ends with chilling footage of the murder of Heather Heyer and the beating of black hip-hop artist DeAndre Harris by a gang of club-wielding fascist thugs. Yet the truth of these searing scenes is used to promote the grotesque lie that the racist police are allies in the fight against fascist terror. Loosely based on the story of Ron Stallworth, a black cop who initiated the infiltration of the Klan in Colorado Springs in the 1970s, BlacKkKlansman presents the cops as heroes. Needless to say, this requires not a little fabrication. To invent the supposed risks taken by the police, the white cop who in real life stood in for Stallworth at KKK meetings is portrayed as a Jewish cop who narrowly escapes being exposed (circumcision and all) by a Klansman. A similarly concocted scene toward the end of the movie shows Stallworth and his fictitious black radical girlfriend teaming up with the chief of police and other “good” cops to set up and bust a white racist “bad” cop. That never happened and never would. But it serves to excuse cop terror as simply that of a few hardcore racists. In fact, the cops, as a core component of the capitalist state, are the main perpetrators of daily racist violence in this country. The victims of cop terror—Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland and countless others—are blatantly disappeared in Lee’s film. Hip-hop artist Boots Riley, whose recent semi-surrealist movie Sorry to Bother You is an explicit commentary on race and class oppression in capitalist America, issued a scathing rebuke of BlacKkKlansman. Immediately summing up his critique of Lee’s film in a #quickfilmreview tweet which read, “Fuck the police,” Riley later wrote a more extensive exposé, commenting: “It’s a made up story in which the false parts of it try to make a cop the protagonist in the fight against racist oppression. It’s being put while Black Lives Matter is a discussion, and this is not coincidental.” Pointing to the fact that Spike Lee was paid $200,000 by the New York Police Department to collaborate in an ad campaign to supposedly “improve” police relations with minorities, Riley remarked that BlacKkKlansman “feels like an extension of that ad campaign.” Of course there is an element of revenge fantasy in the idea that Stallworth, a black man, was in real life able to dupe the Klan and that one of the chumps was none other than former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. But that is only one piece of the story. Lee’s cop hero served as a police operative who spied on leftist organizations. In his memoir, Stallworth recounts his investigation of the ostensibly communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP), which he describes as “extremely radical, organized, and dedicated to their conviction of ultimately ‘smashing’ the Ku Klux Klan.” Stallworth would alternate between going undercover in PLP meetings to gather information about anti-Klan actions and acting as a security detail for David Duke himself. He informed both the Klan and the police about PLP counterdemonstrations against Duke, protecting the Klan from those who intended to stop its race-terror provocations. The only hint of Stallworth’s infiltration of left-radical organizations in BlacKkKlansman is when he spies on a Colorado Springs meeting featuring Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael). Lee uses this scene to portray Stallworth as both a cop doing his job and a black man drawn into Ture’s “black power” message. The scene also serves to develop a fictional romantic relationship between Stallworth and a radical young Black Student Union leader. Unbelievably, she sticks with Stallworth even after learning that he is a cop, something no self-respecting leftist would do. Toward the end of the movie, Stallworth and his girlfriend are propelled together down a hallway, guns drawn in unison pointed at a white-supremacist cross-burning. The purpose is to peddle the lie that black cops and black radicals have a common interest. It is not a secret that police agents have a sordid history of derailing, disrupting and “neutralizing” left and black radical organizations. Stallworth’s real-life surveillance of PLP was consistent with the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO, which in its official form ended in the early 1970s. Launched in 1956 against the Communist Party, COINTELPRO later unleashed a savage campaign of racist sabotage and murder against others deemed subversive. Its deadliest fire was aimed at the Black Panther Party, which defiantly organized armed self-defense against the racist cops. Panther leader Fred Hampton and 37 others were killed, and hundreds imprisoned. Today the FBI continues to target left groups and activists around Black Lives Matter, branding them “Black Identity Extremists.” BlacKkKlansman buries the deadly history of collusion between the cops, government and the Klan. State agents who infiltrated the Klan were often active participants in racist terror and murder. One infamous FBI informant, Gary Rowe, was involved in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young black girls. Two years later, Rowe was in the car and may have been the actual triggerman who shot civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo on the highway outside Selma, Alabama. Federal as well as state and local police agencies took part in the 1979 KKK/Nazi murder of five union organizers and anti-racist activists associated with the Communist Workers Party in Greensboro, North Carolina. A Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent helped train the fascist killers and a police/FBI informer rode shotgun in the lead car while a local police car followed behind. The ensuing massacre was carried out in broad daylight and in full view of TV cameras. Nonetheless, the fascists were acquitted by all-white juries. In 2014, one of the Greensboro killers, Frazier Glenn Miller, gunned down three people outside Jewish community facilities in Kansas. At least Spike Lee’s earlier movie Do the Right Thing showed the NYPD in true form, e.g., getting away with murder. Now he uses his filmmaking talents to push the myth that the racist police can “do the right thing.” Responding to Riley’s criticisms of BlacKkKlansman, Lee retorted: “Look at my films: they’ve been very critical of the police, but on the other hand I’m never going to say all police are corrupt, that all police hate people of color.... I mean, we need police.” And, it’s not just the police that Lee thinks “we need.” Lee opined in a CNN interview that he hoped the movie would inspire people “to register to vote” (Democrat), arguing that Trump’s presidency is evidence of “what happens when you don’t vote.” At various points, BlacKkKlansman draws a connection between the fascist Duke and Duke’s hero president. That Trump is a raving racist who has coddled and encouraged the fascists is hardly news. But the Democrats no less than the Republicans represent the interests of racist American capitalism. The only difference is that the Democrats serve it up with a hefty dose of hypocrisy aimed at obscuring the racial oppression and brutal exploitation of the working class that are inherent to this system. While BlacKkKlansman is movingly dedicated to Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer, one need only fast-forward one year to last month’s anti-fascist protests to puncture the lie that the cops are anything but the enemies of black people, the working class and oppressed. An open letter to Spike Lee from “The Young People of the Charlottesville Attack” (21 August) contrasts Lee’s rosy depiction of the cops with the reality of Charlottesville this year and last year, where police escorted and protected the fascist killers while repressing anti-racist activists. The letter writers noted: “We were met by a force who sought to control, suppress and attack us. And it wasn’t just the ones who showed up with hoods and torches. Most of them wore badges.” As we said in the aftermath of Charlottesville last year (WV No. 1116, 25 August 2017): “The outrage against the fascists needs an organized expression: a disciplined, militant and military mobilization of the social power of the multiracial working class. It is this power that is feared and hated by the bosses, their kept labor lieutenants in the trade-union bureaucracy and capitalist politicians of all colors and genders. The working class has the power and the objective interest not only to stop the fascists but also to overturn the whole capitalist system that spawns these vermin.” Rather than the shell game of voting for the capitalist Democratic Party, what is needed is to build a revolutionary party that will wield workers’ social power in the fight for black freedom and the emancipation of all the oppressed. It will take nothing less than a socialist revolution to break the chains of racist capitalist rule and bury the fascist gangs for good.

A View From The Left- DSA and Ocasio-Cortez: No Kind of Socialists Democrats, Republicans: Class Enemies of Workers and Oppressed We Need a Revolutionary Workers Party!

Workers Vanguard No. 1139 7 September 2018 DSA and Ocasio-Cortez: No Kind of Socialists Democrats, Republicans: Class Enemies of Workers and Oppressed We Need a Revolutionary Workers Party! With her surprise victory over incumbent Joseph Crowley in the June Democratic Congressional primary, the Bronx’s 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), became an overnight media sensation. She has since been a regular feature of late-night talk shows and the liberal press, which view her and her cothinkers as a shot in the arm of the so-called resistance to Trump. The aim of Ocasio-Cortez and other DSA-backed candidates is to refurbish the Democrats’ image so as to better rope disaffected youth and workers back into the party, which, no less than the Republicans, represents the capitalist system of exploitation, racial oppression and imperialist war. Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory is the centerpiece thus far of the various “progressive” challenges to the Democratic Party leadership following Trump’s election. Pennsylvania DSA members Summer Lee and Sara Innamorato won their primaries for seats in the state assembly, while Julia Salazar is challenging a 16-year incumbent for the New York State Senate. Also in New York, Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo is fending off a challenge from Sex and the City star and recently self-identified “democratic socialist” Cynthia Nixon. The bulk of the Democratic leadership has responded to these challengers with barely concealed contempt, with House leader Nancy Pelosi admonishing people to not get “carried away” by Ocasio-Cortez’s victory: “They made a choice in one district.” For their part, Trump’s friends on Fox News have labeled Ocasio-Cortez “a communist” and “downright scary.” In a Fox News interview, Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis launched into a racist diatribe against Andrew Gillum, the black Democratic candidate supported by Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, warning voters not to “monkey this up” by electing Gillum. Ocasio-Cortez, Nixon, et al. represent disgruntled elements in the Democratic Party who believe that victories in the midterm and the 2020 presidential elections require more than invented “Russiagate” scandals and the generic sales pitch of being less openly racist, anti-union and reactionary than Trump. The label “democratic socialist” has increasingly come to define liberal Democrats who still rally behind the party, but don’t fancy its establishment leadership. The DSA-allied candidates have as much to do with socialism as biology courses at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University have to do with evolution. It is an indication of the extreme rightward shift in the Democratic Party and society more broadly that a group like the DSA, which has always been committed to the Democratic Party and to upholding imperialism, can be seen as socialist. A London Economist (1 September) article, “Shivering the Chains,” aptly remarked: “Perhaps the surest sign that American socialists are not revolutionaries is their willingness to work within the two-party system.” As with Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, the recent ascendance of these “democratic socialists” only serves to reinforce illusions in Democratic lesser-evilism and is an obstacle to the necessary struggle to forge a revolutionary workers party. Making clear her allegiance to U.S. imperialism, Ocasio-Cortez eulogized the recently deceased Republican Senator John McCain, tweeting that his legacy represented “an unparalleled example of human decency and American service.” While causing uproar among her supporters, her gushing over a war criminal whose “service” included the slaughter of numerous Vietnamese, who declared, “I hate the gooks,” and who was fond of singing “bomb Iran” is not an aberration but consistent with her bourgeois program. On her campaign website, Ocasio-Cortez complains that U.S. intervention in the Near East and North Africa “damages America’s legitimacy as a force for good.” She calls to “repair our image”—i.e., to make U.S. imperialism more effective. Here, she is merely echoing her mentor, Sanders, who also called McCain an “American hero” and has a long history of supporting U.S. imperialism’s wars of conquest (see “Bernie Sanders: Imperialist Running Dog,” WV No. 1083, 12 February 2016). Latching on to the demands of youth and workers who crave some relief from capitalist misery and austerity, Ocasio-Cortez calls for Medicare for all, a federal jobs guarantee, tuition-free public colleges and trade school education and abolition of private prisons. Her demand to “abolish ICE” amounts to resurrecting a version of its predecessor, the INS. She was clear that “abolish ICE” does not mean “abolish deportation.” The reforms proposed by Ocasio-Cortez and her cothinkers are little more than hot air. We support reforms that benefit the working class and oppressed. But they are not won by electing “progressive” bourgeois politicians nor are they gained by appealing to some (imaginary) benevolent ruling class. Any significant gains—from unionization to black and women’s rights—have been wrested through hard-fought class and social struggle against the exploiters, their political parties and their state. What remains of these gains today continues to be ravaged in the bosses’ one-sided class war enabled by the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy, including DSA labor misleaders, which has long abandoned the class-struggle means through which the unions were built and channels labor discontent into voting for Democrats. Facing little struggle, the bourgeoisie sees no reason to enact a series of beneficial reforms. Socialism: What It Is and How to Fight for It Recent victories by DSA-supported politicians have spawned numerous articles about what socialism is, mostly to express relief that what Ocasio-Cortez and her cohorts represent has nothing to do with the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution of 1917. The Bolsheviks were genuine socialists who fought for and achieved a revolutionary transformation of society. As Karl Marx put it in his 1850 “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” the purpose of socialists “cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one.” Marxism is based on the understanding that society is fundamentally divided between classes: the working class, whose labor produces the wealth of society, and the tiny class of capitalist exploiters who own the means of production and finance. The reformists promote the lie that capitalism can be made to operate in the interest of the working and oppressed masses. The capitalists are represented by their parties—in the U.S., that means the Democrats, the Republicans and small-time parties like the Greens. The capitalist state and its machinery of repression, like the police, exist to preserve bourgeois rule. Democracy under capitalism is a facade used by the bourgeoisie to obscure its class dictatorship. As Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin wrote in 1918: “Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.” We do not give political support to any capitalist politician or party; to do so would subordinate the interests of working people and the oppressed to the class enemy. We champion the fight for union jobs at good wages; for quality, fully government-funded health care for all; for free, quality education for all at all levels; for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. Our purpose is to link such demands to building a multiracial revolutionary workers party committed to a socialist future through workers revolution. International working-class rule will lay the basis for rationally planned economies based on production for need, not profit, and for qualitative development of the productive forces, opening the road to the elimination of scarcity and to the creation of an egalitarian society. Break with the Democrats! Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist veneer is so thin as to be see-through. As she herself explained, her views are rooted in Democratic Party history, drawing on the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) and Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ). “It’s time to own that our party was the one of the Great Society, of the New Deal, of the Civil Rights Act. That’s our party. That’s who we are.” This sentiment was echoed by prominent DSA spokesman and Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara who published an article in the Guardian (1 September) titled, “What’s Your Solution to Fighting Sexism and Racism? Mine Is: Unions.” In it, he yearns for the Democratic Party to go back to “its promises of shared prosperity and equality” under FDR, which he argues laid the basis for the growth of the unions. FDR was forced to grant New Deal concessions because of the tumultuous class battles of the early 1930s, with key strikes led by reds (see Spartacist pamphlet Then and Now). His aim was to put a lid on class struggle, stabilize U.S. capitalism in the face of the Great Depression and lull workers into believing that the government would act on their behalf. Legislation like the 1935 Wagner Act was meant to bring mass union organizing drives under the machinery of government control. Sunkara paints FDR’s New Deal as “anti-racism.” In fact, it was a pact between Northern liberals and the racist Dixiecrats, who imposed lynch-mob terror on the black masses in the South. Likewise, LBJ’s “Great Society” reforms came as a result of the massive struggles of the civil rights movement. With plebeian uprisings erupting in places like Harlem and Watts, the Johnson administration enacted legislation, such as the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, which have since been whittled away, in order to co-opt civil rights leaders and quell the upheavals. While legal segregation was done away with, the socioeconomic conditions for the majority of black people today are comparable to those prior to the civil rights movement. During the civil rights movement, Michael Harrington, an anti-communist who would go on to found the DSA, worked overtime to keep protest within the confines of the Democratic Party. He was a member of the LBJ administration’s bogus “War on Poverty” task force while the government escalated the dirty, losing war in Vietnam and crushed black militants through FBI COINTELPRO operations. In his Guardian article mentioned above, Sunkara notes: “Unlike other countries, the United States didn’t have its own labor party.” The U.S. is indeed the only advanced capitalist country that has never had a mass workers party that represents even a deformed expression of working-class political independence. The fundamental reason for that is black oppression, which is the bedrock of American capitalism. The capitalist masters have used racism to pit workers against one another in order to divide and rule their wage slaves. At the same time, the shell game through which the Democratic Party is promoted as the “friend” of blacks and labor has been essential to preserving racist American capitalism. As for the DSA, it has more than a little responsibility for the sorry state of the labor movement today. The DSA was involved in one of labor’s biggest defeats during the 1981 PATCO air traffic controllers strike. When President Reagan fired the workforce of 12,000, we called on the unions to shut down the airports, which there was sentiment among the workers to do. But William “Wimpy” Winpisinger, a DSA leader and the president of the IAM machinists union, which included airline mechanics, refused to call for solidarity labor action, selling out the strikers. The unions need a new leadership, one based on class struggle not class collaboration. Such a task requires a political fight against the labor bureaucracy and the likes of the DSA, who act as the agents of the bosses inside the union movement. The struggle to revitalize the unions must be integrally linked to forging a workers party that acts as the tribune of the people. Such a party will fight to mobilize the social power of the multiracial working class in defense of all victims of capitalist oppression as part of the struggle for proletarian revolution, which will lay the basis for the liberation of black people and all the oppressed. Beware Pro-Democratic Party Hustlers Since its founding, the DSA has been an extension of the Democrats’ voting machine. It has loyally supported every Democratic Commander-in-Chief, including Bill Clinton, who escalated the racist “war on drugs” and gutted welfare, and Barack Obama, who bailed out Wall Street at the expense of working people, reveled in assassination by drone and deported an unprecedented number of immigrants. Over the past two years, the DSA has grown substantially, now boasting more than 50,000 members. This has sparked an internal debate on whether to “realign” (take over) the Democratic Party, exit their host or leave things as they are. Looming behind this controversy is the fact that the DSA’s membership growth is due to Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez garnering attention precisely because they were running on Democratic Party tickets. While the DSA has long been openly riding the Democratic bus, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Socialist Alternative (SAlt) serve as its spare tires. Having spent months doing donkey work for Sanders in 2016, SAlt now boasts of having “worked with the Ocasio-Cortez campaign” (socialistalternative.org, 2 July). After explicitly calling for a vote to Julia Salazar, SAlt incredulously encourages “Salazar to more clearly warn her supporters that the Democratic Party, as a whole, is a barrier to socialist change” (socialistalternative.org, 21 August). This as they assiduously reinforce that same “barrier.” No less effusive, but a little more cagey, the ISO has carried out its own debate on its website on whether to openly endorse “progressive” Democrats (“dirty break”) or maintain a fig leaf of “independence” (“clean break”). A piece on socialistworker.org (6 August) by one Eric Blanc enthuses that socialists “can, under certain conditions, effectively use the Democratic Party ballot line,” which he argues “isn’t a question of principle.” In response, ISO honcho Alan Maass laid down the party line—sort of: “It is a principle to not support Democratic Party candidates—or at least a conclusion that is directly related to the principle of working class independence” (socialistworker.org, 8 August). Given that the ISO celebrated the Ocasio-Cortez victory as “a testament to the appeal of a left political alternative,” Blanc and others are simply taking such excitement to its logical conclusion. Why buy the pompoms if you can’t join the cheerleading squad? Underlining that the “clean break” vs. “dirty break” debate is not based on any principle, the ISO is once again supporting the New York gubernatorial campaign of Howie Hawkins on the capitalist Green Party ticket in a safely Democratic blue state. For New October Revolutions! Militant youth and workers who want a society free of oppression and exploitation should look to the example of the 1917 Russian Revolution led by Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, which expropriated the capitalist class and landlords and established a workers state. Anti-communist to their core, the “democratic socialists” are motivated by hostility to the Russian Revolution. As we elaborated in “DSA: Democratic Party ‘Socialists’” (WV No. 1113, 2 June 2017), the newfound popularity of groups like the DSA comes in the context of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union and East European deformed workers states, a momentous defeat for working people and the oppressed worldwide. Pummeled by the bourgeoisie’s “death of communism” propaganda for nearly three decades, left-leaning activists largely perceive Marxism to have been a failed experiment. DSA founder Michael Harrington earned his stripes leading radicalized youth away from Marxism during his time in the Socialist Party, which acted as loyal servants of the U.S. government during the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Later, as the U.S. waged war to crush Vietnam’s insurgent workers and peasants, Harrington echoed the counterrevolutionary drive of the imperialists, stating, “I am anti-communist on principle—because I am pro-freedom.” The line between social democracy and communism is drawn in blood: In January 1919, amid the struggle to extend the Russian Revolution to Germany, revolutionary leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were assassinated by reactionary military forces at the behest of the Social Democratic government. Today, the DSA, ISO and other progeny of those who drowned Luxemburg’s revolutionary struggle in blood like to cite her as an authority. But she could have been writing about them when she noted in her 1900 work Reform or Revolution that those who push “legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modification of the old society.”

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky- Fourth International-We Need A Socialist International More Than Ever

On The 80^th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky- Fourth International-We Need A Socialist International More Than Ever 

By Harry Sims

Usually I am a behind the scenes guy dishing out anniversary dates and other facts and figures to site manager Greg Green and/or the recently created Editorial Board but I felt compelled to write a little something about the anniversary, the 80^th anniversary this month of September, of the Fourth International that will be forever linked to the name of the great Russian Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky. In accordance with the seemingly obligatory notice of transparency that accompanies anything today greater that what you had for breakfast at one time I was close to those who were carrying on the wilted tradition of the Fourth International after Trotsky was assassinated by a Stalinist agent down in Mexico in the summer of 1940. Aside from that though, as the headline to this introduction telegraphs, we are still in need of an international that will lead the way forward for humankind’s hopefully more equitable future. Such progress as we are now painfully aware does not happen automatically but must be planned and led by people committed to such aims. The same is true for those who want to revive the night of the long knives that was the hallmark of the 20^th century and now the first couple of decades of the 21^st century. So the die is cast.

Here is a short primer for those legions who do not have the foggiest notion of a what an International, Fourth or otherwise, is or was. These institutions are associated with various historical epochs of the socialist movement in all its struggles-victories and defeats. The first short-lived International was associated directly with the personages of the socialist revolutionaries Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of the Marxist wing of socialism back in the middle of the 19^th century. The two important events beyond the fact of creating the first international devoted to the struggle for socialism were the support for the Northern side led by Abraham Lincoln in the American Civil War and the stalwart defense of the Paris Commune, the first workers republic, of 1871 which was drowned in blood by Thiers and his mercenaries. The Second International before it became a “mail drop,” before it dropped the ball in not opposing World War I on any side, an event we are commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the Armistice this year as well, was the first mass organization of international socialism toward the end of the 19^th century. With the rapid rise of industrialization under late capitalism working people swarmed to this organization to defend them. In 1914 with the aforementioned failure to oppose the bloody war which decimated the flower of the working classes of all European nations its historic important as a serious force for social change much less socialism was finished even if the shell lingered, still lingers on today.

The Third International, Communist International, Comintern, and the Fourth share not only the personage of Leon Trotsky but purported to have the same aims at various points up to World War II. The Comintern was created as a direct result of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 by leaders Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky among others for the direct purpose of leading the world socialist revolution. When that task was abandoned in practice under the Stalin regime in Russia Trotsky in exile and with not enough resources called for and established the Fourth International we are commemorating.

Traces of that Fourth International like the Second still exist but unlike the first three Internationals it was essentially still-born in a time of defeats, serious defeats for the working classes especially with the rise of Hitler in Germany. So why beside nostalgia for an old International associated with the name of an honest revolutionary do I write this short piece today. Like I said the headline has telegraphed what is needed, what I think is needed today-another International, a fifth International if you like to lead the fight against the one-sided class struggle that is being waged by the international capitalist classes. While Trotsky’s organization for many reasons including the decimation of its cadre in Europe during World War II never got off the ground some of its programmatic points in the key document that came out of the conference which established the organization-the Transitional Program- read like they could have been written today.

Beyond the program though cadre, new cadre are needed to continue the forlorn fight against the greedy vultures who control the means of production and finance and that is where Leon Trotsky’s desperate and usually lonely fight to bring the 4^th International to the light of day can still serve as a model going forward. He, Trotsky, a man who has led the Russian Revolution of 1905, has subsequently been exiled and escaped the Czarist prisons when that revolution was crushed, had been central to the seizure of power in the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, had been Commissar of War during the bloody civil war against the counter-revolutionary Whites and their international imperialist allies, and had led the fight to save the revolution when the dark hand of Stalin and his henchmen pulled the hammer down stated unequivocally at the time in 1938 that establishing a new international to fight the dark clouds coming over Europe was the most important task he had done in his life. In our own epoch we are looking for such men and women to continue the task. They will have to read about and look at these 1938 documents and that very uneven struggle along the way.

Workers Vanguard No. 1139	7 September 2018

TROTSKY

LENIN

Reforge the Fourth International!

(Quote of the Week)

Eighty years ago, on 3 September 1938, the Fourth International was established under the leadership of Leon Trotsky. In opposition to the reformism of the social-democratic Second International and the Stalinized Communist International (Comintern), its founding document, excerpted below, provided the framework for building a new world party of socialist revolution. It is the task of the International Communist League to reforge the Fourth International, which was destroyed by a revisionist current under Michel Pablo in the early 1950s that renounced the need to build Trotskyist parties.

It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.

Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program, which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program, which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying. The Comintern has set out to follow the path of Social Democracy in an epoch of decaying capitalism: when, in general, there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and the raising of the masses’ living standards; when every serious demand of the proletariat and even every serious demand of the petty bourgeoisie inevitably reaches beyond the limits of capitalist property relations and of the bourgeois state.

The strategical task of the Fourth International lies not in reforming capitalism but in its overthrow. Its political aim is the conquest of power by the proletariat for the purpose of expropriating the bourgeoisie.

—Leon Trotsky, “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International,” commonly known as the Transitional Program (1938)

She Came Out Of The Karoo-The Music Of Tony Bird-A Review

She Came Out Of The Karoo-The Music Of Tony Bird-A Review

CD Review

By Zack James

Sorry Africa, Tony Bird, 1986

During the 1980s Seth Garth had been taking on more and more purely political assignments for the New Times Gazette, a successor newspaper to the old alternative The Eye for which he had gotten his first jumps in journalism as the film and music critic. It wasn’t that he had lost interest in covering the happenings in the world of independent cinema and the edges of popular music but that in that period there were political trends around the struggles for liberation in Central and South America and Southern Africa that for the first time since the slowdown of the Vietnam War back in the early 1970s required attention. And so Benny Gold, his editor from back in The Eye days who had moved on with the Gazette assigned him more and more of those political assignments with the idea that he would weave those in with some off-beat cultural pieces.    

One night he had been in the Open Space, a new music club in the Village [Greenwich Village]that had previous been a coffeehouse, a popular one, the Unicorn, to hear a new guy out of Africa who Seth was told had an interesting beat, had combined the sounds of Mother Africa with more popular Western music. This was the kind of off-beat combination that he was sure Benny Gold would go for. As the MC for the evening announced the performer, Tony Bird, he was surprised that out came on the stage a young white man backed up by an all black group of sidemen. Seth had known that there were some, not enough, white youth who were supporting the various black liberation struggles in Southern Africa, particularly in South Africa but he was not prepared for a white musician to surface who supported those struggles although he should have known that fact going in.    

Tony Bird let everybody in the place know where he was coming from when he started singing a very heartfelt and upbeat song, Sorry Africa, taking on the burden on his shoulders of expressing sorrow at the way the white man, the way his people had treated the ones they had conquered one way or another. Very moving. 

What had gotten to Seth that night though and he was as surprised at this as he was that Tony Bird was a white African man was a song that he finished up with, She Came From The Karoo. The Karoo being the outback in the country he came from. What was strange about the song was that except that the locale was Africa it could have been a song of love and lost in America. More to the point was the vision that Seth had of the woman Tony was speaking of, a woman who came out of the mist with a red sundress on and effected all around her with her bright Botticelli smile and demeanor. Seth thought that little idea, the idea that a woman could spark such imagination out in the bush was the hook that he would use in his article. That and that Tony Bird, a black liberation  struggle fighter in his own right had no apology to give to Africa.     

Riding With The King-The Music Of B.B. King

Riding With The King-The Music Of B.B. King

CD Review

By Zack James

Riding With The King, B.B. King, Eric Clapton

“You never know where music, the muse of music if that is the right way to say it, if it is not redundant” Seth Garth said to his old friend Bartlett Webber one night when they were discussing various musical trends and commitments over a few drinks at Friday’s in downtown Boston. Seth had just been commenting on the hard fact that the guys and gals who were holding up the blues traditions of that quintessentially black musical form were mostly then younger whites who had gotten their baptisms of fire back in the early 1960s maybe the 1970s when as part of the British invasion of rock groups (the Beatles and Stones mostly) who worshiped at the feet of the old bluesmen and as part of the folk revival of the early 1960s when the young were looking for roots music and hit upon some old time country blues singers they got hooked on this genre.(That worship at the feet was no mere expression since as august a group as the Rolling Stones made their way to Chicago, made their way to legendary blues label Chess Records, made their way to meet Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.) 

Seth went on, “You know with very few exceptions, maybe in the old days guys like Taj Majal and more recently Keb ‘Mo young blacks were running away from their “blues is dues” contributions, except the hip-hop artists who were savoring those blues as backdrop to their new language experiences.” Bart nodded his head not so much because he was as knowledgeable as Seth about musical trends, he wasn’t, but because ever since Seth had turned him on to various non-rock and roll forms of music such as these blues and folk music he had deferred to him on such subjects.        

That deference to Seth had not been happenstance since for early in his journalistic career starting with the American Folk Gazette when he was still in college he had been a music critic most frequently and profitably before it folded long ago when the ebb tide of the 1960s faded the prestigious The Eye. Moreover although Bart was a true aficionado Seth would be the one to lead the way forward musically ever since the old days back in Riverdale when Seth had been the guy who turned the crowd they hung around with to that folk music that was coming over the horizon. He would take the lead here as well ever since both men had attended a concert at the Garden by Big Bill Bloom, the legendary folksinger from the 1960s. Both men had agreed to walk out of the performance before the encore as a protest to the hard fact that Big Bill could no longer sing, was practically talking the lyrics through. That experience got Seth onto the trail of an idea. He wanted to check out all the singers still standing from back in the day who were still performing and rate them on the question of whether they still had “it.”  As it turned out some did like David Bromberg and his band who burned up the joint one night downtown. The late Etta James didn’t, didn’t have it. And so the quest.      

That quest was now centered more particularly on the fading fast few blues masters still around. That is where Seth began to see that break in the black blues tradition as two generations or more removed from Southern country life or hard inner city industrial madness which had brought a couple of generations north in search of a better life and the music needed to pick up the pace as well bringing forth the whole electric blues scene that hummed cities like Chicago and Detroit in the early 1950s. That brought them to this-B.B. King and Eric Clapton CD. Clapton, one of those British invasion guys who was crazy for the blues (and classic rock, now classic rock, with the likes of Chuck Berry who Clapton to this day swears he does not know how Berry did what he did with a guitar as hard as he looked to find out what the master was doing) and the King were going to perform together at the Garden in a week or so.

At the concert Seth and Bart had been apprehensive when they saw ancient B.B. and his latest version of Lucille being escorted to a seat on center stage with Eric Clapton to the side. Not to worry though the work they did was a great success. Seth mentioned to Bart though that he was not sure where the new generation would get their blues from since they would never go away, the blues, the causes for the blues, whiskey. Women, work, and a wad of dough just like rock and roll once guys like Eric passed away. This CD was their work to insure the future whatever may come-okay.        

Films To While The Class Struggle By- With Serge Eisenstein’s "Strike" (1925) In Mind

Films To While The Class Struggle By- With Serge Eisenstein’s "Strike" (1925) In Mind

DVD Review  

By Frank Jackman

Strike, starring a cast of hundreds of working people and others, directed by Serge Eisenstein, 1925

No question, no question at all that some political films whether they were intended as propaganda for a certain viewpoint as with the film under review, Russian mad man filmmaker Serge Eisenstein’s 1925 Strike, or because as the story line developed everybody was compelled to think through the implications of the cover-up and preclude to figure out the coup in a film like Costa-Garvas’ Z. Here is the beauty of Eisenstein’s work whether with Strike or an effort like Potemkin, the one with the famous baby carriage scene on the Odessa Steps. The medium is the message to steal a phrase from an old-time social media commentator (okay, okay I will give the attribution-Marshall McLuhan).   The whole thing is done, powerfully done, with nothing but absolutely stunning cinematography, a few signboards (in Russian with English subtitles), and some very interesting and varied mood music which if I am not mistaken included some jazz theme stuff from Duke Ellington, and if not him then definitely some jazz riffs along with that inevitable classic music that one would have expected from a Russian filmmaker who grabbed what he could from the Russian Five.        

Now the question of who a film is directed at is usually pretty much just to lure in general audiences, maybe if it is cartoonish then kids but usually general audiences. Eisenstein in this film though is directing his efforts to working people in order for them to draw some important lessons about the class struggle. Of course Eisenstein was working shortly after the October Revolution of 1917 in his own country and so he probably was more or less committed to this type of film in the interests of the Soviet government and of the world revolution that was still formally what the Bolsheviks and their international allies, through the Communist International, were all about. (I might add though that a later film about Ivan the Terrible had the same fine cinematic qualities and that was not particularly directed at the world’s working classes but to ancient Russian patriotic fervor.) That drawing of lessons about what happened during the strike is what drives the force of the film.

Here is how this one played out in all its glory and infamy. The workers at a Russian factory of unknown location and for that matter of unknown production had been beaten down by the greedy capitalists and stockholders, had had no say in what they made and how much dough they made. (The scenes with the greedy capitalists are a treasure, something out of any leftist’s caricature of the old time robber barons complete with fat bellies, cigars and top hats). Like any situation where tensions are strung out to the limit it did not take a lot to produce a reason for a strike for a better shake in this wicked old world. Here it was an honest workman’s being accused of a theft which he couldn’t defend himself against and so in shame he committed suicide. After have previously spent several weeks talking about taking an action to better their conditions the leaders of the underground “strike committee” decided to have everybody “down tools.” (The scene of this action with a rolling shutdown as section after section left their benches was breathtaking.)      

Of course in turn of the century (20^th century) Russia (and elsewhere) the capitalists were as vicious as one would expect of a new class of exploiters dealing here with people, men and women, just off the farm and so in no mood to grant such things as an eight-hour day (a struggle that we in America are very familiar with from the Haymarket Martyrs whose chief demand a few decades before the time of this film was for that same eight hour day) and a big wage increase. So the committee of capitalists and their hangers-on gave a blanket “no.” Said the hell with you to the strikers.

The aftermath of this refusal is where the real lessons of this film are to drawn. Needless to say the capitalists were willing, more than willing to starve the workers into submission (the scenes of some workers pawning off their worldly possession for food for the kids, for themselves are quite moving).But not only were they willing to starve the mass of workers back to the factory but did everything in their power to break the strike by other means. First and foremost to send spies out to stir up trouble in order to get the class unity broken, then tried to get some weak-links to betray the movement from within, and if that didn’t work then try might and main to round up by any way possible the leaders of the strike in order to behead the movement. In the end though they were not above using their “Pharaohs,” their mounted cops and troops to suppress the whole thing. In the final scene after the cops and troops have done their murderous assaults on unarmed strikers the corpses spread out widely on the massacre field tell anybody who wasn’t sure about the role of the cops and troops all they need to know about the way the strike was defeated. 

From what I could gather from the last signboard (one which mentioned the Lena gold strike which was I believe was suppressed in 1912) the time period of this strike was between the 1905 revolution that went down in flames and the victorious revolution in 1917. The implications of the failure of the strike, of the need to take the state power, were thus through Eisenstein’s big lenses there for all to see. Hey, even if you don’t draw any political conclusions from this film just watch to see what they mean when they say a picture sometimes is worth a thousand words. Eisenstein has a thousand such pictures that will fascinate and repel you.  

The Hour Of The Wolf-With Mad Monk Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf In Mind

The Hour Of The Wolf-With Mad Monk Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf In Mind 

CD Review

By Zack James

Howlin’ Wolf, The Hour Of The Wolf,  

Jack Callahan made his old high school corner boy from in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner in growing up town Riverdale west of Boston Seth Garth laugh one night when they were tossing down a couple of high shelf scotches, with water chasers after having just seen one James Montgomery, the famous blues harmonica player who had learned his trade at the feet of Little Walter and Junior Dean, perform at the Shell and prove once and for all that he still had “it.” That “it” not just some far-fetched idea that Seth had as an old-time music critic when he had first started out in journalism, started first when he was still in college throwing small pieces into the American Folk Gazette before he got his big break with The Eye in the days when guys like Trick Stearn and Bones Bennett made names for themselves and dragged the newspaper along with them before the big ebb tide of the 1970s washed away the glad tidings of the 1960s that everybody had pinned their hopes on.

No this “it” had some spunk, some substance to its core and Jack had gone along with Seth on this one. See one night Jack and Seth had gone to a Big Bill Bloom concert at the Garden and had come away angry, angry that they had spent their good money on expensive tickets when Big Bill could no longer carry a tune, Back in the day that had not mattered as much because the power of his lyrics carried the day. But that night he was not producing new lyrics, hadn’t done so in ages and was living off old time nostalgia from the AARP-worthy demographic that still followed him essentially uncritically. And the fools had clapped their hands off giving him yet another false life. Jesus. Seth had written a scathing article in the prestigious American Folk Review about the event and had hell rain down on him from the editor. (Old biddy editors he had called them. After that blast Seth resolved to check out as many of the old time folk and blues singers who were still standing to see if they still had “it” and let people know what was what (he did not bother to check out the old time rock and rollers that had started the great jail break-out of the 1950s since all that were left except Jerry Lee were one hit wonders who didn’t make the cut).       

So James Montgomery got his thumbs up. Funny some guys, guys like David Bromberg still had it, Jim Kweskin too but before he passed away Utah Phillips was doddering and the late Etta James was in different planet. Sad.

Now that you know the score, know what the old corner boys were up to we can get back to what Jack said that made Seth laugh. Simple. He just said, “You know as good as James is Howlin’ Wolf would have had him for lunch and had time for a nap.” And of course Seth had to agree. Agree for no other reason that he and Jack had been present in a little side room in Newport, at the big Folk Festival back in 1965 when the Wolf practically blew the walls of Jericho down when he played How Many More Years practically devouring the harmonica. Now the Wolf always claimed that he was not a drinking man (had taken the legendary country blues guys, guys like Son House, his “father,” to task for showing up drunk and giving the race a bad name) and wasn’t a dope fiend (his term one time when Seth interviewed him after he had come back from London after playing on an album with the Stones and Seth had joked that he probably had been stoned all the time and the Wolf looked at him with evil eyes like don’t go there sonny boy). But Seth was convinced that that whiff he smelled was not from some other workshop, the one with the white kids as Howlin’ Wolf put it. (Jim Kweskin and his jug band as it turned out which was entirely possible as well). But no way that a living breathing man, a big burly hunk of a man could put that much energy, that much air, that much bloody sweat (wringing out his handkerchief drawing torrents when he was done) without some “help.”     

So while Seth and Jack would never know for sure whether the Wolf man was high that famous Newport afternoon they knew one thing, one laugh making thing, the Wolf would have had James Montgomery for lunch. And James still had “it.”  So you can bet six two and even the Wolf had it at the end too. If you don’t believe Seth then listen to this CD and weep for your not having been there back in the day when the Wolf mopped up the blues floor, made his bones.   

On The Wild Side Of Life Minute-With Mister Jerry Jeff Walker’s Music In Mind

On The Wild Side Of Life Minute-With Mister Jerry Jeff Walker’s Music In Mind

CD Review

By Zack James   

Great Gonzos, Mister Jerry Jeff Walker,

The 1980s, the early 1980s, were a tough time to try and weather the financial doldrums of the alternative newspaper industry (much like today, in 2017, the whole print press and journal industry is going down with the ship in the digital age). That was the age of Ronald Reagan, a time when the night-takers took their revenge in big gobs, those bastards who almost got kicked in the ass for good back in the 1960s except we forget the first rule of a power struggle whether down on the corner boy block or in order to take state power-if you are going to take on the big guys you had better be ready to go all the way down and dirty or just back off. The blow-back for the past forty some years is graphic testament to that failure, to our defeat.  

As if to put paid to that night-taker “victory” those who would in earlier times have come through and supported such ventures as truth-teller alternative media took a dive, waved the white flag and fell into line (a straight and narrow line that even the latest polls have shown they never have backed away from, have passed on that “keeping their heads down” to their kids, hell, their grandkids, Jesus) the money dried up and the publication that Seth Garth had been the film critic for in good times and bad for over a decade The Eye had put him on short rations, had almost reduced him to the free-lancer status he had started out in the business doing. To alleviate their dilemma, maybe to draw one last breathe would have been a better way to put it Benny Gold the long time editor had begged Seth to take a long swig at the then emerging outlaw country music scene that was starting to bust out of Nashville, started getting up a head of steam in Texas, Austin, really and places like Colorado, Iowa and the like.   

Seth Garth, for those who don’t remember the name from when what he had to say about some song, album (tapes in those days really), or a performer carried weight via the distribution of The Eye on the coasts and with some strongholds in the center of the country too or were too young to know who he was could give, to use and expression from his corner boy days which he had really never given up, a rat’s ass about country music, the Nashville Grand Ole Opry stuff. Held his nose whenever anybody mentioned that George Jones had not shown up at a concert for the millionth time since he was in a drunken stupor out in Wyoming when he was supposed to be right there in Georgia or that Loretta Lynn, a coalminer’s daughter had the vapors or something and was a “no show” at one of her performances. Yeah Seth could give a rat’s ass about this incestuous country scene no question.

Moreover having just started the process of divorcing his third wife (three wives and a brood of kids, all young fueling up alimony, child support and future earnings college tuitions) he was in a sullen funk about starting all over like some rookie chasing ambulances and cop cars for a fucking story. Was trying, seriously trying, to decide whether he might link up with his old corner boy Johnny Blade who was now out of stir after doing a nickel for his last armed robbery and start pulling a few quick haul bank robberies. That larcenous heart of his that he had held in check for a number of years now was beginning to come to the fore. He after all was the guy back in the day who had perfected the “clip,” had designed the neighborhood midnight creep into Mayfair swell houses that kept the boys in clover through high school.

In the end though, at least for the public prints, Seth decided that he would give the outlaw country scene a quick run through to see if circulation would rise and The Eye would stop bleeding away financially. So he held his nose and headed to Austin (he refused to go to Nashville where some of the guys he was supposed to check out still had connections enough to draw work if the “outlaw” thing was running a little to the lean side). He first ran into a guy named Townes Van Zandt who was a true outlaw, could have given a fuck about Nashville and just wanted to write his lonesome life road lyrics, drown his sorrows in liquor and chase young honeys, the younger the better. But Townes with his downer lyrics, his lusts and his short-handed way of talking when he was not singing was not going to help Seth out of his miseries never mind a left-leaning newspaper in need of a big circulation jump.        

So he pushed on, had a nice interview with Willie Nelson but the guy was almost too big by then, hell, he was playing Northern venues to sell-out crowds, radio stations were ready to switch formats if they could get a hook from him. Same with Kris Kristofferson who was getting acting jobs as well as drinking the state of California dry. Then Big Bill Bloom who had made a career out of big bang folk lyrics that everybody in the 1960s was chewing on (or chewing on partially because while everybody knew maybe three verses of his stuff they could not go the distance on the whole song, half the time Seth couldn’t either and he wrote about the whole scene) called Seth to tell him that he had heard that The Eye was on the ropes (The Eye always gave Big Bill great build-up reviews although a couple of times Seth had nixed his work but Benny had nixed his nix) and that he was working the outlaw country racket. Did Seth know about a guy, Jerry Jeff Walker, who just then was out of jail but who was a great performer, wrote great lyrics and had a pal, a guy named Guy Clark, who wrote stuff for him too?            

Seth told Big Bill that he had never heard of the guy, was moreover worried about that “just out of jail” bit even if he was an outlaw but when Big Bill said he could make the connections Seth in desperation said he would go for it. And strangely enough they connected, connected when Seth was able to see that Jerry Jeff was just another larcenous corner boy except down Texas way and out West they called them good old boys instead of up North in growing up Riverdale. Seth was the guy who gave Jerry Jeff’s first concert out of jail a big play. Got him a connection to a big record producer and even got him his first gig north of the Mason-Dixon line. Got him into Harvard Square for crying out loud. The crowd almost all old folkies and raw college kids with dates went crazy for a real outlaw country singer. For a while, maybe a year, The Eye got by but the Reagan era was in deep throttle by then and once Jerry Jeff became old news everybody went back to keeping their heads down as the newspaper sank into its dreams. And Seth became once again a freaking free-lancer with no place to go but down.      

The Folkie Rank And File-An Interview With 1960s Folkie Loudon Wainwright (2017)

The Folkie Rank And File-An Interview With 1960s Folkie Loudon Wainwright  (2017)

Comment by Josh Breslin

I was somewhat of a late-comer to the folk revival scene of the early 1960s having missed that early segment completely while I was growing up in Olde Saco, Maine away from the big centers of the movement like Harvard Square in Cambridge, The Village in NYC, Old Town in Chicago, and North Beach in Frisco town. I did not pick up the folk habit until 1967, the Summer of Love, when I went out to Frisco town to see what it was all about and met fellow New Englander Peter Paul Markin, always called Scribe by his friends on Russian Hill and he took me in on the Captain Crunch caravan that he was part of. (I suppose it does not matter now but my introduction to the Scribe was going up to this long-haired bearded guy and asking him for a joint. He gave a huge one to me and the rest is history until his untimely early death under mysterious circumstances.)    

The Scribe had been a folkie fan since his early high school days going over to Harvard Square and soaking in whatever there was to soak in. Of course by 1967 the main stream of the revival had run out of steam and so I got most of what I know second-hand. In the case of the folkie that I am creating a link for here of an interview he did on the Terry Gross interview  show Fresh Air of NPR discussing his latest memoir it was really third-hand. The third-hand part is through a discovery of the McGarrigle Sister, Anna and the late Kate, the latter who was married to Wainwright for a time and had two children with him, one the well-known Rufus Wainwright. As usual when I get into something I like to see where it leads (a trait I picked up from the Scribe who really did try to learn every possible fact of any possible use for any possible purpose). Knowing of the McGarrigle-Wainwright connection I checked out his eclectic folk work. I can’t say I was a strong supporter of his work but there were some interesting things he did. Let him tell you via the interview some of the highlights.

http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/2017/09/06/548788469/fresh-air-for-sept-6-2017-loudon-wainwright-iii