A View From The International Left- France Macron’s Anti-Worker Attacks Lessons of the Rail Strike

Workers Vanguard No. 1141	5 October 2018

France

Macron’s Anti-Worker Attacks

Lessons of the Rail Strike

The following article is an edited translation from Le Bolchévik No. 225 (September 2018), newspaper of the Ligue trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). For other articles in French on the recent railway workers strike, see Le Bolchévik No. 224 (June 2018).

It was a somber anniversary of May ’68. The French capitalists, whose rule was badly shaken 50 years ago, took revenge against the rail unions this spring. The government is trying to take back perhaps the most important thing the bourgeoisie had been compelled to concede: strong trade unions in the workplace. In the 1970s and right up to the beginning of the 1980s, the working class and the oppressed had been able to wrest a series of gains until Socialist Party president François Mitterrand, with the complicity of the trade-union bureaucracy, turned the tide in favor of the capitalists.

Today, President Emmanuel Macron intends to ratchet up his attacks, and all the more so because the weakening of the unions gives him hope that the most difficult task is already done. For more than 30 years, railway workers have often been the backbone of major class battles, particularly the 1986 and 1995 strikes that brought right-wing prime minister and then president Jacques Chirac’s attacks against the workers to a stop. The bourgeoisie hopes that by breaking the railway workers unions, it can head off the specter of wide-scale upheavals against its efforts to increase the rate of profit on the backs, and with the blood, of the workers. But no matter what Macron thinks, the balance of power between the working class and the capitalist class is not set in advance nor for eternity. It is the class struggle ahead that will determine that.

The bourgeoisie now wants to complete the destruction of the entire social safety network set up after World War II (which was, at the time, to neutralize the working class and derail any struggle for socialist revolution). Pensions and the health care system are in the crosshairs. People are already working longer and longer, while life expectancy and the remaining years retirees can expect to be in good health have dropped. By lowering net pension payments and increasing co-pays for treatment in a health care system that is increasingly privatized, the government is pursuing a goal that is as blatant as it is unspoken: to make poor pensioners die faster because they have the misfortune of no longer producing profits for the capitalist class! We say: let capitalism perish!

This horrible cruelty is not a personality trait of Macron or, for that matter, of the defectors from the Socialist Party who joined him. Nor is it a “neoliberal” aberration of capitalism. The very laws of capitalism itself drive these policies. If one accepts the idea that capitalism can’t be overcome, these measures become “necessary” to increase the rate of profit of French capitalism. Otherwise, faced with its German and other rivals, it would ultimately sink, with the social safety net alongside it.

The rate of profit tends to fall as capital accumulates, which ends up causing crises of “overproduction.” It’s not that too many goods are produced with respect to the basic needs of the working class and the oppressed: these crises break out when the capitalists can no longer sell their goods at the expected rate of profit. The only way the capitalist class can extricate itself from economic downturns is by shutting down factories and provoking trade wars that lead to shooting wars.

Capitalism is a system as deadly as it is irrational, fraught with unsolvable contradictions. Production is socialized in large-scale industries, but profit is privately appropriated by the capitalists who own the means of production. While production is organized on an international basis, capitalism is based on the nation-state; therefore the imperialist national bourgeoisies engage in a continual battle to dominate and redivide the world.

Only the working class, whose labor is the source of capitalist profit, has the social power to overthrow this system. For humanity to progress, the world economy must be reorganized on a planned and collectivized basis. Applying the most advanced science and technology will greatly increase labor productivity. In meeting the needs of the entire population, socialism will lay the foundation for putting an end to poverty, social and class oppression, war and other scourges inherent to class-divided societies.

The Russian Revolution of October 1917 was the first to point the way to end this system. That is why it remains our model and why we are fighting to build a party of the same type as Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, without which the revolution could not have triumphed.

Down With the European Union!

Macron’s campaign in favor of the European Union is actually a statement of the government’s determination to make full use of the EU’s arsenal against the workers and the oppressed. With regard to the national railway, the SNCF, the government is implementing the EU’s “railway packages,” which, like all EU directives, aim at liquidating public services, fully subjecting them to the law of profit and busting the unions. Down with the European Union! Down with its financial instrument, the euro, and its neocolonial sub-currencies like the CFA franc! [The CFA francs are still controlled by the French state and used mainly in former French colonies of Africa.]

The European Union is an unstable consortium of imperialist powers (essentially Germany and France, who are its main architects) that also includes a number of dependent countries in the East and South, notably Greece. This conglomerate of separate nation-states has the objective of strengthening the competitiveness of the European imperialists against their rivals by maximizing the flow of capital to wherever the rate of profit is highest. Thus, it is a powerful weapon against the unions and against the working conditions and wages of workers throughout Europe, including in Germany and France. This is why the French bourgeoisie today swears by the EU, even though it is dominated by Germany and constantly increases Germany’s advantage vis-à-vis declining French imperialism.

The Rail Strike and the Road Forward

After a three-month strike from April to June, railway workers suffered a serious defeat. But they fought with courage and determination. A large number of them remained on strike until the end, especially drivers and ticket collectors, who may be among the first to be transferred to small, anti-union companies (subsidiaries or affiliates of large transportation companies, including the SNCF). The rail workers showed that they will fight tooth and nail to defend their gains. An orderly retreat absolutely requires defending the trade unions so that they can engage in future struggles.

What was lacking to consolidate and extend the strike was a class-struggle program that can effectively rally wider layers of workers, in the SNCF and beyond, for a general confrontation with the capitalist government. This is the type of program we sought to put forward in our propaganda before and during the strike.

To begin with, a class-struggle union leadership would have categorically said no to the French legislature’s enactment of the EU’s anti-union “railway package,” which mandates the introduction of competition in the rail industry. But this would raise the question of smashing the EU through class struggle, and that’s the last thing the leadership of the CGT (or SUD) trade-union federations wanted. Indeed, it was Thierry Lepaon, a CGT bureaucrat who, before becoming the head of the union, was assigned to the government’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council and co-authored a 2012 report on how to implement the EU directives against the railway workers.

For the capitalists, with Lepaon as their accomplice, the implementation of the directive was about how to make it the most profitable for French capitalism against European competitors. That meant putting an end to the railway workers’ special set of benefits in exchange for contracts referred to as “high-level collective agreements.” These contracts by industry are increasingly undermined by sellout local “agreements,” starting a race to the bottom that is fatal for the workers. Macron’s anti-union attacks against railway workers are basically the realization of the EU recommendations as laid out by…then CGT bureaucrat Lepaon.

Current CGT leader Philippe Martinez finally pushed Lepaon out of the union’s leadership in early 2015. But he called for a vote for Macron last year and he refuses, like his predecessor, to say no to the EU. His program for the railways is also reduced to pushing a “high-level collective agreement,” which in fact accepts the destruction of the rail workers’ gains.

The warm welcome the French railway workers gave to their German and other union brothers and sisters at the May 29 rally in front of the Senate showed the potential that existed for joint struggle with trade unionists in other countries who are being attacked in the name of the same deadly EU guidelines. But the French left—whether the French Communist Party, the New Anticapitalist Party, or Lutte Ouvrière—surely won’t address this kind of issue because they support the European Union as much as the bureaucrats do!

Lutte Ouvrière (LO) seeks to conceal this capitulation to its own pro-EU bourgeoisie with “internationalist” verbiage, claiming that opposing the EU would play into the hands of racist populists like Le Pen in France, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Britain or the Alternative for Germany party. But LO and other pro-EU forces are actually putting the wind in the sails of these reactionary demagogues by giving them an apparent monopoly in opposing the EU; some workers who understand to a degree that the EU is attacking their gains will look to those who claim to oppose it.

LO fundamentally shares the worldview of the reformist trade-union bureaucracy. In fact, many of its supporters in industry are part of it (some LO supporters who are SNCF railway workers have moved in recent years from the CGT to the SUD union federation). Since they cannot attack the bureaucrats on the fundamental questions, LO now blames the leadership of the CGT for the losing tactic of “two out of five,” i.e., rolling two-day strikes followed by three days of work, instead of a “renewable” strike that could be continued until victory. But what else did LO have to offer that the CGT railway leadership didn’t? LO acknowledges that it is not a question of “opposing a tactic in and of itself, such as a renewable strike instead of the ‘two out of five,’ as if this were a fool-proof recipe, valid at any time and in any place and especially regardless of what workers are ready to do” (Lutte de Classe, July-August 2018).

However, regarding the CGT leadership, in reality LO had nothing else to counterpose! We observed in the general assemblies at some train stations in Paris how LO supporters encouraged more militant strikers to also strike during the non-strike days in order to build, little by little, “a dynamic.” In vain. The rail workers wanted the unions to remain united. The CGT tops cynically presented themselves as the best defenders of unity, arguing that their tactics allowed for a solid strike in which all workers participated, even if it was only two days out of five.

The rail workers have amply shown that they are ready to endure hardships, but the union leadership was clearly lacking the perspective and determination for a general confrontation with the government. And the rail workers understood that. A class-struggle program could have rallied larger layers of workers behind the railway workers still covered by their special set of benefits. Just a few months ago there was a strike of cleaners at Reinier-ONET, a large SNCF subcontractor employing mainly immigrant workers. Down with the piecemeal privatization of the SNCF! The SNCF must directly rehire subcontracted workers! Organize the unorganized! For one union to unite all railway workers, including cleaning and catering staff, second-tier and temporary employees, posted workers, etc., with one benefits package for all!

The current leadership of the unions could not put forward such a perspective because they are dedicated to class collaboration. Recently, in Paris transit (RATP), the bureaucrats capitulated to management. However, back in December 1995 the joint action of the RATP transit workers and the SNCF railway workers had succeeded in getting the government to back down. But the benefits of transit workers are in immediate danger if the railway workers’ benefits are scrapped! And now the pensions of those workers with the special benefits, including in the RATP, are openly targeted in order to destroy the pensions of all.

In the face of government attacks that will hit hard this autumn, the lesson drawn from the rail workers strike must not be defeatism, but the need for a revolutionary strategy and leadership. The fight for a class-struggle leadership in the unions is an integral part of the struggle for a revolutionary workers party. 

Black Activist Railroaded for Self-Defense Free Siwatu-Salama Ra!

Workers Vanguard No. 1141	5 October 2018

Black Activist Railroaded for Self-Defense

Free Siwatu-Salama Ra!

The nightmare for Siwatu-Salama Ra, a 27-year-old black environmental activist in Detroit, began in July of last year. That was when Ra picked up her registered, unloaded handgun to fend off an attacker who was ramming her vehicle into Ra’s, which held her two-year-old daughter inside, and was attempting to run over both Ra and her mother. For the act of brandishing a weapon to protect herself and her family, Ra was outrageously convicted in March of this year of felony assault and firearm possession, and is serving a two-year prison sentence. Ra’s lawyers have filed an appeal of her sentence on the basis that she did not receive a fair trial. We demand: Overturn the conviction! Free Siwatu-Salama Ra now!

From her arrest to her imprisonment, Ra has faced racist, vindictive treatment for the simple fact that she is a black woman who tried to defend herself. Despite the fact that the gun had no bullets, that she was legally armed, and that Michigan is a concealed carry and Stand Your Ground state, this made absolutely no difference to the cops, prosecutors and judge. The cops justified charging Ra and not the woman who attacked her on the ridiculous pretext that her assailant had filed a police report first. When Ra maintained that she had a legal right to self-defense and refused a plea deal, the prosecution retaliated by slapping the felony firearms charge onto the assault charge, which meant she got a two-year mandatory sentence instead of probation. The appeal by Ra’s lawyers exposes the mockery of a trial: the judge instructed the jury that pointing an unloaded gun constituted “deadly force” and blocked the defense from revealing how Ra’s attacker had a strong motivation to lie given that she was on probation for an earlier assault.

After her conviction, the judge denied motions that then-pregnant Ra be allowed to serve her sentence after giving birth. Ra was imprisoned in the final months of a high-risk pregnancy and shackled during medical examinations. In May, Ra gave birth to a baby boy, under confinement and without any family present. Her husband was not informed of the birth for two days, at which point Ra was separated from her newborn child. Such cruel abuse is endured by women prisoners around the country. Ra has also been victimized in prison for being a Muslim—denied halal meals, a copy of the Koran and a headscarf to wear during prayers.

Among the ludicrous assertions made by the prosecution at her trial was that Ra’s self-defense claim was baseless because Ra had purportedly shown no fear when she was being attacked. As Ra said: “The prosecutor convinced the jury and judge that I lacked fear and that’s not true. I was so afraid, especially for my toddler and mother. I don’t believe they could imagine a black woman being scared—only mad” (Detroit Metrotimes, 2 April). Meanwhile, killer cops and racist vigilantes who gun down black people in cold blood routinely get away with murder by invoking “fear” for their lives as a defense. That was how George Zimmerman walked free after killing black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012. The Chicago cop who killed black youth Laquan McDonald in 2014 also claimed “fear for his life” as his defense.

Anything from sitting to driving to being at home “while black” can invite a potentially lethal encounter with the police, who aren’t about to tolerate black people with guns. The racist U.S. ruling class is haunted by the specter of an armed black population. When Philando Castile told a Minnesota cop who pulled him over in 2016 that he had a legal firearm in his vehicle, he was blown away in front of his girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter. In July, Harith “Snoop” Augustus was killed by Chicago cops while appearing to show them his Firearm Owners Identification card. Even a toy gun is enough of a pretext for the cops to gun down a black child, such as the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014.

As Marxists, we uphold the right of armed self-defense, a necessity for the working class, black people and the populace as a whole. We oppose gun control laws, which are most often promoted by Democratic Party liberals and black elected officials. Gun legislation only serves to preserve the monopoly of armed force in the hands of the racist capitalist state, an instrument of violence to uphold the brutal system of exploitation. Gun control leaves guns in the hands of the cops, criminals, strikebreakers and Klansmen, taking them out of the hands of the working and oppressed masses.

Ra’s conviction makes crystal clear that Stand Your Ground laws are not applicable to black people, whose oppression is the bedrock of American capitalism. They are meant to sanction only white, racist vigilantism and the wanton murder of black people and other minorities. We oppose Stand Your Ground which, as we wrote following the killing of Trayvon Martin, “allows for the use of deadly force by anyone who claims a ‘reasonable belief’ that such force is necessary, without even attempting to disengage. And in racist America, a black kid in a hoodie is enough to claim ‘reasonable belief’ of danger” (“Trayvon Martin: Killed for Being Black in America,” WV No. 999, 30 March 2012). A study by the Urban Institute found that 34 percent of Stand Your Ground cases involving white people killing black people are deemed justifiable, and only 3 percent when the shooter is black and the victim white.

The railroading of Siwatu-Salama Ra is another reminder that black people have no rights that the racist capitalist rulers are bound to respect. The reality is that over 150 years after the slavocracy was defeated in the Civil War, basic citizenship rights are still withheld from much of the black population. The liberation of black people can be realized only by the destruction of the capitalist system through socialist revolution.

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The Partisan Defense Committee—a legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—has donated to Siwatu-Salama Ra’s legal defense, and urges others to do so. To donate, go to: actionnetwork.org/fundraising/freesiwatu.

A View From The Left-Racist, Anti-Poor Mandate Chicago Refuses Diplomas to High School Graduates

Workers Vanguard No. 1141	5 October 2018

Racist, Anti-Poor Mandate

Chicago Refuses Diplomas to High School Graduates

Chicago’s Democratic Party mayor Rahm Emanuel has found another way to punish minority youth for the “crime” of being poor and working-class. According to a new mandate, beginning with the class of 2020, public and charter high school seniors meeting all academic requirements to graduate will be denied their diplomas if they don’t provide proof of employment, college acceptance, trade apprenticeship or military enlistment. Emanuel’s initiative—grotesquely called “Learn. Plan. Succeed.”—is a frontal attack on Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students, who are nearly 85 percent black and Latino. Stealing high school diplomas from these students would all but eliminate even the minimal opportunity available to them. Already, their bleak future under American capitalism holds few options other than to toil as low-paid wage slaves or serve as foot soldiers in the U.S. imperialist military.

The racist “Learn. Plan. Succeed.” mandate calls to mind the post-Civil War “Black Codes” in the South requiring former slaves to show proof of an annual labor contract or else risk being arrested, fined and forced into indentured servitude. The haughty mayor blames students for their supposed lack of planning after graduation, accusing them of creating the abysmal conditions they face of unemployment, segregated schools and housing, cop terror and mass incarceration. The real culprits here are the capitalist rulers, who see little value in investing in the education of minority youth. For his part, the much-hated Emanuel will be leaving behind a legacy of having systematically gutted the Chicago public education system: school closures, teacher layoffs and education funding cuts.

Black and Latino youth, who are deprived of resources and treated as criminals in this Democratic Party stronghold, will have the odds stacked even higher against them with this mandate. Gone are the days when the south shore of Lake Michigan, from Chicago into Indiana, was filled with steel mills and other factories, or when a high school diploma could be a ticket to a well-paid union job with health benefits and a pension. Decades of union-busting and deindustrialization have shrunk the area’s manufacturing workforce, and even McJobs are not so easy to come by. Black people between 20 and 24 years of age face a 37 percent unemployment rate, nearly six times that of whites of the same age group. Black workers, who still form a core of organized labor in and around the city, have suffered a 17 percent drop in median wages between 2000 and 2015, leaving them worse off.

Many black and Latino youth who manage to jump through all the hoops and get through high school are still denied access to college because of race and class bias, despite the fact that they are fully capable of thriving at top-notch institutions. The astronomical price of tuition saddles students nationwide with crippling debt, and many CPS students cannot even afford an education at one of the City Colleges, which cost about $3,500 a year. Taking a “gap year” before college—another so-called “pathway” to a diploma under Emanuel’s plan—is a luxury afforded to Malia Obama but virtually unknown on Chicago’s black South and West sides. For free, quality, integrated public education at all levels for everyone!

The new requirement puts these students in virtual limbo, where they can’t get a diploma without a job and can’t get a job without a diploma. If anything, it is designed to give a boost to the armed forces, which are having trouble replenishing their ranks. The Army, for one, just recently missed its recruitment goal and had to cut back its target. The U.S. imperialist war machine—an instrument of conquest, terror and occupation that is unleashed against working people and the oppressed abroad—demands a regular supply of fresh blood. The hard race and class lines of “Segregation City” make it easy for military recruiters to recruit minorities through the “economic draft” that is driven by the harsh conditions of life in its ghettos and barrios. “Learn. Plan. Succeed.” is no doubt a pilot project for other heavily minority school districts across the nation.

Chicago is already the most militarized school system in the country thanks to former CPS head Arne Duncan. The Democrat Duncan, who later became Obama’s secretary of education, was instrumental to cementing a partnership with the Department of Defense that has from 1999 infused millions of military dollars into a deteriorating CPS in exchange for an ever-expanding recruitment pipeline. Today, CPS is the only district in the U.S. where all of the military branches (save the Coast Guard) have their own high school. There are six such academies—one each run by the Marines, the Navy and the Air Force, and three run by the Army. These are public schools with regular classes, but the military calls the shots and students are forced to wear military uniforms and undergo inspection and drills.

In addition, some 45 Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) programs are housed in nearly half of the city’s remaining public high schools. Around 70 percent of JROTC programs in Chicago are at schools in majority black or Latino neighborhoods, that is, not in the whiter, selective-enrollment high schools, such as Northside Prep, Payton and Whitney Young.

All told, over 9,000 students (94 percent of them black or Latino) participate in these programs, which are incorporated into the curricula and offered as an alternative to physical education. JROTC was launched nationally in 1916 during World War I explicitly to prepare youth for war. To this day, its mission is to train teenagers to unquestioningly obey authority and to indoctrinate them to kill or be killed for “God and country.” We oppose every attempt to turn public schools into appendages of the murderous U.S. military and stand for driving out JROTC and the other military recruiters. Cut the link between CPS and the Pentagon!

The graduation mandate is cynically couched as a plan for success, but it is just another example of Democratic Party-initiated “school reform,” i.e., union-busting and starving schools of funds. From the get-go, Emanuel has engaged in a war on public education and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). The mayor followed in the footsteps of his former White House boss, Barack Obama, whose “Race to the Top” initiative encouraged the rapid growth of privately run charter schools, which increase racial segregation and class inequality in education and serve to undermine teachers unions. Among the Emanuel administration’s many attacks, in 2013 it carried out the single largest school closure in U.S. history, shuttering 50 CPS schools (the vast majority over three-quarters black) and laying off hundreds of unionized teachers and staff.

To the extent that CPS students get any education at all, it is a testament to the dedication of the poorly paid teachers who navigate cutbacks, decaying facilities and constant bureaucratic harassment. The CTU, with the active backing of the other unions in the city like transit and hotel workers, must mobilize to aggressively fight the graduation mandate as part of a broader defense of public education and its members’ own livelihoods. In this struggle, the teachers union would find many allies in the black and Latino community. Instead, the CTU tops have conciliated the mayor and school board, demonstrating their unflagging allegiance to the capitalist Democratic Party.

When the hurdle to graduation was first announced, then CTU president Karen Lewis pronounced it “a good plan.” Subsequently, union officials, like current CTU president Jesse Sharkey, expressed opposition based on funding and staffing concerns. Sharkey, who is supported by the International Socialist Organization, whimpered: “Our schools confront an acute shortage of high school counselors, college and career coaches and other staff...virtually guaranteeing that this policy will fail thousands of our students.” It is true that CPS counselors are overworked, but Sharkey is dodging what it means to deny students the basic right to a diploma. “Learn. Plan. Succeed.” reinforces the status of black people as second-class citizens segregated at the bottom of society and increases the multitude of miseries heaped on Latino youth in the barrios. The CTU should demand an end to the program while also fighting for additional teachers and counselors.

It is little wonder that Sharkey and Lewis are willing to barter away the futures of CPS students—they have done just that in the case of the CTU membership. On their watch, layoffs have continued apace, charter schools have expanded, and conditions for teachers, staff and students have deteriorated. In 2012, a solid strike by CTU members was called off with key issues left unresolved and the union has since been battered. Two years ago, the same CTU misleaders pulled the plug on a possible strike, accepting a giveback contract even as teachers stood ready and willing to hit the picket lines (see “Chicago Teachers Get Sold Out,” WV No. 1100, 18 November 2016).

In the face of all-sided attacks by the capitalist rulers on public education, unions and working conditions, what is needed is to mobilize labor’s power independently of and in opposition to all representatives of the class enemy, including the Democrats. To do so requires a new leadership in the unions, a class-struggle leadership that would undertake battles in the interests of all the exploited and oppressed—from halting the expansion of charter schools to leading a charge for a massive program of public works to rebuild basic infrastructure. It would engage in struggle to organize the unorganized and for jobs for all through a shorter workweek at full union wages. A successful fight to establish union-run minority job recruitment and training programs, as well as union hiring halls, would open the way to begin to redress the grave injustices of this deeply racist society.

While fighting against discrimination and segregation in schools, we understand that racial oppression cannot be rooted out short of the revolutionary overturn of the capitalist system. Eliminating race and class bias in the schools and granting everyone access to free quality and fully integrated education requires that the working class take power. The road to black liberation and the emancipation of all the oppressed lies in the fight for an egalitarian socialist society, where production is organized to serve human need, not to increase the profits of the capitalist class.

We need a revolutionary workers party, acting as a tribune of all the oppressed, to fuse the power of labor with the discontent of the ghettos and barrios in order to clear a path to workers rule. Black and Latino working-class youth in the crosshairs of the rapacious ruling class will form a key component of this party and the fight for a socialist future for humanity.

For Bob Dylan -*Professor Douglas Brinkley's "Rolling Stone" Interview With Bob Dylan

Click On Title To Link To Douglas Brinkley's "Rolling Stone" 2009 Interview With Bob Dylan.

Once Again Haunted By The Question Of Questions-Who Represented The “Voice” Of The Generation Of ’68 When The Deal Went Down-And No It Was Not One Richard Millstone, Oops, Milhous Nixon

By Seth Garth

I have been haunted recently by various references to events in the early 1960s brought to mind by either seeing or hearing those references. First came one out of the blue when I was in Washington, D.C. on other business and I popped in as is my wont to the National Gallery of Art to get an “art bump” after fighting the dearies at the tail-end of the conference that I was attending. I usually enter on the 7^th Street entrance to see what they have new on display on the Ground Floor exhibition areas. This time there was a small exhibit concerning the victims of Birmingham Sunday, 1963 the murder by bombing of a well-known black freedom church in that town and the death of four innocent young black girls and injuries to others. The show itself was a “what if” by a photographer who presented photos of what those young people might have looked like had they not had their precious lives stolen from them by some racist KKK-drenched bastards who never really did get the justice they deserved. The catch here, the impact on me, was these murders and another very disturbing viewing on television at the time, in black and white, of the Birmingham police unleashing dogs, firing water hoses and using the ubiquitous police billy-clubs to beat down on peaceful mostly black youth protesting against the pervasive Mister James Crow system which deprived them of their civil rights.

Those events galvanized me into action from seemingly out of nowhere. At the time I was in high school, in an all-white high school in my growing up town of North Adamsville south of Boston. (That “all white” no mistake despite the nearness to urban Boston since a recent look at the yearbook for my class showed exactly zero blacks out of a class of 515. The nearest we got to a black person was a young immigrant from Lebanon who was a Christian though and was not particularly dark. She, to my surprise, had been a cheer-leader and well-liked). I should also confess, for those who don’t know not having read about a dozen articles  I have done over the past few years in this space, that my “corner boys,” the Irish mostly with a sprinkling of Italians reflecting the two major ethic groups in the town I hung around with then never could figure out why I was so concerned about black people down South when we were living hand to mouth up North. (The vagaries of time have softened some things among them for example nobody uses the “n” word which needs no explanation which was the “term of art” in reference to black people then to not prettify what this crowd was about.)

In many ways I think I only survived by the good graces of Scribe who everybody deferred to on social matters. Not for any heroic purpose but because Scribe was the key to intelligence about what girls were interested in what guys, who was “going” steady, etc. a human grapevine who nobody crossed without suffering exile. What was “heroic” if that can be used in this context was that as a result of those Birmingham images back then I travelled over to the NAACP office on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston to offer my meager services in the civil rights struggle and headed south to deadly North Carolina one summer on a voting drive. I was scared but that was that. My guys never knew that was where I went until many years later long after we had all gotten a better gripe via the U.S. Army and other situations on the question of race and were amazed that I had done that.         

The other recent occurrence that has added fuel to the fire was a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition where they deal with aspects of what amounts to the American Songbook. The segment dealt with the generational influence of folk-singer songwriter Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ as an anthem for our generation (and its revival of late in newer social movements like the kids getting serious about gun control). No question for those who came of political age early in the 1960s before all hell broke loose this was a definitive summing up song for those of us who were seeking what Bobby Kennedy would later quoting a line of poetry from Alfred Lord Tennyson call “seeking a newer world.” In one song was summed up what we thought about obtuse indifferent authority figures, the status quo, our clueless parents, the social struggles that were defining us and a certain hurried-ness to get to wherever we thought we were going.

I mentioned in that previous commentary that given his subsequent trajectory while Bob Dylan may have wanted to be the reincarnation Plus of Woody Guthrie (which by his long life he can rightly claim) whether he wanted to be, could be, the voice of the Generation of ’68 was problematic. What drove me, is driving me a little crazy is who or what some fifty plus years after all the explosions represented the best of what we had started out to achieve (and were essentially militarily defeated by the ensuing reaction before we could achieve most of it) in those lonely high school halls and college dormitories staying up late at night worrying about the world and our place in the sun.

For a long time, probably far longer than was sensible I believed that it was somebody like Jim Morrison, shaman-like leader of the Doors, who came out of the West Coast winds and headed to our heads in the East. Not Dylan, although he was harbinger of what was to come later in the decade as rock reassembled itself in new garb after some vanilla music hiatus but somebody who embodied the new sensibility that Dylan had unleashed. The real nut though was that I, and not me alone, and not my communal brethren alone either, was the idea that we possessed again probably way past it use by date was that “music was the revolution” by that meaning nothing but the general lifestyle changes through the decade so that the combination of “dropping out” of nine to five society, dope in its many manifestations, kindnesses, good thought and the rapidly evolving music would carry us over the finish line. Guys like Josh Breslin and the late Pete Markin, hard political guys as well as rabid music lovers and dopers, used to laugh at me when I even mentioned that I was held in that sway especially when ebb tide of the counter-cultural movement hit in Nixon times and the bastinado was as likely to be our home as the new Garden. Still Jim Morrison as the “new man” (new human in today speak) made a lot of sense to me although when he fell down like many others to the lure of the dope I started reappraising some of my ideas -worried about that bastinado fate.  

So I’ll be damned right now if I could tell you that we had such a voice, and maybe that was the problem, or a problem which has left us some fifty years later without a good answer. Which only means for others to chime in with their thoughts on this matter.         

The “Cold” Civil War Rages In America-In The Second Year Of The Torquemada (Oops!) Trump Regime- Immigrants, Trans-genders, DACAs, TPSers, Media People, Leftists, Hell, Liberals Know Your Constitutional Rights-It May Save Your Life

The “Cold” Civil War Rages In America-In The Second Year Of The Torquemada (Oops!) Trump Regime- Immigrants, Trans-genders, DACAs, TPSers, Media People, Leftists, Hell, Liberals Know Your Constitutional Rights-It May Save Your Life     

By Frank Jackman

Over the first year of the Trump regime as this massive control freak regime has plundered right after right, made old Hobbes’ “life is short, brutish and nasty” idea seem all too true for a vast swath  of people residing in America (and not just America either) I have startled many of my friends, radical and liberal alike. Reason? For almost all of my long adult life I have been as likely to call, one way or another, for the overthrow of the government as not. This Republic if you like for a much more equitable society than provided under it aegis. This year I have been as they say in media-speak “walking that notion back a bit.” Obviously even if you only get your news from social media or twitter feeds there have been gigantic attempts by Trump, his cronies and his allies in Congress to radically limit and cut back many of the things we have come to see as our rights in ordinary course of the business of daily life. This year I have expressed deep concerns about the fate of the Republic and what those in charge these days are hell-bend of trying to put over our eyes.

Hey, I like the idea, an idea that was not really challenged even by the likes of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes in their respective times that I did not have to watch my back every time I made a political move. Now maybe just every move. This assault, this conscious assault on the lives and prospects of immigrants, DACAs, TPSers. Trans-genders, blacks, anti-fascists, Medicaid recipients, the poor, the outspoken media, uppity liberals, rash leftist radicals and many others has me wondering what protections we can count on, use to try to protect ourselves from the onslaught.

I, unlike some others, have not Cassandra-cried about the incipient fascist regime in Washington. If we were at that jackboot stage I would not be writing, and the reader would not be reading, this screed. Make no mistake about that. However there is no longer a question in my mind that the “cold” civil war that has been brewing beneath the surface of American society for the past decade or more has been ratchetted up many notches. Aside from preparing politically for that clash we should also be aware, much more aware than in the past, about our rights as we are confronted more and more by a hostile government, its hangers-on and the agents who carry out its mandates.

I have been brushing up on my own rights and had come across a small pamphlet put out by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a good source for such information in these times. I have placed that information below.

As the ACLU disclaimer states this information is basic, should be checked periodically for updating especially the way the federal courts up to and including the U.S. Supreme  Court have staked the deck against us of late. In any case these days if you are in legal difficulties you best have a good lawyer. The other side, the government has infinite resources, so you better get your best legal help available even if it cost some serious dough which tends to be the case these days with the way the judicial system works.

Most importantly when confronted by any governmental agents from the locals to the F.B.I. be cool, be very cool.  

The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road"-Ain't Got No Time For Corner Boys, Down In The Streets Making All That Noise”-The Mean Streets Of Working Class Times- “The Fighter”- A Film Review

The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road"-Ain't Got No Time  For Corner Boys, Down In The Streets Making All That Noise”-The Mean Streets Of Working Class Times- “The Fighter”- A Film Review

DVD Review

The Fighter, starring Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, Paramount Pictures, 2010

I know the mean streets of Lowell, Massachusetts, although of late that geographical reference point would center on a more literary sense of the place around the figure of 1950s beat novelist/poet Jack Kerouac. I do not, by the way, mean that I know Lowell from actually growing up in that old-time textile mill town that has seen better days, mainly. I mean I know Lowell because I know the double-deckers, the triple-deckers, the seedy bowling alleys, the back lot gyms, the mom and pop variety stores, the ethnically-tinged bars, biker hang-outs, and flop houses that dot that working class town and form the backdrop to the cultural life of that place. I grew up on the southern side of Boston in North Adamsville. That past its prime working class town (formerly a shipbuilding center rather than Lowell's textile but they shared the same ethos) had its full compliment of tight housing, rundown stores, sparse entertainment possibilities and cramped view of life’s prospects just like Lowell.

I know Mickey Ward (Wahlberg) and, more importantly, I know Dickie Eklund (Bale) and their mother Alice (Leo). I do not mean that I know any of them personally but I know their ilk. See North Adamsville also had its fair share of club fighters (or other sports king wanna-bes), working out of some third floor back door gym that smelled of tiger’s balm and other liniments, looking to make it out of the dead-end town and on to the big tent, whether they actually left North Adamsville or not. And most didn’t and most did not even get a shot at hitting someone like Sugar Ray Leonard down on some matted ring floor like Dickie did. Frankly, I spent most of my time as a youth being attracted too but ultimately trying to run, run very hard, away from the Dickie guys, the street-wise corner boys who fall sort of catching the brass ring. While they may be street-wise corner boys, unlike in this film, they are strictly bad-ass cut your throat for a dime characters best left behind. That was hard lesson to learn back in the day, and as the film makes clear, now too.

That said about the social realities of working class life what is there not to like about a film that highlights, Mickey Ward, one of our own getting out from under by sheer perseverance, wit, and his own sense of street smarts, mainly on his own terms. And to be a bloody stubborn Irishman to boot. Some of the stuff concerning his family connections, his eight million family connections, the “us against the world (you do not air your dirty linen in public, period)” while hard to take at points rang true. As did many of the confrontation scenes with Mickey’s high-flying girlfriend Charlene, when she tried to break her man out of the family’s grip. Finally, the acting from Wahlberg’s conflicted (between family and career, between being a “stepping stone” and a champ) boxer, to Bale’s mad monk ex-boxer who had gone a long way down from those Sugar Ray days (a not uncommon fate for those who are just not good enough to wear the crown, whatever the crown might be) to Leo’s (Alice)one-dimensional family worldview (with nine kids, seven of them girls, that might have been the beginning of wisdom in her case) was uniformly fine. Still, I am glad, glad as hell that I made a left turn away from those corner boys down in the streets making all that noise. But it was a close thing, no question.

On The 150th Anniversary Of Marx's "Das Capital"(1867)-"Slavery, Plunder and the Rise of Capitalism"

Workers Vanguard No. 1116 25 August 2017 TROTSKY LENIN Slavery, Plunder and the Rise of Capitalism (Quote of the Week) This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Karl Marx’s seminal work, Capital, in which he laid bare the workings of the capitalist mode of production. In the excerpts below, Marx explains the key role that slavery, pillage and conquest played in the primitive accumulation of capital by the European powers. The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.... The colonies secured a market for the budding manufactures, and, through the monopoly of the market, an increased accumulation. The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital.... Whilst the cotton industry introduced child slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world. Tantae molis erat [so great was the effort required], to establish the “eternal laws of Nature” of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into “free labouring poor,” that artificial product of modern society. If money, according to Augier, “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. —Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867)

Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain-Watch Your Back, Sister, Watch Your Back-Humphrey Bogart’s “The Enforcer” (1951)-A Film Review

Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain-Watch Your Back, Sister, Watch Your Back-Humphrey Bogart’s “The Enforcer” (1951)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Jack Callahan

The Enforcer, starring Humphrey Bogart, Everett Sloane, 1951  

[Although Jack Callahan very infrequently writes for this publication I feel it is necessary in the now seemingly obligatory interest of transparency to note that Jack has been a major financial supporter of this publication both in the days when it was in hard copy and now on-line. That said it is no accident that Jack is writing this film review since he along with a cohort, a word by-line writer Seth Garth has been falling in love with of late and which some of us have picked up on until some other fall in love expression moves in, of guys like Allan Jackson, Si Lannon, Sam Lowell, and Phil Larkin who all grew up together in the “Acre” section of North Adamsville south of Boston and who spent many an ill-spent Saturday afternoon feasting on such films at the Strand Theater. (This well before Jack took up with his ever-loving high school sweetheart Chrissie McNamara, now his wife, at which time they were balcony-bound and I bet hard-pressed to give detail number one about any film allegedly seen. How they met and became a high school item is a story in itself which I believe Allan Jackson has written about in these pages.)

Since Jack is not a regular writer like those listed above from the Acre a few details are in order-this beyond the need for transparency but maybe gives the reader an idea of why he has been a fervent supporter of this publication. Jack, unlike all the others mentioned and lets’ include the late Peter Paul Markin who has something like legendary status among this crowd reflected in the inordinate amount of stories about him in this space and in others, did not serve in the military during the 1960s, during the time of the hellish Vietnam War. Didn’t serve for the simple reason that he was 4-F which meant physically unable to serve. That disability the result of a severe football injury sustained when he went to State U on a football scholarship and got injured in his sophomore year when his team played Boston College.

Jack, in any case, was not a natural fit for the crowd he hung around with since he was the high school football hero as once could imagine. Except he was very shy despite all the attention every male in the school, and most females, gave him. (He only had eyes for Chrissie and she for him I really ought to have Allan or Seth revive that romance story about this pair). These guys provided cover for him since he was an Acre guy, one of them, one of the poor as sin Catholic boys. Still after high school and college with one short exception when he went West for a while with this crew of ex-G.I.s who turned against the war of their generation after having all the fill they wanted of killing and death Jack was the shoulder to the wheel guy among the cohort. With Chrissie and later four fine daughters Jack became Mr. Toyota of Eastern Massachusetts and therefore of all the guys was the one who made a ton of money. Money which he used partially to help finance a million Acre boy schemes and this publication. That said lets’ let Jack go through his paces doing this film review which he begged me, no, asked me to let him do. Greg Green]

Seth Garth said it best, or the character in the film Key Largo ex-World War II officer Frank McCloud played by Humphrey Bogart the lead actor in the film under review The Enforcer did, “one more Johnny Rocco, more or less, is not worth dying for.” Meaning in that case that one Chi town gangster was not worth death when some other Johnny Rocco was waiting in the wings to move up the food chain. That did stop McCloud from bang-bang shooting old Rocco  when he messed with his woman and it will not stop ADA Ferguson, Bogie’s role here, from putting a gangster underground, sending him to the big step off- letting a few volts do him in. For a while Ferguson was on hard times, looked defeated against the scumbag was trying to send to the chair but whether there was one more Mendoza, the arch-criminal here played by Everett Sloane, or not this one is going down, going down hard.   

The reason that Ferguson was on the ropes for a while in this police procedural, a kind of film noir that we didn’t necessarily like all that much because in the end the story-line was always “crime doesn’t pay” and we didn’t like cops very much in the Acre and had our own reasons for looking kindly on “crime paying” without penalty which I will leave to the reader’s imagination just in case, was that his key witness, his only witness against the kingpin was Mendoza’s “dispatcher.” This stoolie, a guy named Joe, Joe Rico started folding like a hand of cards once the deal was ready to go down, when he was supposed to go to the witness stand and finger his boss for a murder when they first started out together. Fearing the long arm of Mendoza the sappy bleeding all over the place Rico tried to escape and fell down, fell down hard when he slipped off the ledge of the building from which he was attempting to flee. Sorry, Fergie, but those are the breaks when you depend on a rat, a stoolie, a fink, whatever you want to call such a guy. 

But here is where Ferguson got wise, figured he had nothing to lose by reviewing the case from day one via a bunch of flashbacks (and then some back flashbacks on those which sounds menacing to follow but was not, not at all). Wait a minute, maybe I better lay out Mendoza’s racket first, and why Ferguson was desperate to get him to the chair. (This “lay out” veteran reviewer Seth’s suggestion). Why Rico would rather have fallen down than get the big kiss-off from one of Mendoza’s killer boys. This wily Mendoza must had had some time on his hands and furthermore have been tired of living on cheap street because he figured out a racket a that a few guys in the Acre would have loved to have thought of, the perfect crime. Murder for hire, murder without any apparent motive for the coppers to pin something on somebody who knew the deceased on. Beautiful in its way.  Mendoza puts the word out that he has an operation to take care of some unwanted person for somebody didn’t matter the reason or non-reason. Rico, away from Mendoza for plausible deniability purposes, “dispatches” the “hit” man, pays him off and that is that. Clean hands, clean as a whistle, perfect crime. Except there was one little misstep right at the beginning of Mendoza and Rico’s beautiful friendship. The first murder for hire killing of a restaurant owner ordered up by parties unknown was witnessed by a guy and his daughter who walked in while Mendoza did his dirty deed.            

That of course meant that there were two witnesses to what happened and while they were left alone for whatever reason Mendoza left them alone for that would be Fergie’s edge if he could find either one. Assuming that he knew there were witnesses which he did once he dug the dirt up which started him on his long road investigation. The rest of the story line depends on those flashbacks mentioned above. After going for years working the murder for hire racket Mendoza stepped into a cab which was being driven by the guy who saw him murder the restaurant owner.  One cabbie gone to cabbie heaven if there is such a place for the over-charging bastards. Of course if you kill Papa then you need to waste the daughter since you needed to tidy things up. And that was done too, or it sure looked like it was done.

The “hit” man on the daughter job nothing but a stone- cold killer though screwed up, made the cardinal error of hits. Got to know the young woman and so was ready to back her out, flee with her. But you don’t do that to a guy like Mendoza and so he ordered the weak-kneed hit man to kill her under penalty of being killed himself. That is when things really unraveled. See Mister bad-ass hitman had moral qualms about killing his girl and went to the coppers who though he was screwy. Then Ferguson got into the act, especially when that stone-cold killer committed suicide. Fergusson conducted a thorough investigation (which is how he got Rico and how he had Mendoza in the slammer ready for the big step-off) including talking to the slain girl’s roommate after her mutilated body was found. No help. But Ferguson was intrepid working on every angle and not quitting, not falling down himself. The pieces start coming together though once the racket’s aims were exposed when Ferguson was able to ride the train up to Rico’s part in the whole caper.

You know though that no way was Mendoza was going to get sprung, although not for lack of trying. Not by his lawyers but by his gallery of hit men two of who he dispatched to kill that loose end roommate once he got wise to something. That wise to something is the beauty of the whole film although we knew what had happened long before Ferguson and his coppers knew what hit them. See that hit man who killed his girl, murdered her under duress, killed the wrong girl-she had brown eyes but eye witness to that restaurant murder Rico who almost spilled his guts out distinctly remembered the girl’s eyes were blue. Bingo roommate and double bingo Ferguson who wasted one of the two hit man sent to kill her under jail cell Mendoza’s orders. Nice, still though thinking back on it I wish every police procedural didn’t “prove” crime doesn’t pay. Okay that is the Acre in me speaking.