This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
On June 3, 2017, NSA contractor Reality Leigh Winner was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act for providing a media organization with a single five-page top-secret document that analyzed information about alleged Russian online intrusions into U.S. election systems.
Reality, who has been jailed without bail since her arrest, has now been sentenced to five years in prison. This is by far the longest sentence ever given in federal court for leaking information to the media. Today, she is being transferred from a small Georgia jail to a yet-unknown federal prison.
Several months before her arrest, the FBI’s then-Director James Comey told President Trump that he was (in the words of a subsequent Comey memo) “eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message.” Meanwhile, politically connected and high-level government officials continue to leak without consequence, or selectively declassify material to advance their own interests.
Join Courage to Resist and a dozen other organizations in calling on President Trump, who has acknowledged Winner’s treatment as “so unfair,” to pardon Reality Winner or to commute her sentence to time served.
Feds holding last public hearing on draft registration Los Angeles, California Thursday, September 20 At California State University Los Angeles More info
50th anniversary events of the Presidio 27 mutiny San Francisco, California Panel discussion on Saturday, October 13 Commemoration on Sunday, October 14 At the former Presidio Army Base More info
“And The Choir Kept Singing
Of Freedom”- Birmingham Sunday-1963-A Reflection After Viewing "Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project"Photograph
Display At The National Gallery Of Art
Richard Farina's Birmingham Sunday
Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project
September 12, 2018 – March 24, 2019
West Building, Ground Floor
Dawoud Bey, Mary Parker and Caela Cowan, 2012, 2 inkjet prints mounted to dibond, overall: 101.6 x 162.56 cm (40 x 64 in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Collectors Committee and the Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
For more than 40 years photographer Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) has portrayed American youth and those from marginalized communities with sensitivity and complexity.Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project marks the National Gallery of Art's recent acquisition of four large-scale photographs and one video from Bey's series, The Birmingham Project, a tribute to the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Coinciding with the 55th anniversary of this tragedy, the exhibition focuses on how Bey visualizes the past through the lens of the present, pushing the boundaries of portraiture and engaging ongoing national issues of racism, violence against African Americans, and terrorism in churches.
On September 15, 1963, four girls were killed in the dynamiting of the church, and two teenaged boys were murdered in racially motivated violence. Each of Bey’s diptychs combines one portrait of a young person the same age as one of the victims, and another of an adult 50 years older—the child's age had she or he survived. Alongside these photographs, the exhibition features Bey's video 9.15.63. This split-screen projection juxtaposes a re-creation of the drive to the 16th Street Baptist Church, taken from the vantage point of a young child in the backseat, with slow pans that move through everyday spaces (beauty parlor, barbershop, lunch counter, and schoolroom) as they might have appeared that Sunday morning. Devoid of people, these views poeticize the innocent lives ripped apart by violence.
This exhibition is curated by Kara Fiedorek, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
By Seth Garth
Sometimes things, events,
ideas, and such lead into one another. Recently I had written a short piece
based on hearing a segment on NPR’s Morning
Edition where the reporter was ruminating about the effect that folk-singer/songwriter
Bob Dylan’s “anthem” The Times They Are
A-Changin’ had on her and the Generation of ‘68 when it first hit the
airwaves in 1963. That reportage got my attention since I have spent plenty of
cyber-ink throughout my journalistic career highlighting various aspects of the
tremendous push on my generation, that Generation of ’68 or the best part of it,
of events in the early 1960s which were harbingers of what we expected to have
occur that would change the world, would turn the world upside down. I thus
need not go into detail here about my notion that Bob Dylan’s song set him up
as the “voice” of a generation whether he wanted to be that or not. Nor about
what effect that song, and songs like his had on us, gave us our marching
orders.
As part of her presentation
the reporter mentioned that some events, some events down South around the
black civil rights movement against one Mister James Crow like the beatings,
the water-hosing and the unleashing of the vicious dogs by the police on
innocent protestors had on her growing political consciousness, her desire to
work for social change. Although she did not specifically mention Birmingham
Sunday, the bombing of a black church killing four innocent children and
wounding others that event triggered the activism button of many young people,
including myself.
I have detailed elsewhere some
of the events like the black civil rights struggle down South, the fight for
nuclear bomb disarmament, the emerging struggle against the escalating Vietnam
War as acting as catalysts to action. Also tried to convey a more general sense
of the mood of the times among young people that the world, a world then on the
brink, on as one song had it on the “eve of destruction” was not responding to
their needs, was not changing in ways that we could understand. Most of all
that we had no say, had not been asked about what had been created in our
names. And nobody in power seemed to think that they needed to consult us.
All of this came to mind as
well by a recent visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. where
on the ground floor there was a small photographic exhibit centered on that
Birmingham Sunday bombing. A kind of what if, or rather what would those who
were killed or maimed look like today if they had been permitted to live out
their precious lives. That got me to thinking the thoughts I expressed in that
“voice of a generation” commentary and about the changes in people who did
survive, who now have aged, gracefully or not, and who are thinking about, are
summing up their lives and what they did, or did not do. Powerful stuff
although when one realizes what is what in the world today one has to be very
circumspect about the little changes we have made. Not profound but something
to think about whatever generation designation.
The foundation article by Marx or Engels listed in the headline goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in other posts in this space. Just below is a thumbnail sketch of the first tentative proceedings to form a communist organization that would become a way-station on the road to building a Bolshevik-type organization in order fight for the socialist revolution we so desperately need and have since Marx and Engels first put pen to ink.
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Marx/Engels Internet Archive-The Communist League
A congress of the League of the Just opened in London on June 2, 1847. Engels was in attendance as delegate for the League's Paris communities. (Marx couldn't attend for financial reasons.)
Engels had a significant impact throughout the congress -- which, as it turned out, was really the "inaugural Congress" of what became known as the Communist League. This organization stands as the first international proletarian organization. With the influence of Marx and Engels anti-utopian socialism, the League's motto changed from "All Men are Brothers" to "Working Men of All Countries, Unite!"
Engels: "In the summer of 1847, the first league congress took place in London, at which W. Wolff represented the Brussels and I the Paris communities. At this congress the reorganization of the League was carried through first of all. ...the League now consisted of communities, circles, leading circles, a central committee and a congress, and henceforth called itself the 'Communist League'."
The Rules were drawn up with the participation of Marx and Engels, examined at the First Congress of the Communist League, and approved at the League's Second Congress in December 1847.
Article 1 of the Rules of the Communist League: "The aim of the league is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes, and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property."
The first draft of the Communist League Programme was styled as a catechism -- in the form of questions and answers. Essentially, the draft was authored by Engels. The original manuscript is in Engels's hand.
The League's official paper was to be the Kommunistische Zeitschrift, but the only issue produced was in September 1847 by a resolution of the League's First Congress. It was First Congress prepared by the Central Authority of the Communist League based in London. Karl Schapper was its editor.
The Second Congress of the Communist League was held at the end of November 1847 at London's Red Lion Hotel. Marx attended as delegate of the Brussels Circle. He went to London in the company of Victor Tedesco, member of the Communist League and also a delegate to the Second Congress. Engels again represented the Paris communities. Schapper was elected chairman of the congress, and Engels its secretary.
Friedrich Lessner: "I was working in London then and was a member of the communist Workers' Educational Society at 191 Drury Lane. There, at the end of November and the beginning of December 1847, members of the Central Committee of the Communist League held a congress.Karl Marx and Frederick Engels came there from Brussels to present their views on modern communism and to speak about the Communists' attitude to the political and workers' movement. The meetings, which, naturally, were held in the evenings, were attended by delegates only... Soon we learned that after long debates, the congress had unanimously backed the principles of Marx and Engels..."
The Rules were officially adopted December 8, 1847.
Engels: "All contradiction and doubt were finally set at rest, the new basic principles were unanimously adopted, and Marx and I were commissioned to draw up the Manifesto." This would, of course, become the Communist Manifesto.
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Markin comment on this series:
No question that today at least the figures of 19th century communist revolutionaries, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, are honored more for their “academic” work than their efforts to build political organizations to fight for democratic and socialist revolutions, respectively, as part of their new worldview. Titles like Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, The Peasants Wars In Germany, and the like are more likely to be linked to their names than Cologne Communist League or Workingmen’s International (First International).
While the theoretical and historical materialist works have their honored place in the pantheon of revolutionary literature it would be wrong to neglect that hard fact that both Marx and Engels for most of their lives were not “arm chair" revolutionaries or, in Engels case, merely smitten by late Victorian fox hunts with the upper crust. These men were revolutionary politicians who worked at revolution in high times and low. Those of us who follow their traditions can, or should, understand that sometimes, a frustratingly long sometimes, the objective circumstances do not allow for fruitful revolutionary work. We push on as we can. Part of that pushing on is to become immersed in the work of our predecessors and in this series specifically the work of Marx and Engels to create a new form of revolutionary organization to fight the fights of their time, the time from about the Revolutions of 1848 to the founding of various socialist parties in Europe in the latter part of the 19th century.
History of the Paris Commune, Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, translated by Eleanor Marx, Black and Red Press, St. Petersburg, Florida, 2007
When one studies the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 one learns something new from it even though from the perspective of revolutionary strategy the Communards made virtually every mistake in the book. This book by a participant and survivor of the Commune has historically been the starting point for any pro-Commune analysis. The original English translation by Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx, has given the imprimatur of the Marx family to that view.
Through a close study of the Paris Commune one learn its lessons and measure it against the experience acquired by later revolutionary struggles and above all by later revolutions, not only the successful Russian Revolution of October 1917 but the failed German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese and Spanish revolutions in the immediate aftermath of World War I. More contemporaneously we have the experiences of the partial victories of the later Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.
Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of these later experiences, as if to show that history is not always totally a history of horrors against the fate of the masses we honor the Paris Commune as a beacon of the coming world proletarian revolution. It is just for that reason that Karl Marx fought tooth and nail in the First International to defend it against the rage of capitalist Europe. It is one of our peaks. The Commune also presented in embryo the first post-1848 Revolution instance of what was later characterized by Lenin at the beginning of World War I as the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement. So this question that after Lenin’s death preoccupied Trotsky for much of the later part of his life really has a much longer lineage that I had previously recognized. Unfortunately, as we are too painfully aware that question is still to be resolved. Therefore, even at this great remove, it is necessary to learn the lessons of that experience in facing today’s crisis of leadership in the international labor movement.
As a final thought, I note that in the preface to this edition that the editors have given their own view about the lessons to be learned from the experience of the Paris Commune. Although virtually every page of Lissagaray’s account drips with examples of the necessity of a vanguard party their view negates that necessity. While we can argue until hell freezes over, and should, about the form that a future socialist state will take one would think that there should be no dispute on that necessity at this late date in history. In any case read this important work (including the above-mentioned provocative preface) as it tells the tale of an important part of our working class history.
Honor Native American History Month-Once Again-The Trail Of 1000, No, 1,000, 000 Tear-The Little War On The Prairie-The Execution of 38 Dakota Warriors In Mankato, Minnesota in 1862
By Frank Jackman
Honor Native American History Month-Once Again-The Trail Of 1000, No, 1,000, 000 Tear-The Little War On The Prairie-The Execution of 38 Dakota Warriors In Mankato, Minnesota in 1862
Yes, I am well aware that the date of this piece is in December and Native American History Month was in November but this piece aired on December 1, 2018 around my way on NPR’s This American Life and so belongs along with other entries on the trail of tears, the endless trail of tears brothers and sisters.
Growing up in Mankato, Minnesota, John Biewen says, nobody ever talked about the most important historical event ever to happen there: in 1862, it was the site of the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Thirty-eight Dakota Indians were hanged after a war with white settlers. John went back to Minnesota to figure out what really happened 150 years ago, and why Minnesotans didn’t talk about it much after.
When You Are A Jet You Are A Jet All The Way- The Centennial Of
Composer- Conductor Leonard Bernstein’s Birthday-When The Acre Corner Boys Went
Down And Dirty-In Memory Of Corner Boy Sergeant John “Johnny Blade” Rizzo,
(Born North Adamsville, Massachusetts, 1946, Died, Central Highlands, South Vietnam,
1967)
By Seth Garth
Recently in a quick acknowledgement of the centennial of American
composer Leonard Bernstein’s birthday I mentioned that I don't know much about the
man but I did know his breakthrough West
Side Story and could relate to the turf warfare in the piece from my old
corner boy days when we defended our turf just as fervently as any New York
City kid. Any Jet, any Shark.
The story has been told many times in this publication by me and
others about growing up, particularly that high school coming of age corner boy
scene that animated our lives, gave us a certain tribal identity, in the
impoverished Acre section of working-class North Adamsville south of Boston but
Josh Breslin has told me that the same fierce defenses applied in the Ocean View
section of Olde Saco up in Maine, Ralph Morris the Tappan Street section of
Troy in New York and Sam Eaton ditto down the Bog section of Carver also south
of Boston. Mostly those youthful stories have been given a positive spin, or
have been sweetened up for public consumption, but there was a dark side, a
very dark side to much of what went on-and how we related to our poverty and
other corner boy aggregates.
Maybe the single best way to describe this dark side is to give
the event that made the late Peter Paul Markin, the Scribe, take this corner
boy stuff, this from hunger stuff to heart. Before he met most of us, except I
think Sam Lowell whom he had known since elementary school when they would hustle
the younger kids out of their milk money, the Scribe used to hang around a spot
familiar to all of us-mainly to stay away from-Harry’s Variety Store since
Harry had a great pin-ball machine there and a very cool ice-filled container
of all kind of soft drinks. Being a kid and if you saw Scribe then you would
know he was no threat to anybody, in the physical sense, to the guys who hung
around Harry’s, that corner’s corner boys and so he was something like a mascot
to them. Would run errand for them, and in turn they would give him some of
their free games which they inevitably won since they were wizards at the game,
knew how to sway the thing just right, especially when some young girlfriend was
tucked in between his arms.
The funny thing is that this group, these guys were nothing like
what Scribe and others would do and put together when their corner boy time
came up at Tonio’s Pizza Parlor. These Harry’s guys were hoods, hoodlums,
bad-ass motorcycle guys, guys who nobody, and according to Scribe nobody messed
with. Their leader was one Harold, never called that under penalty of broken
bones, “Red” Riley, a guy who lived near Scribe’s grandmother, another reason
why he may have been taken on as a mascot, was the baddest of them all. Nobody
challenged his authority, not and be able to tell anybody about it. The corners,
the corners with corner boys, in the Acre in those days sprawled out to maybe
half a dozen locations, all protected by their members. That was the rules and
you lived or maybe died by them. One day Scribe saw what Red could do when
somebody from another corner even came near Harry’s. This guy who Scribe swore
did nothing except walk across the baseball field the other side of Harry’s.
Somehow Red knew though that the guy was from another corner, a different turf.
Without word one Red pulled out his whipsaw chain, went up to the guy and beat
his mercilessly leaving him a lump on the ground. Somebody called the cops and
they called an ambulance which took the guy away a bloody stump. Get this-the
guy never finked on Red, hell, the cops who actually used Harry for his real
purpose at the store to make book-to gamble on the horses-never even asked what
happened. Asked if there were any witnesses. Nobody, not Scribe, nobody said
word one with that bloody stump in their minds. So the Sharks and the Jets had
nothing on the Irish bad boys around Harry’s.
Scribe, or really Frankie Riley who was the real leader of softer and
younger Irish boys, mostly in high school where Frankie’s con artist, grifter ways
were quickly recognized even by Scribe who couldn’t have organized his socks
despite his brilliant plans and dreams, of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys
once he told him the Red Riley story, always made sure to have a tough guy or
two hanging around in case some assholeswanted to rumble, to cut our turf. Enter one Johnny Blade, Johnny Rizzo
really who was one of the few Italians allowed on the corner as a favor to
Tonio who was Johnny’s uncle but really by his saving grace that his mother was
Irish, a Doherty who had also grown up in the Acre. Johnny Blade, nobody ever said
the Johnny without the blade even a couple of industrial arts teachers at
school, the track they threw Johnny on, who heard about him early on. I hope I
don’t need to explain how Johnny got the blade part but for those who might not
be quite sure Acre boys at some point, maybe about puberty, sixth grade somewhere
around there became fascinated with knives, jackknives at first which everybody
had and the more dangerous ones, the kind Johnny carried around from early
on-and used.
Johnny Blade maybe could have gone a different root, that Irish-Italian
mix made an Acre girl’s dream and he could have if for no other reason that by
force of will had whomever he wanted, some older girls too, college girls later
so he had something. The thing is Johnny Blade loved his knife (knives really
but only carried one at a time by law I think). Like I said Frankie, larcenous
Frankie Riley, funny to say now, maybe, since he has been a very successful
lawyer in Boston for many years, knew that Johnny Blade was just what we needed
to defend our turf if trouble came. Naturally when a guy gets a tough guy
reputation somebody is bound as if by osmosis to challenge him, test him.
Usually the excuse would be looking at some girl, some “spoken for” girl the
wrong way and the boyfriend had to assert his prerogative. This time, this time
I speak of which shows not only Johnny’s usefulness but Frankie’s via Scribe’s
wisdom to have a “hitman” on board, it was Mother Goose, a member of Red Riley’s
corner boys, an older guy like Red and most of his boys, a twenty something although
nobody said that then, who took umbrage ( I am being polite) that Cecilia
Duggan had caught Johnny’s eye, or more probably she had glanced his way. Bad
blood, bad blood no question. (By the way nobody knows why he was called Mother
Goose except maybe he never had a mother because he was one tough and fierce looking
guy who I would cross the street when I saw him approaching me.
One dark, probably weekend night I forget now, Mother came strutting,
or maybe lumbering is better, into our Tonio’s space not looking for pizza but
Johnny. Called Johnny out, started talking the talk that tough guys talk and
guys who want to be tough guys have to respond to. I think Johnny was in having
pizza or listening to the already mentioned fabulous Tonio’s jukebox (placed
there as we later learned by the local Mafia who controlled all that kind of
action then, maybe now too for all I know) when he heard the clarion call. He
went up to Mother said something like “let’s go out back” who knows but that
sounds right. That back was the alleyway between building in the commercial section
of the Acre, the area where Tonio’s was located, dark, dark as the dungeon. They
went out back together, alone (frankly most of us, whether we admitted it or not,
would have freaked out if we had to watch this hand to hand combat in person).
Several minutes later Johnny Blade came out breathing heavily, sweating from
his forehead and maybe a little peaked. All he said was “maybe somebody should call
an ambulance.” Somebody, I think Tonio but don’t quote me on that, did call and
the cops and ambulance came. Mother had been cut up badly, a few deep gashes
although mostly arm and leg wounds, nothing life threatening. Mother, eyes
looking right at Johnny Blade when asked by a cop who had done this horrible
deed said he had not been able to identify his assailant. Followed the time-honored,
time-worn code of not finking out, ratting out to the coppers. Funny the cops
never asked anybody if they knew anything, saw anybody run since they also knew
they would get the time-honored, time-worn didn’t see a fucking thing. Didn’t ask
sweated Johnny Blade anything.
We expected some blow-back, serious blow-back when Red Riley found
out what had happened to Mother and by whom, but he may have been in shock that
anybody would waste one of his corner boys and that person must have been a
mean mother, meaner than Mother indeed. Or maybe it was just “collateral damage,”
another term not used then in the turf wars since Mother had chosen, wisely or
not, to confront a corner boy on his own turf. A few years later Red Riley,
motorcycle at the ready and motorcycle mama in tow, got wasted by some redneck
cops down in some freaking White Hen store in North Carolina trying to rob the
place.
Johnny Blade Postscript: After high school we went our various
ways as usually happens, and Johnny Blade whether he finished high school or
not I am not sure I know he had been kept back at least one year, went his way.
The story goes around the old neighborhood that Johnny Blade almost killed a
man, by knife of course, in Riverdale out west of Boston, got caught and was
given “the choice.” The choice in those days given by a judge was a nickel in the
state pen or go in the Army. Johnny Blade, Sergeant John Richard Rizzo, took
the latter course and laid down his head in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam
in 1967. He forever has his name etched on the Adamsville town memorial wall
and down in that black granite-etched wall in Washington, D.C. Every time I go
down there, I go to the wall and shed a tear for him (and Frank White). Thanks
for defending your corner boys. RIP, Sergeant John Richard Rizzo, “Johnny Blade”
(1946-1967)
If anybody had asked me back when I was a kid, a kid growing up in the desperately poor, working poor but desperate nevertheless, Acre section of North Adamsville a town south of Boston in Massachusetts that I would be commemorating, no, honoring an anniversary of the publication in 1847 of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s seminal political document TheCommunist Manifesto in the year 2018 I would have said they were crazy. (I will not get into the issue of commemorating odd-ball year anniversaries of events, like a 170th anniversary, which in general I abhor since I have beaten that dead horse elsewhere and in any case such a whole historic event as here would draw a worthy exemption). Not because the document was, is, not worthy of talking about but back in the day, back in my teenage days I was adamantly an anti-communist in the tradition of almost all red scare Cold War post-war baby boomers who came of age, political under the threat of the nuclear bomb (some things seem to never change given the recent saber-rattling over the developments in North Korea by the American government).
Some, at least from that baby-boomer generation who have at least heard about the document which I cannot say is true for Generation X or the Millennials since they were not born under the sign of the red scare in a post-Soviet world, may be surprised that a backward working class kid in 1950s America would even had snuck a peek at that besotted document for fear of being tainted by the red scare coppers as pinko-red commie turn him in and be done with it. Except I was very interested in politics even then and had heard about TheCommunist Manifesto by some from their photographs nefarious heavily bearded German guys who wanted back in the 1800s to upset the whole applecart and henceforth the root of all evil, the root of the international Communist conspiracy that would kill us in or beds if we were not vigilant against “Uncle Joe,” his successors or their hangers-on throughout the world and especially those “traitors” in America.
I had first heard about TheCommunist Manifesto in a political way although I was naïve as hell about the whole situation and about who I was working with in 1960. In the fall of that year, the fall of the famous Kennedy-Nixon fight for the American presidency where I was a serious partisan for Kennedy, our local, Massachusetts local, Irishman who made good I was also very, very interested in nuclear disarmament (a subject I still am interested in as the world have not gotten qualitively safer from that threat) and had gone to the Boston Common and participated in an anti-nuclear bomb rally (as the youngest participant by far) along with others from SANE (Doctor Spock’s organization) who had called the demonstration, the Quakers, and others. (Those others would include I later found out, many years later, members of the American Communist Party but not under that name but that of some “front” group. Of course by that time several years later I would have gone through three stages about American Communist Party members-from ho-hum so what if they are Commies we need all the forces we can muster to oppose the Vietnam War to being glad they were organizing like crazy against that war to disdain as they attempted to corral the youth movement into building bigger and better demonstrations against the war when that idea had worn out.) What got me going was when a bunch of people, guys, were harassing us, calling us “reds” and why didn’t we get the hell out of America and go to the Soviet Union. Along the way somebody, some guy mentioned TheCommunist Manifesto by that “Jew” Karl Marx. I had never hear of it although I was familiar with the name Karl Marx.
Here’s the funny thing, funny in retrospect anyhow, I could not when I was interested in checking the Manifesto out for myself, find a copy in the school library or the public library. I never did find out the reason why and I was too timid once I saw it was not in the card catalogues to ask a librarian. Thus the way I got the document was looking through publications put out by the Government Printing Office, the U.S. government’s official printing operation. The reason they had printed it at the time, and it said right on the front page was that it had been a document used by the House Un-American Activities Committee and thus was part of the record of that nefarious entity (which in 1960 I think I found out later was almost run out of San Francisco by the demonstrations against it-one of the first breaks in the red scare Cold War phalanx).
I made no pretense at the time nor do I now that I understood all that Marx was trying to get at. Certainly was clueless about the various polemics in Section Four against various other mostly pro-socialist opponents. (That part made greater sense later when I swear I went through almost every one of those oppositional ideas before coming to Marxism except maybe that exotic “feudal socialism” Marx vented against). What drew me in, although only haltingly at the time, was the idea that working people, my people, my family and friends, would get a better shake out of a socialist society, out of a classless society than we were getting at the time. But in those days I was hung up on some kind of career as a political operative, remember that Kennedy point earlier (not a candidate but the guy behind the candidate). So while I was never hostile to the ideas in that document and maybe have even been a “closet” social democrat masquerading as a liberal there was nothing operative for me then, certainly I was not in favor of revolution as the way forward for myself or my people.
What changed things? I have written elsewhere about my induction into the American Army during the height of the Vietnam War and what that meant to me-and how I reacted to it by becoming a serious anti-war person (before I had been anti-war but in a wishy-washy way). Even then after I gave up the idea of a “normal” political career (that operative behind the scenes business) I was no Marxist but was in a search for some kind of way to change society short of revolution. (That is the period when I was engaging in those activities similar to the ones proposed by the groups Marx was polemicizing against in the Manifesto.)
By 1971 it was clear that the American government under Nixon (that same Nixon was beaten to a gong by Kennedy) was not going to end the war in Vietnam. Didn’t give a damn about the whole thing. At that time I was hanging around a radical commune in Cambridge where we were trying to work out ideas (in isolation) about ending the fucking thing. That was the year on May Day when under the banner “if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government” we attempted to do just that. Heady stuff and a dramatic move to the left on my part. All we got for that effort was tear gas, the police baton, and some days in Robert Kennedy Stadium (ironic, huh) for many thousands of good radicals and no end to the war.
After that I, having picked up a copy of Marx’s TheCommunist Manifesto at the Red Bookstore in Cambridge, began to sense that our isolated efforts were self-defeating if we didn’t have a larger force to bring down the damn system. Didn’t have in Marxian terms a class with the objective self-interest to lead the overturn. At the time, given the hostile attitude of the real American working class to us and to any ideas of socialism for the most part, I was unsure that such a strategy made sense. What I knew was that was where the work had to be done. It has not been a fruitful struggle but nevertheless a necessary one even today when such ideas seem even more utopian than in my young adulthood. Some of what Marx talked about needs serious updating but the general premise of class struggle and the revolution as way forward as still solid. Just look around. Are the capitalists (the right now winning capitalists in the one-sided class war) going to give anything of value up? No way- we will have to take it away from them if we want to get that equalitarian society we dreamed about in our youth. As for the Manifesto a lot of it still reads like it was written yesterday.
Click On Title To Link To Wikipedia's Entry For Woody Allen.
DVD REVIEW
Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall, Javier Barmen, Penelope Cruz, directed by Woody Allen, 2008
I have been reviewing Woody Allen productions in this space over the past year or so. I have highly rated such old Woody classics as “Annie Hall, “Manhattan” and “Radio Days”, those memorable films with New York City its trials, tribulations and traumas as an epicenter. I have also given mixed reviews to some of his later productions like “Manhattan Mystery” and others based in other geographic locales (“Purple Rose Of Cairo”, etc.). I was, however, fully prepared to fulsomely praise the film under review, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”, after having heard the hype about Penelope Cruz’s performance as, Maria Elena, the talented estranged artsy wife of the central male character, Juan Antonia (Javier Bardem), a Spanish avant guarde artist. After viewing the film Ms. Cruz's performance was certainly Oscar-worthy. Nevertheless the overall production falls flat. And here is why.
Woody Allen has created an important cinematic niche for himself as a performer, director, writer and producer in that netherworld of the alienated modern urbanite, especially of distracted women unsure of their place in the world and their ability to navigate it with (or without) a man. The classic examples of such angst and confusion were various film vehicles created for Diane Keaton (“Annie Hall”) Mia Farrow (“Broadway Danny Rose”, “Stardust Memories”) and along the way Woody himself, his doubts and his inhibitions (in about six billion of his films starting with “Take The Money And Run”). Here Woody has gathered the old familiar concerns about sexual inhibitions, the vacuity of upper middle class suburban life, the eternal problems with the opposite sex and various social conventions like bisexuality, adultery, threesomes and the like. All very familiar Woody material, although not always set in Barcelona.
With the above-mentioned exception of Ms. Cruz the other characters are Woody’s stock and trade of late: young woman with various personal and social problems, with or without Woody as conduit. The truly beautiful and talented Scarlett Johansson is wooden here as Cristina. The lesser known actress, Rebecca Hall, playing Vicky's role is the same. In the end I did not care whether the two women (or three, if we include Ms. Cruz) got their issues resolved, or not. That is not a good sign in a Woody Allen film where in earlier, better film , if nothing else, we are at least left wondering about their fates. Woody, come back to your New York hearth and home with all its tangled energies, excitement, enigmas and hangups. There you are “king of the hill”. Leave Europe for the kids.
When The King Of Rock And Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -In Honor Of The Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced Wild Child Part Of It -On That Old Hill-Billy Down In The Hills And Hollows Come Saturday Red Barn Dance Father Moment
