Traipsing Through The Arts -In Lieu Of Discussing Artist And Known Voyeur Edward Hopper’s “Summertime”-Down In The Mud With The Holy Roller End Times Sex Patrol-A Thankless Task-But Necessary

Traipsing Through The Arts -In Lieu Of Discussing Artist And Known Voyeur Edward Hopper’s “Summertime”-Down In The Mud With The Holy Roller End Times Sex Patrol-A Thankless Task-But Necessary     

The much maligned Mary Magdeline before that saint business-Tintoretto's view   

By Laura Perkins

(If you are only interested in reading about the import of Edward Hopper’s works written through the prism of an art lover although not a member of the curator, gallery owner, high-end museum patron-donor, art collector cabal you will have to wait for my next piece to be published. For now I have to get some seriously disturbed people off my case so I can breathe enough to talk of guys like Edward Hopper and the whole sex mad modern art scene. L.P.).

[Once again I have to start imprisoned within brackets to avoid having to ruin a perfectly good piece about one of Edward Hopper’s collection of paintings, about his salacious take on painting young nubile women without them looking while he looked on quite leeringly. (Check, for example, his 1943 Summertime with the diaphanously summer dressed urban dwelling femme waiting, waiting for something to happen to while away the heat. The model although clothed certainly was not his wife who forbade him to paint women other than her in the nude but Hopper must have snuck out the back door or gave her some lame excuse about needing cigarettes to go do his lust-driven task) But that discussion for later. Cutting right to the chase I have been dogged in this series of pieces on my take on various paintings, American paintings that have attracted my attention as I have dug into this assignment, by a clot, no, a cohort of what I call evangelicals who have been trashing me endlessly about my discussing sex and sensuality, eroticism, in art. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the art (both the “rat’s ass” expression and idea about the place of art for these holy goofs courtesy of long-time companion Sam Lowell who has had forty years of experience dealing with what these days he calls the trolls or one sort or another but which took me a little while to figure out) or even my opinion about any particular piece.

What has them hot under the collar and me on the hellish hot seat, me, as a conscious agent of the devil, you know the devil that Johnny Milton talked about endlessly back the 1600s with such best-selling potboilers as Paradise Lost and Paradise Found. Me as Keil, that I am still baffled by since this character was a disciple, man-servant as far as I could tell of the Zoroastrian devil figure Loh, not the Christian one who goes by the name Satan, Lucifer, Bad Boy, Billy Bob Thornton etc. What has them exercised is that somehow their junior or missy will Google something for a school assignment and see me in my vivid splendor talking about the sex life of John Singer Sargent’s Madame X who essentially acted the role of courtesan, of professional beauty in the wild and wily days of the Third Republic in France, the strange opium dream drug-induced kinky sex cult worship of Alexander’s Isabella, or the Whole of Babylon advertisement announcing she is open for business explicit in Whistler’s The White Girl via the telltale wolf’s head and fur beneath her feet. What planet are they on since no self-respecting teenager is going to do anything but laugh at the idea of reading some supposedly sexually suggestive stuff in early modern art in some funky review when they can get whatever they want of real visual sex on the various sexploitation sites that dot the Internet. And with hormones going crazy who could blame them.              

Frankly, although my long-time partner and fellow writer Sam Lowell mentioned above swears by the use of bracketed introductions to not spoil the good stuff I don’t like the idea, am not going to do this after I have my say here. What has me up in arms, although silently since I do not answer any comments by the trolls who have descended on me since I started my little project, is that somehow I don’t know “jack” (that from Walter, from, oh, I forget now where he is from, Kansas I think) about religion, about religious sensibilities. They didn’t frame it that way- it came out more as the well-trodden-liberal multiculturalist secularist, comsymp (communist sympathizer from the younger set who otherwise have no clue what that meant and which in passing also tells me I am dealing with some on the older side parents making me wonder about that so-called concern for their collective off-springs’ moral welfare certainly not of the folk or anything like that, stuff along that line. What they don’t know, and I would not ordinarily feel I had to discuss the issue in a series on art is that I grew up in upstate New York, grew up in the country that was “burned over” in the Second Great Awakening in this country in the early 19^th century.

There are still small standing churches with attendees who can date their church structures to those times, plenty still left practicing the respective faiths of forbears even if the number of congregants is falling off. Not far from where the farm that I grew up on stands a church-Lord’s Host-Disciples of Christ which was built by the farmers in the valley back in 1820 in about three days as a sign of their devotion and of their desire to have a fitting place to worship according to their lights. The few remaining ancient descendants still practice their religion there. You can go across upstate, across the “burned-over” areas traversed by preachers like Grandison, Miller, and the lecherous Hansbury who like today’s Preacher Roe, and allegedly Reverend Larson who just got exposed for playing around with his congregants, male and female, had a field day with the women and girls they conned into believing they were the Son of God and find if not congregations then churches and markers reflecting those events. Find places that farmers and small townspeople built, and built quickly, to temper their faiths. Fourth Awakening folk be advised.       

I grew up in a household, a farm as I said where my father was Mountain Methodist, meaning a split from the Wesley boys’ operation over theological differences around whether everybody will be saved or not (Mountain Meths calling out in glee that there will salvation for all-even sinners no questions asked if you can believe that-especially if you had known my father and his penchant for casting me to the hell-fires when I lived at home) and my mother was purebred Brethren of the Common Life, a grouping which broke from the Monrovian Tabernacle over adult baptism, or maybe the need for baptism. (This was not a marriage made in heaven, far from it, since from the get-go my mother’s people “scorned” her for marrying outside the covenant, for marrying a “heathen,” apparently to them no better than an Indian, now Native American, in going for an MM). Those are my bloodlines, that’s my DNA so don’t tell me I can’t go hand to hand with any of the trolls over what they think is happening to their world-which is basically that it has gone to hell in a handbasket. And as a corollary to their well-worked out if sour worldview we need End Times to come quickly to wash away the sins of this earth and return to the Garden. (That latter part not a bad sentiment if they would not be so nasty about explicitly by name excluding Keil’s servant-me.)          

It probably will not do any good since speaking of religious controversy usually gets you nowhere fast and I am not directly responding to any particular thread (although Sarah from Duluth with her numbered list of sins for which I have to atone is in my mind as I write this) from these holy goofs but there have been three main objections to what I have had to say about why people, trolls and non-trolls alike, should back off and just let me go about my business of writing little scrawny pieces about art, about what one troll actually identified, correctly identified, as high culture except used that notion to cast the whole cabal of curators, collectors and gallery owners and their hangers-on to the lake of fires. Exception has been taken to my aspersion that Mary Magdalene, the street whore, lets’ call her what she was, what she had called herself after she changed careers, who converted to Christianity around the time Jesus was murdered had been his lover, and if not him if he was not into sex with women then one, or more of the apostles. Exception has been taken to my assertion that Jesus may have been gay, may have been sleeping with one, or more, of his boys. And exception has been taken to my characterization of the various differences between religious sects over various ceremonial and theological doctrines as “tempests in teapots.”    

Maybe it was all the clamor over my attempt to place Singer Sargent’s Madame X (finally I get to say a word about art if only for a minute) in the long line of professional beauties who used that beauty to get ahead in the world. This may not accord with any religious scruples or anything like that but ever since Eve, ever since Adam poisoned Eve with his jealous ways there have been women who have had to do the “best they could” to fend for themselves. I just mentioned Eve but at least in the Christian saga I trace the genesis to Mary Magdalene, who was nothing but a street-walker despite all the bullshit halos some scholars have tried to throw around her name. Have tried to pawn her off as some bored little rich girl who “got religion” when Jesus showed up at a revival in her town and went meekly, and chastely along for the ride.

Yeah, right. The hard evidence was she was any man’s woman, had a specialty of washing feet for a fee at the time which I guess was an erotic foreplay when sandals were in or something now looked at when we have well shod feet as a fetish, and rightly so. A simple whore doing the best she could who would up being at “the right place at the right time.” There is substantial evidence, despite the conflicting and frankly bizarre renderings on the subject by the four guys who told the Jesus story from their own crooked little subjective angles, that Jesus has spotted Mary Mags in the crowd when he was working the town, working Jerusalem when that was a Roman enclave and he was desperate for converts. Needed some good-looking women to draw the guys in (some things unfortunately never change). Meeting her he saw that maybe it wouldn’t be bad to have a little company on those long lonely nights out on the circuit. On good authority Jesus was not alone when he took a vacation for forty days to refuel himself-and you know who was with him.  

Eyewitness reports, those of a couple of apostles if anybody is asking and if they are to be believed, state that after they met Mary started working the crowd as Jesus started working his grift. Look here you have if you can believe any of the various ancient drawings of the guy a good- looking guy and a good-looking gal, you had to be to work the streets in those days all the older used up women were working the wineries, who were smitten. Now there is no proof that they went under the sheets together, but it is a pretty safe bet that a guy like Jesus, unless he was gay which will be dealt with in a minute had no trouble coaxing her in his bed. Alternatively, if he didn’t, was gay and that is okay if he was although then I believe he would have been stoned or something like that, then at least John and James are known to have had carnal knowledge of her once Jesus left for heaven and his father’s place. For all her troubles and this is kind of the clincher as to what really went on-our Mary Mags got a sainthood, got to get a trip to Paradise. Not bad for washing some guy’s feet gratis when he went down for the count.      

Okay, it is definitely possible that Jesus was the “B” of LGBTQ, “bi” but that makes it harder to make my case about the torrid affair between him and Mary Mags. If Mary Mags and he were not getting under the sheets after a tough day of preaching, which is my preferred and more historically correct view, then Jesus hanging around with twelve guys and no gals is very, very strange, especially for those times when twelve guys or so doing anything amounted to an act of insurrection against the Roman state. And not just twelve guys but a bunch of guys who were fishermen, a profession known to be nothing but a gay preserve back then -at least at sea. The whole thing would have escaped my attention except that, and this information gathered via Sam Lowell, W. H. Auden, the English poet make a habit of “outing” various guys whom he called in the parlance of the 1930s part of the “Homintern,” which Sam says is just a take-off on the Comintern, the Communist International, another international organization of the time.

This “outing” given the nature of the times and the criminal implications when the “love that dare not speak its name” was a serious crime just ask Oscar Wilde, was privately held by him and his circle but did not include Jesus. It did however include Matthew and the villainous Judas Iscariot of unblessed memory. Since then Edward and Timothy have been added to the list. Of course the trolls will go crazy on this one since to them “gay” means devil, maybe not as bad as Keil, the devil’s servant, me but bad and beyond the pale. That Jesus was letting gay guys into his operation if he was straight would be beyond the pale. The idea that Jesus was gay would destroy their whole theological construct, blow the Catholic Church a fatal knock-down as well and wreak havoc with their opposition to gay marriage.         

Although I have laughingly noted that my troll cohort has created a veritable “united front” around my acting as an active agent for the devil, as the truly sinister Keil who in Zoroastrian lore really was a bad- ass from what I have read up on the character I have noted that they are not above a few internal skirmishes around their various religious differences. What I have called to their furor “tempests in teapots” have appeared from time to time. To add fuel to the fire I have consciously tried to be provocative about those differences. I mentioned in my own family my father’s Mountain Methodist roots which derived from the differences around who could be saved and under what conditions. Like I said strangely my father’s MMs strongly believe everybody will be saved come judgement day as against the traditional view that only the repentant will avoid the lakes of fire. In my mother’s case the main split point back in the 1700s in Monrovia was how long it took God to create the earth-the Tabernacle’s traditional six days and a day of rest or the Brethren’s view of twelve days and two days of rest. Those are at least understandable doctrinal differences and while maybe there should not have been a century of religious civil wars over the damn issues and nobody should have faced the stake, or worse been shunned, there you have it.           

What makes no sense to me and this came up an exchange between Wanda from Wabash, a leading and prolific troll, and Jeffrey Jay, no hometown given, was over the question of when and in what condition baptism would be appropriate. Wanda, strait-laced Wanda, has argued for adult baptism, only done after appropriate repentance and while fully clothed in some mud-raked river or pond. Jeff, and a few others who have become his acolytes, has argued that those who have attained the age of reason, have repented of their sinful ways before the gathered church, should be stripped naked to receive the Lord and can do it anywhere from a mud-calked river to the family swimming pool. Such distinctions floor me but that is what keeps guys, endlessly repentant guys like Preacher Roe and Preacher Baxter in clover. Reverend Larson even as I write is probably writing up his repentance statement, getting some cheapjack loin cloth at the Salvation Army store and getting ready to get back on the gravy train and into those dark bedrooms.           

All this religious talk though really is just that compared to the firestorm I set off among a small subset, a mini-cohort when I made a statement that none of these holy goofs cared about art. Were happy to see the whole art world and the culturati blown to bits, won’t let their kids within five miles of an art museum. As long as they have their Velvet Elvis memorabilia to grace their trailer living rooms. Then the guns came out, the heavy guns. Needless to say all the tripe of the cultural wars came out, the class issue with the trailer, gun, Walmart, Bud-lite crap.

You would not believe the stuff thrown at me, would have been surprised at the lack of elementary solidarity with a fellow human sufferer who maybe had lost her way. A lack of Christian charity even to a vowed opponent. None of that for I was to be immediately cast in the lake of fires (one guy Jed I think must have been playing Johnny Cash when he wrote because that came out “ring of fire” in his submission). Of course I got the now obligatory Keil, devil’s servant business, although Betty from Toledo at least called me the devil’s handmaiden. There is more but I can’t go on without commenting on this rush to have me put down as Keil, a male figure, a male bad guy in the ancient Zoroastrian religion who when I looked it up, and I had to look it up, was struck down by Lan, by the force of some primeval moan, some artful prayer which saved humankind. Is that the fate that awaits me among some of the brethren?      

Speaking of brethren, we could not have a bout of revelation without the obligatory stand-off between those who will be saved and those who won’t. My father’s now seemingly gentile religious beliefs that all would be saved-sinner and saint alike-is like some beautiful dream compared to the hoops some of the cohort want the “saved,” meaning sinners are in that lake with me, to jump through. Funny how much it all comes down to ceremony-to the outward show. Those who want adult baptism via that muddy river fully-clothed and after public repentance and those who want their saved naked as jaybirds in some backyard swimming pool with all eyes averted while the swimmers read off their lists of transgressions. But enough. Back to strictly traipsing through the art museums.   

Happy Birthday Frederick Douglass- A New BiographyFor Frederick Douglass On His 200th Birthday- From The Pages Of “Workers Vanguard”-Mumia Abu-Jamal Radio Interview -“Frederick Douglass Taught Us That Power Concedes Nothing Wit

Happy Birthday Frederick Douglass- A New Biography

Click on link to hear a serious biographer of Frederick Douglass the revolutionary abolitionist who broke with the William Lloyd Garrison-wing of the movement when the times called for remorseless military fighting against the entrenched slave-holders and their allies. This from Christopher Lydon’s Open Source program on NPR.

https://player.fm/series/open-source-with-christopher-lydon/behind-the-leonine-gaze-of-frederick-douglass

This is what you need to know about Frederick Douglass and the anti-slavery, the revolutionary abolitionist fight. He was the man, the shining q star black man who led the fight for black men to join the Union Army and not just either be treated as freaking contraband or worse, as projected in early in the war by the Lincoln administration the return of fugitive slaves to “loyal” slave-owners. Led the fight to not only seek an emancipation proclamation as part of the struggle but a remorseless and probably long struggle to crush slavery and slaver-owners and their hanger-on militarily. Had been ticketed at a desperate moment in 1864 to recreate a John Brown scenario if they logjam between North and South in Virginia had not been broken. Yes, a bright shining northern star black man.    

Click on the headline to link to the article from “Workers Vanguard” described in the title.


Markin comment:

As almost always these historical articles and polemics are purposefully helpful to clarify the issues in the struggle against world imperialism, particularly the “monster” here in America.

American Slavery, The Civil War And Reconstruction- A Few Notes- A Guest Commentary

February Is Black History Month

American Slavery, The Civil War And Reconstruction, Part II from Young Spartacus, March 1980.

Part Two of Two

The following article is the conclusion of a two-part series based on a transcription of an educational on American slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction given in the Detroit SYL local committee by Brian Manning. The period of the Civil War and Reconstruction is crucial to understand because it provides the backdrop for the formation of class relations, the development of the Democratic and Republican parties, the twin parties of capitalism, and the development of race relations as they exist today.

Part One covered the period from the American revolution to 1860, the beginning of the Civil War. It discussed the rise of American slavery and the conflict between northern industrial capitalism and the anachronistic mode of production of the slave plantations of the old South; the nature and scope of the slave revolts particularly in comparison to those of the Caribbean; the development of the abolitionist move¬ment; and the events which sparked the South's secession.

Part Two covers the period of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. It discusses the role of blacks in the war, the establishment of the Reconstruction governments, the institution of the black codes and the systematic terror against black freedmen in the aftermath of the war, blacks and the early labor movement, and the reversal of the gains of Reconstruction. The transcription has been minimally edited to preserve the character of the original presentation.

Back issues of Young Spartacus No. 78 containing Part One of "Slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction" are available and may be obtained for 25 cents from: Spartacus Youth Publishing Co., Box 825, Canal Street Station, New York, N. Y. 10013

According to Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War was started as a war to save the Union. But everybody, particularly the slaves, knew that it was a war to free the slaves. There's a little story in Rehearsal for Reconstruction by Willie Lee Rose about Port Royal in the Sea Islands of North Carolina between Charleston and Savannah right off the coast. It was one of the first places liberated by the North because the South never had a navy; the slave owners just fled back to the mainland. An ex-slave 75 years later related the story of the day the Yankees came. He was tugging on his mother's skirts as the ships were coming in, and they were firing on Port Royal. He said, "Mommy, listen—there's thunder." And his mother explained crisply, "Son, dat ain't no t'under, dat Yankee come to gib you Freedom." They knew. The Union army couldn't keep the black slaves from flocking to its lines, even when it persisted in saying that it wasn't going to liberate them. Officially, slaves were still the property of the slave owners.

Blacks in Union Blue

Lincoln held off as long as he could on the slavery question. Finally, in 1862 he saw that the Union wasn't winning the war and was having more and more trouble getting an army together. The North hadn't instituted a draft and was enlisting people for just three months at a time, so that after fighting one battle the soldiers would go home and plough their fields. Lincoln needed some help. Meanwhile the blacks in the South were pretty quiescent, except when the Union army was near. The slaves were continuing to produce the goods and agricultural products needed for the Confederacy. So Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation which wasn't even a real emancipation. All it said was that all slaves in the areas not currently under the control of the Union army were hereby free. What about the slaves in the areas the Union did control? The Union army still didn't know what to do with all the refugees. It started using them as laborers. First blacks were given lower pay, and the army would only send them on picket duty in the garrisons along the southern coast where there was a lot of yellow fever. Finally they were integrated into the army in fighting regiments. By the end of the war there were 200,000 blacks under arms, approximately a fifth to a quarter of the Union army.

When they saw what the Union was doing, the Confederates figured they would try the same thing. They offered freedom after the war to anyone who enlisted in the Confederate army. They were not very successful because, as one perceptive southern gentleman put it, "Why should the slaves join us and have a chance at freedom, when all they have to do is walk across to the Union lines, and they're automatically free?"

The blacks fought well, which surprised a lot of people who still thought that they had tails. Proportionally they were in the Union army in greater numbers than were the northern whites. I'm sure that the black soldiers in the Union blue deeply threatened the slave owners. They certainly didn't like to see black soldiers marching through Charleston, the seat of the South and its biggest and most civilized city. It was a black regiment raised in Massachusetts by Garrison and Douglass which took the lead of the army, singing "John Brown's Body" as it marched through Charleston after the Confederate withdrawal.

Free At Last... But Destitute

The situation of the black freedmen after the war was really bad. Destitute
and landless, in desperate poverty, they were uneducated of course, but they were to a large extent skilled. It was the blacks who had built the South before the war. The slave owners would teach their slaves how to blacksmith or how to be mechanics rather than pay outside white labor, so there were far more skilled blacks than whites. For example, Philip Foner estimates that there were two black blacksmiths for every white one in Mississippi; and six Negro mechanics for every white one in North Carolina. But after the war there was terrible disorder and dislocation in the South. One of the things that all travelers in the immediate post-war period commented on was the masses of blacks wandering aimlessly around the roads of the South, real poor, in rags. There had been a number of attempts to give blacks land. When the slaves were freed on Port Royal, a number of blacks were able to work for wages and work their own land. Jefferson Davis' plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi was also one of the places liberated relatively soon—by U.S. Grant, in fact. The blacks had land and worked it for a while. When Sherman marched to the sea through Georgia, he had a terrible problem with all the liberated slaves following the army eating food, so he decided to give them 40 acres for the duration.

Generally, this is not what happened after the war. Blacks were either working on the plantations in much the same conditions or they were wandering around. Lincoln never had a thoroughgoing plan for Reconstruction. All he wanted to do was to save the Union. Perhaps if he had lived longer, his mystique as the Great Emancipator would have been smashed. His basic attitude toward blacks can be illustrated by a famous quote from the Lincoln-Douglass debates: "On the question of the negro, I don't regard him as an equal, never have and never will. I don't think he can be taught," etc., etc. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation his plan was to gradually free the slaves so that by 1900, blacks would be free throughout the South. By 1900! Those who were emancipated he wanted to colonize in Africa. He didn't live to try to institute his plan.
Andrew Johnson came in as president after Lincoln's assassination with a seeming determination to bust the planter aristocracy. Johnson was a poor white from Tennessee, and he always hated the planter aristocracy. His main objection to slavery was that only a few privileged whites got to enjoy the fruits of it. He wanted to strengthen and establish the position of a white American yeomanry in the South. His plan was to let the Confederates take an amnesty oath with some exceptions, and the state governments would be restored. He said nothing about blacks, nothing about emancipation. At first, in order to vote, any person who owned $25,000 worth of property or more couldn't simply take an amnesty oath, but needed a personal pardon from the president. So of course all the planter aristocracy came up to Johnson, flocked to him, flattered him and sweet-talked him, so that eventually he became its tool.

The Black Codes and the Rise of Racist Terror

Meanwhile, the blacks in the South were kept in a subordinate position with the institution of the black codes. These codes prohibited blacks from bearing arms; blacks couldn't sell produce without evidence that it wasn't stolen; there was a poll tax placed on all blacks; any white could arrest any black upon viewing a misdemeanor by aforesaid black; the right to buy land was limited in both amount and location, i.e., the whites got all the good land and the blacks didn't get any. There were numerous vagrancy apprenticeship laws, so that a black had to make a contract with a landowner within the first ten days of January, and was bound for a year to work for him. If he didn't, then he was a vagrant and was fined, imprisoned and probably sent to work on the plantation of that very same landowner. A black had to have a pass to go anywhere, and the wage system was only nominal. White people were prevented from associating with blacks on terms of equality, but blacks could finally get legaUy married. All this was an attempt by the slavocracy to main¬tain its power while legally abolishing slavery, but still using the same system of gang labor on the plantations.
Blacks didn't take this entirely sitting down. There were "colored conventions" throughout the South to protest this treatment. In a number of cities the upper layer of blacks—the skilled workers and the professionals—would participate in these colored conventions. On the one hand the slavocracy was instituting the black codes, but on the other hand there were 200,000 blacks who had been in the army, a number of whom hadn't been demobilized. There was a desire among the freedmen to take over the land, with the tacit consent of these black troops. But that never really got off the ground. It was at this time, around the winter of 1865 to 1866, that if the Radicals had had power, the blacks might have had a chance to get the land. The Confeder¬ates had definitely been militarily defeated.

I wanted to read you a graphic passage out of DuBois' Black Reconstruction which describes a convention in New Orleans and how it was broken up by the Klansmen. It was a state convention to determine whether blacks would get the vote. A lot of blacks were in attendance:

"Most of the leaders in this movement stayed away from the opening, and in fact only a small number of members accepted the call; but Monroe, also chief of a secret society known as "The Southern Cross," armed his police and the mob, who wore white handkerchiefs on their necks.

A signal shot was fired, and the mob deployed across the head of Dryades Street, moved upon the State House, and shot down the people who were in the hall.

The Reverend Dr. Morton waving a white handkerchief, cried to the police: 'Gentlemen, I beseech you to stop firing; we are non-combatants. If you want to arrest us, make any arrest you please, we are not prepared to defend our¬selves.' Some of the police, it is claimed, replied, 'We don't want any prisoners; .'you have all got to die.' Dr. Morton was shot and fell, mortally wounded. Dr. Dostie who was an object of special animosity on account of his inflammatory addresses was a marked victim. Shot through the spine, and with a sword thrust through his stomach, he died a few days later. There were about one hundred and fifty persons in the hall, mostly Negroes. Seizing chairs, they beat back the police three times, and barred the doors. But the police returned to the attack, firing their revolvers as they came. Some of the Negroes returned the fire, but most of them leaped from the windows in wild panic. In some cases they were shot as they came down or as they scrambled over the fence at the bottom. The only member of the convention, however, that was killed was a certain John Henderson. Some say six or seven hundred shots were fired. Negroes were pursued, and in some cases were killed on the streets. One of them, two miles from the scene, was taken from his shop and wounded in his side, hip, and back. The dead and wounded were piled upon drays and carried. Some say forty-eight were killed—".

That was New Orleans in 1865, and here was another big riot up in Memphis. The black codes didn't go over too big with the northerners, either. They didn't like the idea that they had just fought a war to end slavery and break the power of the slavocracy, and yet the condition of blacks seemed almost unchanged. So for example, the Chicago Tribune, that bastion of radi¬calism during Reconstruction, warned upon the enactment of the black codes in Mississippi that the North would "convert Mississippi into a frog-pond before permitting slavery to be reestablished." That kind of militant sentiment on the part of the northerners was omnipresent. Also, they didn't like the political power that the South was going to get in Washington. If their governments were readmitted, the South would actually have more power than it had before the Civil War, when the basis of representation for blacks was three-fifths. Now that blacks were going to be citizens, every black counted as a whole person. Since blacks weren't being allowed to vote under the black codes, the planter aristocracy would have that much more political power, and the Republicans would lose in any national elections. Other issues were that the North did not want to pay the debts incurred by the southern governments during the Civil War, nor did it want to pay the Confederate pensioners. By and large, northerners did not like the fact that the Johnson governments in the South had introduced a whole system of discrimination, segregation and disenfranchisement, and they were willing to fight it.

The southern whites weren't reconciled to the status of blacks as freedmen, and they fought tooth and nail to drive them back onto the plantations and forcibly suppress them as at best second-class citizens. At this time, 1865, the Klan was formed in Tennessee. Bands of ex-Confederates roamed around at will murdering, beating and intimidating. There were also people called the "regulators," like Marlon Brando in "Missouri Breaks." He was a regulator and a pretty rotten character in the movie, but these regulators were even worse, with a real social purpose. They weren't just guns for hire. They were murderers of blacks in particular, and murderers of Republicans and Unionists. In Texas, for example, they were so bad that it led the military administrator of the state, General P. H. Sheridan, to comment that if he owned both hell and Texas, he would live in hell and rent out Texas.

The Rise and Fall of Reconstruction

Let me shift back to the North where the decisions about what was going on in the South were actually being made. That's the whole dynamic of Reconstruction. It was a revolution from above, determined by the Republicans in Washington, D.C., not by the freedmen in the South. The freedmen went along with the Republicans until it was too late.

So Washington, D.C. controlled what Reconstruction was going to look like in the end, and the Republicans controlled Washington, D.C. They had won a smashing victory in the 1864 presidential elections and still enjoyed almost total support from the northern electorate. The party itself was divided into three main camps: the conservative supporters of Johnson, the majority of the party who were moderates vacillat¬ing between support to Johnson or the Radicals, and the Radicals. The Radicals were committed to the enfranchise¬ment of blacks and believed in their equality, but while most formally recognized the primacy of the land question for black freedmen, little was done to actually redistribute the land. The Radical leaders were people like Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips. They were all radicals from way back, and Charles Sumner was actually caned to within an inch of his life on the Senate floor by a southern senator for his political views. The Republican Party was pretty timid except for these few isolated Radicals. It was lucky that the Radicals were able to push through the Reconstruction Acts at a time when the party was divided and threatened by the slavocracy in the South.

It was the moderates who held the real balance of power in the Republican Party, and only the ability of Stevens, Sumner and Phillips to get these moderates on their side for a while enabled Reconstruction to go forward at all. The Radicals made a number of attempts to get Johnson to change, and not succeeding there, they eventually impeached him. The whole dynamic was that Congress would pass some bill enacting civil rights or the vote for blacks, and Johnson would veto it, thumbing his nose at Congress, and they would override his veto. For example, the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave blacks citizenship and implicitly the right to vote, was ratified by the Radical Unionist government in Tennessee, the first southern government to be re-admitted to the Union. The governor of Tennessee sent his message to Congress saying that it has been a great victory and the Fourteenth Amendment has been ratified, and by the way, give my regards to that dead dog in the White House. Essentially, the impeachment was a frame-up on charges of bureaucratic shuffling. But Johnson's policy toward the South was the real issue, and the impeachment failed by one vote.

In 1867, over Johnson's veto, the Reconstruction Act was passed, separating the South into five military districts, giving universal suffrage to blacks and calling for state conventions in order to write up new state constitutions. Everybody had to take an oath of allegiance, and each state convention had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before the state would be re-admitted to the Union. Also the Freedmen's Bureau, which had been in existence since 1865, became a real force in the South; it was a bureau for establishing schools and giving aid to refugees. On the whole, the South got off easy. What conquered nation has ever gotten off as easy as the South did after the Civil War? There were 2,000 troops in each state, and essentially all they did was guard the state house. They weren't out on the bayous and the plantations protecting blacks.

After the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, the blacks were a landless but voting mass. They had to fight even to keep the vote. They were dependent on the small Union army forces which by and large looked on benignly whenever anything happened. The Reconstruction governments them¬selves, although charged with all sorts of corruption and high taxation, were in fact governments with a large black component, which did things like establish the first school system the South had ever seen. They were small and moderately effective governments. But only the land would have given blacks the social basis for the protection of their rights. Land and arms. The Republicans weren't enthusiastic about fighting for that. Confiscation of land— private property—came too close to home for all the freeholders in the North. The Radical Republicans how¬ever did fight for land. In the forefront of this was Thaddeus Stevens, an industrialist for Pennsylvania. He introduced a bill in Congress with the intention of giving land to blacks.

Meanwhile, the planters were moving toward controlling the black vote through the actions of the Klan and other groups. It was easy for them to do this: there's a poor little sharecropper who votes Republican, and his boss says, "I'm sorry, I don't want you voting Republican, so get off my land." There were big campaigns of intimidation. For example, DuBois mentions a parish in Louisiana where in an election in the spring, something like 17,000 people voted Republican, and all throughout the spring and summer there was a campaign of intimidation, murder and terror, so that by the fall, two people voted Republican. That went on throughout the South.

The economic power of the planters provided the basis for the development of the race/color caste of blacks. With no land and no vote, it was clear that blacks weren't going to be integrated as equals into American society. The poor whites feared the blacks being raised to the level of social equals, and so they did the planters' dirty work. They were the ones in the Klan. They were the ones wno drove the blacks out of the cities, out of the skilled trades and back into the fields. At the same time a different system of labor was developed. After the slavocracy was politically defeated through Reconstruction, the plantations were broken up. Gang labor no longer existed as it had under slavery, but the new sharecropping system, a system of virtual peonage, didn't mean that the living conditions of blacks was improved significantly.

The Republicans abandoned the blacks after Reconstruction because the interests of the northern industrialists jived more with the interests of the planters than the blacks. Any union between the Republican Party and blacks could only be uneasy after the Republican Party failed to give blacks land. The continued enfranchisement of blacks was no longer a condition for the success of the Republican Party. They had consolidated power. They had accomplished the triumph of the urban North. They had gotten their protective tariffs, their national banking system and their transcontinental railway, and the party was rent with divisions. They wanted to unify the party and make profits. The Radical Republicans were isolated and the blacks, the freedmen, were left holding the bag. By 1869, land reform was essentially a dead issue and the Freedmen's Bureau was winding up. Some Reconstruction governments had been overturned as early as 1869. The power of the Radicals was broken by 1870 through retirement, electoral defeats, death, etc. A large portion of the southern landholders came to accept black suffrage and some civil and political rights. They were able to control the vote anyway. Given the removal of Federal troops in 1877, they knew that they could control the blacks entirely.

In 1877, the contested election of Rutherford Hayes led to the withdrawal of the Union troops. Hayes was a Republican. The southern Democrats said, "We won't contest it, which would mean that you might lose, if you promise to pull out all your troops." That was the Compromise of 1877, the official end of Reconstruction, but it was dead long before that.

Blacks and the Early Labor Movement

Given the fact that the Republican Party did not give blacks land, it would seem logical for blacks to turn to labor at this time to fight for their rights. But the labor movement was just getting off the ground. It was not strong, and given the anti-black prejudice in the unions, the presence of blacks was not looked on kindly. There was a labor organization called the National Labor Union (NLU), formed right after the Civil War, which did not actually have an explicitly anti-black program, but it certainly did not go out of its way to organize blacks. It had segregated union locals and a prejudice in favor of skilled tradesmen and craftsmen. Even the Marxists, the American First Internationalists—even Fredrick Sorge—-did not speak up in favor of blacks or of land for blacks at the convention of the NLU. The perspective'of the NLU was that if it didn't organize blacks, they might scab, so it would organize them when it had to. One delegate from the Bricklayers summed up their attitude welk "If we don't organize him, he will work for anyone at any price."

There were also instances of white labor driving out black labor. Philip Foner in Blacks and Organized Labor mentions the Baltimore ship caulkers (they sealed seams in wooden ships) who were driven out of the labor force. The blacks got together, bought their own shipyard, formed their own union and worked in their own shipyard in Baltimore because they had been driven out of the industry by the whites.

The Colored National Labor Union (CNLU) was formed in 1869 from a split in the NLU. One of the main reasons for the split was that the NLU said that the workers shouldn't support the Demo¬crats or the Republicans because they were both the bosses' parties. The CNLU wanted to support the Republi¬cans. While the NLU was groping toward a break with the bourgeois parties, its policies on the race question were often backward. Not only did the NLU organize segregated unions but it failed to recognize the revolutionary side of Reconstruction. The CNLU remained loyal to the Republican Party as the party of Reconstruction. The CNLU organized both blacks and whites together, addressed the land question in the South, and also admitted Chinese labor, whereas the NLU op¬posed "coolie labor" on the West Coast.

The Knights of Labor (K of L), which made real inroads into the organization of blacks and whites, didn't hit the scene until the mid-1870s after Reconstruction had been defeated.On the whole, the Civil War and Reconstruction were a triumph for capitalism. It united for the first time the northern and southern propertied classes. It broke the back of the slavocracy and the plantations and recruited the southern workers as lackeys for the southern landowners. It established an industrial reserve army, which however was not needed until the beginning of the twentieth century. This industrial reserve army of sharecroppers and marginal workers, hillbillies, was consolidated in the South. Recon¬struction paved the way for black people like Booker T. Washington and his ilk: the shut-up-and-work school, where maybe a black man could make it if he avoided politics. That's how blacks were until the 1930s, until they got out of the South. Two societies existed, separate and unequal, black and white. At the same time the basis was laid for the integration of blacks into the political economy of the United States, albeit at the bottom, as a race-color caste. It was the failure of Reconstruction that really laid the groundwork for that caste system.

*Poets' Corner- Langston Hughes' John Brown Tribute- "October 16"

*Poets' Corner- Langston Hughes' John Brown Tribute- "October 16"

October 16-Langston Hughes

Perhaps
You will remember
John Brown.

John Brown
Who took his gun,
Took twenty-one companions
White and black,
Went to shoot your way to freedom
Where two rivers meet
And the hills of the
North
And the hills of the
South
Look slow at one another-
And died
For your sake.

Now that you are
Many years free,
And the echo of the Civil War
Has passed away,
And Brown himself
Has long been tried at law,
Hanged by the neck,
And buried in the ground-
Since Harpers Ferry
Is alive with ghost today,
Immortal raiders
Come again to town-

Perhaps
You will recall
John Brown.

In Honor Of John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry-1859- Books To While Away The Class Struggle By- "Strike The Blow"- The Legend Of Captain John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry- A Book Review

Click headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Captain John Brown.

STRIKE THE BLOW-THE LEGEND OF CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN

Reclaiming John Brown for the Left

BOOK REVIEW

JOHN BROWN, ABOLITIONIST, DAVID S. REYNOLDS, ALFRED A. KNOPF, NEW YORK, 2005

From fairly early in my youth I knew the name John Brown and was swept up by the romance surrounding his exploits at Harpers Ferry. For example, I knew that the great anthem of the Civil War -The Battle Hymn of the Republic- had a prior existence as a tribute to John Brown and that Union soldiers marched to that song as they headed south. I was then, however, neither familiar with the import of his exploits for the black liberation struggle nor knew much about the specifics of the politics of the various tendencies in the struggle against slavery. I certainly knew nothing then of Brown’s (and his sons) prior military exploits in the Kansas ‘proxy’ wars against the expansion of slavery. Later study filled in some of those gaps and has only strengthened my strong bond with his memory. Know this, as I reach the age at which John Brown was executed,I still retain my youthful admiration for him. In the context of the turmoil of the times he was the most courageous and audacious revolutionary in the struggle for the abolition of slavery in America. Almost 150 years after his death this writer is proud to stand in the tradition of John Brown.

That said, it is with a great deal of pleasure that I can recommend Mr. Reynolds’s book detailing the life, times and exploits of John Brown, warts and all. Published in 2005, this is an important source (including helpful end notes) for updating various controversies surrounding the John Brown saga. While I may disagree with some of Mr. Reynolds’s conclusions concerning the impact of John Brown’s exploits on later black liberation struggles and to a lesser extent his position on Brown’s impact on his contemporaries, particularly the Transcendentalists, nevertheless on the key point of the central place of John Brown in American revolutionary history there is no dispute. Furthermore, Mr. Reynolds has taken pains to provide substantial detail about the ups and downs of John Brown’s posthumous reputation.

Most importantly, he defends the memory of John Brown against all-comers-that is partisan history on behalf of the ‘losers’ of history at its best. He has reclaimed John Brown to his proper position as an icon for the left against the erroneous and outrageous efforts of modern day religious and secular terrorists to lay any claim to his memory or his work. Below I make a few comments on some of controversies surrounding John Brown developed in Mr. Reynolds’s study.

If one understands the ongoing nature, from his early youth, of John Brown’s commitment to the active struggle against slavery, the scourge of the American Republic in the first half of the 19th century, one can only conclude that he was indeed a man on a mission. As Mr. Reynolds’s points out Brown took every opportunity to fight against slavery including early service as an agent of the Underground Railroad spiriting escaped slaves northward, participation as an extreme radical in all the key anti-slavery propaganda battles of the time as well as challenging other anti-slavery elements to be more militant and in the 1850’s, arms in hand, fighting in the ‘proxy’ wars in Kansas and, of course, the culmination of his life- the raid on Harpers Ferry. Those exploits alone render absurd a very convenient myth by those who supported slavery or turned a blind eye to it and their latter-day apologists for his so-called ‘madness’. This is a political man and to these eyes a very worthy one.

For those who like their political heroes ‘pure’, frankly, it is better to look elsewhere than the life of John Brown. His personal and family life as a failed rural capitalist would hardly lead one to think that this man was to become a key historical figure in any struggle, much less the great struggle against slavery. Some of his actions in Kansas (concerning the murder of some pro-slavery elements under his direction) also cloud his image. However, when the deal went down in the late 1850’s and it was apparent for all to see that there was no other way to end slavery than a fight to the death-John Brown rose to the occasion. And did not cry about it. And did not expect others to cry about it. Call him a ‘monomaniac’ if you like but even a slight acquaintance with great historical figures shows they all have this ‘disease’- that is why they make the history books. No, the ‘madness’ argument will not do.

Whether or not John Brown knew that his military strategy for the Harper’s Ferry raid would, in the short term, be defeated is a matter of dispute. Reams of paper have been spent proving the military foolhardiness of his scheme at Harper’s Ferry. Brown’s plan, however, was essentially a combination of slave revolt modeled after the maroon experiences in Haiti, Nat Turner’s earlier Virginia slave rebellion and rural guerrilla warfare of the ‘third world’ type that we have become more familiar with since that time. 150 years later this strategy does not look so foolhardy in an America of the 1850’s that had no real standing army, fairly weak lines of communications, virtually uninhabited mountains to flee to and the North at their backs.

The execution of the plan is another matter. Brown seemingly made about every mistake in the book in that regard. However, this is missing the essential political point that militant action not continuing parliamentary maneuvering advocated by other abolitionists had become necessary. A few more fighting abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, and better propaganda work among freedman with connections to the plantations would not have hurt the chances for success at Harpers Ferry.

What is not in dispute is that Brown considered himself a true Calvinist avenging angel in the struggle against slavery and more importantly acted on that belief. In short, he was committed to bring justice to the black masses. This is why his exploits and memory stay alive after over 150 years. It is possible that if Brown did not have this, by 19th century standards as well as our own, old-fashioned Calvinist determination that he would not have been capable of militant action. Certainly other anti-slavery elements never came close to his militancy, including the key Transcendentalist movement led by Emerson and Thoreau and the Concord ‘crowd’ who supported him and kept his memory alive in hard times.

In their eyes he had the heroic manner of the Old Testament prophet. Now this animating spirit is not one that animates modern revolutionaries and so it is hard to understand the depths of his religious convictions on his actions but they were understood, if not fully appreciated, by others in those days. It is better today to look at Brown more politically through his hero (and mine, as well) Oliver Cromwell-a combination of Calvinist avenger and militant warrior. Yes, I can get behind that picture of him.

By all accounts Brown and his small integrated band of brothers fought bravely and coolly against great odds. Ten of Brown's men were killed including two of his sons. Five were captured, tried and executed, including Brown. These results are almost inevitable when one takes up a revolutionary struggle against the old order and one is not victorious. One need only think of, for example, the fate of the defenders of the Paris Commune in 1871. One can fault Brown on this or that tactical maneuver. Nevertheless he and the others bore themselves bravely in defeat. As we are all too painfully familiar there are defeats of the oppressed that lead nowhere. One thinks of the defeat of the German Revolution in the 1920’s. There other defeats that galvanize others into action. This is how Brown’s actions should be measured by history.

Militarily defeated at Harpers Ferry, Brown's political mission to destroy slavery by force of arms nevertheless continued to galvanize important elements in the North at the expense of the pacifistic non-resistant Garrisonian political program for struggle against slavery. Many writers on Brown who reduce his actions to that of a ‘madman’ still cannot believe that his road proved more appropriate to end slavery than either non-resistance or gradualism. That alone makes short shrift of such theories. Historians and others have also misinterpreted later events such as the Bolshevik strategy which led to Russian Revolution in October 1917. More recently, we saw this same incomprehension concerning the victory of the Vietnamese against overwhelming American military superiority. Needless to say, all these events continue to be revised by some historians to take the sting out of there proper political implications.

From a modern prospective Brown’s strategy for black liberation, even if the abolitionist goal he aspired to was immediately successful, reached the outer limits within the confines of capitalism. Brown’s actions were meant to make black people free. Beyond that goal he had no program except the Chatham Charter which seems to have replicated the American constitution but with racial and gender equality as a cornerstone. Unfortunately the Civil War did not provide fundamental economic and political freedom. That is still our fight. Moreover, the Civil War, the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, the reign of ‘Jim Crow’ and the subsequent waves of black migration to the cities changed the character of black oppression in the U.S. from Brown’s time. Black people are now a part of "free labor," and the key to their liberation is in the integrated fight of labor against the current one-sided class war and establishing a government of workers and their allies. Nevertheless, we can stand proudly in the revolutionary tradition of John Brown (and of his friend Frederick Douglass). We need to complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the Civil War, not by emulating Brown’s exemplary actions but to moving the multi-racial American working class to power. Finish the Civil War.

On The 60th Anniversary -IN DEFENSE OF THE CUBAN REVOLUTION

In Honor of Anniversary Of The July 26^th Movement

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman (2015)

Every leftist, hell, everybody who stands on the democratic principle that each nation has the right to self-determination should cautiously rejoice at the “defrosting” of the long-time diplomatic relations between the American imperial behemoth and the island of Cuba (and the freedom of the remaining Cuban Five in the bargain). Every leftist militant should understand that each non-capitalist like Cuba going back to the establishment of the now defunct Soviet Union has had the right (maybe until we win our socialist future the duty) to make whatever advantageous agreements they can with the capitalist world. That despite whatever disagreements we have with the political regimes ruling those non-capitalist states. That is a question for us to work out not the imperialists.

For those who have defended the Cuban Revolution since its victory in 1959 under whatever political rationale (pro-socialist, right to self-determination, or some other hands off policy) watching on black and white television the rebels entering Havana this day which commemorates the heroic if unsuccessful efforts at Moncada we should affirm our continued defense of the Cuban revolution. Oh yes, and tell the American government to give back Guantanamo while we are at it.    

COMMENTARY-BOOK REVIEW (2007)

END THE U.S. BLOCKADE!-U.S. OUT OF GUANTANAMO!

THE REAL FIDEL CASTRO, LEYCHESTER COLTMAN, YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW HAVEN, 2003

This year marks the 54th anniversary of the Cuban July 26th movement, the 48th anniversary of the victory of the Cuban Revolution and the 40th anniversary of the execution of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara by the Bolivian Army after the defeat of his guerrilla forces and his capture in godforsaken rural Bolivia. I have reviewed the life of Che elsewhere in this space (see July archives, dated July 5, 2006). The Cuban Revolution stood for my generation, the Generation of 68, and, hopefully, will for later generations as a symbol of revolutionary intransigence against United States imperialism. Thus, it is fitting to review a biography of Che’s comrade and central leader of that revolution, Fidel Castro. Obviously, it is harder to evaluate the place in history of the disabled, but still living, Fidel than the iconic Che whose place is secured in the revolutionary pantheon. The choice of this biography reflected my desire to review a recent biography. As always one must accept that most Western biographers have various degrees of hostility to the Castro regime and the Cuban Revolution and one would expect that to be particularly true of one written by a former British Ambassador to Cuba (who has since died). After reading this biography I find that it gives a reasonable account of the highlights of Fidel’s life thus far and for those not familiar with the Fidel saga a good place to start.

Let us be clear about two things. First, this writer has defended the Cuban Revolution since its inception; initially under a liberal- democratic premise of the right of nations, especially applicable to small nations pressed up against the imperialist powers, to self-determination; later under the above-mentioned premise and also that it should be defended on socialist grounds, not my idea of socialism- the Bolshevik, 1917 kind- but as an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist revolution nevertheless. That prospective continues to be this writer’s position today. Secondly, my conception of revolutionary strategy and thus of world politics has for a long time been far removed from Fidel Castro’s (and Che’s) strategy, which emphasized military victory by guerrilla forces in the countryside, rather than my position of mass action by the urban proletariat leading the rural masses. That said, despite those strategic political differences this militant can honor the Cuban Revolution as a symbol of a fight all anti-imperialist militants should defend.

The Ambassador obviously differs with my political prospective. Nevertheless he has interesting things to say about the highlights of Fidel’s career; the early student days struggling for political recognition; the initial fights against Batista; the famous but unsuccessful Moncada attack; the subsequent trial, imprisonment and then exile in Mexico; the return to Cuba and renewed fight under a central strategy of guerrilla warfare rather than urban insurrection; the triumph over Batista in 1959; the struggle against American imperialist intervention and the nationalizations of much of Cuba’s economy; the American sponsored Bay of Pigs in 1961; the rocky alliance with the Soviet Union and the Cuban Missile Crisis; the various ups and downs in the Cuban economy stemming from reliance on the monoculture of sugar; the various periods of Cuban international revolutionary support activity, including Angola and Nicaragua; the demise of the Soviet Union and the necessity of Cuba to go it alone along with its intendant hardships; and, various other events up until 2002. There is plenty of material to start with and much to analyze. As mentioned before Che’s place is secure and will be a legitimate symbol of rebellion for youth for a long time. Fidel, as a leader of state and a much more mainline Stalinist (although compared with various stodgy Soviet leaderships he must have seemed like their worst Trotsky nightmare) has a much less assured place. Alas, the old truism holds here - revolutionaries should not die in their beds

On The 60th Anniversary Of The Cuban Revolution-*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Jose Marti's "Guantanamera"

In Honor of Anniversary Of The July 26^th Movement

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman (2015)

Every leftist, hell, everybody who stands on the democratic principle that each nation has the right to self-determination should cautiously rejoice at the “defrosting” of the long-time diplomatic relations between the American imperial behemoth and the island of Cuba (and the freedom of the remaining Cuban Five in the bargain). Every leftist militant should understand that each non-capitalist like Cuba going back to the establishment of the now defunct Soviet Union has had the right (maybe until we win our socialist future the duty) to make whatever advantageous agreements they can with the capitalist world. That despite whatever disagreements we have with the political regimes ruling those non-capitalist states. That is a question for us to work out not the imperialists.

For those who have defended the Cuban Revolution since its victory in 1959 under whatever political rationale (pro-socialist, right to self-determination, or some other hands off policy) watching on black and white television the rebels entering Havana this day which commemorates the heroic if unsuccessful efforts at Moncada we should affirm our continued defense of the Cuban revolution. Oh yes, and tell the American government to give back Guantanamo while we are at it.    

Click on the title to link to a YouTube film clip of Pete Seeger performing Guantanamera.





In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.


Markin comment:

As has been appropriate on this date for over one half a century- Defend The Cuban Revolution! Free The Cuban Five!

GUANTANAMERA

Original music by Jose Fernandez Diaz
Music adaptation by Pete Seeger & Julian Orbon
Lyric adaptation by Julian Orbon, based on a poem by Jose Marti

Yo soy un hombre sincero
De donde crecen las palmas
Yo soy un hombre sincero
De donde crecen las palmas
Y antes de morirme quiero
Echar mis versos del alma

Chorus:
Guantanamera
Guajira Guantanamera
Guantanamera
Guajira Guantanamera

Mi verso es de un verde claro
Y de un carmin encendido
Mi verso es de un verde claro
Y de un carmin encendido
Mi verso es un ciervo herido
Que busca en el monte amparo

Chorus

I am a truthful man from this land of palm trees
Before dying I want to share these poems of my soul
My verses are light green
But they are also flaming red

(the next verse says,)
I cultivate a rose in June and in January
For the sincere friend who gives me his hand
And for the cruel one who would tear out this
heart with which I live
I do not cultivate thistles nor nettles
I cultivate a white rose

Cultivo la rosa blanca
En junio como en enero
Qultivo la rosa blanca
En junio como en enero
Para el amigo sincero
Que me da su mano franca

Chorus

Y para el cruel que me arranca
El corazon con que vivo
Y para el cruel que me arranca
El corazon con que vivo
Cardo ni ortiga cultivo
Cultivo la rosa blanca

Chorus

Con los pobres de la tierra
Quiero yo mi suerte echar
Con los pobres de la tierra
Quiero yo mi suerte echar
El arroyo de la sierra
Me complace mas que el mar

Chorus

©1963,1965 (Renewed) Fall River Music, Inc (BMI)
All Rights Reserved.

Black Lives Matter-The Late Class-War Prisoner Mondo we Langa's -"When It Gets To This Point"

Black Lives Matter-The Late Class-War Prisoner  Mondo we Langa's -"When It Gets To This Point" Workers Vanguard No. 1086	25 March 2016

“When It Gets to This Point”

by Mondo we Langa

Michael Brown?
I had never heard of him
had never heard of anything he’d done
before the news of his death came
whoever he might have become
whatever he might have achieved
had he lived longer
not been riddled lifeless by
bullets from Darren Wilson’s gun
and crumpled on the pavement of a ferguson street
for more than four hours in
the heat of that august day
and before
I’d never heard of Trayvon Martin
had known nothing of who he was
until I learned of his demise
and cause of death
a bullet to the chest
George Zimmerman, the shooter
a badge-less, pretend police
with a pistol
and fear of the darkness
Trayvon’s darkness
and after a while
the pictures, the names,
the circumstances
run together
like so much colored laundry in the wash
that bleeds on whites

was it Eric Garner or Tamir Rice
who was twelve but seen as twenty
Hulk Hogan or The Hulk
with demonic eyes it was said
who shrank the cop in ferguson
into a five-year-old who
had to shoot
just had to shoot
and John Crawford the third
in a walmart store aisle
and air rifle in his hands he’d pick up
from the shelf
and held in the open
in an open-carry state
was it John or someone else
killed supposedly by mistake
in a dark stairwell
I know Akai Gurley fell
I hadn’t heard of him before
nor of Amadou Diallo or Sean Bell
prior to their killings
which of these two took slugs in the greater number
I don’t recall
my mind is too encumbered
with the names
of so many more before and since

the frequent news reports of
non-arrests, non-indictments,
non-true bills
and duplicitous presentations by “experts in the field”
the consultants put out front
to explain away
that which is so often plain as day
to coax and convince us that we’re the ones
who can’t see straight and
can’t hear clearly
who are the ones replacing facts with spin
to mislead and mystify
as the beatings and the chokings and shootings
of our boys and men
by these wrong arms of the law
proceed in orderly fashion
before the sometimes sad
sometimes angry faces of
our uncertain
our hesitant
disbelief.

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program- Two- A Job Of One’s Own

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program- Two- A Job Of One’s Own  

Two- A Job Of One’s Own  

Leon Coleman was worried, worried sick, when he heard rumors that due to the world oil situation, whatever that was, although as a practical matter he knew that meant higher gas prices at the pump and more shell out for ways to get around, get around in cars, the main way, including him, people got around in America.  The reason that Leon Coleman was worried, and rightly so, was that the world oil situation would determine whether he had a job or not, at least a good-paying union wage job or not. Whether people would still buy new cars every few years. See Leon worked the line, the assembly line, over at Dodge Main in Detroit (really Hamtramck, over in Polack town) yes, that famous Dodge Main from a few years back, around 1971, when some brothers, some righteous black brothers mainly, closed the place down over some cracker foreman’s racist slurs and stuff like hiring brothers in the skilled trades jobs to get them the hell off of the damn assembly line. And he had reason to worry as well because he had just come off of a short lay-off  about eight months back and since he was as they say “last hired”  (having only worked at the plant a couple of years altogether) he would again be among the “first fired.” An old story, an old black story as far as he knew but he didn’t have anything in particular to back that view up since most of his people had  come north from Mississippi a while back and they had always had plenty, too plenty, of back-breaking hot sun work to do on some Mister’s plantation. At least he never had to suffer that fate, tough as the line was, tough as it was when they kept speeding the damn thing up.  

All Leon Coleman knew was it was tough to be a black man, a young black man, trying to make something of himself. Maybe just being a man was tough, especially a man with family and a woman with wanting habits, he wouldn’t argue that, but the way the deal went down when things went wrong, anything from the world oil situation to get kicked off the job first a black man had a burden. Yah, the damn thing was stacked against a black man. Hell, he could understand why those brothers said enough a few years back (although as a “new hire” right after that time he was told to, and did, stay clear of any revolutionary brother stuff) and argued that the way workers were hired and fired (okay, laid-off but it felt like being fired) had to be changed, that black men (and women too since they were starting to hire more woman for some quota thing) should not have to be the “fall guy.” And just that minute he could see where they were right back then, although little good it would do him.       

Little good too it would do him with wifey, Alberta, sweet Alberta with her child-wanting ways, harping on him about starting a family. Jesus, lord. As he thought about what loomed ahead he thought back to the days before he got his first serious job at the auto plant (before then for real jobs as a teenager he had worked in a low-rent car wash and flipped a few burgers at different places but mainly he didn’t work) when he was “running the streets” with his corner boys, stealing stuff, midnight stealing stuff, a couple of armed robberies (never picked up for) and at the end, dealing dope (and sniffing to, bad stuff, dealing and sniffing too, because you take too many chances when you are dope-addled), dealing dope to high heaven (and picking up a couple of arrests in the pursuit). It was the last arrest, the last arrest when they were going to step him off for a few years at state prison that his mother (father, Leon too, long gone, a Mississippi rolling stone, whereabouts unknown) stepped in, made some connection with a union rep relative to get the auto job, made a deal with the judge, and he walked, as long as he kept clean. And he had, and Alberta, whatever her wanting ways, had made sure of that, after they had met at some whiskey joint out on Six Mile Road. So he harnessed himself to the work, kept straight during that lay-off time and grabbed all the overtime he could when he got back. He just wished it wasn’t so tough being a black man, a young black man, and that he had a job that he could call his own …                

The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:^[39][40]



1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.



2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.



3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.



4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.



5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.



We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.



6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.



We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.



7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.



8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.



9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.



We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.



10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.



When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.



We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.