For Workers Revolution in Indonesia! Independence for West Papua! (Parts 1 &2 ) We reprint below the first part of an article from Australasian Spartacist No. 236 (Summer 2018/19), newspaper of the Spartacist League of Australia, section of the International Communist League.

Workers Vanguard No. 1147	18 January 2019

For Workers Revolution in Indonesia!

Independence for West Papua!

(Part One)

We reprint below the first part of an article from Australasian Spartacist No. 236 (Summer 2018/19), newspaper of the Spartacist League of Australia, section of the International Communist League.

Next year [2019] marks 50 years since the 1969 “Act of Free Choice” that formalised West Papua’s incorporation into Indonesia. The former Dutch colonial rulers had ceded control seven years earlier. Under this cynically named Act, just over 1,000 Papuan leaders were selected by the Indonesian regime and threatened and coerced into voting unanimously in favour of integration. The rigged outcome was rubber-stamped by the United Nations, with Australia playing a leading role in having it rammed through. Faced with the indigenous population’s just strivings for self-determination, the Indonesian regime has carried out a brutal military occupation from the outset.

Between 1963 and 1969, it is estimated that as many as 30,000 Papuans were killed by the Indonesian military (TNI), with many more tortured and terrorised. Today, the estimated number of Papuans slaughtered ranges from 100,000 to 500,000. Simply raising the Morning Star flag, the symbol of West Papuan independence, is a crime that carries a 15-year jail sentence or worse. The 1998 Biak massacre is but one example of the countless atrocities carried out by the Indonesian state. In a coordinated action, Indonesian police, navy and military forces attacked, tortured, sexually abused and killed some 150 people following pro-independence gatherings. Mutilated bodies dumped at sea washed up on shore for days afterwards. Twenty years on, the Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, seeks to lull the populace with talk of giving “special attention to West Papua” while overseeing the continued military suppression of Papuan separatism. According to an article in the Asia Times (13 March), 8,000 Papuan independence activists have been imprisoned in the last two years.

Such repression is carried out with the assistance of Australian and other imperialist forces [including the U.S.], who help train and supply the ruthless Kopassus special forces killers and the “anti-terror” squad known as Detachment 88 linked to the widespread torture and extra-judicial killings in West Papua. One Papuan activist summed up the Australian government’s role: “You give money for Indonesia to kill people in West Papua—you are the perpetrators of violence in West Papua” (ABC News online, 29 August 2012). We oppose all military ties between the Australian imperialists and the Indonesian regime.

With its vast wealth of natural resources, West Papua is a place of brutal exploitation where largely tribal subsistence farmers have been driven off their land without compensation. West Papua’s per capita GDP is more than 40 percent above the Indonesian average, yet the poverty rate among the indigenous population is nearly triple the country’s average. The region has the highest infant, child and maternal mortality rates in Indonesia as well as the worst literacy rates. A study in 2013 reported the occurrence of HIV/AIDS was almost 20 times the national average.

Despite dire hardship and the ferocious repression meted out against men, women and children, the Melanesian Papuans have been fighting tenaciously for decades for their independence, defiantly protesting, convening independence congresses, and waging a protracted low-level guerrilla insurgency by the armed wing of the Free Papua Movement (OPM), the National Liberation Army of West Papua. The Papuans’ struggle for independence must be championed by workers around the world, including in Australia. As a Leninist tribune of the people, we oppose the hideous oppression of indigenous Melanesians and link that opposition to a program for socialist revolution. We stand for the military defence of the independence fighters against the Indonesian military, while giving no political support to bourgeois nationalist forces. We demand: Indonesian troops out! Australia hands off! Independence for West Papua!

We fight for a workers and peasants government centred on the indigenous Melanesians. However, our support for Papuan independence is not contingent upon socialist revolution. As Marxists, we recognise that the struggle for the rights of oppressed nations can be a motor force for revolution. Our stand for West Papuan independence is part of our perspective for socialist revolution in the Indonesian prison house of peoples. Indonesia’s multinational population, brought together under colonial rule, is predominantly Muslim. Today, with the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, religious minorities and the small ethnic Chinese population are targets for persecution. From Aceh to West Papua, oppressed national minorities have struggled against the stranglehold of the Javanese-chauvinist bourgeoisie and its military machine.

In suppressing the struggles of workers and the myriad oppressed minorities, the Indonesian bourgeoisie act as compradors for the Australian, U.S. and other imperialists. Enforcing capitalist stability, they ensure the imperialists’ continued plunder of the archipelago’s rich natural resources and super-exploitation of its toiling masses. This is sharply seen in West Papua with the currently majority U.S.-owned Freeport-McMoRan Grasberg mine. One of the world’s largest gold and copper mines, it is Indonesia’s largest taxpayer. While the Indonesian capitalists, corrupt governmental bodies and TNI all take their cut of the profits, the mining conglomerates take the lion’s share under the protection of the imperialist-funded military.

Reasserting Leninism on the National Question

It is over 30 years since we have raised the correct demand for West Papuan independence in our Trotskyist press (see “Australia’s Indonesia Jitters,” ASp No. 109, Summer 1984/85). While we have opposed the murderous Indonesian military, demanding the TNI get out and Australian imperialism keep its bloody hands off, the call for independence for West Papua as for East Timor was dropped following the publication of a letter in ASp No. 110 (March/April 1985). Titled “East Timor/West Papua: The National Question,” and published without reply, the letter conflated political independence and national emancipation. In doing so, the conclusion was that, as these were largely tribal, pre-national societies, their independence could only be achieved by “breaking the grip of imperialism through region-wide socialist revolution.”

The premise of the letter was consistent with an anti-Leninist assimilationist framework for oppressed nations in multinational states then adhered to by the International Communist League (ICL). By concluding that these societies would be incapable of forging independent states under capitalism this letter served to denigrate the just fight of the East Timorese and West Papuans for national liberation. Despite the talk of “socialist revolution,” this attitude could only be to the benefit of the brutal Indonesian regime and its imperialist overlords.

As Lenin wrote in 1916:

“It would be no less mistaken to delete any of the points of the democratic programme, for example, the point of self-determination of nations, on the ground that it is ‘infeasible,’ or that it is ‘illusory’ under capitalism….

“…all the fundamental demands of political democracy are ‘possible of achievement’ under imperialism, only in an incomplete, in a mutilated form and as a rare exception (for example, the secession of Norway from Sweden in 1905). The demand for the immediate liberation of the colonies, as advanced by all revolutionary Social-Democrats, is also ‘impossible of achievement’ under capitalism without a series of revolutions. This does not imply, however, that Social-Democracy must refrain from conducting an immediate and most determined struggle for all these demands—to refrain would merely be to the advantage of the bourgeoisie and reaction.”

— The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (January-February 1916)

While it is true that national emancipation cannot be won short of socialist revolution, it is false that independence cannot be achieved under capitalism.

Through an internal political fight in the mid-1990s, with key contributions from international cadre, the SL/A re-established the call for independence for East Timor. This was a qualitative step forward in taking a Leninist approach to the national question in Indonesia. It also put us in good stead when the chauvinist campaign for Australian troops to East Timor erupted in 1999 in response to the terror unleashed by TNI-sponsored pro-Indonesian death squads following the vote for independence. The SL/A was almost alone on the left in opposing the pro-imperialist campaign. Demanding independence for East Timor, we motivated the need for workers revolution in both Australia and Indonesia (see “Australian/UN Imperialist Troops Out of East Timor,” ASp No. 170, Autumn 2000).

While reinstating the call for East Timor’s independence, our internal fight did not draw broader programmatic conclusions and the question of West Papua was left untouched. In 2012, an attempt by the SL/A to restore the demand for independence was shelved following international discussion. The question was finally put on a Leninist foundation in the context of our recent international fight against adaptation to great power chauvinism and the concomitant longstanding perversion of Leninism on the national question. The outcome of this internal fight was codified at the Seventh International Conference of the ICL (see Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 65, Summer 2017).

An SL/A motion re-establishing the call for independence for West Papua was endorsed by the 2017 International Conference. Pointing to the convulsive 2011 Grasberg miners’ strike that united Melanesian and non-Melanesian workers in struggle, and galvanised support from West Papuan independence fighters, the motion concluded, “This [strike] illustrates our perspective of linking the emancipation of the deeply exploited working class of the archipelago with the struggles of its minority peoples, and the necessity of linking the fight for workers revolution in Indonesia with the fight for workers revolution in the advanced imperialist countries.”

West Papua and Dutch Colonialism

West Papua was one of three colonies carved out by the imperialists on the island of New Guinea in the 19th century. The eastern half of the island was divided between Germany and Britain. In 1906 Australia took over administration of the British colony and then seized the German colony with the outbreak of the first imperialist world war. The League of Nations (precursor to the UN) granted “trusteeship” to Australia in 1920. Thus Australia got its very own colony as a result of World War I. With little prospect for major profits until mining opened up around the 1960s, Australia developed little infrastructure and ran a grotesquely racist, paternalistic colonial regime. Renamed Papua New Guinea (PNG), the country gained independence in 1975 and became a neo-colony of Australian imperialism.

The western half of New Guinea, now West Papua, was claimed by the Netherlands and known as Dutch New Guinea. It became part of the lucrative Netherlands East Indies that extended across the islands of the Indonesian archipelago. The indigenous Melanesian people, however, are distinct from the largely Austronesian ethnic groups of Indonesia. Made up of hundreds of ethnolinguistic groups, the Melanesians are more closely linked to the populations of Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Vanuatu and Kanaky (New Caledonia).

The Dutch government had little interest in developing Dutch New Guinea and little impact. Far greater inroads were made by Dutch and German missionaries, such that today most Papuans identify as Christian. Government posts established around 1900 served mainly to assert territorial claims against the British, Germans and Americans. The almost impenetrable highlands remained largely unexplored until the Second World War. One thing the Dutch did establish in the inhospitable jungles of West Papua was the notorious disease-ridden Tanah Merah internment camp, built to hold Indonesian nationalist and Communist anti-colonial militants. Opened in 1927, the first prisoners, numbering more than 2,000, were survivors of two abortive uprisings in 1926-27 which were led by the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and ruthlessly crushed by the Dutch.

During World War II, with the advance of the Japanese army into the Netherlands East Indies in 1942, the Dutch colonial administration fled to Australia. After three centuries of being under the boot of the Dutch, many Indonesians initially welcomed the Japanese imperialists as a liberating force. This illusion was soon shattered by the brutality of the new occupying power. In Dutch New Guinea, Papuans reportedly aided the Allied imperialist forces. Contrary to Australian nationalist mythology, in neighbouring PNG many inhabitants had little choice. Dragooned into service, those who rebelled or simply wanted to leave were kept by force. The Second World War in the Pacific, as in Europe, was an imperialist war between rival powers for markets and colonies. Australia’s “war effort” was fuelled by vile anti-Japanese racism. Trotskyists fought for revolutionary defeatism of the imperialist combatants while standing for the unconditional military defence of the Soviet Union, a degenerated workers state, and for the liberation of the colonies.

By mid-1944, U.S.-led forces under General MacArthur had defeated the Japanese military in western New Guinea and the Dutch oppressors returned to the region. However the Japanese remained in control of Java and other islands until their surrender in August 1945, whereupon the Indonesian nationalists declared independence. When the Dutch subsequently attempted to reassert control, they were met with determined, widespread resistance by independence fighters. This struggle was supported by unions in India, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere, including Holland. Workers successfully fought together to black ban [refuse to handle] Dutch shipping to Indonesia, including preventing the transport of military equipment and personnel. Known as the Black Armada, these international proletarian solidarity actions played a vital role in stopping the Dutch from recolonising Indonesia, helping to open the way for independence.

Indonesian Nationalists Demand West Papua

It took four years of fierce armed struggle before the Dutch finally conceded Indonesian independence in late 1949. However, the Dutch refused to relinquish their New Guinea province to the new Indonesian bourgeois-nationalist regime, who claimed the territory as part of the old colonial Dutch East Indies. The Dutch hoped to turn the province into a profitable neo-colony. (The discovery of a huge oil field was kept under wraps.) Making a show of having broken from the old forms of colonialism, they began to prepare the Papuan population for independence. West Papuans welcomed the moves to increased self-governance and the prospect of sovereignty.

Ongoing negotiations over West Papua between the Dutch and Indonesians completely broke down in 1952. By the following year, the dispute was the central political issue in Indonesia, with all parties, including the PKI, backing President Sukarno’s strident determination to bring West Papua under Indonesian control. During the anti-colonial struggle, Dutch New Guinea had been promoted as an intrinsic part of the future nation— “Indonesia free—from Sabang to Merauke” was a popular slogan. It was also woven into the folklore of the independence struggle as many Indonesian martyrs had been interned and had died at the Tanah Merah prison camp. The capitalist state that emerged with independence was dominated by the Javanese majority, whose political representatives opposed autonomy or independence for the various peoples of the former Dutch colony.

Over the next decade, Sukarno used the continuing Dutch administration of West Papua to whip up nationalism and hold together the multitude of competing ethnic, religious and political groups within Indonesia. His “anti-colonial” rhetoric demanding Indonesian sovereignty over West Papua helped to harness potential political rivals to his leadership and divert attention from deteriorating economic conditions, including skyrocketing inflation. By 1957, growing bitterness towards the Javanese-centred government erupted in open revolt. Outer islands which were the major wealth producers (from oil, rubber, tin and copra) resented that the greater share of revenue went to the main, most populous island of Java.

In 1957-58, rebellions in Sumatra and Sulawesi, led by disgruntled regional army commanders in collusion with the imperialists, attempted to break from Jakarta. Faced with insurrections and economic chaos, Sukarno imposed a “State of War and Siege” and set about crushing the revolts. This was followed by a campaign whipping up a frenzy against the Dutch over West Papua and leading to the nationalisation of Dutch-owned companies. Sukarno also proclaimed the basis of government to be “Nasakom,” the union of nationalist, religious and communist organisations (nasionalisme-agama-komunisme). Sukarno’s bloc with the PKI was an attempt to both prop up his fragile bonapartist regime and to co-opt the Communists. By then the PKI had become the largest Communist Party in the capitalist world, with three million members, and over fifteen million in affiliated unions and peasant, women’s and other associations.

Imperialist Cold War Machinations

In the 1950s, the imperialists’ anti-Communist Cold War against the Soviet Union was in full swing. While the United States had emerged from World War II as the preeminent imperialist power, the Soviet Union had also gained enormous international prestige through its leading role in defeating Nazi Germany. U.S. imperialism and its Australian junior ally watched developments in Indonesia with growing concern. Already revolutionary upheavals in the rest of Asia had seen peasant-based guerrilla armies in China and North Korea sweep away capitalist rule, consolidating bureaucratically deformed workers states modelled on the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. Communist-led forces in Vietnam had defeated the French colonialists at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and were now fighting against a U.S.-backed puppet regime in the South. Communist-led insurgencies had erupted in Burma (Myanmar), Malaya and elsewhere. Capitalist Indonesia’s professed “non-alignment” with either Washington or Moscow and, above all, the growth of the PKI was of major concern to the imperialists, who wanted to ensure that the toiling masses of Indonesia did not take the Communist road. To that end, they began developing closer ties with the Indonesian military, fostering anti-communist elements within the officer corps.

By the early 1960s, escalating tension over control of West Papua led the Indonesians and Dutch imperialists to the brink of war. Sukarno played the two camps of the Cold War off against each other, anticipating that the substantial military aid received from the Soviets would force Washington’s intervention into the dispute over West Papua. In 1961, newly elected U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, spearheaded a drive to stop Sukarno moving closer to the Soviet Union by pressuring the Dutch to abandon their claim on West Papua. The Dutch finally ceded West Papua to Indonesia in a 1962 “New York Agreement” overseen by Washington. Jakarta was “obligated” under the agreement to conduct a referendum on self-determination no later than 1969. However, once in control, the Indonesian military acted to stamp out any political dissent.

By 1967, General Suharto and his military dictatorship had risen to power in Indonesia through the slaughter of over a million Communists, workers, peasants and ethnic Chinese. One of the most savage massacres in modern history, the white terror that raged throughout the archipelago from late 1965 through early 1966 was perpetrated by an alliance between the army and Islamic fanatics mobilised in a holy war against Communism with the direct support of the imperialists. The killings were so ferocious that rivers were choked with human corpses. Hundreds of thousands more were arrested and thousands interned for years, including the renowned anti-colonial novelist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Workers Vanguard No. 1148	8 February 2019

For Workers Revolution in Indonesia!

Independence for West Papua!

(Part Two)

We reprint below the second part of an article from Australasian Spartacist No. 236 (Summer 2018/19), newspaper of the Spartacist League of Australia, section of the International Communist League. Part One appeared in Workers Vanguard No. 1147 (15 January).

The bloody slaughter of 1965-66 was the direct product of the support by the PKI [Communist Party of Indonesia], as well as their Stalinist mentors in Moscow and Beijing, to the bourgeois government of Sukarno. Far from championing national struggles as a motor force for proletarian revolution, the PKI helped to channel the Indonesian masses’ deep bitterness at colonialism into support for bourgeois nationalism. After Sukarno’s forces crushed its 1948 revolt in the city of Madiun, the PKI gained “respectability” and re-established its prominence as a political party by grotesquely embracing Indonesia’s chauvinist claim over West Papua.

In line with Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong’s “bloc of four classes” doctrine and the Stalinist quest for “peaceful coexistence” with “progressive, non-aligned” capitalist “friends,” the PKI helped to prop up capitalist Indonesia, maintaining its alliance with the weak bourgeoisie by restraining the working class and containing class struggle. Adhering to Sukarno’s “Nasakom” popular front, the party leadership preached “joint unity” with Sukarno and his Indonesian National Party to forge a “united national front, including the national bourgeoisie,” which would carry out “not socialist but democratic reforms” (see “Lessons of Indonesia 1965,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 55, Autumn 1999).

This treacherous class-collaborationist program stands in stark contrast to the revolutionary internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party in Russia. In many respects, Indonesia then, as today, resembled tsarist Russia, albeit the latter was the weakest link in the imperialist chain. Russia was a multinational state with a narrowly based ruling class, subservient to and dependent on imperialist countries, and with enormous social contradictions between a modern industrial sector and a countryside stamped in pre-capitalist times. The perspective for resolving the fundamental democratic questions posed by such combined and uneven development is provided by the theory of permanent revolution, developed by Leon Trotsky and vindicated by the victory of the 1917 Russian Revolution. As Trotsky wrote:

“With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.”

— The Permanent Revolution (1929)

If it is not to be strangled by backwardness and imperialist intervention, the social overturn must be linked to the fight for workers rule in the advanced capitalist countries, like Australia.

Lenin forged the Bolshevik Party in the struggle against Great Russian chauvinism and for national liberation struggles in the tsarist prison house of peoples. The Bolsheviks’ championing of the democratic right of self-determination resonated amongst the masses of the oppressed nations under tsarism. As Trotsky put it in his powerful History of the Russian Revolution (1932), “the national current, like the agrarian, was pouring into the channel of the October revolution.” Just as the Bolsheviks’ fight for the rights of oppressed nationalities was key to the victory of the 1917 October Revolution, so too championing the national rights of the Melanesian Papuans and other oppressed nationalities will be key to uniting the workers and peasants across the archipelago, including the Javanese masses, in the struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of Indonesian capitalism.

The regime issuing from the October Revolution provides a model for what this might look like. In November 1917, the new Soviet government issued the “Declaration of Rights of the Peoples of Russia” setting forth the equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia, the right of self-determination up to secession and the formation of a separate state, abolition of all national and religious privileges, and the free development of all national and ethnic groups inhabiting Russia.

The Russian Revolution was also internationalist in character, the first step on the road to world socialist revolution. It opened the possibility for extension to Europe. However, with the failure of revolutionary opportunities in Europe, most particularly in Germany, the economic backwardness and isolation of the Soviet workers state led to the rise of a nationalist, bureaucratic caste that seized political power from the working class in a political counterrevolution headed by Stalin in 1923-24. With the consolidation of its rule, and the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet workers state, the revolutionary, internationalist program of the Bolsheviks was replaced with the Stalinist dogma of “socialism in one country” and the illusory pursuit of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. Defending the remaining gains of the revolution, not least the collectivised property forms, Trotskyists stood for the unconditional military defence of the Soviet Union against imperialist attack and internal capitalist counterrevolution while fighting for a political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and return to the road of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks.

West Papua: “New Order” Prize for 1965 Massacre

U.S., British and Australian imperialism were up to their necks in the blood of the Indonesian people in 1965-66. From the U.S. embassy in Jakarta lists that had been compiled of some 5,000 Communist Party members and sympathisers were passed on to the Indonesian Foreign Ministry to aid the massacres. Radio Australia operating in Indonesia broadcast pro-army propaganda during the killings, urged on by Australia’s ambassador to Indonesia, who boasted it was “excellent propaganda and of assistance to the anti-PKI forces.” In the wake of the massacres, Australia’s prime minister, Harold Holt, gloated to a gathering of the Australian-American Association in New York, “With 500,000 to 1 million Communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place” (New York Times, 6 July 1966).

Once in power, Suharto’s “New Order” regime reopened Indonesia to foreign capital, and soon many American and European companies had regained control of mines, estates and other enterprises nationalised under Sukarno. The Suharto regime also began selling off West Papua’s resources for imperialist exploitation. In 1967 they signed a contract with the U.S.-based Freeport Sulphur company to begin mining gold and copper at Mt. Ertsberg. In 1968, a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate for Indonesia smugly stated, “The prospects for private foreign investment in extractive industries are fairly good….”

The imperialists’ endorsement of the 1969 “Act of Free Choice” in West Papua was a reward for services rendered by Suharto’s military in crushing the Indonesian Communists. The military commander in West Papua at the time was the violently anti-Communist CIA-linked Sarwo Edhie, who (having returned from military training in Australia) commanded the paramilitary forces dispatched in 1965 to Central Java to “clean up” and restore order.

For 32 years, Suharto’s blood-drenched military regime ruled Indonesia with an iron fist. While Suharto has long gone, Jakarta continues to ride roughshod over the many different peoples across the archipelago. In West Papua, successive regimes have enforced the ongoing military occupation, with at least 15,000 troops stationed there in 2011. There are over 40 administrative regencies across the territory, each with its own police station and military base. There are reportedly plans to increase the number by 70 percent. As one activist put it, “Special forces and intelligence personnel are stationed in virtually every village.” The military in West Papua have vested interests in suppressing dissent. Only 25 percent of their budget comes from the central government with the rest made up from fees for services, including providing security at businesses and facilities such as the Grasberg mine.

Seeking to “divide and conquer” West Papua, in 2003 Jakarta split the territory into two provinces, called “West Papua” and “Papua.” Jakarta also implemented “special autonomy” in a futile attempt to weaken the independence movement but this has only led to greater discontent.

From the beginning, Jakarta has pursued conscious policies designed to assimilate West Papua into the Malayic culture of Indonesia and extinguish the Melanesian Papuan identity with its different languages, religion, social customs and organisation, and agricultural practices. To this end, Jakarta has for decades used its government-sponsored transmigration program to relocate many thousands of people from Java and other islands to West Papua. Significant self-financed transmigration has also occurred over the last decades, particularly from eastern provinces such as Sulawesi and Maluku. Alongside creating a non-Papuan workforce, transmigration has also served “security” objectives, with settlements adjacent to PNG [Papua New Guinea], along with the depopulation of local villages, acting to restrict the cross-border movements of Papuan activists. Reportedly, many transmigrants in these areas are former military personnel. While President Widodo stated in mid-2015 that the transmigration program to West Papua would end, it continues to be encouraged. As one government minister earlier declared, “There is still a lot of land,” (Sydney Morning Herald, 5 February 2015).

Following successive waves of settlers, by 2010 the population in West Papua had grown to 3.6 million and was fairly evenly divided between Papuans and non-Papuans. More recent population projections calculate that Papuans may now have become a minority within their own country. However, they continue to occupy the largest geographical area, almost exclusively in the highlands. In the accessible coastal areas, where new settlers predominate, there is a vast mix of ethnicities.

As part of the fight to break the hold of the Indonesian ruling class, Marxists would seek to mobilise the combative Indonesian workers, including those in West Papua, to champion the struggle of the indigenous population for independence. In an independent West Papua, revolutionaries would recognise the right of settlers to remain in the land they have made home. Among those who have moved to West Papua are minorities fleeing religious and ethnic persecution. Many of these people have little reason for allegiance to the Javanese-chauvinist regime in Jakarta and may welcome independence from Indonesia.

For Workers Revolution in Indonesia

In September 2017, exiled Papuan independence leader, Benny Wenda, presented the United Nations “decolonisation committee” with a petition calling for an internationally supervised referendum for self-determination. The West Papuan People’s Petition had been signed by 1.8 million West Papuans, including reportedly 70 percent of all Papuans and more than 96,000 settlers. The committee chairman predictably refused to consider the petition, declaring his support for Indonesia’s territorial integrity. The campaign then sought to appeal to the UN General Assembly, which met in September/October this year. In the lead-up, independence activists in West Papua organised protests seeking to highlight the plight of West Papuans. These were met with a crackdown by security forces. For over a week security forces systematically arrested, tortured, shot at and killed West Papuans accused of supporting self-determination.

Also appealing to the UN to oversee a new independence referendum is the “Westminster Declaration” of the International Parliamentarians for West Papua, a group co-founded by British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, renowned for opposingScottish independence from his own country. The Declaration has been signed by an array of capitalist politicians internationally. West Papua is a cause célèbre for bourgeois liberals, including the capitalist Greens in this country. These “friends of West Papua” would keep Papuans begging to the same United Nations that oversaw the outrageous 1969 “Act of Free Choice” in the first place. The UN is a den of imperialist thieves, their victims and intended victims. Its interests lie in upholding the grinding oppression of the West Papuans under the heel of the Indonesian regime and their imperialist masters. The natural ally of the oppressed Papuan peoples is the working class of Indonesia and internationally.

Like the Bolsheviks, we base our revolutionary program on the political independence of the workers movement. We fight to forge Leninist-Trotskyist parties, tribunes of the people, that instil in the working class irreconcilable hostility to all the capitalist exploiters and the consciousness of its historic tasks. Led by such a revolutionary workers party, and at the head of all the oppressed, the working class must sweep away the entire capitalist system through socialist revolution, and establish a workers state based on collectivised industry and serving the needs of all.

In 2013, after three West Papuan activists sought refuge in the Australian consulate in Bali, calling for the release of Papuan political prisoners incarcerated by the Indonesian regime, the then prime minister, Tony Abbott, warned that Australia would not “give people a platform to grandstand against Indonesia.” As part of their role in maintaining stability for Australian imperialist profit-making in the region, both Liberal/National Coalition and Labor Party administrations have long defended the territorial integrity of Indonesia. For Australia, backing the Indonesian regime’s oppression in West Papua also serves its interest in keeping unrest from spilling over the border and igniting struggles in its poverty-stricken PNG neo-colony.

Australia has become increasingly jittery about Chinese influence in the region and in PNG in particular. PNG has pushed for Australia to help fund a doubling of its defence force, with the defence chief declaring that China was ready to step in if rebuffed. Recently Australia brokered a deal with PNG (since joined by the U.S.) to redevelop the Lombrum Naval Base on Manus Island, where Australia long maintained a notorious offshore refugee detention camp.

Along with its extensive national resources and low-wage labour, Indonesia is of great geo-strategic importance as it sits astride the gate to the Pacific Rim. It forms the southern land mass of the narrow Strait of Malacca through which much of China’s fuel imports are carried from the Middle East. Ever since the 1949 Revolution swept away capitalist rule in China, the imperialists have sought to destroy the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state by one means or another, in the pursuit of unhindered imperialist exploitation. Today, as part of the U.S.-led military encirclement of China, U.S. and Australian imperialism have been strengthening their military ties with Jakarta.

It is in the interests of the world’s working class and oppressed to defend the Chinese deformed workers state against imperialist attack and internal capitalist counterrevolution. A political revolution is necessary in China to sweep away the bureaucratic, nationalist Stalinist regime, which appeases the imperialists, and to establish a government based on genuine workers councils and a revolutionary internationalist program.

In Indonesia, the fight to emancipate the deeply exploited working class is bound up with the struggles of the oppressed minority peoples, of women and the rural poor. Only socialist revolution establishing the dictatorship of the workers, leaning on the poor peasantry, can satisfy the basic needs of the masses: freedom from imperialist subjugation, agrarian revolution, alleviation of poverty, social equality for women and emancipation for oppressed national minorities. This struggle is necessarily internationalist in its outlook. For workers to succeed in this fight requires the building of a multiethnic revolutionary internationalist workers party—an Indonesian section of a reforged Fourth International. Workers in Australia also have a role to play, not simply by standing in class solidarity with the struggles of their Indonesian class brothers and sisters but by forging a Trotskyist party in this country to lead the necessary fight to sweep away the racist Australia ruling class through socialist revolution and establish a workers republic of Australia, part of a socialist Asia.

Nothing to Lose But Our Chains Join the Fight for a Socialist Future! We print below a speech, abridged and edited for publication, by Spartacist League speaker Kelly Glass at the Partisan Defense Committee’s 33rd annual Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners in New York City on January 26.

Workers Vanguard No. 1148	8 February 2019

Nothing to Lose But Our Chains

Join the Fight for a Socialist Future!

We print below a speech, abridged and edited for publication, by Spartacist League speaker Kelly Glass at the Partisan Defense Committee’s 33rd annual Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners in New York City on January 26.

Over the last month of the government shutdown, the media would have you believe that there is a major divide between the two capitalist parties. Trump calls to “Make America Great Again,” a return to the days when black people and women supposedly knew their place, and reds were witchhunted. Meanwhile, the Democrats peddle the lie that America is already great…“Make America America again.” America’s true legacy is the genocide of the Native Americans and slavery, class exploitation and imperialism. Its legacy is stealing about half of Mexico’s territory, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Haymarket Massacre, the Japanese American internment camps, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the anti-Soviet Cold War, years of slaughtering Vietnamese workers and peasants, wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen…I could go on.

The ruling class of this country is united when it comes to plundering the oppressed peoples of the world, even if they have different ideas about how to carry out their occupations, drone attacks and domination of the Near East and beyond. If anything, the Democrats are the party of war. They are often more hawkish and more dangerous because they fool the masses into thinking this is about defending democracy and so-called human rights. When Trump announced that he was pulling U.S. troops out of Syria, Democrats raised a stink. And the Democrats, from the Clintons to Bernie Sanders, are among the most vocal promoters of the anti-China trade war and military provocations. Trump’s counterrevolutionary drive against the Chinese deformed workers state is just a continuation of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia.” The imperialists hate that they don’t have free rein, and want to turn the world’s biggest workers state into a sweatshop they can profit from. We defend China unconditionally against imperialism and counterrevolution, while fighting for a workers political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy.

So now it looks like the government is temporarily reopened, while negotiations over “border security” continue. Despite this recent lovers’ quarrel, both parties agree that whether you call it a wall, a fence or a hedge, strong border protection is a priority. That includes militarization, deportations and detentions. Under Obama, billions went to border enforcement, including thousands more agents and over 700 miles of fencing. The working class has a direct interest in fighting against deportations and in organizing immigrant workers into the unions with full rights. Many of the people trying to cross the border now are fleeing destitution brought about by U.S. imperialism in their home countries. Every immigrant who has made it here should have full citizenship rights.

It was pretty cheap for the Democrats to cry crocodile tears over the suffering of federal workers during the shutdown, while those in Congress and the Supreme Court judges were still getting their fat paychecks. It’s easy for the Democrats to posture as the friends of the oppressed when standing next to Republicans who openly ponder why white supremacy is offensive. During the shutdown, the main tactic of the Democrats in Congress, including the so-called progressive Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), was to prove themselves better defenders of national security by, for example, complaining that airport security agents, border patrol and prison guards were not getting paid. One of the very first votes of newly elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a DSAer, was to keep the Department of Homeland Security up and running. Prison guards torture inmates; cops break strikes, kill blacks and terrorize immigrants. We do not consider any of these “law and order” forces to be part of the working class. They should not be in the unions and we wouldn’t support their strikes.

But this shutdown has and will continue to be widely felt by thousands of government workers, as well as Native Americans, people relying on food stamps and government assistance, and the homeless. Here we are in the richest country in the world, and nearly 80 percent of fulltime workers live paycheck to paycheck, with tens of thousands dying every year because they lack health insurance. Every day, the capitalist rulers starve and deprive their wage slaves of basic human needs.

Is it any wonder that overworked and underpaid teachers are going on strike across the country? From West Virginia to Arizona, and most recently Los Angeles, teachers have fought back against the gutting of public education and the ongoing war against the teachers unions. It’s clear that workers want to fight. The pro-capitalist leadership of the unions holds them back by selling the lie that some progressive politician will come to their rescue. We need a new class-struggle leadership of labor. One that understands that the battle is class against class, that workers organizations must be independent of the bosses’ parties, and that the only way anything has ever been won in this country is through hard-fought struggle, not by begging politicians.

What we really need is workers power—a workers government that will seize industry and finance from the capitalists and build a planned, socialist order. For this, the workers need their own party with an internationalist, revolutionary program. This party will be, in the spirit of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, a tribune of the people, able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, painting a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation.

My favorite slogan is actually on that sign over there—“Finish the Civil War!” Being from the South, I knew right away how powerful this slogan was. Some 150 years ago, a bloody Civil War—the Second American Revolution—successfully smashed black chattel slavery. In the words of Frederick Douglass, “It is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” Indeed. But the promise of black freedom was never fulfilled, and so black oppression continues to be the bedrock of capitalist America. It will take another earthquake, another fire to win black freedom by overthrowing capitalist rule. The fight for black liberation and the fight for socialism will not be won separately. Black workers are slated to play a leading role in the revolutionary party that the Spartacist League is committed to building.

Those who are today behind bars for struggling against racism and capitalist injustice, like Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, will be honored as fighters on the road to liberation. I’d like to end with the last lines of the Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels in 1847, which I encourage everyone to read and reread. “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

On The 60th Anniversary- In Honor of Anniversary Of The July 26th Movement-IN DEFENSE OF THE CUBAN REVOLUTION -On The Anniversary Of The July 26th Movement

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

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 58th anniversary of the Cuban July 26th movement, the 52nd anniversary of the victory of the Cuban Revolution and the 44th 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

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- “You Are On The Bus Or Off The Bus”- The Transformation Of “Foul-Mouth” Phil Into “Far-Out” Phil- With Mad Hatter Writer Ken Kesey And His Merry Pranksters In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- “You Are On The Bus Or Off The Bus”- The Transformation Of “Foul-Mouth” Phil Into “Far-Out” Phil- With Mad Hatter Writer Ken Kesey And His Merry Pranksters In Mind

From The Archives Of ALH Founder Allan Jackson:

Everybody, well everybody who checks things out here, or on other sites that I am associated with, knows that I am dedicated to swapping lies about the old days. The old days in this case being the 1960s, and more specifically the 1960s old time corner boy days in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in North Adamsville, my growing-up working class hometown. And, of course, if one wants to swap lies about those old days, or any days, then one needs a, well, foil, or foils. Needless to say, via the “miracle” of the Internet, in its various manifestations, all one has to do is latch onto some search engine, type in “corner boys,” “North Adamsville,” or some such combinations and, like lemmings from the sea, our homeland the sea, every surviving corner boy with enough energy to lift his stubby little fingers will be on your screen before you can say, well, say, be-bop night.

Frankie Riley, our lord and chieftain was the first, although he has lost much speed in his pitch since the old days. I won’t bore you with the details of his “exploits.” You can fumble through the archives here for that. Nor will I speak of fast-talking Johnny Silver, except to point out that he is the culprit, there is no other way to put it, who started the sexual revolution. No, no the real one that started with “the pill” in the early 1960s and continues through to today with the struggle for women’s liberation, liberation from all kinds of second-class citizen stuff from jobs and wages to help with childcare and housework. No, Johnny started the AARP-version of the sexual revolution-old geezers looking for love, looking for love in all the wrong places, if you ask me but nobody is, asking that is. Those gripping tales can also be found in the archives here.

All of this, of course, is prelude to the real subject here. Phil Larkin’s transformation from corner boy “Foul-Mouth” Phil (and he really was, as he would tell you in that moment of candor that he is occasionally capable of) in early 1960s North Adamsville to “Far-Out” Phil on one of the ubiquitous Merry Prankster-inspired converted yellow brick road school buses that dotted the highways and by-ways of the American be-bop heading west night from about the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s (maybe a little earlier in the ‘70s). (For those too young to know, those who have forgotten, and those who have conveniently feigned forgetfulness just in case some statute of limitations has not run out I have placed a link above to a Wikipedia entry for the Merry Pranksters with this post.)

When last we hear from Phil he was heading to Pennsylvania to meet up with some doctoral program research addict whom he “met” on Facebook. That tale, ah, can also be found in the archives here. However, unlike these seemingly endless “haunting the Internet” schoolboy antics from guys old enough, well I am no snitch, so let’s say old enough to know better, looking for the fountain of youth, or whatever this Phil transformation story actually interests me. And so here it is. As usual I edited it lightly but it is Phil’s story, and I am pleased to say a good one.

*********

Phil Larkin here. Jesus, The Scribe [Markin: Like I warned the other guys, Phil, watch out on that scribe, or The Scribe thing] actually liked this idea of me telling about riding the, what did he call it, oh ya, the yellow brick road bus, back in my prankster days [Markin: Just to keep things straight, since Phil still likes to play a little rough with the truth, not the famous Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters bus made famous through Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but certainly inspired by it]. I barely got by with my stories about real stuff that people want to read like the trials and tribulations of an older guy trying to “hook-up” with the ladies on what amounted to a sexless sex site and my rendezvous with Amy (and she is not a research addict, Markin, no way, although she is an addict another way but you don’t want to hear that real stuff story), my lovely sociology doctoral student down at Penn State (Go, Nittany Lions!). But he is all over, all f—king over, some little bit of “cultural history” stuff that nobody, except AARP-guys (and dolls) would do anything but yawn over. And those AARP-guys (and dolls) are too busy trying to “hook-up,” to grab some sex before is too late to spent more than two seconds on ancient history. So this one is strictly for The, oops, Peter Paul Markin.

What got the whole memory lane thing started was that somewhere Markin picked up, probably second-hand off of Amazon if I know him, a CD from Time-Life Music entitled something like Shakin’ It Up: 1966. Now the music on the compilation, the music in the post-British invasion, heart of acid rock night, was strictly for laughs. But the artwork on the cover (as Markin told me was true on other CDs in this expansive classic rock 'n' roll era series) featured nothing more, or nothing less, than a day-glo bus right out of my prankster days, complete with some very odd residents (odd now, not then, then they were righteous, and maybe, just maybe still are). That scene gave us a couple of hours conversation one night and jogged my memory about a lot of things. Especially about what Markin, hell, me too, called the search of the great American freedom night. (He put some colors, blue-pink like just before dark, dark out West anyway, in his but we, for once. were on the same page.)

Naturally, Markin as is his wont [Markin: “Wont” is my word not Phil’s. His, I prefer, strongly prefer, to not to post], once he played the CD and played me for information (I know this guy, remember) ran off like a bunny and wrote his version as part of a review of the CD. Of course, being, well, being Markin he got it about half-right. So let me tell the story true and you can judge who plays “rough” with the truth.

Markin at least had it just about right when he described that old bus:

“A rickety, ticky-tack, bounce over every bump in the road to high heaven, gear-shrieking school bus. But not just any yellow brick road school bus that you rode to various educationally good for you locations like movie houses, half yawn, science museums, yawn, art museums, yawn, yawn, or wind-swept picnic areas for some fool weenie roast, two yawns there too, when you were a school kid. And certainly not your hour to get home daily grind school bus, complete with surly driver (male or female, although truth to tell the females were worst since they acted just like your mother, and maybe were acting on orders from her) that got you through K-12 in one piece, and you even got to not notice the bounces to high heaven over every bump of burp in the road. No, my friends, my comrades, my brethren this is god’s own bus commandeered to navigate the highways and by-ways of the 1960s, come flame or flash-out. Yes, it is rickety, and all those other descriptive words mentioned above in regard to school day buses. That is the nature of such ill-meant mechanical contraptions after all. But this one is custom-ordered, no, maybe that is the wrong way to put it, this is “karma”-ordered to take a motley crew of free-spirits on the roads to seek a “newer world,” to seek the meaning of what one persistent blogger on the subject has described as the search for the great blue-pink American Western night.”

“Naturally to keep its first purpose intact this heaven-bound vehicle is left with its mustard yellow body surface underneath but over that primer the surface has been transformed by generations (generations here signifying not twenty-year cycles but trips west, and east) of, well, folk art, said folk art being heavily weighted toward graffiti, toward psychedelic day-glo splashes, and zodiacally meaningful symbols. And the interior. Most of those hardback seats that captured every bounce of childhood have been ripped out and discarded who knows where and replaced by mattresses, many layers of mattresses for this bus is not merely for travel but for home. To complete the “homey” effect there are stored, helter-skelter, in the back coolers, assorted pots and pans, mismatched dishware and nobody’s idea of the family heirloom china, boxes of dried foods and condiments, duffel bags full of clothes, clean and unclean, blankets, sheets, and pillows, again clean and unclean. Let’s put it this way, if someone wants to make a family hell-broth stew there is nothing in the way to stop them. But also know this, and know it now, as we start to focus on this journey that food, the preparation of food, and the desire, except in the wee hours when the body craves something inside, is a very distant concern for these “campers.” If food is what you desired in the foreboding 1960s be-bop night you could take a cruise ship to nowhere or a train (if you could find one), some southern pacific, great northern, union pacific, and work out your dilemma in the dining car. Of course, no heaven-send, merry prankster-ish yellow brick road school bus would be complete without a high- grade stereo system to blast the now obligatory “acid rock” coming through the radiator practically.”

That says it all pretty much about the physical characteristics of the bus but not much about how I got on the damn thing. Frankly, things were pretty tough around my house, things like no having much of a job after high school just working as a dead-ass retail clerk up at Raymond’s Department Store in Adamsville Plaza. Not really, according to dear mother, with dear old dad chiming in very once in a while especially when I didn’t come up with a little room and board money, being motivated to “better myself,” and being kind of drift-less with my Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boys long gone off to college, the service, or married, stuff like that. Then too I was having some girl trouble, no, not what you think girl baby trouble just regular the battle of the sexes stuff when my honey, Ginny McCabe, practically shut me off because I didn’t want to get married just then. But I knew something was in the air, something was coming like “the scribe” was always predicting. [Markin: I'll let that small case scribe pass, Phil] And for once I wanted in on that. But the specific reason that I split in the dead of the North Adamsville night was that I was trying to avoid the military draft, now that the war in Vietnam was escalating with nowhere else to go. I knew my days were numbered and while I was as patriotic (and still am, unlike that parlor pinko, commie, Markin) as the next guy (and these days, girls) I was not ready to lay down my life out in the boondocks right then. So I headed out on the lam.

[Markin: Phil, as he related this part of the story that night, had me all choked up about his military plight and I was ready to say brother, welcome to the anti-imperialist resistance. Then I realized, wait a minute, Phil was 4-F (meaning he was not eligible for drafting for military service due to some medical or psychological condition in those days for those who do not know the reference. A prima facie example, I might add, of that playing rough with the truth I warned you about before.]

Hey, I am no slave to convention, whatever the conventions are, but in those days I looked like a lot of young guys. Longish hair, a beard, a light beard at the time, blue jeans, an army jacket, sunglasses, a knapsack over my shoulder, and work boots on my feet.(Sandals would not come until later when I got off the road and was settled in a “pad” [Markin: house, rented or maybe abandoned, apartment, hovel, back of a “free” church, back of a store, whatever, a place to rest those weary bones, or “crash”] in La Jolla and were, in any case, not the kind of footwear that would carry you through on those back road places you might find yourself in, places like Deadwood, Nevada at three in the morning with a ten-mile walk to the nearest town in front of you). I mention all this because that “look” gave me the cache to make it on the road when I headed out of the house that Spring 1966 be-bop night after one final argument with dear mother about where I was going, what was I going to do when I got there, and what was I going to do for money. Standard mother fare then, and now I suppose.

So short on dough, and long on nerve and fearlessness, then I started to hitchhike with the idea of heading west to California like about eight million people, for about that same number of reasons, have been heading there since the Spanish, or one of those old-time traveling by boat nations, heard about the place. Of course, nowadays I would not think to do such a thing in such a dangerous world, unless I was armed to the teeth and that would take a little edge off that “seeking the newer world” Markin has been blabbing about since about 1960. But then, no problem, let’s get going. 

Especially no problem when just a few miles into my journey a Volkswagen mini-bus (or van, neither in the same league as the yellow brick road school bus, no way, that I will tell you about later but okay for a long ride, and definitely okay when you are in some nowhere, nowhere Nebraska maybe, back road, hostile territory dominate by squares, squares with guns and other evil implements and they, the VW-ites, stoned, stoned to the heavens stop to ask you directions because they are “lost” and invite you on board) stopped on Route 128, backed up, and a guy who looked a lot like me, along with two pretty young girls says, “where are you heading?” (Okay, okay, Markin, young women, alright.) West, just west. And then the beautified words, “Hop in.”

Most of the road until the Midwest, Iowa is the Midwest right, was filled with short little adventures like that. A mini-van frolic for a few hours, or a few days. Maybe a few short twenty-miles non-descript rides in between but heading west by hook or by crook. Did I like it? Sure I did although I was pretty much an up-tight working class guy (that was what one of those pretty girls I just mentioned called me when I “passed” on smoking a joint and, hell, she was from next door Clintondale for chrissakes) who liked his booze, a little sex {Markin: Phil, come on now, a little?], and just hanging around the old town waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I could see, after a few drug experiences, no, not LSD, that I was starting to dig the scene. And I felt every day that I was out of North Adamsville that I was finally shaking off the dust from that place.

Then one night, sitting in the front seat of a big old Pontiac (not everybody, not every “hip” everybody had the mini-bus, van or school bus handy for their “search” for the great American night), Big Bang Jane between us, the Flip-Flop Kid driving like god’s own mad driver, smoking a joint, laughing with the couple of in back, Bopper Billy and Sweet Pea, we headed into a pay-as- you go roadside camp near Ames out in Iowa. And at that campsite parked maybe five or six places over from where we planted ourselves was god’s own copy of that day-glo merry prankster bus I mentioned before. I flipped out because while I had hear about, and seen from a distance, such contraptions I hadn’t been up close to one before. Wow!

After we settled in, the Flip-Flop Kid (and the guy really could never make up his mind about anything, anything except don’t go too close to Big Bang Jane, no kidding around on that, no sir), Bopper Billy (who really thought he was king of the be-bop night, but, hell in the North Adamsville corner boy night Frankie Riley, hell, maybe even Markin, would have out be-bopped him for lunch and had time for a nap), Big Bang Jane (guess what that referred to, and she gave herself that nickname, but I never tried to make a move on her because she was just a little too wild, a little too I would have to keeping looking over my shoulder for me then, probably later too when things got even looser. And then there was the Flip-Flop Kid’s warning ), and Sweet Pea (and she was a sweet pea, if Bopper Billy wasn’t around, well we both agreed there was something there but in those 1966 days we were still half tied up with the old conventions of not breaking in between a guy and his girl, well that was the convention anyway whether it was generally honored or not, I did) we headed over once we heard the vibes from the sound system churning out some weird sounds, something like we had never heard before (weird then, little did we know that this was the wave of the future, for a few years anyway).

Naturally, well naturally after the fact once we learned what the inhabitants of the bus were about, they invited us for supper, or really to have some stew from a big old pot cooking on a fireplace that came with the place. And if you didn’t want the hell-broth stew then you could partake of some rarefied dope (no, again, no on the LSD thing. It was around, it was around on the bus too, among its various denizens, but mainly it was a rumor, and more of a West Coast thing just then. In the self-proclaimed, tribal self-proclaimed Summer of Love of 1967, and after that, is when the acid hit, and when I tried it but not on this trip. This trip was strictly weed, hemp, joint, mary jane, marijuana, herb, whatever you wanted to called that stuff that got you high, got you out of yourself, and got you away from what you were in North Adamsville, 

Mechanicsville or whatever ville you were from, for a while.

So that night was the introduction to the large economy size search for the freedom we all, as it turned, out were looking for. I remember saying to Sweet Pea as we went back to our campsite (and wishing I wasn’t so square about messing with another guy’s girl, and maybe she was too, maybe wishing I wasn’t square about it) that we had turned a corner that night and that we had best play it out all the way to the end right then for the chance might not come again.

The next day, no, the next night because I had spent the day working up to it, I became “Far-Out” Phil, or the start of that Phil. Frankly, to not bore you with a pipe by pipe description of the quantity of dope that I smoked (herb, hashish, a little cocaine, more exotic and hard to get then than it became later) or ingested (a tab of mescaline) that day, I was “wasted.” Hell I am getting “high” now just thinking about how high I was that day. By nightfall I was ready for almost anything as that weird music that crept up your spine got hold of me. I just, as somebody put a match to the wood to start the cooking of tonight pot of stew to keep us from malnutrition, started dancing by myself. Phil Larkin, formerly foul-mouthed Phil, a cagey, edgy guy from deep in corner boy, wise guy, hang-out guy, never ask a girl to dance but just kind of mosey up world, started dancing by himself. But not for long because then he, me, took that dance to some other level, some level that I can only explain by example. Have you ever seen Oliver Stone’s film, The Doors, the one that traced the max-daddy rocker of the late 1960s night Jim Morrison’s career from garage band leader to guru? One of the scenes at one of the concerts, an outdoor, maybe desert outdoor one, had him, head full of dope, practically transformed into a shaman. Ya, one of those Indian (Markin: Native American, Phil] religious leaders who did a trance-dance. That was me in late May of 1966, if you can believe that.

And see, although I wasn’t conscious of it first I was being joined by one of the women on the bus, Luscious Lois, whom I had met, in passing the night before. This Lois, not her real name, as you can tell not only were we re-inventing ourselves physically and spiritually but in our public personas shedding our “slave names” much as some blacks were doing for more serious reasons than we had at the time. [Markin: Nice point, Phil, although I already ‘stole’ that point from you in my review.] Her real name was Sandra Sharp, a college girl from Vassar who, taking some time off from school, was “on the bus” trying to find herself. She was like some delicate flower, a dahlia maybe, like I had never encountered before. I won’t bore you with the forever have to tell what she looked like stuff because that is not what made her, well, intriguing, maddeningly intriguing, like some femme fatale in a crime noir film that Markin, from what I can gather, is always running on about. She was pretty, no question, maybe even a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty if it came to a fair description in the light of day but what made her fetching, enchanting, if that is a different way to say it, was the changes in her facial expressions as she danced, and danced provocatively, dance half-nakedly, around my desire. And I danced, shedding my shirt although I do not remember doing so, danced half-naked around her desire. Then, faintly like a buzz from some hovering insect, maybe a bee, and then more loudly I kept hearing the on-lookers, half-mad with dope and with desire themselves, yelling far out, far out. And Far-Out Phil was born.

Oh, as for Luscious Lois and her desire, well, you figure it out. I might not have been as wise to the ways of the Vassar world in those days when such places were bastions to place the young women of the elite and keep them away from clawing upstarts from the corner boy night as I should have been but the rest of my time on the bus was spend hovering around Lois, and keeping other guys away. I even worked some plebeian “magic” on her one night when I started using certain swear words in her ear that worked for me every Sunday after 8:00 AM Mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church with foxy Millie Callahan, back in the day. Far-Out Phil got a little something extra that night, proper Vassar girl or not.

No offense against Iowa, well only a little offense for not being near an ocean, I think. No offense against the university there, well only a little offense for not being Berkeley but after about a week of that campsite and its environs I was ready to move on and it did not matter if it was with Flip-Flop and his crowd or with Captain Crunch (the guy who “led” his clot of merry pranksters, real name, Samuel Jackman, Columbia Class of 1958, who long ago gave up searching, searching for anything, and just hooked into the idea of taking the ride). Captain Crunch, as befitted his dignity (and since it was “his” bus paid for out of some murky deal, probably a youthful drug deal, from what I heard), was merely the “leader” here. The driving was left to another, older guy. This driver was not your mother-sent, mother-agent, old Mrs. Henderson, who prattled on about keep in your seats and be quiet while she is driving (maybe that, subconsciously, is why the seats were ripped out long ago on the very first “voyage” west) but a very, very close imitation of the god-like prince-driver of the road, the "on the road” pioneer, Neal Cassady, shifting those gears very gently but also very sure-handedly so no one noticed those bumps (or else was so stoned, drug or music-stoned, that those things passed like so much wind). 

His name: Cruising Casey (real name, Charles Kendall, Haverford College Class of ’64, but just this minute, Cruising Casey, mad man searching for the great American be-bop night under the extreme influence of one Ken Kesey, the max-daddy mad man of the great search just then). And Cruising was, being just a little older, and about one hundred years more experienced, also weary, very weary of co-eds, copping dope and, frankly, staying in one place for so long. He also wanted to see his girlfriend, or his wife, I am not sure which in Denver so I knew where we were heading. So off we go, let’s get going.

And the passengers. Nobody from the Flip-Flop Express (although Flip-Flop, as usual, lived up to his name and hemmed and hawed about it), they were heading back east, back into the dark Mechanicsville night. I tried, tried like hell, to get Sweet Pea to come along just in case the thing with Lois fell apart or she took some other whim into her head. See, re-invented or not, I still had some all-the-angles boyhood rust hanging on me. We did know for sure that Casey was driving, and still driving effortlessly so the harsh realities of his massive drug intake had not hit yet, or maybe he really was superman. Other whose names I remember: Mustang Sally (Susan Stein, Michigan, Class of 1959, ditto on the searching thing), Captain Crunch’s girl friend, (although not exclusively, not exclusively by her choice, not his, and he was not happy about it for lots of reasons which need not detain us here). Most of the rest of the “passengers” have monikers like Silver City Slim, Penny Pot (guess why), Moon Man, Flash Gordon (from out in space somewhere, literally, as he told it), Dallas Dennis (from New York City, go figure), and the like. They also had real names that indicated that they were from somewhere that had nothing to do with public housing projects, ghettos or barrios. And they were also, or almost all were, twenty-somethings that had some highly-rated college years after their names, graduated or not). And they were all either searching or, like the Captain, were at a stage where they are just hooked into taking the ride.

As for the rest. Well, no one could be exactly sure, as the bus approached the outskirts of Denver, as this was strictly a revolving cast of characters depending on who was hitchhiking on that desolate back road State Route 5 in Iowa, or County Road 16 in Wyoming, and desperately needed to be picked up, or face time, and not nice time with a buzz on, in some small town poky. Or it might depend on who decided to pull up stakes at some outback campsite and get on the bus for a spell, and decide if they were, or were not, on the bus. After all even all-day highs, all-night sex, and 24/7 just hanging around listening to the music is not for everyone. And while we had plenty of adventures, thinking back on it now, they all came down to drugs, sex, and rock and roll with a little food on the side. If you want to hear about them just ask Markin to contact me. The real thing though, the thing that everybody should remember is that dance night in Ames, Iowa when Phil Larkin got “religion,” 1960s secular religion. He slid back some later, like everybody does, but when he was on the bus he was in very heaven.

Markin note: No question that this story, except perhaps for hormonal adolescents, is better than those dreary old geezer searching for young love tales that he ran by us before. By the way Phil, you don’t happen to have Luscious Lois’, ah, Sandra Sharp’s, cell phone number or e-mail address. And don’t lie and say you don’t have it. You never crossed off a woman’s name from your book in your life. Give it up.