This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Venezuela: Law, Democracy and Open Government | Harvard Law School<https://hls.harvard.edu/event/venezuela-law-democracy-and-open-government/> hls.harvard.edu Featuring attorney Eva Golinger, this event will discuss the state of democracy and open government in Venezuela between the current government and th
Featuring attorney Eva Golinger, this event will discuss the state of democracy and open government in Venezuela between the current government and the opposition, the legitimacy of U.S. interventions there, and the relationship between democratic institutions in the U.S. and abroad. Copies of Ms. Golinger’s most recent book, Confidante of Tyrants, will be for sale at the event. Lunch will be served. _______________________________________________ Act-MA mailing list Act-MA@act-ma.org http://act-ma.org/mailman/listinfo/act-ma_act-ma.org To set options or unsubscribe http://act-ma.org/mailman/options/act-ma_act-ma.org
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Steve Earle covering Townes Van Zandt's Colorado Girl.
CD Review
Townes, Steve Earle, New West Records, 2009
I have mentioned on previously occasions when I have discussed county music, or rather more correctly outlaw country music, that I had a very short, but worthwhile period when I was immersed in this genre. After tiring somewhat of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and other more well know country outlaws I gravitated toward the music, eerily beautiful and haunting music, of the man who Steve Earl is paying tribute to here, Townes Van Zandt. And while this outlaw country thing was short-lived and I scrabbled back to my first loves, blues, rock and folk music I always had time to listen to Townes. And today listen to Townes through the medium of Steve Earle.
As the liner notes indicate Steve Earle and Townes shared some common time together and Earle learned much of his trade at the side of Townes so it is rather appropriate that Steve has produced this tribute album to his fallen comrade. Townes led a nomad live, have some very peculiar ideas about life and about how it was to be lived but he knew how to write songs. Songs of sorrows, songs of grief, songs of lost loves and lost opportunities. And even a few “happy” ones, although those do not stand the test of time as well as the more moody ones. And in his own way Steve Earle has captured those emotions, and in his own style. That style on some songs seemingly very close in voice and sound to some of Bruce Springsteen’s later folk-oriented work.
The stick outs here are the hauntingly beautiful Colorado Girl; the lyrical No Place To Fall; the hard-edged Loretta; and my favorite Townes songs, the wistfully symbolic, magically word-mastered (Quicksilver Daydreams of) Maria.
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
******** March Is Women's History Month
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FEMINISM by Juliet Mitchell. New York: Random House, Pantheon Books, $8.95 hardcover, 456 pp.
A Review by Ed Clarkson
The pioneering theories of Sigmund Freud have engendered stormy controversy in scientific, literary and political circles ever since their embryonic formulation around the turn of the century. The birth of the psychoanalytic movement was attended by a split between co-workers Freud and Breuer, and dissension was frequently to beset the developing psychoanalytic school as many of Freud's collaborators and followers rejected central tenets of his theories—the role of the unconscious, the importance of sexuality and its energizer libido, and the critical significance of the Oedipus conflict in personality development.
Likewise in the communist movement heated debates have raged over the validity of Freudianism as a science of human behavior. As a consequence of the growing bureaucratic degeneration of the backward and isolated Soviet workers state, Freudian theory came under attack in the Soviet Union in the mid-1920's from both Stalinist-Bukharinist bureaucratic philistines in the party and the intelligentsia following Pavlov, whose ideas had the dual advantage of being more ostensibly materialistic and having a Russian origin—no small consideration for the proponents of ^"socialism in one country."
Marxism vs. Freudianism?
It was the embattled Trotsky who insisted against the vulgar materialists that Freudian psychoanalytic theory required attentive consideration. In a 1926 essay on culture and socialism, which is breathtaking in its brilliance, Trotsky evaluates Freud as follows:
"The school of the Viennese psychoanalyst Freud proceeds in a different way [than Pavlov]. It assumes in advance that the driving force of the most complex and delicate of psychic processes is a physiological need. In this general sense it is materialistic, if you leave aside the question whether it does not assign too big a place to the sexual factor at the expense of others, for this is already a dispute within the frontiers of materialism.
But the psychoanalyst does not approach problems of consciousness experimentally, going from the lowest phenomena to the highest, from the simple reflex to the complex reflex; instead, he attempts to take all these intermediate stages in one jump, from above downwards, from the religious myth, the lyrical poem, or the dream, straight to the physiological basis of the psyche....
"The attempt to declare psychoanalysis 'incompatible' with Marxism and simply turn one's back on Freudian-ism is too simple, or, more accurately, too simplistic. But we are in any case not obliged to adopt Freudianism. It is a working hypothesis that can produce and undoubtedly does produce deductions and conjectures that proceed along the lines of materialist psychology."
Psychological theories conflict with dialectical materialism when they attempt to demonstrate that human beings are innately incapable of organizing society in such a manner that would qualitatively advance their material conditions of existence. For instance, Robert Audrey's theory of territoriality and Konrad Lorenz' theory of aggression are counterposed to Marxism precisely because they set out to prove that human cooperation beyond the narrow limits established by class, particularly capitalist, society is impossible.
There is a historical fatalism to be found in Freud's thought, especially in his pessimistic post-WWI writings, in which Thanatos (the death wish) hovers over a self-immolating humanity. Because Freud's petty-bourgeois world view does intrude upon his effort to formulate a scientific theory .of behavior, many in the working-class movement regard Freudianism with hostility.
In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) Freud declares that the possibilities • for human satisfaction and happiness are "limited from the start by our constitution," and "the natural human aversion to work gives rise to the most difficult social problems." The abolition of private property would "in no way alter the individual difference in power and influence." Commenting on a by then Stalinized Soviet Union, Freud confirms his skepticism by accepting the bureaucracy's claims of "socialist" society:
"The Russian Communists, too, hope to be able to cause human aggressiveness to disappear by guaranteeing the satisfaction of all material needs and by establishing equality in other respects among all members of the community. That, in my opinion, is an illusion. They themselves are armed to-day with the most scrupulous care and not the least important of the methods by which they keep their supporters together is hatred of everyone beyond their frontiers." -"Why War?," Collected Papers, Vol. 5
Freud and Feminism
While his views on Marxism and the Soviet Union brought Freud denunciation by the Stalinists and fellow-traveling intellectuals, His theories of femininity similarly evoked considerable antipathy from "feminists. For Freud, two themes were of "paramount importance" in analysis: "the wish for a penis in women and, in men, the struggle against passivity [toward other men]... “("Analysis Terminable and Interminable^ *° Collected Papers Vol. 5). To feminists this theory of penis envy seemed to doom women td the status of biological second-class citizenship—men in wish, but not in being.
In the context of the general anti-Marxist and anti-Freudian biases of New Left feminism, the "socialist-feminism" of Juliet Mitchell's first book, Woman's Estate (1971), appeared as a left bulge in "Movement" feminism. A quasi-Marxist and a "scientific" Freudian, Mitchell argued that Marxism was both relevant to the liberation of women (which it certainly is) and in harmony with the feminist "principle" of women" organizing separately as women (which it is not). Woman's Estate even criticized, albeit mildly, the implications of the anti-Leninist basis of New Left feminism:
"Feminist consciousness will not \// 'naturally' develop into socialism, nor should it. If we simply develop feminist consciousness (as radical feminists suggest) we will get, not political consciousness, but the equivalent of national chauvinism among Third World nations or economist!) among working-class organizations."
The penchant of American behaviorist psychologists to focus on "antisocial" behavior, recently expressed in the extreme by Skinner's apologetics for a benevolent totalitarianism, has prompted the radical petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, yesterday sympathetic to the "progressive" pragmatism of Skinner's Walden II, to search elsewhere for a psychological justification for their liberalism. Much in vogue in the feminist milieu have been the humanist psychology of Maslow, the hyper-genital theories of Reich and the "schizophrenia-is-good-for-you" ravings of Laing.
Debunking Reich and Laing
Juliet Mitchell's most recent book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, is an 1 attempt to come to terms with a declining movement which has become hardened in its anti-Marxism, anti-Freudianism and virulent bourgeois feminism. By this time, the reconciliation attempted in Woman's Estate between an eclectic Marxism, Freudianism and anti-capitalist feminism had obviously become untenable. Something had to give; it was Juliet Mitchell's "Marxism."
For those who prefer Freud to his detractors, Psychoanalysis and Feminism will prove, at least in part, an eminently satisfying work. Mitchell presents an intelligent and for the most part accurate exposition of the core elements of Freudian theory, especially the analysis of femininity. This is combined with insightful critiques of the "radical psychotherapists" Reich and Laing and of Freud's feminist critics, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Eva Figes, Germaine Greer, Shoal-Smith Firestone and Kate Millet.
Mitchell argues convincingly that most criticisms of psychoanalysis are based on a misunderstanding of an important distinction in Freudian psychology: the distinction between the psychic representation of the conflict of social reality with instinctual forces (the data of psychoanalysis) and the biological instincts themselves. Freud fully realized that he was dealing only with the former; the latter he regarded as the subject of investigation for a future, more advanced science.
Reich asserts the matter in more "basic" terms: the repression of sexual energy is bad, its "ultimate" orgasmic expression good; heterosexual genitality is natural, homosexuality unnatural; the vagina is thus the biological counterpart of the penis. Lost are Freud's insights into the inherently bisexual natural of human sexual development and the extent to which the conflict between human drives and social reality both shape (through sublimation) and distort happiness and role. For Reich, instinct is all. Similarly, where Freud analyzes both normal and abnormal behavior as manifested through the a-logical operations of the unconscious, Laing sees the delusional world of the schizophrenic as a logical response to a current conflict. For Laing, humans are simply reactive.
Although Mitchell is frequently brilliant and incisive in her defense of the "science" of psychoanalysis, she is disquieted by Freud's insistence that all understanding of behavior, in the final analysis, must be grounded on the bedrock of biology. In Mitchell's schema biological determinism has no place, and her uneasiness with its presence in Freudian theory leads her to distort precisely that area of Freudianism she is most concerned to defend—his hypotheses concerning the "psychological consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes."
Freudianism and the Oppression of Women
Generally Freud carefully distinguishes between the psychological impact of biological factors and the factors themselves. When Freud takes up the problem of the psychological development of women, however, he sidesteps this distinction.
Freud posits that the fear of castration for males is caused not merely by the sight or conception of penisless beings (women), but in addition by an actual, although perhaps implied, threat of castration. The female case is different:
"A momentous "discovery which little girls are destined to make [is that] they notice the penis of a brother or playmate, strikingly visible and of larger proportions, at once recognize it as the superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ, and from that time forward fall a victim to envy for the penis.... A little girl... makes her judgment and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without and wants to have it." (our emphasis)
— "Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes," Collected Papers, Vol. 5
For Freud, the esteem for the penis is established not socially, but phylo-genetically: "The penis (to follow Ferenczi) owes its extraordinarily high narcissistic cathexis to its organic significance for the propagation of the species" (ibid.). The penis is valorized because of its role in reproduction.
Although the clitoris is "analogous to the male organ," Freud regards the vagina as the "true female organ" (Female Sexuality). Freud thus considers women as constitutionally inferior to men.
Freud's error is a logical one, based, no doubt, on the intrusion of male chauvinist assumptions into his scientific thinking. His letters to his wife are1 adequate testimony to his susceptibility to such influences. They reek of sexism, although of the icky-poo, "women-as-the-salt-of-the-earth" variety. Mitchell's aversion to Freud's biologicisms, however, is motivated not by political opposition to their anti-feminist implications, but by the desire for an idealistic revision of psychoanalysis which could provide the long-sought feminist "answer" to Marxist dialectical materialism.
Mitchell Contra Engels
In Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Mitchell sweeps aside the self-proclaimed Marxist orientation of Woman's Estate and poses anew the, "fundamental question of the cause of women's oppression:
"The longevity of the oppression of women must be based on something more than conspiracy, something more complicated than biological handicap and more durable than economic exploitation (although in differing degrees all these may feature)."
The missing link turns out to be "culture"; specifically, patriarchal culture:
"It seems to be the case that contemporary anthropology supports Freud's contention that human society in many ways equals patriarchy rather than Engels' notion that patriarchy can be limited to strictly literate civilization."
Using the anthropological theories of academic doyen Claude Levi-Strauss, Mitchell argues that since the exchange of women by men between kinship groupings (exogamy) has characterized all human societies, all human society has been patriarchal, i.e., "fathers not men" have "determinate power." The Oedipus complex now becomes for Mitchell the internalized manifestation of the cultural tyranny represented in the incest taboo. With the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, "man finally enters into his humanity."
Mitchell realizes that kinship systems are obviously neither operative nor relevant in modern capitalist society and therefore maintains that the bourgeois nuclear family is socially redundant, merely "created to give that law [the patriarchal law] a last hearing." The struggle against the oppression of women no longer must be directed against capitalism or even the "domination of men," but must become a "struggle based on a theory of the social non-necessity at this stage of development of the laws instituted by patriarchy."
This contention that fathers have "determinate" power flies in the face of the fact that their role in anthropologically earlier (avuncular) societies was not significantly greater than the mother's. Nor is the father's son prohibited from copulating with the father's wife (the Oedipus complex as understood by Freud), although biological mother-son sexual relationships have apparently generally been taboo. The most primitive societies seldom have mechanisms for identifying either the father’s sons or his mates (i.e., the nuclear family).
Incest (the prohibition of heterosexual copulation between certain biologically related individuals) only imperfectly correlates with the more primitive forms of unilinearity (kinship determined by membership to either the mother's or the father's clan) and exogamy (marrying out of one's clan). The incest taboo as such is a more recent historical development associated with increasingly differentiated social arrangements and the rise of the monogamous family.
Completely absent from Mitchell's analysis is any sense why the "law of patriarchy" should endure. Basing his hypothesis on inadequate anthropological data (Morgan's studies), Engels wrongly inferred that a matriarchal stage preceded the development of patriarchy. But the essence of Engels' method, however, is the appreciation of the role of social relationships (the emergence of private property) in causing a qualitative perforation of the condition of women. Mitchell draws her analysis, however, from Freud's unfounded, fanciful hypothesis that in the dawn of primitive society exogamy and the incest taboo resulted from the successful alliance of sons against the sexual privileges of the all-powerful father, which resulted in the cannibalization of the father and the sharing out of his women.
Forward to the Pages of Ms.
Psychoanalysis and Feminism thus floats above any concern for the actual oppression of women. The degradation suffered by women imprisoned within the nuclear family and oppressed by capitalist society simply becomes the equivalent perforce of men exchanging women. Prostitution, social isolation, divestiture of legal rights, sole responsibility for child raising—all features of the monogamous nuclear family noticeably absent in most primitive societies —recede in importance for Juliet Mitchell. The bourgeois nuclear family is "not in itself important. V Rather, it is the kinship system, which "in our society... barely can be seen to regulate social relationships," that is the source of women's oppression, because "it is within kinship structures that women, as women, are situated"!
Mitchell has accomplished an idealist subversion of even that rudimentary Marxist understanding revealed in Woman's Estate. Now she conceptualizes culture as having its own dynamic (exactly what, remains unstated) and being transmitted through the unconscious independent of material conditions. Mitchell now recognizes "two autonomous areas: the economic mode of capitalism and the ideological mode of patriarchy."
In Woman's Estate Mitchell envisioned the revolution as the product of a coalition of oppressed groups, each raising its consciousness of its own particular oppression by a theoretical operation-bootstrap and then working to a point of solidarity. From her revised perspective, Mitchell has come to consider even a tactical unity between the women's liberation movement and the labor movement as unnecessary:
"Because patriarchy is by no means identical with capitalism the successes and strengths of the two revolutionary movements [the women's liberation movement and the working-class movement] will not follow along neatly parallel paths."
Not only are these paths not "neatly parallel," but they may in fact diverge. Mitchell readily admits that "It is perfectly possible for feminism to make more gains under social democracy than it does in the first years of socialism." Indeed, if capitalism has already rendered women's oppression redundant, then it is difficult to explain why the liberation of women could not occur under any form of capitalist government, from reformist Laborism or the popular front to fascism. In fact, the most optimum conditions could well be a fascism where there are sufficiently strong drives toward racial purity as to necessitate the challenging of the "utility" of the incest taboo.
The politics of Psychoanalysis and Feminism are a justification for "Movement” feminism at any of its-stages, from the radical, anti-capitalist; New Left period through its current trivial, careerist and venal expression. For Juliet Mitchell the battle against cultural oppression no longer need be waged in the streets; the need for a Popular Front against Patriarchy can 'be propagated with equal efficacy from the pages of MS.
Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Townes Van Zandt Covering The Classic Blues Song, "Cocaine Blues".
CD Review
On The Road With Townes Van Zandt
Road Songs, Townes Van Zandt, Sugar Hill Records, 1992
The main points of this review have been used to review other Townes Van Zandt CDs.
Readers of this space are by now very aware that I am in search of and working my way through various types of American roots music. In shorthand, running through what others have termed "The American Songbook". Thus I have spent no little time going through the work of seemingly every musician who rates space in the august place. From blues giants, folk legends, classic rock `n' roll artists down through the second and third layers of those milieus out in the backwoods and small, hideaway music spots that dot the American musical landscape. I have also given a nod to more R&B, rockabilly and popular song artists then one reasonably need to know about. I have, however, other than the absolutely obligatory passing nods to the likes of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline spent very ink on more traditional Country music, what used to be called the Nashville sound. What gives?
Whatever my personal musical preferences there is no question that the country music work of, for example, the likes of George Jones, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette in earlier times or Garth Brooks and Faith Hill a little later or today Keith Urban and Taylor Swift (I am cheating on these last two since I do not know their work and had to ask someone about them) "speak" to vast audiences out in the heartland. They just, for a number of reasons that need not be gone into here, do not "speak" to me. However, in the interest of "full disclosure" I must admit today that I had a "country music moment" about thirty years ago. That was the time of the "outlaws" of the country music scene. You know, Waylon (Jennings) and Willie (Nelson). Also Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash and Jerry Jeff Walker. Country Outlaws, get it? Guys and gals ( think of Jesse Colter)who broke from the Nashville/ Grand Old Opry mold by drinking hard, smoking plenty of dope and generally raising the kind of hell that the pious guardians of the Country Music Hall Of Fame would have had heart attacks over (at least in public). Oh, and did I say they wrote lyrics that spoke of love and longing, trouble with their "old ladies" (or "old men"), and struggling to get through the day. Just an ordinary day's work in the music world but with their own outlandish twists on it.
All of the above is an extremely round about way to introduce the "max daddy" of my 'country music moment', Townes Van Zandt. For those who the name does not ring a bell perhaps his most famous work does, the much-covered "Pancho And Lefty". In some ways his personal biography exemplified the then "new outlaw" (assuming that Hank Williams and his gang were the original ones). Chronic childhood problems, including a stint in a mental hospital, drugs, drink, and some rather "politically incorrect" sexual attitudes. Nothing really new here, except out of this mix came some of the most haunting lyrics of longing, loneliness, depression, sadness and despair. And that is the "milder" stuff. Not exactly the stuff of Nashville. That is the point. The late Townes Van Zandt "spoke" to me (he died in 1997) in a way that Nashville never could. And, in the end, the other outlaws couldn't either. That, my friends, is the saga of my country moment. Listen up to any of the CDs listed below for the reason why Townes did.
Townes Van Zandt was, due to personal circumstances and the nature of the music industry, honored more highly among his fellow musicians than as an outright star of "outlaw" country music back in the day. That influence was felt through the sincerest form of flattery in the music industry- someone well known covering your song. Many of Townes' pieces, especially since his untimely death in 1997, have been covered by others, most famously Willie Nelson's cover of "Pancho and Lefty". However, Townes, whom I had seen a number of times in person in the late 1970's, was no mean performer of his own darkly compelling songs.
This compilation with the aptly named title, “Road Songs”, gives both the novice a Van Zandt primer and the aficionado a fine array of his core works on the road theme in one place. Start with, naturally, “Automobile Blues”, work through the longing felt in “Texas River Song”, and the pathos of “Indian Cowboy” that could serve as a secondary personal Townes anthem. Then on to the sadness of the ill-fated story of Ira Hayes. Finally, round things out with the slight hopefulness of the Lightnin’ Hopkins classic “Hello Central” and the epic tragedy of Bruce Springsteen's “Racing In The Streets”. Additionally, Townes covers The Rolling Stones classic, “Dead Flowers” and Lightnin’ Hopkin’s wryly ironic “Shorted-haired Woman Blues”. Many of these songs are not for the faint-hearted but are done from a place that I hope none of us have to go but can relate to nevertheless. This well thought out product is one that will make you too a Townes aficionado. Get to it.
The Desert Flower Blooms-Joan Allen’s
“Georgia O’Keeffe” (2009)-A Film
Review
DVD Review
By Si Lannon
Georgia O’Keeffe, starring Joan Allan,
Jeremy Irons, 2009
[When I was a kid I hated art, art as
it was presented in art class where Mr. Jones-Henry held forth from freshman to
senior in high school. Worse unlike some of the other guys I hung around in
high school like Sam Lowell who loved art, was Mr. Jones-Henry’s star pupil I
had not gone to North Adamsville Junior High School and had him for seventh and
eighth grade at Snug Harbor Junior High before he transferred over to the high
school.* So maybe I double-hated art especially after the time he took the
whole eight grade class up to the famous Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The
idea was to grab some culture I guess in his eyes by viewing some masterpieces
they had there, especially a guy named Monet who did haystacks and churches that
Jones-Henry was crazy for (guy is what I would have called him or any artist
then).
The big reason that I hated art from that museum experience on was that
I was pretty naïve, naïve naturally if anybody is talking about budding
teenagers and sex. I was sweet on a girl from the neighborhood named Laurie
Kelly who I thought liked me (and actually did before the museum disaster) and
we were paired together to view the works of art. I had never seen a woman, any
woman naked so when we got to a painting by Renoir of a chubby woman bathing
outdoors I turned bright red, maybe crimson red.Laurie who was just beginning to bud out
herself started laughing at me, started pointing out how red in the face I was
to other students. After that she didn’t want anything to do with me according
to my friend Ben Lewis who knew her older sister who told him that I was
“square,” meaning social death in those days. After that horrible episode I
hated Jones-Henry with a passion and I went crazy trying to get out of art
class when he went over to the high school, No such luck and it is a good thing
that Sam did a lot of my art projects or I might still be in that class. (The
villain of the piece Renoir by the way who Sam and Laura in line with their
theory recently claimed had a fetish for painting nudes with womanly bodies and
girlish faces and have wondered out loud why the authorities didn’t catch on to
his perversions.)
[Mr. Jones-Henry was an Englishman in a
heavily Irish school where almost everybody had some Irish blood and some
family bad blood against the English for the 800 years of troubles, but nobody
faulted him on that score, no me as I have mentioned above with other hatreds
stirring. We all found it odd that he had that hyphenated name though and one
day he explained it along with his art heritage. He was from some branch of the
Burne-Jones family, I asked Sam recently, but he does not remember how the
family tree went. One forbear was Edward Burne-Jones of the second wave of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which had been started by the poet-artist Dante
Gabriel Rossetti back in the mid-19th century.
More importantly Jones-Henry’s family
had come to America due to his father’s work in Boston for some English firm
and when it came time for him to go to college he went to the famous
Massachusetts School of Art. From there he got jobs in North Adamsville. Why
all of this was important was that he encouraged Sam to go to his alma mater
and had worked to get Sam, a poor working-class family guy, a scholarship to
the school. In the end Sam’s mother talked him out of it on economic grounds
that she didn’t want him to become some starving artist in some cold-water
garret.]
After high school and after the Army,
after Vietnam which changed a lot of ways I looked at stuff as it did to
everybody from the old corner boy neighborhood I took up with a young woman,
Kathie, my first wife and you should know that every corner boy from our corner
wound up having at least two wives and two divorces which tells you something
although not necessarily something good, who was an art student at the Museum
School associated with that MFA that I hated from eighth grade. She gradually
nurtured my interest in art, into going back to that tomb MFA since she got in
free. When we got to that Renoir which had broken my heart indirectly when I
was a kid I told her the story of the last time I had seen that painting. She
laughed. The funny thing was that having grown up, having seen the adult world
and women this time I looked at the masterly way he had painted and how he had
used the space to almost make it seem like some Garden of Eden that his nude
was entwined in. All taught to me by Kathie who would go on even after we were
married to do her art work and after we divorced she went I think to the
Village in New York or maybe San Francisco and then the Village and had a
middling career (and two more husbands) as a regional artist. Me, I would eventually
devour art every chance I got later on and hence this review which was assigned
to me after I had told Greg Green, the site manager my hoary childhood tale. Si
Lannon]
*Sam Lowell who like I mentioned loved art
although turning down that scholarship opportunity as if to grab a second chance
at the brass ring is now helping “ghost” an on-going series entitled Traipsing Through The Arts by Laura
Perkins on self-selected works of art that interest her under the theory for 20th
century art, serious art anyway from what I understand, that it is driven hard
by sex and eroticism. I can understand how Sam, the old corner boy part of Sam half
of our time spent grabbing at straws for girls and dates and back seats of hopped
up cars, came by that theory but hearing prim and proper Laura was a proponent
came as a shock to me.
On the subject of Georgia O’Keeffe this
part should have a field day with their exotic erotic theory of serious art.
While they would be hard pressed to get much sexual mileage out of the barns up
in Lake George, the hills and desert fauna and flora out in New Mexico or the skyscrapers
in New York (except Sam in a wild frantic moment might see them as some phallic
totem but he can figure that out for himself when it comes to her famous series
of lush and symbolic flowers magnified many times larger than life and with a
sensual feel they may get some mileage. At least one art critic has noted that
almost vaginal depth and swirl that clearly suggests erotic possibilities
anyway.
********
No question from early on once that first
wife Kathie straightened out my head about art and art’s value as a cultural
signpost I loved to look at the great 20th century artist Georgia
O'Keeffe's works where possible including a visit to the Ghost Ranch out in New
Mexico to get a first-hand view of what was driving her-especially her use of
color. Hell, I even usually buy some kind of Georgia O’Keeffe calendar each
year and if that isn’t love what is. Speaking of love the film under review
simply but properly titled Georgia
O’Keeffe (as opposed to say O’Keeffe and her husband-lover and pioneer photography
as art organizer in New York City at various galleries Stieglitz or some
variation on that idea) has one of its important strands beside a look at what
drove her to her art was the seminal relationship for good or evil between her
and Alfred Stieglitz –her most serious promoter and a great creative force as a
photographer and exhibitor of modern art in his own right.
Almost from the first frame of the film
we are entwined in the obvious attraction that this pair, Alfred and Georgia had
for each other sexually as well as artistically (although they called each
other Miss O’Keeffe and Mister Stieglitz more often than one would think proper
given that they were married but maybe the formalities were more carefully
observed then). That attraction in the end would provide many emotional
distraught moments for Ms. O’Keeffe as her Alfred proved to be another of those
rascals who couldn’t keep away from the woman.
But break she did to signal a very important
assertive streak that was not apparent at the start. Of course the painful
cause that broke the camel’s back was Stieglitz’s infidelity with an heiress to
the Sears fortune. That and his unwillingness to have a child with her
(allegedly to avoid distracting her from her life-force art) tore her apart for
a while-a long while. Heading to the rough and ready West, heading to the
sullen beauty of New Mexico saved her sanity-and drove her art to another
level. The great question posed by the film and posed by O’Keeffe herself was
how much her art was driven by Stieglitz’s ambitions and her own. My guess is
in the end it was her own. See the film and figure that one out for
yourself.
The Trials And Tribulations Of Legendary Artist Jasper Johns-The Double Yoke Of Being A Closeted Gay Man And Growing Up In Bible- Belt Southern America-It Was A Close Thing.
By Ronan Saint James
Ordinarily I would not put the relationship between an artist and where he or she grew up and under what conditions under too strong a microscope letting happenstance and innate ability run its course as more determinative. But a recent trip to the South, close to where the artist under discussion, legendary Jasper Johns he of the Amerikkka flags, figures symbols, maps and other stuff hanging out of his artwork like the inevitably spending a life measured by coffee spoons and hence the need for coffee cans, grew up made me realize how close a thing it was that he escaped from the desperate ghost town he grew up in down in Allendale, South Carolina.
The first thing you notice, no, that I noticed in one town, Travelers Rest, I passed through was how many Baptist churches there were in a few mile area. I counted something like fifteen along one short stretch which seemed impossible given the size of the town and the actual population. Without knowing whether this number of churches represented a church for each person in the town or reflected various arcane theological differences it seemed frankly weird.
Living in a Northeastern secular cultural enclave, a bubble if you like, this bears more observation and study. All I know is that it goes a long way in describing why we are as Frank Jackman of this publication has described on many occasions a cold civil-these are partisans on the other side. Unless we can bridge some unbridgeable gap the die seems to be cast-and not our way necessarily so we had better dig in and organize like our lives depended on it.
Of course when you talk about the South, about this South that a gay man like Tennessee Williams wrote plays about and the general attitude of Baptists and other evangelical toward gays then you have to address the long-term lovers’ relationship between Johns and fellow artist Ricard Rauschenberg and can totally understand why Johns had to flee that berg for his life in the closeted gay life 1950s. As a post-Stonewall, almost post-gay marriage man I feel though I have very little understanding how hard it must have been to thrive under those South Carolina circumstances. So hats off brother, hats off to your art too which has given me many an enjoyable and thoughtful moment.
The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Face (Book) Photo That Launched A Thousand Clicks- Or “Foul-Mouth” Phil Hits Pay-Dirt-Finally
From The Archives Of Allan Jackson
[Recently in an introduction to a re-posting of one of this series involving a take on the mad monk writer Ken Kesey and the equally mad monk Phil Larkin from the old North Adamsville working class Acre neighborhood where, Sam Lowell, the late Peter Paul Markin, Allan Jackson and a few others who have written here including me, I pointed out that the by-line had changed. The by-line which had originally in the first thirty or so sketches been attributed to Frank Jackman another guy from the old neighborhood has now truthfully as far as it goes been attributed to the guy, Allan Jackson, who actually wrote, edited, and guided the series through about two or so years of heavy work.
This whole subterfuge had been the brainchild of Greg Green the current site manager who owes his position to having been on the “winning side” in the big internal fight that roiled this publication in the fall of 2017 after Allan, the old site manager and one of the founders of this publication back when it was in hard copy had been purged, retired take your pick after he lost a fatal vote of no confidence. To stem the continuing controversy in the aftermath of the struggle when writers on both sides of the dispute on the future direction of the blog which was tearing things apart for a while Sam Lowell, and old-timer and also a founder of the hard copy edition, and Greg worked out a truce. An “armed truce” as one wag put it where writers would no longer refer to Allan Jackson, his regime, his shortcomings and fixations about the 1960s nostalgia trip that he was pushing the publication toward, or for that matter his good points.
Greg used the “truce” to sort of underhandedly revive the series under Frank’s name without Frank knowing that he had unwittingly taken credit for what was essentially Allan’s work although he had written several of the sketches under Allan’s direction. What was Greg’s purpose? When Greg took over with the aid of the stable of younger writers who forced the vote of no confidence he had planned to take the publication away from the old time base of 1960s nostalgia freaks and aficionados and appeal to a younger audience by among other things forcing everybody on staff to do film reviews of super-hero movies, you know, Ironman, Batman, Superman those Marvel and DC comic book characters come to the screen. While every writer I think held his or her nose while doing the damn thing they also tried in vain to tell Greg that the kids, Generation X, the Millennials frankly don’t read film reviews, book reviews, cultural takes, which is why the comic book companies went to the screen anyway. See they can’t even take the twenty minutes to read a fucking comic book. Greg finally got wise when that “old fogy” base which has stuck with the publication although that population is dwindling and was a cause of Greg’s unwise decision started complaining about the wall to wall coverage of this comic book madness. That is genesis on Greg seeing the light.
Enter one Allan Jackson who found out what Greg had done and had a fit although they was not much he could do about it since all the material on the site unlike the hard copy stuff in the old days was not copyrighted. We had gone the freely publish common copyright route assuming nobody would care to “filch” the stuff. Apparently from what Sam Lowell told me Allan got in touch with Sam to find out what he could do to see some justice done to his work. Sam said he would talk to Greg the result of which ended up with a “compromise” of attributing the material to Allan’s “archives” without recognizing his central role in putting the whole series together.
You have to realize how intense that internal struggle was which now by general consensus of the old-timers who sided with Allan and the Young Turks who forced him out, who using a term Sam used forthrightly “purged” him and sent him into exile. To have him through negotiation become a “non-person” in the old Stalinist terminology that the old-timers including Allan and Sam were addicted to from their radical pasts in that 1960s which to this day has marked them. All kinds of rumors have floated about what had happened to Allan since last fall. That have gone from innuendoes that Greg had him done away with like in old Stalin times once he lost the vote like this was some epic Stalin-Trotsky world historic dispute to his being forced into exile in Utah working for some Mormon newspaper touting the virtues of wearing clean white underwear and praying seven times a day to the shade of Joseph Smith to hiding out in La Jolla with some twenty-something part-time waitress surfer girl to running dope across the border for the Cuernavaca cartel to running a high end whorehouse in Argentina with old friend Madame La Rue for Chinese bigwigs on travel. The very latest rumors have him in Big Sur as a disciple of Buddha of the hills or pimping for a local Fox News outlet in Phoenix. Fortunately I have found out where he is, or maybe better, where he last was and will report what is what when I catch up to my old comrade who seems to have gone off the rails. Jack Callahan]
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Here's the story of the headline:
Yes, I know. I know damn well that I should not indulge my seemingly endlessly sex-haunted old-time corner boys. After all this space is nothing but a high-tone “high communist” propaganda outlet on most days- the good days. I should, moreover, not indulge a “mere” part-timer at our old North Adamsville Salducci’s Pizza Parlor hang-out be-bop night “up the Downs” like one “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin. (For those who do not know what that reference refers to don’t worry you all had your own “up the Downs” and your own corner boys, or mall rats as the case may be, who hung out there.) Despite his well-known, almost automatic, foul mouth in the old days Phil had his fair share, more than his fair share given that mouth, of luck with the young women (girls, in the old days, okay). I am still mad at him for “stealing” my old-time neighborhood heartthrob, Millie Callahan, right from under my nose. (And right in the Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church after Mass to boot. If he is still a believer he stands condemned. No mercy. As for me, an old heathen, I was just glad that I stared at her ass during Mass. I stand condemned anyway, if things work out that way).
Well, that was then and now is now and if you read about “poor” Phil Larkin’s trials and tribulations with the ladies recently in a post here entitled -“Sexless” sex sites” you know that his old Irish blarney ( I am being kind to the old geezer here) had finally given out and that he was scoreless lately. That is he was scoreless as of that writing. As Phil pointed out to me personally as part of our conversations while I was editing his story he felt that he would have had better luck with finding a woman companion (for whatever purpose) by just randomly calling up names in the telephone directory than from that “hot” sex site that he found himself embroiled in. And, in an earlier time, he might have been right.
But we are now in the age of so-called “social networking” (of which this space, as an Internet-driven format is a part) and so, by hook or by crook, someone placed his story (or rather, more correctly, my post from this blog) on his Facebook wall. As a result of that “click” Phil is now “talking” to a young (twenty-something) woman graduate student from Penn State (that is why just a few minutes ago he was yelling “Go, Nittany Lions” in my ear over the cell phone) and is preparing to head to the rolling Appalachian hills of Pennsylvania for a “date” with said twenty-something. Go figure, right? So my placement of this saga, or rather part two of the saga (mercifully there will be no more), is really being done in the interest of my obscure sense of completeness rather than “mere” indulgence of an old-time corner boy. As always I disclaim, and disclaim loudly for the world to hear, that while I have helped edit this story this is the work of one “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin, formerly of North Adamsville and now on some twisted, windy road heading to central Pennsylvania.
Phil Larkin comment:
Jesus, that Peter Paul Markin is a piece of work. Always rubbing in that “foul-mouth” thing. But I guess I did get the better of him on that Millie Callahan thing back in the day and he did provide me a “life-line” just now with his posting of my story on his damn communist-addled blog. It is a good thing we go back to “up the Downs” time and that I am not a “snitch” because some of the stuff that I have read from him here should, by rights, be reported directly to J. Edgar Hoover, or whoever is running the F.B.I., if anybody is. We can discuss that another time because I don’t have time to be bothered by any such small stuff. Not today. Not since I hit “pay-dirt” with my little Heloise. Yes, an old-fashioned name, at least I haven’t heard the name used much lately for girls, but very new-fashioned in her ideas. She is a twenty-five graduate student from Penn State and I am, as I speak, getting ready to roll out down the highway for our first “in person” meet.
You all know, or should be presumed to know to use a Markinism (Christ, we still call his silly little terms that name even forty years later), that I was having a little temporary trouble finding my life’s companion through sex sites. I told that story before and it is not worth going into here. [Markin: Fifty years Phil, and every other guy (or gal) from the Class of 1964. Do the math. I hope you didn’t try to con Heloise with that “youthful” fifty-something gag-christ, right back to you, Phil.] Let me tell you this one though because it had done nothing but restore my faith in modern technology.
Little communist propaganda front or not, Peter Paul’s blog goes out into the wilds of cyberspace almost daily (and it really should be reported to the proper authorities now that I have read his recent screeds on a Russian Bolshevik guy named Trotsky who is some kind of messiah to Markin and his crowd). So a few weeks ago somebody, somehow ( I am foggy, just like Markin, on the mechanics of the thing, although I know it wasn’t some internet god making “good” cyberspace vibes or anything like that) picked it up and place it (linked it) on his Facebook wall ( I think that is the proper word). Let’s call him Bill Riley (not his real name and that is not important anyway) Now I don’t know if you know how this Facebook thing works, although if you don’t then you are among the three, maybe four, people over the age of five that doesn’t.
Here’s what I have gathered. Bill Riley set up an account with his e-mail address, provided some information about himself and his interests and waited for the deluge of fan responses and “social-connectedness” (Markin’s word). Well, not exactly wait. Every day in every way you are inundated with photos of people you may know, may not know, or may or may not want to know and you can add them to your “friends” pile (assuming they ‘confirm” you request for friendship). Easy, right?
Well, yes easy is right because many people will, as I subsequently found out, confirm you as a friend for no other reason than that you “asked” them to include you. Click- confirm. Boom. This, apparently, is what happened when Bill “saw” Heloise’s photo. (I found out later, after “talking” to Heloise for a while, that she did not know Bill Riley or much about him except that he has a wall on Facebook. So the weird part is that Bill “introduced” us, although neither Heloise nor I know Bill. This has something Greek comedic, or maybe a Shakespeare idea, about it, for sure.). In any case Heloise, as a sociology graduate student at Penn State, took an interest in the “sexless” sex site angle for some study she was doing around her thesis and, by the fates, got hooked into the idea that she wanted to interview me about my experiences, and other related matters.
Without going into all the details that you probably know already I “joined” Bill Riley’s Facebook friends cabal and through him his “friend” Helosie contacted me about an interview. Well, we “chatted” for a while one day and she asked some questions and I asked others in my most civilized manner. What I didn’t know, and call me stupid for not knowing, was that Heloise not only was a “friend” of Bill’s but, unlike me (or so I thought), had her own Facebook page with photos. Now her photo on Bill’s wall was okay but, frankly, she looked just like about ten thousand other earnest female twenty-something graduate students. You know, from hunger. But not quite because daddy or mommy or somebody is paying the freight to let their son or daughter not face reality for a couple more years in some graduate program where they can “discover” themselves. Of course, naturally old cavalier that I am said, while we were chatting, that she was attractive, and looked energetic and smart and all that stuff. You know the embedded male thing with any woman, young or old, that looks the least bit “hit-worthy.” (Embedded is Markin’s word, sorry.)That photo still is on Bill’s wall and if I had only seen that one I would still be sitting in some lounge whiskey sipping my life away.
Heloise’s “real” photos, taken at some Florida beach during Spring break, showed a very fetching (look it up in the dictionary if you don’t know that old-time word means) young woman that in her bikini had me going. Let’s put it this way I wrote her the following little “note” after I got an eyeful:
“Hi Heloise - Recently I made a comment, after I first glanced at your photo wall, that you looked fetching (read, attractive, enchanting, hot, and so on). On that first glance I, like any red-blooded male under the age of one hundred, and maybe over that for all I know, got a little heated up. Now I have had a change to cool down, well a little anyway, and on second peek I would have to say you are kind of, sort of, in a way, well, okay looking. Now that I can be an objective observer I noticed that one of your right side eyelashes is one mm, or maybe two, off-balance from the left side. Fortunately I have the “medicine” to cure you. If you don’t mind living with your hideous asymmetrical deformation that is up to you. I will still be your friend. But if you were wondering, deep in the night, the sleepless night, why you have so few male Facebook friends or why guys in droves are passing your page by there you have it. Later-Phil.”
The famous old reverse play that has been around for a million years, right? Strictly the blarney, right? [Markin: Right, Phil, right as ever]. That little literary gem however started something in her, some need for an older man to tell her troubles to or something. And from there we started to “talk” more personally and more seriously. See I had it all wrong about her being sheltered out there in the mountains by mom and dad keeping her out of harm’s way until she “found” herself. No, Heloise was working, and working hard, to make ends meet and working on her doctorate at the same time. Her story, really, without the North Adamsville corner boy thing, would be something any of us Salducci’s guys would understand without question.(I was not a part-time corner boy by the way, except by Frankie Riley’s 24/7/365 standards and The Scribe’s). [Markin: Watch it, Phil. I told you not to use that nickname anymore.] I’ll tell you her story sometime depending on how things work but right now I am getting ready to go get a tank full of gas and think a little about those photos that launched a thousand clicks.
Markin comment:
Phil, like I said to Johnny Silver about what people might say about his little teeny-bopper love. Go for it. Don’t watch out. And like I said before we had better get to that communist future we all need pretty damn quick if for no other reason that to get some sexual breathes of fresh air that such a society promises.
For Quality, Integrated Public Education! No to Charters!
For six days last month, Los Angeles teachers engaged in determined strike action in defense of public education. United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) members were up against a cabal of Democratic Party officials, not least billionaire Austin Beutner, the hated superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The walkout over better working conditions and learning conditions in the schools was widely popular, as many parents and students joined the picket lines along with sections of organized labor. Tens of thousands rallied with placards reading, “We Stand with LA Teachers” and “Estamos con los Maestros de Los Angeles,” a testament to the strike’s resonance among the city’s heavily Latino population.
The mood of many union members was captured by one first grade teacher, who declared: “We’re a lot stronger than we thought we were” (Los Angeles Times, 22 January). In the end, the UTLA successfully staved off an attack on union health benefits for new hires and won some modest concessions from the LAUSD, such as more nurses, librarians and counselors and minimal class-size reductions. However, the union leadership called a halt to the strike with a settlement that on the core issues of school funding and charter schools undercuts the teachers’ future struggles by further binding the union to the district and city bosses in the capitalist Democratic Party. The longstanding reliance on the Democrats by labor officialdom has paved the way for the decimation of union jobs nationwide. In fact, the union’s strength is brought to bear when it mobilizes under its own banner, independently of the capitalists and their political representatives.
As one UTLA teacher put it, “The Democrats and Republicans are like a double-headed snake.” Indeed, so-called “friend of labor” Democrats have helped spearhead the decades-long ruling-class offensive to gut public-sector unions, starve education of funding and promote “free market” education schemes, such as privately run charter schools. The same capitalist rulers who are devastating public education also ratchet up the exploitation of workers and subject the black, Latino and poor masses to misery and repression. The fight for quality, integrated and secular public education for all, including bilingual education, is part of a broader struggle to address the felt needs of millions—for decent jobs, housing and health care.
Educators across the country, many themselves preparing to hit the picket lines as in Denver and Oakland, viewed the UTLA strike as a crucial battle. Although the L.A. teachers were not defeated, they also did not win. The settlement, brokered by Democratic mayor Eric Garcetti, who praised a “new culture of collaboration,” was hailed as a “historic victory” by UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl, who rammed it through in a few hours. In fact, the contract will barely make a dent in the wretched conditions that teachers endure to educate hundreds of thousands of poor and working-class students. The minimal pay raise is hardly different from the LAUSD’s last pre-strike offer, as several angry teachers told Workers Vanguard. Even the scrapping of the previous contract’s hated Section 1.5, which had allowed the district to keep increasing class sizes, could be reversed in the event of any purported budget crisis.
One week after the strike was over, the cries of impending bankruptcy were renewed by the Los Angeles County Office of Education that oversees district finances. Claiming that the agreement is not “sustainable” due to “financial insolvency,” the agency threatened to put the LAUSD under its authority if it does not come up with adequate spending cuts. Meanwhile, with powerful financial forces ominously bemoaning the high pension costs of K-12 and community college educators, teachers’ health care and retirement benefits could be next on the chopping block.
Down With the Charter Industry!
On the question of charter schools, which pose a mortal danger to public education and the teachers unions, the UTLA bureaucrats have patted themselves on the back for getting a toothless resolution passed by the school board as part of the strike settlement. The resolution requests that Democratic governor Gavin Newsom implement a moratorium of eight to ten months on new charter authorizations to allow for a study of their “financial implications.” Paying lip service to charter “accountability” is cheap for Democrats and hardly coincidental in the era of Trump and his “privatize at all costs” education secretary Betsy DeVos, especially with the 2020 elections on the horizon.
Pushing charter schools has always been a bipartisan project. The industry massively expanded under Barack Obama and his education secretary Arne Duncan, who replaced so-called “failing” schools with charters in cities like Chicago. As San Francisco mayor, Newsom was backed by charter proponents and lauded charter schools. Yet the labor tops continue to promote Democrats like Newsom as partisans of public education. The UTLA leadership is currently backing the school board campaign of longtime Democrat Jackie Goldberg, who, having supported charters time and again, calls for more “transparency.”
The union bureaucrats, working within the framework of what is acceptable to their Democratic masters, seek to regulate, not eliminate, charter schools, including through a cap. Obscenely, the new contract makes the union complicit in the setup of colocated charters, which take facilities away from public schools. A UTLA coordinator will now be part of the decision-making process on the sharing of space, that is, will give a union stamp of approval to the charter takeover.
In L.A. alone, charters have stripped nearly $600 million annually from state education funds over the last decade. From coast to coast, charters increase racial segregation and class inequality in schools. The goal must be to smash the charter industry and bring charter teachers and staff into the public school system. A major step in that direction would be to wage an uncompromising fight to unionize the charter schools and win full union protections and compensation, undercutting their main selling point to the anti-union privatizers.
During the LAUSD strike, three UTLA-organized charter schools operated by the Accelerated Schools network also walked off the job. The first charter strike ever in California presented a unique opening to cement unity in action between charter school and public school teachers, but the UTLA leadership kept the struggles separate. District teachers were sent back to work before the charter teachers settled, as the union tops left them to fend for themselves. What was necessary was an all-out fight for equal wages and benefits at the highest level, which would have gone a long way toward fueling enthusiasm for a drive to organize all charter schools.
Break with the Democrats!
Universal public education is a historic gain of the working class issuing out of the Civil War that smashed black chattel slavery. A century later, in the 1950s and ’60s, the struggles of the civil rights movement took aim against segregated and inferior schools. But its liberal, pro-Democratic Party leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. could not end the de facto segregation of black people that is materially rooted in the capitalist system. In the decades since, America’s racist capitalist rulers have deemed there to be little value in educating black, Latino and working-class youth.
Amid a racist backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement, California’s Proposition 13, which capped property taxes, was signed into law in 1978. At the time, a section of the bourgeoisie had fanned the flames of a white, middle-class tax revolt against government programs viewed as benefiting poor blacks and Latinos. This social reaction was linked to a racist opposition to busing, a modest effort to achieve some measure of school integration. After Prop. 13’s approval, funding for public schools was massively depleted, welfare was slashed, and libraries and hospitals devastated, while big businesses reaped huge tax windfalls. California, once known as the education state, today ranks 44th in school funding.
The UTLA leadership is now pushing a 2020 tax reform ballot initiative that would abolish Prop. 13’s tax cap for commercial and industrial properties. This initiative, the California Schools and Local Communities Funding Act, is being promoted as the way to restore billions of dollars to education across the state. As opponents of Prop. 13, we would support measures that curtail or reverse it.
However, the union bureaucrats push such legislative measures as a diversion from the necessary militant class struggle against the capitalists and their state. Indeed, in the new contract, the UTLA tops commit the union to acting as a lobbying arm of the LAUSD for the initiative. It’s not the union’s job to help the bosses figure out how to divvy up their funds. At the end of the day, the amount allocated to education and other vital social services is determined by the relationship of forces in the class struggle.
Caputo-Pearl’s Union Power caucus is cheered on by supporters of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the International Socialist Organization (ISO). In the article “We Won a Historic Victory for LA Schools” on the ISO’s website (socialistworker.org, 23 January), Gillian Russom, a member of the UTLA Board of Directors, bends over backward to sell teachers on the contract. Russom is a typical union bureaucrat, accepting the premise that there is only so much money to go around: “If you were to reduce one student in every classroom in LAUSD, that’s the equivalent cost of a 5 percent raise. So you’re talking about a very expensive item in terms of hiring new people.”
The ISO’s enthusiastic support of the UTLA leadership, which is ever-loyal to the capitalist profit system, parallels its backing of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) that heads the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and has longstanding ties with the UTLA’s Union Power. During the 2012 Chicago teachers strike, CORE bowed to the city’s Democratic mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who refused to negotiate about such issues as school closings, layoffs and charters. As in L.A., the CORE misleaders abided by the parameters laid out by the Democratic bosses, and the CTU has since been battered.
The reformist ISO hitches its wagon to those Democrats being touted as “progressive” instead of “corporate,” selling the myth that capitalist politicians can be convinced to provide for the well-being of the masses. To this end, the ISO is working together with the DSA, which from its inception has been an organic component of the Democratic Party. A joint statement issued on January 22 by the L.A. chapters of the ISO and DSA claims: “Building a socialist alternative to capitalism means holding these Democrats to account and breaking with their pro-business agenda.”
No! As Workers Vanguard supporters emphasized on the picket lines, the starting point must be breaking with the Democratic Party as a whole. The situation cries out for a new class-struggle leadership of the unions, one based on the understanding that working people have nothing in common with the bosses and their parties. Key to unlocking the social power of the multiracial working class is severing the ties between labor and its class enemy.
The corporations and banks are sitting on mountains of cash, yet to put that wealth in the service of human need rather than private profit requires breaking the power of the bourgeoisie and reorganizing the economy on a socialist basis. To do so is a question of leadership. The fight for a multiracial revolutionary workers party is crucial not only to defend the interests of workers, blacks, immigrants and others against the ravages of capitalism, but also to lead the struggle for workers revolution. Only this will open the door to an egalitarian society, in which everyone has access to housing, health care and education of the highest quality.
