Bernie’s Revenge- With Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” In Mind

Bernie’s Revenge- With Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” In Mind  

By Seth Garth 

[Bernie, O., we will avoid his last name since he has recently retired from the force and we will let him enjoy his peace, after twenty-five of decent and honorable service. The “force” for those who are clueless any police department but here the Bay City Police Department a comfortable California seaside town as its name would indicate, although not as sleepy a town as the seaside designation would connote, That last phrase about Bernie, we can skip the “O” now that we can without rancor leave him to his peace was at one time up for grabs. Had been challenged back when he had been on the force maybe five years in the days before the war (World War II) when anything went in the fair city from gambling, dope, un-bonded booze and women, women who would take you around the world or around the block where a male confederate with a handy blackjack waited in earnest for any unsuspecting goof, not Kerouac’s unsuspecting holy saintly beaten down by the grind of modern society and left to rust along the empty roadside goof either but just some drunken wayward tourist who thought he still had that old sex appeal that his Martha used to brag to her friends about.

And that anything goes, the dope to girls action, especially that latter category since he had started out as a hustling jack-roller grabbing marks some whore he was working with was steering his way was strictly the bought and paid for territory of one Eddie Miles, Mister Edward Raymond Miles when they let him into the swanky Bay City Golf Club-or else- but plain run of the mill gangster Eddie now. We can use his last name since he is finishing up the last five years of a twenty-five year gaff at the Q for plenty of stuff-extortion, pandering, armed this and that,  everything except the one the jury couldn’t pin on him-murder one, murder for hire if you want the full kick. They had a raw assistant D.A. assigned to the case since everybody had the case down to a shoo-in for sure and the D.A. had his own set of problems having let a few Eddy non-murder crimes go under the sea (and “sponsoring” Eddie in that swanky club where he was ostracized after the rap sheet on Eddie became public- probably would have been worse except it is always good to have a D.A. sweating and forgetting stuff-criminal or country club).   

Bernie, Bernie O. when you think back about those days was the straightest rightest cop that ever put on shoe leather in Bay City. The problem back those twenty some years ago was that every other freaking cop on the force was “on the take” to Eddie, or knew guys on the take to Eddie which was the same thing. Somebody, without a shred of evidence had fingered Bernie as a bad cop in Eddie Miles hip pocket. Bought and paid for- a tough charge to defend against when everybody was on the take and wanted to cover their asses. Of course in those days a cop, a five year cop anyway, couldn’t pursuit a case on his own where he had been accused of corruption. Against Department policy. A great set-up for a set-up. So he clamped Phil Marlin, a guy who had been on the force with him, had gone through the academy with Bernie but had been fired for insubordination, fired good, when he wouldn’t tumble to looking the other way when one of Eddie’s boy took some underage girl into a backseat out on the back roads of the Pacific Coast Highway for a blow job and whatever else she was offering-or he was taking. Phil had turned private investigator, private dick, keyhole peeper to most cops. Took the case strictly as a favor to Bernie, no charge, you see, that was how tight they had been back when they had each other’s back in the days they were flat-footing beat cops down in the tough Five Points neighborhood.

Bernie had been in on the bust of Eddie Miles, after the Staties had taken over based on what Marlin had dug up from the sewer and they insisted that Bernie be in on the nab so he had some satisfaction that he was cleared by his own actions. The problem for Bernie and for Marlin came later when Marlin decided he wanted to tell the story to the general public-maybe as a cautionary tale, maybe to show how fragile a grip every human has on life, or maybe he just wanted his name up in lights in some fake private dick’s hall of fame. What Marlin did was get this writer, kind of well- known for writing racy pulp fiction crime detection novels, a guy named Raymond Chandler, to “ghost” the story for him. Between Marlin’s vivid imagination and Chandler’s excessive literary license they balled the whole story up, balled it up pretty bad. So Bernie with his own leisure time, his peace time, hired me to “ghost” his true version of the case-the Eddie Miles bust. The only thing that Bernie and Marlin, the late Phillip Marlin who had his check cashed down in sunny Mexico one back alley night when he was looking for a fugitive named Terry Manning, agreed on was that Bernie had handed him a private job for General Guy Sternwood. Yeah, Sternwood the guy who turned the La Brea tar pits into gold-for himself and his. He was having trouble with one of his wild daughters and needed a guy who could handle the fix he had been put in by her posing for raw, today they would say kinky, nude photographs and guys were looking for dough, serious dough for the negatives-or else. Here is how it really played out from that agreed point on.             

****

Marlin had shown up at the General’s mansion one sunny summer afternoon up in the hills of Bay City far from the humidity and dust and far from the sight of those still-producing oil pumps that got him the place on the hill. Before he could be invited into the General’s bedroom (the General would enumerate more health issues than seemed possible for a breathing human being and he had been under doctor’s to keep to his bed, his now bed-office) he was confronted by one of the wild daughters, the younger one Carol. She had asked him, once she had looked him up and down in a way usually reserved for guys and figured him for a tumbler, if once he had finished talking to her father he wanted a good time in her room. She also told him that she did not care what her father wanted she wanted those nude photos circulated, wanted to be a Hollywood starlet just like Eddie Miles had promised. Wanted all the boys to get big in the pants when they snuck a peak at her luscious body doing nasty little things (and it was luscious according to Marlin-Bernie rated her as a good afternoon fuck and then get the hell out of town).

Phil had told Bernie, and more importantly had told Chandler who retailed the story, that he never had gone into her room after speaking with the General with whom he had accepted the assignment to act as go-between to Eddie in order to get the freaking photos and negatives back to be burned. According to Norris, the trusty butler, a guy who had no ax to grind then, was the General’s eyes and ears in those days (and was stealing him blind since he had control of household checking accounts-like manna from heaven if a guy knew how to fudge the books just so and old Norris had the game down pat) told him that he had seen Marlin coming out of Carol’s room disheveled and glassy-eyed like she had taken him around the world.

That is the real reason Marlin never got anywhere trying to get those photographs back. He would always argue that the General was maybe hot to trot to get the pictures after all he could hardly face his social equals when his daughter was front and center in some low-rent “girlie” magazine (where in the end they would wind up courtesy of Carol sending an agent to one of those publications begging them to put them in the magazine). But the real reason he hired Marlin was he was looking to find out what had happened to his trusted confidante, Rex Randall, who had apparently run off with Eddie Miles’ girlfriend to parts unknown. (Phil had dismissed the run away and elope story as so much eyewash but Bernie knew, had reason to know that Eddie was carrying a big torch for the broad and who knows what he might have done with Rex). Rex a guy Phil knew from the days when Rex was managing a guy in Half Moon Bay dope operations and grapping all the ass he could from young things who were ready to do anything to get something for the head-anything. Bernie knew of him but even then knowing about Eddie’s big torch figured that Rex was sleeping out in the bay somewhere with a sack of rocks tied to him.                

So Phil went through the paces, went through the motions of trying to earn his big bonus-attached (not for the Rex part-for the fucking nude pics), and had met Laura the older daughter as he was leaving his sister’s room. He always claimed he never met her then but had been in the General’s bed-side office after having swigged a couple of high-shelf brandies to seal the deal and then left to pursue justice some such bullshit. Although she wasn’t as photograph pretty as her younger sister Carol she was just as wild, her lovely vices gambling and cases of scotched devoured. Needless to say the story gets jumbled up again when Marlin later denied that he tumbled to her bedroom eyes proposition but Norris once again put paid to that lie since early the next morning he had seen Marlin, disheveled, glassy-eyed and looking sexually-sated (how Norris knew that was the case in England where he had learned the butler trade he had had his fill of such meanderings from the nobility that he had been in service  to-said they had the morals of a great white shark-none). The worse part of that tryst with Laura was that he had spilled the beans about the General’s desire to see what had happened to Rex to Eddie Miles whom she was in hock to for gambling debts at his off-shore casino (and as it turned out had been trying to get out from under by fucking Eddie and a couple of his boys to death-yeah, the morals of a shark- a resourceful girl no question).

Marlin after having his fill of the Sternwood young women then “got to work,” hit the library to see about old rare books and their provences since he assumed that the photos of Carol would wind up in some high-end antique bookstore used as a front for select clientele to “borrow” such fare (some of them when the lists became public later friends of the General who must have gloated and a veritable who’s who at the Bay City Golf Club-yeah, the morals of a shark all the way around). (It was only later that Carol got that agent to hustle his photo-ass to the “girlies” once they had been used at Eddie’s trial since they “belonged” to her). Phil did a perfunctory search of all the old-timey bookstores in town, got nowhere and laid low for a few days before telling the General he was hot on the case and told him that he needed some walking around money to go to Eddies’ casino off-shore. Norris set him up with a cool thou-not bad for walking around money-then anyway. 

One night, the first night he ran into one Eddie Miles, he also ran into Laura losing a load at the tables but smiling about it as she gave him a come hither look that would snow (later when they were in closer proximity she offered to take him out to her car for a little off-hand tryst-which after he had finished up with Eddie he gladly took her up on funny how that time appeared on his bill when it came time to close up accounts with Norris. Services rendered. So another glassy-eyed night with a Sternwood sister. He had gotten nowhere asking Eddie Miles where his wife was and about the rumor that she had taken a powder with Rex-the General’s confidante.  Getting nowhere fast on this case. Getting nothing on Eddie either. 

Then the great break-through although it was really only Marlin falling into something after another guy, a guy he could have saved by all the evidence but he had gotten “cold feet” when the deal went down. It seems that one of the clerks, Iris, a comely female clerk that he had taken into the stockroom one rainy afternoon, at Ye Olde Bookstore had had a boyfriend who had been acting as an agent for Eddie Miles in trying to unload Carol’s sulky nude photos. Somehow he had had trouble moving the merchandise and Eddie dumped him-dumped him literally in the bay for some purpose-or np purpose. Oh, not Eddie personally-Edward Miles did not do his own dirty work but had his number one boy, The Camino Kid, a bad-ass no question throw a sack over the boyfriend’s head and put a few stones in the mix and let him sink and sleep with the fishes off the bow of  Eddie’s casino liner. Nice boy. The girlfriend after getting friendly with Phil that afternoon loosened up by a few drinks had spilled the beans about the boyfriend number one after she had got herself another beau. To even the score with Eddie though she was ready to tell Marlin where Eddie’s wife was-for a couple of hundred bucks to blow town with. Marlin agreed and was to meet the new beau, a square little guy who probably was too short for that ravishing clerk.        

                 

That boyfriend number two, Harry, wasn’t any luckier than number one since he was acting as go-between for Iris with Marlin (Iris a girl who had her charms apparently but who always left standing unlike her beaus). They were supposed to meet at Harry’s office but the Camino Kid got there first while Phil was hiding in an anteroom. The Kid’s chore that day to get Harry to clam up about Eddie’s wife’s whereabouts. The little guy held out though-Iris must have had something he had not noticed that afternoon in the stockroom. Yeah, paid with his life for protecting his honey while Marlin stood breathless in the next fucking room. Here is where the wheels turned though. The cops, Bernie and his partner, were tailing the Camino Kid since the Iris’ boyfriend number one washed up on shore tied up in a sack just the way the Camino Kid liked to finish up his handiwork. They were able to follow him to the backroads of Ocean City the next town over where he stopped at an old house set back from the road. Waiting at the door was Eddie Miles’ wife. No sign of Rex though.         

Earlier back at Harry’s office Marlin had gotten out of his deep freeze long enough to follow Bernie’s police vehicle to that lonely country road. That is why Marlin claimed he took the Camino Kid out. That the fire -power that did the Kid in when he resisted arrest and started ban-banging had come from his weapon. Claimed he “saved” Bernie’s partner who was a dead man if he hadn’t shot the Kid first. Since he was using a police special (he had never turned in his gun when he was fired from the cops figuring he would need a weapon as a private dick) who the hell would have known. Bernie knew for a fact that he had winged the Kid and then doubled-down on him. He had heard no additional shots. Chalk one bad guy gone up for Bernie if you are keeping score. That action is what got him in on the deal when the Staties went after Eddie Miles and his henchmen.

As for Rex, well, here is where things get weird, where what the rich or do not do gets sealed with seven seals. Carol, and Marlin should have seen this coming given his own experiences with the girls, had killed Rex one afternoon when he would not give her a tumble. Carol did not like not being obeyed when she had her wanting habits on. That is why Marlin got taken around the world that day he went into the General’s hire. Laura had covered up for her sister-also why he gotten taken around the world by her. They had him figured as a sex-addled guy and they knew their mark. Marlin out of respect for the old man and his troubles with those wild sisters let it ride. Let the old man fade into his endless sleep not knowing he had sired two monsters. Before he left that hillside mansion though he made sure he got his full rate and expenses. That’s the real “skinny” forget all that other self-serving stuff.          

Not Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle- A Folk Revival, Revival? - “A Mighty Wind”- A Film Review

Not Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle- A Folk Revival, Revival? - “A Mighty Wind”- A Film Review

A "YouTube" film clip from the movie "A Mighty Wind".


DVD Review

A Mighty Wind, 2003




One of the strands of leftist cultural expression, apart from the central struggle to get people fighting for a workers party that fights for a workers government, that this space has attempted to explore and give some meaning to is the folk revival of the 1960s that was a critical nodal point in this writer’s turn away from mainstream popular culture. Now, as an attentive reader might well know, I have reviewed more well-known folk figures like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger than one could shake a stick at. I have also paid plenty of attention to lesser figures like Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton, as well as reaching back to the iconic figures from the mist of time that motivated those revivalist performers, like Harry Smith and the Lomaxes, John and son Alan. In short, I have paid my dues and have treated that folk revival with proper respect.

Not so this mostly witty sent-up of a film that takes on the whole revival of the folk revival question head first, and gives it a big boot in the behind. The story line, such as it is, and which is not really the factor that keeps this thing moving, is that an old folk music agent has died, leaving a request to his erstwhile dutiful son to try to bring the top three acts that he acted as agent for back for one more shot in the limelight. Nothing wrong with that premise, unless of course it is merely done to take a crack at the pocketbook of the nostalgically-inclined sector of the now aging folk music component of the post-World War II “boomer” generation. And this film does just that, doing a nice job of putting-on the whole PBS-like public television apparatus that thrives on just such events to satisfy their demographics, and helps raise that every constant need for cash from its listeners.

Of course, as is to be expected, it is no easy thing to get the three groups to cooperate, especially the star attraction, Bob and Joan, oops, Mitch and Mickey. Along the way there are more sent-ups: where the folk niche fits in today’s download-driven music market; the problems with aging voices; and the dippy doings of some of the folk musak entertainers. This one is for laughs, and although some bits are corny, intentionally or not, there is enough to keep you interested for the one and one half hours that the movie has you in its grip. From a guy who takes his folk music straight, and with no nonsense, that means something.

In Honor Of The Anniversary Of The Paris Commune-On The Barricades- The Dwindling Days

In Honor Of The 148^th Anniversary Of The Paris Commune-On The Barricades- The Dwindling Days

Henri Broue was beside himself when he heard the alarm bell, the bell that was used to warn of impending danger in front of the barricades coming now from two sources, the dreaded Prussians who had the outpost fortresses of the city under their control and now the dreaded revamped Theirs governmental forces who were charging throughout the at various point. He thought back to late March, late March when the now fallen Jean-Paul Dubois had urged the section committee to pursue the Thiers troops and disband them before they had a chance to regroup in Versailles. But that fervent brave voice was not listened to was not heeded as the spirit of the time was not following a military bend but a good riddance to bad company feeling after Theirs and company had fled to Versailles. Now with the ringing of the alarm (three long gongs, repeated) they were back, back seeking revenge, seeking blood, seeking death.    

Henri had been nothing but a young man the first time, his first time, on the barricades back in those bloody June Days of ’48 when all hell broke loose as the as the old forces tried to drown the new republic in blood, and did so. And hell that was only a republic, not even a workers republic like he and his comrades on barricade Marat (French Revolution, circa 1789, figured murdered by Corday) were trying to establish, establish through the German defeat, the starvation blockade, the perfidy of the Theirs government, their flight and now their vengeful return. The Commune had made some headway, had stabilized things for a while but they forgot a few things too, forgot they were not an isolated island in France but part of all France and should have fought, fought like hell to link up with the other communes in some kind of defensive league. Now they were being destroyed section by section without any outside help, without, as well, any forces to hold the Prussians at bay.

Henri Broue did not consider, despite his revolutionary past, himself a brave man, or a great military fighter although he accounted himself well back in the days. This he knew though, this he knew well, brave or a coward, he was going to be on barricade Marat just as long as he held breathe…  

Down And Dirty In The Delta-With Bluesman Skip James In Mind

Down And Dirty In The Delta-With Bluesman Skip James In Mind 

CD Review

By Music Critic Zack James

Skip James Unchained, Skip James Around Records, 1985 

“Hey, Josh, Sally Ann and I are headed to Newport this weekend for the folk festival, do you want to go?” asked Seth Garth plaintively knowing that Josh would give his right arm to be there that weekend, the weekend when the great old time country blues singers “discovered” by the young urban folk archivists and aficionados were going to “duel” it out for the “king of the hill” title. Of course Josh, stuck in a job as a research assistant in order to pay his way through college could not go since Professor Levin had some paper he was going to present to a conference out in California, out at Berkeley, that needed last minute upgrading and footnoting, a fact of life in the profession, and so would be drudging around at least until Tuesday. Even if he had been able to sneak away for several hours to run down there some seventy miles away he knew that Seth and Sally Ann would be heading down courtesy of the Greyhound bus and so that was strictly out.

Seth, knowing of Josh’s plight thought that it had really been something for a couple of guys from the working poor Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville were deeply into blues by guys from down in places like the Delta in Mississippi and the swamps of Alabama, places like that. City boys really and to the core, corner boys by inclination and so previously heavily attuned to nothing but bad boy rock and roll, you know, Elvis, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee, country boys too but guys who had hooked into some primal beat that moved them, spoke to them, hell, spoke for them, in a way that no sociologist could ever figure out in a hundred years.

Strangely it had almost been an accidental occurrence since one night Seth had taken Annie Dubois from Olde Saco up in Maine to a blues concert in Cambridge where an old blues man from rural Texas, Mance Lipscomb was playing at the Café Algiers. He had been “found” by Alan Battles down in some Podunk town in Texas and came North via bus in tow with Alan. His Ella Speed and a couple of other tunes wowed him and he began studying up on Harry Smith’s anthology, Charles Seeger’s playlist and that of the Lomaxes, father and son. Watched too when unnamed aficionados were combing the South for country blues guys they had heard on old RCA records from the 1920s when that company sent out scouts to find talent for their “race records section.” Surprising some the guys, some of the best ones too, were still alive working in farm jobs or in small trades maybe playing the juke joints for drinks and pocket change.

Then in golden age 1963 (that golden age a true retrospective since many of the great bluesmen like Mississippi John Hurt, ditto Mississippi Fred McDowell, Sam Sloan, Bubba Ball, Bukka White would pass away within a few years of discovery so yes golden age) news came from Newport as they were announcing the festival program that Allan Battles had found Son House and Skip James to go with John Hurt. Now there was no publicity like today that would make the thing some kind of a shoot-out among the three for the title but Seth had a sneaking suspicion that that would happen. Would happen on the assumption that if you put three big gun bluesmen (or any three big guns in any musical genre) you were bound to have a shoot-out. That is what had animated all the conversations between Seth and Josh all spring on the assumption that Josh would be going along.  

In the event Seth had been right, at least in the end right. Each of the three men had their individual sets in a tent area set aside for them which actually was too small by the time serious folkies heard what was afoot. Seth and Sally Ann had gotten seat pretty close to the front because Seth although murder on any instrument he might play had a sense about who could play the guitar and who, beside him, could not. They all did a pretty good job, took a break and then came back together supposedly for one final collective song, John Hurt’s Beulah Land. Son House jumped out first but Seth detected that tell-tale glint he knew from his own drinking experiences that he had been at the bottle. John Hurt did well as would be expected on one of his signature covers. But then Skip James, not as good as a guitarist as the other two pulled down the hammer, came soaring out with that big falsetto voice and kept the field for himself.

And if you don’t believe Seth then check out this CD and then weep for your error.            

From The Archives (U.S.)- "Lenin And The Vanguard Party"-Part Three- "The 1905 Revolution"

From The Archives (U.S.)- "Lenin And The Vanguard Party"-Part Three- "The 1905 Revolution"

Lenin And The Vanguard Party -Part Three- The 1905 Revolution


Markin comment on this series of articles:



Oddly enough, when I first became serious about making a revolution in the early 1970s, a socialist working class-led revolution, in the eternal quest for a more just and equitable society, there were plenty (no enough, there are never enough, but plenty) of kindred spirits who were also finding out that it was not enough to “pray” such a revolution into existence but that one had to build a party, a vanguard party in order to do so. The name "Lenin," the designation "Bolshevik," and the term "world socialist revolution" flowed easily from the tongue in the circles that I began to hang around in. As I write this general introduction, right this minute in 2011, to an important series of historical articles about the actual creation, in real time, of a Leninist vanguard working class party (and International, as well) there are few kindred, fewer still in America, maybe, fewest still, and this is not good, among the youth, to carry the message forward. Nevertheless, whatever future form the next stage in the struggle for the socialist revolution takes the question of the party, the vanguard party really, will still press upon the heads of those who wish to make it.

Although today there is no mass Bolshevik-style vanguard party (or International)-anywhere-there are groups, grouplets, leagues, tendencies, and ad hoc committees that have cadre from which the nucleus for such a formation could be formed-if we can keep it. And part of the process of being able to “keep it” is to understand what Lenin was trying to do back in the early 1900s (yes, 1900s) in Russia that is applicable today. Quite a bit, actually, as it turns out. And for all those think that the Leninist process, and as the writer of these articles is at pains to point it was an unfolding process, was simple and the cadre that had to be worked with was as pure as the driven snow I would suggest this thought. No less an august revolutionary figure that Leon Trotsky, once he got “religion” on the Bolshevik organizational question (in many ways the question of the success of the revolution), did not, try might and main, have success in forming such a mass organization. We can fight out the details from that perspective learning from the successes and failures, and fight to get many more kindred.
********
Markin comment on this article:
Below is a quote from my review of Leon Trotsky's 1905 that underscores the central importance of the lessons learned from the 1905 experience in 1917.

"The author of this book, a central Soviet leader of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and one of the 20th century’s larger-than-life revolutionary figures, Leon Trotsky, noted, as have others, that the unsuccessful 1905 revolution acted as a “dress rehearsal” for the Bolshevik-led October 1917 revolution. And thus this book is intended to, and does, give a bird’s eye view from a key participant about the lessons to be drawn from the failure of that first revolution, both the strategic and tactical military and political lessons. And from reading many histories of the October revolution of 1917, Trotsky and Lenin at least learned those lessons very well."
********
To read about the overall purpose of this pamphlet series and other information about the history of the document go the the American Left History Archives From-Lenin and The Vanguard Party-Preface To The Second Edition And Part One, dated March 15, 2011.

The 1905 Revolution

During 1904, Russian defeats in the war with Japan provoked a surge of liberal bourgeois opposition to the tsarist autocracy. This significant change in the Russian political scene deepened the differences between Menshevism and Bolshevism. Assigning the liberals the leading role in the coming anti-tsarist revolution, the Mensheviks sought to encourage the liberal opposition by toning down criticism of them. The Mensheviks' conciliatory attitude to the liberals marked a further regression down the same path as the Economists, restricting the social-democratic party to the defense of the sectional interests of the Russian proletariat.

Lenin sharply attacked this liberal-conciliationist policy in his November 1904 article, "The Zemstvo Campaign and Iskra's Plan," which opened up a new, more profound phase in the Bolshevik-Menshevik conflict. (The Zemstvos were local government bodies through which the liberals sought to reform tsarism.) The heart of Lenin's polemic is this:

"Bourgeois democrats are by their very nature incapable of satisfying these [revolutionary-democratic] demands, and are therefore, doomed to irresolution and half-heartedness. By crit¬icizing this half-heartedness, the Social-Democrats keep prodding the liberals on and winning more and more proletarians and semi-proletarians, and partly petty bourgeois too, from liberal democracy to working-class democracy....

"The bourgeois opposition is merely bourgeois and merely an opposition because it does not itself fight, because it has no program of its own that it unconditionally upholds, because it stands between the two actual combatants (the government and the revolutionary proletariat with its handful of intellectual supporters) and hopes to turn the outcome of the struggle to its own advantage."

This difference over the role of the liberal bourgeoisie in the anti-tsarist revolution was the main issue at the rival Menshevik and Bolshevik gatherings in April 1905. From their premise that the liberal bourgeois party must come to power with the overthrow of absolutism, the Mensheviks derived the position that the social-democratic party, no matter how strong, ought not to militarily overthrow the tsarist govern¬ment. This policy of passive expectancy and liberal tailism was adopted in resolution form at the April Menshevik conference:

"Under these conditions, social democracy must strive to retain for itself, throughout the entire revolution, a position which would best afford it the opportunity of furthering the revolu¬tion, which would not bind its hands in the struggle against the inconsistent and self-seeking policies of the bourgeois parties, and which would prevent it from losing its identity in bourgeois democracy.

"Therefore, social democracy should not set itself the goal of seizing or sharing power in the provisional government but must remain a party of the extreme revolutionary opposition." —Robert H. McNeal, ed., Decisions and Resolutions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1974)


Lenin counterposed to the Menshevik conception the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry," a concept most extensively set forth in his July 1905 pamphlet, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Dem¬ocratic Revolution. Lenin began from the premise that the Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of carrying through the historic tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. How¬ever, he believed that a peasant-based radical populist move¬ment could and would give rise to a mass revolutionary-democratic party. (Significantly Lenin did not consider the Social Revolutionaries such a party. He regarded them as an "intellectualist" grouping, still addicted to terrorism.) The alliance between the peasant-based revolutionary-democratic and the proletarian social-democratic party, including a coalition "provisional revolutionary government," would over¬throw absolutism and carry through a radical democratic program—the "minimum" program of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP). The operational core of Lenin's strategy was adopted at the all-Bolshevik Third RSDRP Congress:

"Depending upon the alignment of forces and other factors which cannot be precisely defined in advance, representatives of our party may be allowed to take part in the provisional revolutionary government so as to conduct a relentless struggle against all counter-revolutionary attempts and to uphold the independent interests of the working class."
—Ibid.

In developing the concept of the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship," Lenin was primarily concerned with motivating an active military and political role for Russian social democracy in the revolution. As to the future fate of the , "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship," Lenin is deliberately vague; it is clear he did not regard it as a stable form of class rule. In Two Tactics he asserts:

"The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry is unquestionably only a transient, temporary socialist aim, but to ignore this aim in the period of a democratic revolution would be downright reactionary."

The future evolution of Russian society from the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship" would be determined by the balance of class forces not only in Russia but throughout Europe. Lenin's formulation is therefore an algebraic conception. In its most revolutionary outcome it would shade over toward Trotsky's "permanent revolution": a radical democratic revolution in Russia sparks the European pro¬letarian revolution, which allows the immediate socialist revolution in Russia. In the face of triumphant reaction the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship" becomes a revolutionary episode, somewhat akin to the Jacobin dictatorship of 1793 or Paris Commune of 1871, which makes possible the stabilization of normal bourgeois-democratic rule.

By early 1905, the issue of the political dynamic of the revolution had superseded the narrow organizational question as the central conflict between Bolshevism and Menshevism. In fact, the criticism of the Mensheviks adopted at the April 1905 Bolshevik congress did not even mention the issue which caused the original split. Rather it condemned the Mensheviks for economism and liberal tailism:

"...a general tendency to belittle the significance of consciousness, which they subordinate to spontaneity, in the proletarian struggle.... In tactical matters [the Mensheviks] manifest a desire to narrow the scope of the party work; speaking out against the party pursuing completely independent tactics in relation to the bourgeois-liberal parties, against the possibility and desirability of our party undertaking an organizational role in the popular uprising, and against the party's participation under any conditions in a provisional democratic-revolutionary
government."

As is well known, not all the leading Mensheviks of 1903 became the liberal-tailists of 1905. During 1904 the young Trotsky developed the theory of the "permanent revolution" as applied to Russia. Due to Russia's uneven development, no revolutionary bourgeois-democratic force, including a peasant-based radical populist party, would emerge to overthrow absolutism. In carrying through the anti-absolutist rev¬olution, the proletarian party would be forced to take state power and also to introduce the beginnings of socialization. Unless the Russian proletarian revolution extended itself to advanced capitalist Europe, the backward workers state would inevitably be overthrown by imperialist reaction. Trotsky's "permanent revolution" position placed him to the left of the Leninists on the question of revolutionary strategy, but, except for a historic moment in 1905, he remained an isolated figure in the pre-war Russian social-democratic movement.

Revolution and Mass Recruitment
The differences with the Mensheviks over the nature of the Russian revolution weakened, but did not eliminate, the Bolshevik conciliators, who favored reunification of the RSDRP. However, the revolutionary upsurge produced a new division within the Bolshevik camp, and this time Lenin found himself taking an unfamiliar position on the organizational question.

The mass radicalization, particularly after Bloody Sunday, 9 January 1905, produced tens of thousands of militant young workers who were willing to join a revolutionary socialist party, to join the Bolsheviks. However, habituated to a small underground network, many Bolshevik "committeemen" (the cadres who had built hard-core social-democratic cells in the difficult conditions of clandestinity) resisted a radical change in the nature of their organization and its functioning. They opposed a mass recruitment policy and insisted on continuing a lengthy period of tutelage as a precondition for membership.

Lenin adamantly opposed this apparatus conservatism and sought to transform the Bolsheviks from an agitational organization into a mass proletarian party. As early as February 1905, in an article "New Forces and New Tasks," Lenin expressed concern that the radicalization of the masses was far outstripping the growth of the Bolshevik organization: "We must considerably increase the membership of all Party and Party-connected organizations in order to be able to keep up to some extent with the stream of popular revolutionary energy which has been a hundredfold strengthened. This, it goes without saying, does not mean that consistent training and systematic instruction in the Marxist truths are to be left in the shade. We must, however, remember that at the present time far greater significance in the matter of training and education attaches to the military operations, which teach the untrained precisely and entirely in our sense. We must remember that our 'doctrinaire' faithfulness, to Marxism is now being reinforced by the march of revolutionary events, which is everywhere furnishing object lessons to the masses and that all these lessons confirm precisely our dogma....

"Young fighters should be recruited more boldly, widely and rapidly into the ranks of all and every kind of our organizations. Hundreds of new organizations should be set up for the purpose without a moment's delay. Yes, hundreds; this is no hyperbole, and let no one tell me that it is "too late' now to tackle such a broad organizational task. No, it is never too late to organize. We must use the freedom we are getting by law and the freedom we are taking despite the law to strengthen and multiply the Party organizations of all varieties." [emphasis in original]

The conflict between Lenin's mass recruitment policy and the conservative committeemen was one of the most heated issues of the April 1905 Bolshevik congress. Lenin's motion on the subject was actually voted down by a slim majority. This motion calls upon the Bolsheviks to

"make every effort to strengthen the ties between the Party and the masses of the working class by raising still wider sections of the proletarians to full Social-Democratic consciousness, by developing their revolutionary Social-Democratic activity, by seeing to it that the greatest possible number of workers capa¬ble of leading the movement and the Party organizations be advanced from among the mass of the working class to membership on the local centers and on the all-Party center through the creation of a maximum number of working-class organiza¬tions adhering to our Party...."

—"Draft Resolution on the Relations Between Workers and Intellectuals Within the Social-Democratic Organizations," April 1905

In opposing a mass recruitment policy, the conservative Bolshevik committeemen quoted What Is To Be Done? with its line of "the narrower, the better." Lenin replied that the 1902 polemic sought to guide the formation of an oppositional grouping within a politically heterogeneous movement of underground propaganda circles. The tasks facing the Bolshevik organization in early 1905 were, to say the least, different.

Lenin was absolutely right to oppose a conservative attitude toward recruitment during the revolution of 1905. If the tens of thousands of subjectively revolutionary, but politically raw, young workers who came to the fore were not recruited to the Bolsheviks, they would naturally join the opportunist Mensheviks, the radical-populist Social Revolutionaries or the anarchists. The revolutionary party would be deprived of a large and important proletarian generation. Without mass recruitment the Bolshevik Party would have been sterilized during the Revolution and thereafter.
Another aspect of the Bolshevik committeemen's apparatus conservatism was a sectarian attitude toward the mass organizations thrown up by the revolution—the trade unions and, above all, the Soviets. The key St. Petersburg Soviet [council] of Workers' Deputies originated in October 1905 as a centralized general strike committee. While the Mensheviks embraced the trade unions and Soviets precisely because of their loose, politically heterogeneous nature, a section of the Bolshevik leadership distrusted such organizations as competitors to the party.

Thus in October 1905 the Bolshevik Central Committee in Russia (Lenin was still in exile) addressed a "Letter to All Party Organizations" which stated:
"Every such organization represents a certain stage in the proletariat's political development, but if it stands outside Social Democracy, it is, objectively, in danger of keeping the proletariat on a primitive political level and thus subjugating it to the bourgeois parties."

—quoted in Tony Cliff, Lenin, Vol. I: Building the Parry
(1975)

The Bolsheviks' initial sectarian attitude toward the Soviets permitted the Mensheviks to play a leading role in them by filling a political vacuum. Thus Trotsky, as head of the St. Petersburg Soviet, emerged as the most prominent revolutionary socialist in 1905.

Just as he struggled for a mass recruitment policy, so Lenin intervened to correct a sectarian abstentionist attitude toward the Soviets. In a letter to the Bolshevik press entitled "Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers' Deputies" (Novem¬ber 1905) he wrote:

"The Soviet of Workers' Deputies or the Party? I think it would be wrong to put the question in this way and that the decision must certainly be: both the Soviet of Workers' Deputies and the Party. The only question—and a highly important one—is how to divide, and how to combine, the tasks of the Soviet and those of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party.

"I think it would be inadvisable for the Soviet to adhere wholly to any one party." [emphasis in original]

Like Trotsky, Lenin recognized in the Soviets the organizational basis for a revolutionary government:

"To my mind, the Soviet of Workers' Deputies, as a revolutionary center providing political leadership, is not too broad an organization but, on the contrary, a much too narrow one. The Soviet must proclaim itself the provisional revolutionary government, or form such a government, and by all means enlist to his end the participation of new deputies not only from the workers, but, first of all, from the sailors and soldiers...; secondly, from the revolutionary peasantry, and thirdly, from the revolutionary bourgeois intelligentsia. The Soviet must select a strong nucleus for the provisional revolutionary government and reinforce it with representatives of all revolutionary parties and all revolutionary (but, of course, only revolutionary and not liberal) democrats."
—Ibid.

Lenin's positive orientation toward the trade unions and Soviets in 1905 did not represent a change in his previous position on the vanguard party. On the contrary, the concept of the vanguard party presupposes and indeed requires very broad organizations through which the party can lead the mass of more backward workers. What Is To Be Done? states very clearly the relationship of the party to the trade unions: "The workers' organizations for the economic struggle should be trade-union organizations. Every Social-Democratic worker should as far as possible assist and actively work in these organizations. But, while this is true, it is certainly not in our interest to demand that only Social-Democrats should be eligi¬ble for membership in the 'trade' unions, since that would only narrow the scope of our influence upon the masses. Let every worker who understands the need to unite for the struggle against the employers and the government join the trade unions. The very aim of the trade unions would be impossible of achievement, if they did not unite all who have attained at least this elementary degree of understanding, if they were not very broad organizations. The broader these organizations, the broader will be our degree of influence over them." [emphasis in original]

Did Lenin Renounce What Is To Be Done?
Almost every rightist revisionist has zeroed in on Lenin's fight for a mass recruitment policy and against apparatus conservatism to argue that the founder of contemporary communism abandoned the principles of What'Is To Be Done? then and for all time. The British workerist-reformist Tony Cliff concludes that in 1905:

"On the idea that socialist consciousness could be brought in only from the 'outside,' and that the working class could spon¬taneously achieve only trade-union consciousness, Lenin now formulated his conclusion in terms which were the exact opposite of those of What Is To Be Done? In an article called 'The Reorganization of the Party' written in November 1905, he says bluntly: 'The working class is instinctively, spontaneously Social Democratic'." —Op. cit.

Jean-Jacques Marie, a leader of the French neo-Kautskyan Organisation Communiste Internationaliste, says practically the same thing:

"Lenin abandoned the rigidity in the definition which he had given of the relationship between 'consciousness' and 'spon¬taneity.' After the Second Congress (August 1903) he indicated that he had 'forced the note' or 'took the stick bent by the Economists and bent it the other way.' The 1905 Revolution could only force him to underline What Is To Be Done?'s historical function for a particular moment." —introduction to Que Faire? (1966)

Because all manner of reformists and centrists exploit Lenin's 1905 fight against apparatus conservatism for anti-Leninist purposes, it is extremely important to define precisely the issues of that dispute. What aspect or aspects of What Is To Be Done? did Lenin consider no longer relevant in 1905? Lenin did not change his position on the relationship between consciousness and spontaneity. In 1905 and until his death, he maintained that the revolutionary vanguard party was uniquely the conscious expression of the historic inter¬ests of the proletariat. As we have pointed out, the April 1905 Bolshevik congress, where Lenin fought for a mass recruitment campaign, condemned the Mensheviks for "a general tendency to belittle the significance of consciousness, which they subordinate to spontaneity, in the proletarian struggle." Lenin did not regard the "young fighters" and would-be recruits of 1905 as more politically advanced than the con¬servative Bolshevik committeemen. On the contrary, he insisted that the knowledgeable, hardened committeemen could and should raise the subjectively revolutionary "young fighters" to their own level.

Lenin did not water down the party's revolutionary program to attract more backward workers; he did not engage in demagogy. This is obvious from the passage quoted in "New Forces and New Tasks." He also did not believe that broad recruitment required a downgrading in the responsibility and discipline of membership. The April Bolshevik congress replaced the loose 1903 Martovite definition of membership with Lenin's position on formal organizational participation. Nor did Lenin hold that the transformation of the Bolsheviks into a mass workers party should lead to a significant relaxation in organizational centralism. Throughout this period he reaffirmed his belief that centralism was a fundamental organizational principle of revolutionary social democracy. For example, in the article "The Jena Congress of the German Social-Democratic Workers' Party" (September 1905), he wrote:
"It is important that the highly characteristic feature of this revision [of the SPD rules] should be stressed, i.e., the tendency toward further, more comprehensive and stricter appli¬cation of the principle of centralism, the establishment of a stronger organization....

"On the whole, this obviously shows that the growth of the Social-Democratic movement and of its revolutionary spirit necessarily and inevitably leads to the consistent establishment of centralism."

Building on the Foundations of What Is To Be Done?

In what way then did Lenin regard What Is To Be Done? as inapplicable to the tasks facing the Bolsheviks in 1905? In 1905 Lenin advocated a lowering of the hitherto normal level of political experience and knowledge required for recruitment and also for leadership responsibilities. And this change was not so much in Lenin's concept of the vanguard party as in the consciousness of the Russian proletariat. In the underground conditions of 1902-03, only a small number of advanced workers would adhere to the revolutionary social-democratic program, risking imprisonment and exile, and accept the discipline of the newly formed and faction-ridden RSDRP. After Bloody Sunday tens of thousands of militant young workers and also radical petty bourgeois wanted to become revolutionary social democrats, insofar as they understood what this meant. Broad recruitment in 1902-03 would have smothered the revolutionary elements of the RSDRP under a mass of backward, Russian Orthodox, liberal-tsarist workers. In 1905, the solid Bolshevik cadre organization was capable of assimilating large numbers of radicalized, though politically raw, workers.

Lenin's mass recruitment policy in 1905 was neither a repudiation nor a correction of the principles expressed in What Is To Be Done? but was based on their successful implementation. A necessary precondition for a broad recruitment campaign during a revolutionary crisis is a politically homo¬geneous cadre organization. And Lenin explicitly states this in a passage that Cliff himself quotes, but refuses to understand or is incapable of understanding:

"Danger may be said to lie in a sudden influx of large numbers of non-Social-Democrats into the Party. If that occurred, the Party would be dissolved among the masses, it would cease to be the conscious vanguard of the class, its role would be reduced to that of a tail. That would mean a very deplorable period indeed. And this danger could undoubtedly become a very serious one if we showed any inclination towards demagogy, if we lacked party principles (program, tactical rules, organizational experience), or if those principles were feeble and shaky. But the fact is that no such 'ifs' exist.... [W]e have demanded class-consciousness from those joining the Party, we have insisted on the tremendous importance of continuity in the Party's development, we have preached discipline and demanded that every Party member be trained in one or another of the Party organizations. We have a firmly established Party program which is officially recognized by all Social-Democrats and the fundamental propositions of which have not given rise to any criticism.... We have resolutions on tactics which were consistently worked out at the Second and Third Congresses and in the course of many years' work of the Social-Democratic press. We also have some organizational experience and an actual organization, which has played an educational role and has undoubtedly borne fruit." [emphasis in original]
—"The Reorganization of the Party" (November 1905)

A weak propaganda group or small, heterogeneous party which opens its gates during a revolutionary upsurge will be swamped by immature, impressionistic, volatile elements who will lead that party to disaster. This is precisely what happened to the German Spartakusbund of Luxemburg and Liebknecht in 1918-19. Lenin's Bolsheviks in 1905 were able to avoid the tragic fate of the Spartakusbund because they had constructed an organization according to the principles of What Is To Be Done? for the previous five years.

Unlike the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks were in a sense swamped by their mass of radicalized recruits. Under the impact of the deepening revolution, the Menshevik leader¬ship in effect split. Martov's chief lieutenant, Theodore Dan, and Martynov (of all people) supported Trotsky's campaign for a "workers government." Martov and Plekhanov adhered to the official Menshevik position of abstaining from the struggle for governmental power. Thus the revolution of 1905 found the two most authoritative figures of Menshevism isolated on the right wing of their own tendency.

It is doubtful that Lenin believed the large majority of those recruited in 1905 would remain Bolsheviks over the long haul, particularly if the revolution failed (as it did) and a period of reaction set in. But among those first drawn to revolutionary struggle in 1905, it was difficult to distinguish the genuinely advanced elements from the politically backward or deviant, the serious-minded revolutionaries from those simply caught up in the excitement of the moment. Only time and internal struggle would sort out the future Bolsheviks recruited during the revolution from the accidental accretions. During the revolution of 1905 the real Bolshevik Party remained the committeemen of the Iskra period: the new recruits were in effect candidate members.

Under normal conditions a revolutionary organization selects, educates and trains its members in good part before they join. This preparatory process often occurs through a transitional organization (e.g., women's section, youth group, trade-union caucus). But during a revolutionary upsurge such a relatively lengthy pre-recruitment period may well deprive the vanguard party of some of the best young fighters who want to play a full political role through party participation. Given a sufficiently large and solid core cadre, the vanguard party should seek to recruit all the seemingly healthy elements who embrace the revolutionary Marxist program as best they understand it. The process of selection and education then takes place internally.

Mass recruitment during a revolution represents in ex¬treme form a general characteristic of party growth and development. The transition from a propaganda circle to a mass workers party is not a uniform, linear process. Periods of rapid growth and expansion into new milieus are typically followed by a period of consolidation, marked by a certain inward turning, leading to the crystallization of a new layer of cadre.

In June 1907, Lenin brought out a collection of his major writings entitled Twelve Years. At this time the Bolsheviks were still a mass, legal organization with an estimated membership of 45,000. The victory of tsarist reaction had not yet reduced the Bolsheviks to a relatively small underground
network. The condition of the Bolsheviks in early 1907 and the situation they faced were thus very different from the Iskraists of 1902-03.

Lenin therefore had to explain and emphasize the historical context and immediate factional purpose of What Is To Be Done? In his preface to Twelve Years, Lenin observes that "The Economists had gone to one extreme. What Is To Be Done?, I said, straightens out what had been twisted by the Economists....

"The meaning of these words is clear enough: What Is To Be Done? is a controversial correction of Economist distortions and it would be wrong to regard the pamphlet in any other light."

Every rightist revisionist (e.g., Tony Cliff, J.-J. Marie) has leapt upon these few sentences, as if they were a dispensation from heaven, in order to claim that Lenin regarded What Is To Be Done? as an exaggerated and historically obsolete political statement. This is a fundamental distortion of Lenin's meaning. What Is To Be Done? appeared one-sided in 1907 because it dealt with the crystallization of an agitational party composed of professional revolutionaries out of a loose movement of propaganda circles. The 1902 polemic did not deal with the transformation of such an agitational organization into a mass workers party, nor with the prob¬lems and tasks of a mass revolutionary party.

In the same preface to Twelve Years, Lenin asserts that building an organization of professional revolutionaries is a necessary stage in constructing a mass revolutionary proletarian party, of which they will be the vital hard core. He pointed out that the committeemen of the Iskra period formed the basis of all subsequent Bolshevik organizations: "The question arises, who accomplished, who brought into being this superior unity, solidarity and stability of our Party ..It was accomplished by the organization of professional revolu¬tionaries, to the building of which Iskra made the greatest contribution. Anyone who knows our Party's history well, anyone who has had a hand in building the Party, has but to glance at the delegate list of any of the groups at, say, the [1907] London Congress, in order to be convinced of this and notice at once that it is a list of the old membership, the central core that had worked hardest of all to build up the Party and make it what it is."

Part Four Will Appear On March 30, 2011

From The 1930s-1940s Golden Age Of Screwball Comedy-Rosalind Russell’s My Sister Eileen” (1942)- A Film Review

From The 1930s-1940s Golden Age Of Screwball Comedy-Rosalind Russell’s My Sister Eileen” (1942)- A Film Review

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

My Sister Eileen, starring Rosalind Russell, Janet Blair, 1942

I like to listen to my own drummer when I am thinking through “the hook” for any film review I do (probably with any piece of public writing come to think of it). But once in a while some advice my long-time companion and now occasional writer since his retirement in this publication Sam Lowell filters through. Sam who over a long career made something of a specialty out of reviewing black and white films from the 1930s and 1940s (as a result of a youth spent watching this fare in a local retrospective theater in his hometown on angry Saturday afternoons) has always worked under the principal that even the flimsiest production from this era can produce at least a “slice of life” highlighting the times angle when all else fails. Good advice even for the better productions as here with this film under review directed by Alexander Hall and starring Rosalind Russell as Ruth one of the two leading characters in this classic golden age screwball comedy My Sister Eileen.     

So here’s the slice of life of the times angle. Two sisters, the aforementioned Ruth and the Eileen of the title, played by Janet Blair, are for their own reasons ready to break out of some Podunk small town a too small for big dreams town out in the heartland, out in Ohio. The first “hook” is that we are dealing with two women seeking professional careers the former as a writer the later as stage actress. That in itself is worthy of comment in marriage and little white house with picket fence women big dreams times (and maybe a fair part of the female audiences which Sam told me one time made up the majority of the movie population especially during World War II).

The more interesting part though is a look at the dynamics between the two sisters, especially how they will navigate in the world. Ruth, although hardly an ugly duckling is the serious intellectual type (if ironically funny as befits a screwball comedy) is not the kind of gal a whole bunch of guys then, maybe now too, would do a double take over. Eileen is the flirtatious, naïve, beauty of the family who guys will trip over themselves to check out and give it a shot. My wonder is off of this form beyond the entertainment value of the screwball comedy aspect whether such a film could be produced with that stark contrast and feminine competition in mind.

The two sisters in any case see eye to eye that they need to blow that small town and head well where else would budding writers and actresses head but New York City then and still the cultural heart and soul of America. While Ruth may be a step-up over Sis in the naïveté contest and more of a pure go-getting on the merits of her skills she has plenty of hayseed around the edges. The whole caper depends on the place in the big city given their cash flow where they land an apartment, which turns out to be a basement apartment which today might be seen as a golden dream but then was strictly from nowhere which a holy goof of a landlord cons them into renting (“holy goof” Frank Jackman’s term via Jack Kerouac which I feel free to steal every once in a while where it applies). The place winds up being a waystation for a rogue’s gallery of guys and other strays (the guys mostly courtesy of Eileen and her beauty/gullibility) with a whole rafter of slapstick some of it still funny but the rest a relic of the period.

Not to worry, remember this is a comedy, a slightly romantic comedy where even Ruth catches a guy, a magazine editor to boot, as the pair of sisters go through their paces adjusting to New York and working their ways up their respective food chains. But the whole caper was a close thing since their father rushing to the city to save his woe begotten daughters almost forces them to go back to small dream Ohio. The saving grace is that Ruth gets her short stories published in that magazine the editor works for and Eileen well she will work her charms with the publisher of that magazine who has a ton of contacts on old Broadway. Yeah, now that I think about it they couldn’t make one like this now but that’s my “hook” anyway.      

  

March Is Women’s History Month-Honor Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg- The Rose Of The Revolution

Click on the headline to link to the Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archives.

March Is Women’s History Month

Markin comment:

Usually I place the name of the martyred Polish communist revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, in her correct place of honor along with Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht when we of the leftist international working class movement honor our historic leaders each January. This year I have decided to, additionally, honor the Rose of the Revolution during Women’s History Month because, although in life she never fought on any woman-limited basis in the class struggle, right this minute we are in need, desperate need of models for today’s women and men to look to. Can there be any better choice? To ask the question is to give the answer. All honor to the memory of the Rose of the Revolution- Rosa Luxemburg.
********
*From The Pen Of Rosa Luxemburg- On The 1902 Martinique Volcano- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a Workers Vanguard entry, dated February 26, 2010, from Rosa Luxemburg concerning the then imperialist powers response to an earlier natural disaster on Martinique, in light of the current natural disaster that wreaked havoc in Haiti.

Markin comment:

I will always, and happily read anything, any time, and from any source that was written by Rosa Luxemburg- the Rose of the Revolution. Especially when, as here, it hits the nail on the head about the imperialists' crocodile tears over some natural disaster.


Workers Vanguard No. 953
26 February 2010

On 1902 Martinique Volcano by Rosa Luxemburg

(From the Archives of Marxism)

The following article by revolutionary Marxist leader Rosa Luxemburg was written shortly after a massive volcanic eruption in May 1902 that killed some 40,000 people on the Caribbean island of Martinique, which remains to this day a colony of French imperialism. The article, which originally appeared in the Social Democratic paper Leipziger Volkszeitung (15 May 1902), appears here as translated in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (Monthly Review Press [2004]). It conveys the hypocrisy of the European Great Powers, with the blood of millions on their hands, rushing to the aid of Martinique.

Throughout the article Luxemburg refers to various wars and revolutions. These include the Opium Wars of Western intervention into China in the mid 19th century; the Paris Commune of 1871, in which the proletariat briefly governed the city before being crushed by the French army with the support of German forces, with over 20,000 slaughtered; and the Boer Wars of 1880-81 and 1899-1902, when the British imperialists brutally crushed independent Afrikaner states in southern Africa that in turn lorded it over the black African masses. Other such references are explained by brackets in the text.

* * *

Mountains of smoking ruins, heaps of mangled corpses, a steaming, smoking sea of fire wherever you turn, mud and ashes—that is all that remains of the flourishing little city which perched on the rocky slope of the volcano like a fluttering swallow. For some time the angry giant had been heard to rumble and rage against this human presumption, the blind self-conceit of the two-legged dwarfs. Great-hearted even in his wrath, a true giant, he warned the reckless creatures that crawled at his feet. He smoked, spewed out fiery clouds, in his bosom there was seething and boiling and explosions like rifle volleys and cannon thunder. But the lords of the earth, those who ordain human destiny, remained with faith unshaken—in their own wisdom.

On [May] 7th, the commission dispatched by the government announced to the anxious people of St. Pierre that all was in order in heaven and on earth. All is in order, no cause for alarm!—as they said on the eve of the Oath of the Tennis Court in the dance-intoxicated halls of Louis XVI, while in the crater of the revolutionary volcano fiery lava was gathering for the fearful eruption. All is in order, peace and quiet everywhere!—as they said in Vienna and Berlin on the eve of the March eruption fifty years ago [the outbreak of the 1848 European revolutions]. The old, long-suffering titan of Martinique paid no heed to the reports of the honorable commission: after the people had been reassured by the governor on the 7th, he erupted in the early hours of the 8th and buried in a few minutes the governor, the commission, the people, houses, streets and ships under the fiery exhalation of his indignant heart.

The work was radically thorough. Forty thousand human lives mowed down, a handful of trembling refugees rescued—the old giant can rumble and bubble in peace, he has shown his might, he has fearfully avenged the slight to his primordial power.

And now in the ruins of the annihilated city on Martinique a new guest arrives, unknown, never seen before—the human being. Not lords and bondsmen, not blacks and whites, not rich and poor, not plantation owners and wage slaves—human beings have appeared on the tiny shattered island, human beings who feel only the pain and see only the disaster, who only want to help and succor. Old Mt. Pelee has worked a miracle! Forgotten are the days of Fashoda [in 1898, Britain and France nearly went to war over a conflict in Fashoda, Sudan], forgotten the conflict over Cuba, forgotten “la Revanche”—the French and the English, the Tsar and the Senate of Washington, Germany and Holland donate money, send telegrams, extend the helping hand. A brotherhood of peoples against nature’s burning hatred, a resurrection of humanism on the ruins of human culture. The price of recalling their humanity was high, but thundering Mt. Pelee had a voice to catch their ear.

France weeps over the tiny island’s forty thousand corpses, and the whole world hastens to dry the tears of the Mother Republic. But how was it then, centuries ago, when France spilled blood in torrents for the Lesser and Greater Antilles? In the sea off the east coast of Africa lies a volcanic island—Madagascar: fifty years ago there we saw the disconsolate Republic who weeps for her lost children today, how she bowed the obstinate native people to her yoke with chains and the sword. No volcano opened its crater there: the mouths of French cannons spewed out death and annihilation; French artillery fire swept thousands of flowering human lives from the face of the earth until a free people lay prostrate on the ground, until the brown queen of the “savages” was dragged off as a trophy to the “City of Light.”

On the Asiatic coast, washed by the waves of the ocean, lie the smiling Philippines. Six years ago we saw the benevolent Yankees, we saw the Washington Senate at work there [a reference to the 1898 Spanish-American War, in which the U.S. took possession of the Philippines and Cuba—the war had taken place four years previously, not six]. Not fire-spewing mountains—there, American rifles mowed down human lives in heaps; the sugar cartel Senate today sends golden dollars to Martinique, thousands upon thousands, to coax life back from the ruins, sent cannon upon cannon, warship upon warship, golden dollars millions upon millions to Cuba, to sow death and devastation.

Yesterday, today—far off in the African south, where only a few years ago a tranquil little people lived by their labor and in peace, there we saw how the English wreak havoc, these same Englishmen who in Martinique save the mother her children and the children their parents: there we saw them stamp on human bodies, on children’s corpses with brutal soldiers boots, wading in pools of blood, death and misery before them and behind.

Ah, and the Russians, the rescuing, helping, weeping Tsar of All the Russians—an old acquaintance! We have seen you on the ramparts of Praga, where warm Polish blood flowed in streams and turned the sky red with its steam [in 1831, the Tsarist army bloodily suppressed a Polish uprising in Praga, a suburb of Warsaw]. But those were the old days. No! Now, only a few weeks ago, we have seen you benevolent Russians on your dusty highways, in ruined Russian villages eye to eye with the ragged, wildly agitated, grumbling mob; gunfire rattled, gasping muzhiks fell to the earth, red peasant blood mingled with the dust of the highway. They must die, they must fall because their bodies doubled up with hunger, because they cried out for bread, for bread!

And we have seen you too, oh Mother Republic, you tear-distiller. It was on May 23 of 1871: the glorious spring sun shone down on Paris; thousands of pale human beings in working clothes stood packed together in the streets, in prison courtyard, body to body and head to head; through loopholes in the walls, mitrailleuses thrust their bloodthirsty muzzles. No volcano erupted, no lava stream poured down. Your cannons, Mother Republic, were turned on the tight-packed crowd, screams of pain rent the air—over twenty thousand corpses covered the pavements of Paris!

And all of you—whether French and English, Russians and Germans, Italians and Americans—we have seen you all together once before in brotherly accord, united in a great league of nations, helping and guiding each other: it was in China. There too you forgot all quarrels among yourselves, there too you made a peace of peoples—for mutual murder and the torch. Ha, how the pigtails fell in rows before your bullets, like a ripe grainfield lashed by the hail! Ha, how the wailing women plunged into the water, their dead in their cold arms, fleeing the tortures of your ardent embraces!

And now they have all turned to Martinique, all one heart and one mind again; they help, rescue, dry the tears and curse the havoc-wreaking volcano. Mt. Pelee, great-hearted giant, you can laugh; you can look down in loathing at these benevolent murderers, at these weeping carnivores, at these beasts in Samaritan’s clothing. But a day will come when another volcano lifts its voice of thunder: a volcano that is seething and boiling, whether you need it or not, and will sweep the whole sanctimonious, blood-splattered culture from the face of the earth. And only on its ruins will the nations come together in true humanity, which will know but one deadly foe—blind, dead nature.

*From The Karl Marx- Friedrich Internet Archives- In Defense Of The Paris Commune And Its Class-War Prisoners- First Address

Click on the headline to link to the Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels Archive online copy of the material mentioned in the title on the defense of the Paris Commune and its class-war prisoners.

Markin comment:

Readers of this space are, by now, familiar with my interest in the defense of class-war prisoners and, perhaps, know that I express that interest through support to the efforts of the Partisan Defense Committee (PDC). One of the reasons for that support of the PDC is its commitment to the non-sectarian defense of all class-war prisoners, a tradition in which it follows the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) principle expressed in the slogan, “an injury to one is an injury to all.” That principle also animated the early James P. Cannon-led work of the International Labor Defense, the legal defense arm of the American Communist Party and of the early legal defense work of the Trotskyist American Socialist Workers Party.

Perhaps not as well known, although it would seem axiomatic to their theories, is the even earlier class-war prisoner defense work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as an expression of their concept expressed in the slogan “workers of the world unite.” In no place was this work ardently pursued that in their defense against all-comers of the Paris Commune during its short, historic existence and later, after it was crushed of its refugees, exiles, prisoners and their families. Much of this work was done early on through the Marx-created and led First International, and after its demise in the wake of that defeat through other Marx-influenced national organizations. I am posting some material here to provide some examples of their efforts.

The important point here is that, to my knowledge, there was, at most, only one proclaimed Marxist in the leadership of the Commune, and not much more adherence among the plebeians and artisans who heroically defended the Commune. So, mostly, those being defended by Marx and Engels were leftist political opponent, in some cases, severe political opponents. That approach is what has animated my own legal defense work and, hopefully, yours. Here, by the way, is another slogan to end this comment, fittingly I think-All Honor To The Paris Communards! Long Live The Memory Of The Paris Commune!

We’ve Got To Get Back To The Garden-Serpents And All-Dennis Covington’s ‘Salvation On Sand Mountain: Snake Handling And Redemption In Southern Appalachia” (1995)-A Book Review-Of Sorts

We’ve Got To Get Back To The Garden-Serpents And All-Dennis Covington’s ‘Salvation On Sand Mountain: Snake Handling And Redemption In Southern Appalachia” (1995)-A Book Review-Of Sorts

Book Review

By Bart Webber

Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handing and Redemption in Southern Appalachia, Dennis Covington, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995 

     

Josh Breslin had always been the running kind. Not the running kind in the famous country song by the late Merle Haggard The Running Kind where the unnamed narrator is ready to hightail it out some forlorn lonesome door at the first sign that he might have to settle down to some nine to five straitjacket life. Not for him. Nor is it that great American restlessness that physically drove plenty of forebears to run from the “civilized” East to seek fame and fortune or beat the law out to the great American blue-pink night West in the 19^th century before Professor Turner’s frontier hit its limits, closed down on some Pacific Ocean splash. Josh Breslin until very recently had been running away from his past, from his heritage, from his what shall we call them-roots. From what made him tick for good or bad when the deal went down.         

Josh had for most of his life after he actually escaped his growing up home (the word he used when talking about this subject to his friend Lenny Lynch one night over drinks at Fisherman’s Wharf in York, Maine), house in the working class Five Corners section, the mill town factory section, of Olde Saco further up the road in Maine hard by the Sacco River maintained a studied ignorance of his roots, of where his people had come from. Really his father Prescott’s people since he could have hardly missed the French-Canadian roots on his mother’s nee LeBlanc side (and that of half the town) since she had come down from Quebec with his maternal grandparents and a whole shew of relatives from grand aunts and uncles on down.

Yes that father’s people question was buried deep in Josh’s  psyche to remained undisturbed until his was in his early 60s  when maybe taking some early accounting of his life he felt that he had a corner or two of his heart missing. Not that the taciturn Prescott ever really broached the subject, never brought in up at least in his presence that he recalled. (As it turned out when he did begin to research his roots his oldest brother Paul was a fountain of information since Prescott in the few times he felt expansive would confide in the eldest son.)

A few things kind of pushed Josh in that direction beyond that summing up process. He had gone back to the old town after an absence of many years when he had reconnected with an old high school friend Rene Dubois on Facebook and Rene had invited him up for a few days. During that stay Rene’s wife, Anne, had mentioned over dinner something about his father that stopped him in his tracks a bit when the subject came up about the fates of various relatives. His father had passed away in the mid-1980s after spending most of his adult life in Olde Saco, working in the mills before they headed South (and then off-shore) in search of cheaper labor and then whatever jobs an uneducated man could scrape up from what was left.

What Anne had mentioned that night at dinner was that Prescott had never really been accepted by the Five Corners people, by the hordes of French-Canadian transplants who worked the mills with him including Josh’s mother’s relatives. His father had been shunned and made fun of for his soft Southern accent (which Josh never really noticed). Apparently, later confirmed by Paul, his Kentucky birth, his not being a Roman Catholic in the days when that counted in the Five Corners section, and most of all not being French-Canadian (Quebecois now) were held against him. Josh was shocked since he believed that Prescott whatever else he was had been respected as a hard worker and under the circumstances a good provider for his family given what he had to offer.

That started Josh in a tailspin, started him thinking more seriously about what the hell he had grown up in, what his poor benighted father had to endure and maybe explain a little why he had never been interested before in his roots. Not so unnaturally, given that Josh has spent almost all his adult life writing for various publications small and large, mostly specialty journals and small press publications, his other impetuses were from books. One from re-reading a book by Michael Harrington written in the early 1960s and said to be a book that President Kennedy had taken as a signpost for eliminating poverty in America, The Other America. Re-reading that book brought back a painful memory from high school which Josh had also kind of suppressed since then.

The Harrington book centered on rural poverty among whites (what were called “white trash” in some quarters) in the hills and hollows of Appalachia. Mentioned by name the town in Kentucky, Hazard, that his father had been born and grew up in and that was one of the most severely depressed and forsaken areas in the region with all the pathologies inherent in poverty running full force. That brought on a remembrance of the time in high school that the headmaster around Thanksgiving time had come on the P.A and announced that the school was sponsoring a food and clothing drive for the impoverished citizens of Hazard. He had turned about twenty shades of red because the whole class knew that his father was from that town. He had left school early that day he was so embarrassed.                   

The other book that got him thinking about his father’s roots, his roots and how they had affected the course of his life was a strange book about fundamentalist religious people down in the rural South, down in Appalachia who practiced snake-handling as part of their religious observance-as part of their acceptance of the strange ways of their savior Jesus Christ. (They also practiced speaking in tongues and the laying on of hands.) The book Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handing and Redemption in Southern Appalachia by writer Dennis Covington hit a nerve in a couple of ways. Mr. Covington too was, as a result of his exposure to snake-handling when he was on an assignment, thinking hard about his roots, about his own people’s from Appalachia’s relationship to these exotic practices.

The other was a direct reference in the book to Hazard, to people in that area into religious snake-handling as part of their bid for salvation, his people, his father’s people who knows. That really hit home when Josh’s brother Paul mentioned that before Josh was born Prescott and their mother Delores had taken him down to Hazard to see if things could work out there, see if there was work for uneducated ex-soldier. Paul wasn’t sure of the reasons but things didn’t work out, their mother either didn’t like the set-up or was homesick. This was the kicker though when Paul and Josh worked the numbers. The numbers worked out that Josh had been conceived down in Hazard. The both laughed when Paul mentioned that Josh has those hills and hollows in his DNA.     

The book made him wonder though, wonder without any proof one way or the other, whether Prescott had known or delved into the practice of snake-handling as part of his growing up religious practice. But that was sort of secondary since his father (or Paul when he asked) never mentioned anything like that when he was growing up. Mainly Josh knew that Prescott was not a Roman Catholic and not much else. Had agreed to raise his kids in the Roman religion (there would have been hell to pay if he had not in Catholic-dominated Five Corners). Knew now that Prescott had paid a price for being different, for being from a very different people and that got Josh speculating on what those people were like-and how they had marked him. Had marked him without his every having met any of his father’s people. None from grandparents down to siblings.                     

Mr. Covington was much closer to getting some concrete results in seeking his roots having grown up in the South, having been able to trace certain parts of the family, or at least family residences which coincided with “burnt over” snake-handling observance territory at some point in the 20^th century. Got so involved in the people that he was covering, his “people” despite his very different professional path and despite his academic writing background, that he took the leap and did some snake handling himself. But Josh thought that was very different from what he wanted to think through since part of Mr. Covington’s search involved a quest for spiritual, if not religious, meaning in his own life. Josh just wanted to know if those traits, those staying very close to his recent roots inherited from his father (which he never acknowledged when Prescott was alive) were in his DNA.          

          

He wondered what isolated in the boondocks existence led people to carve out a very precise way in which they took their religion, took their Jesus Christ as their exemplar. Didn’t know much of the outside world but knew their Bible front and back. Knew enough that they would be tempted by the serpents (those snakes anyway) in order to get back to the Garden, get out of exile East of Eden. What degree of faith permitted snake-bitten men and women to trust in something enough that they would not seek medical help but “trust in the Lord.” They might not if met be his people, people he could talk to but they certainly were his “people.” He would have to thank Mr. Covington for pushing him on some unknown path back to those etched roots.