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
*In Honor Of The Frida Kahlo Exhibit At The Museum Of Fine Arts In Boston- An Exotic Flower- Frida Kahlo Click On Title To Link To New York Review Of Books article on Frida Kahlo mentioned below.
By Laura Perkins
Honestly although I have known the name Frida Kahlo since back in the 1970s when we down to Mexico and along the way went to the famous Blue House Frida and Diego Rivera shared I was not familiar with her work as I was with Rivera and the other male muralists for which Mexico was then famous. I got more familiar with her work indirectly through the film Frida although I would not say I was well versed even then. What I connected Frida to more than art, or rather who I connected Frida to, was the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky who persecuted by Stalin and his agents was on the planet without a place to stay. Frida and Diego through their connections got Trotsky into the country. Although I had a Trotskyist boyfriend at the time I went to Mexico I was unaware, as I believe he was since he never mentioned it then, of the short love affair between Frida and Trotsky (which would culminate in a Frida painting dedicated to Trotsky now in the Women’s Art Museum down in Washington).
My real introduction to Frida, live and in person, was several years ago when the MFA displayed (as in this exhibit) her famous Two Peasant Women painting which in many ways shows her artistic skills to advantage and has the addition advantage of showing how close she was to her deeply held Mexican roots. That alone is reason enough to see this exhibition at the MFA if you are in or near Boston between now and June.
DVD REVIEW
By Leslie Dumont Frida, Salma Hayek, 2002 I recently read an article in the New York Review of Books (May 15, 2008) analyzing the work of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo that reminded me how much I liked this film, especially the performance by Ms. Hayek (who received an Oscar nomination for her efforts and who bore a striking resemblance to Frida in the film). The gist of the article, which included some biographical detail that is also explored here (her various severe mental and physical problems, his stormy relationship with her fellow artist and husband the world famous muralist Diego Rivera, her bisexuality), is that while much of Kahlo's artistic work reflected her strong psychic attachment to Mexico it also placed her squarely in the camp of naturalist painters. I am not enough of an art devotee to make comment on that above mentioned critique, however, from the several paintings of Kahlo’s that I have seen I would argue a little more toward the surrealist school that virtually every Mexican artist in the 1920’s and 1930’s drew from as they created their work. But enough of that argument for now. This film, in its own round about way, by presenting the various psychic pains (failure to have the children she desperately wanted, her topsy- turvy relationship with Rivera as she tries to make her own space in the art world and the underlying tensions of combining politics and artistic endeavor) gives a fairly decent gloss, for a commercial film, on the trials and tribulations of being a Mexican woman artist in the early part of the 20th century. Of course, for this political junkie and admirer of Leon Trotsky the names Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera conjure up political connections as much as art. One of the strands working its way through the film is this couple’s relationship with the exiled Trotsky when President Cardenas granted him a visa in 1937. All sources that I have read and photographs that I have seen have mentioned that Trotsky was smitten with Frida’s exotic beauty (to the furor of his companion, Natalia). However, it was rather startling to watch the episode where Trotsky jumps into bed with Ms. Kahlo. I have noted elsewhere that the old time revolutionaries, especially the Russians, were extremely reticent about discussing personal sexual matters in their memoirs and autobiographies. Trotsky was no exception. Is that scene merely cinematic license or was Trotsky really just a dirty old man? You decide. I will concentrate of his political wisdom. And Frida’s strangely exotic paintings.
Click on the headline to link to a "Communist International Internet Archives" online copy of Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin's report on the founding of the Communist International in 1919.
Markin comment:
This report by Lenin is from the heyday of the Communist International, the days when revolution was in the air and it looked like we might just turn this dirty old class-ridden human society around. Our day will come, if we have a Marxist program to intersect current events and are willing to fight for it.
Songs To While Away The Social Struggle By-Jim Morrison And The Doors
Peter Paul Markin comment:
A while back, maybe a half a decade ago now, I started a series in this space that I presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By where I posted some songs, you know, The Internationale, Which Side Are You On?, Viva La Quince Brigada, Solidarity Forever and others like Deportee, Where Have All The Flowers Gone, Blowin’ In The Wind, This Land Is Your Land while not as directly political had their hearts in the right place, that I thought would help get us through the “dog days” of the struggle for our socialist future. Those “dog days” in America anyway, depending on what leftist political perspective drove your imagination could have gone back as far as the late 1960s and early 1970s when all things were possible and the smell of revolution could be whiffed in the air for a while before we were defeated, or maybe later when all abandoned hope for the least bit of social justice in the lean, vicious, downtrodden Reagan years of unblessed memory or later still around the time of the great world- historic defeats of the international working class in East Europe and the former Soviet Union which left us with an unmatched arrogant unipolar imperialist world. That one pole being the United States, the “heart of the beast” from which we work. Whatever your personal benchmark they were nevertheless if you had the least bit of political savvy clearly dog days.
I began posting these songs at a time, 2009, when it was touch and go whether there would be some kind of massive uprising against the economic royalists (later chastised under the popular sobriquet “the one-percent”) who had just dealt the world a blow to the head through their economic machinations in what is now called the Great Recession of 2008. Subsequently, while there were momentary uprisings, the Arab Spring which got its start in Tunisia and Egypt and enflamed most of the Middle East one way or another, here in America the defensive uprising of the public workers in Wisconsin and later the quick-moving although ephemeral Occupy movement, and the uprising in Greek, Spain and elsewhere in Europe in response to the “belt-tightening demanded by international financial institutions to name a few, the response from the American and world working classes has for lots of reasons if anything further entrenched those interests.
So as the “dog days” continue I have resumed the series. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs selected; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this kind of formation would mean political death for any serious revolutionary upheaval and would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. I like to invite others to make additional comments on certain pivotal songs, groups and artists and here is one by my old friend Josh Breslin, whom I met out in California during the heyday of the summer of love 1967, that reflects those many possibilities to “turn the world upside down” back in the 1960s and early 1970s before the “night of the long knives” set in:
WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin
My old friend from the summer of love 1967 days, Peter Paul Markin, always used to make a point then of answering, or rather arguing which tells a lot about the kind of guy he was (is) when he gets his political hind legs up with anybody who tried to tell him back in the day that “music is the revolution.” Strangely when I first met him in San Francisco that summer you would have been hard-pressed to tell him that was not the case but after a few hit on the head by the coppers, a tour of duty in the military at the height of the Vietnam War, and what was happening to other political types trying to change the world for the better like the Black Panthers he got “religion,” or at least he got that music as the agency of social change idea out of his head. Me, well, I was (and am not) as political as Markin so that I neither got drowned in the counter-culture where music was a central cementing act, nor did I have anything that happened subsequently that would have given me Markin’s epiphany.
I would listen half-attentively (a condition aided by being “stoned” a lot of the time) when such conversations erupted and Markin drilled his position. That position meaning, of course that contrary to the proponents (including many mutual friends who acted out on that idea and got burned by the flame, some dropping out, some going back to academia, some left by the wayside and who are maybe still wandering) that eight or ten Give Peace A Chance, Kumbaya, Woodstock songs would not do the trick, would not change this nasty, brutish, old short-life world into the garden, into some pre-lapsian Eden. Meaning that the gathering of youth nation unto itself out in places like Woodstock, Golden Gate Park, Monterrey, hell, the Boston Common, or even once word trickled down the way the word has always trickled down to the sticks once the next new thing gets a workout, Olde Saco Park, in the town up in Maine where I grew up would not feed on itself and grow to such a critical mass that the quite nameable enemies of good, kindness starting with one Lyndon Johnson and one Richard M. Nixon and working down to the go-fers and hangers-on, and leave us alone would sulk off somewhere, defeated or at least defanged.
Many a night, many a dope-blistered night before some seawall ocean front Pacific Coast campfire I would listen to Markin blast forth against that stuff, against that silliness. As for me, I was too “into the moment,” too into finding weed, hemp, mary jane and too into finding some fetching women to share it with to get caught up in some nebulous ideological struggle. It was only later, after the music died, after rock and roll turned in on itself, turned into some exotic fad of the exiles on Main Street that I began to think through the implications of what Markin, and the guys on the other side, were arguing about.
Now it makes perfect sense that music, or any mere cultural expression standing alone, would be unable to carry enough weight to turn us back to the garden (I won’t use that “pre-lapsarian’ again to avoid showing my, and Markin’s, high Roman Catholic up-bringing and muddy what I want to say which is quite secular). I guess that I would err on the side of the “angels” and at least wish that we could have carried the day against the monsters of the American imperium we confronted back in the day. (Although I had a draft deferment due to a serious physical condition, not helped by the “street” dope I was consuming by the way, I supported, and something vehemently and with some sense of organization, a lot of the political stuff Markin was knee deep into, especially Panther defense when we lived in Oakland and all hell was raining down on the brothers and sisters.)
Thinking about what a big deal was made of such arguments recently (arguments carried deep into the night, deep in smoke dream nights, and sometimes as the blue–pink dawn came rising up to smite our dreams) I thought back to my own musical appreciations. In my jaded youth (if one could be jaded in Podunk Olde Saco, although more than one parent and more than one teacher called me “beatnik” back then whatever that meant to them) I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. Perhaps it was some off-shoot DNA thing since my people on my mother’s side (nee LeBlanc) were French-Canadian which had a deep folk heritage both up north and here although such music was not played in the house, a house like a lot of other ethnics where in the 1950s everybody wanted to be vanilla American (Markin mentioned that same thing about his Irish-etched parents). So it initially started as a reaction to my parents’ music, the music that got them through the Great Depression of the 1930s and later waiting for other shoe to drop (either in Normandy where my father first went to Europe under some very trying conditions or at home waiting in Olde Saco), and that became a habit, a wafting through the radio of my childhood home habit. You know who I mean Frank (Sinatra for the heathens), Harry James, the Andrews Sisters, Peggy Lee, Doris Day and the like. Or, maybe, and this is something that I have come closer to believing was the catalyst along with the DNA stuff I already mentioned, my father’s very real roots in the Saturday night mountain barn dance, fiddles blazing, music of his growing up poor down in Appalachia. (Again such music except every once in a while Hank Williams who I didn’t know about at the time was not played in the house either. Too “square” I guess.)
The origin of my immersion into roots music first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House(and that raspy, boozy country voice on Death Letter Blues), Skip James ( I went nuts over that voice first heard after he had been “discovered” at the Newport Folk Festival I think in 1963 when he sang I’d Rather Be The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man on the radio after I had just broken up with some devil woman, read girl), Mississippi John Hurt (that clear guitar, simple lyrics on Creole Belle), Muddy Waters (yes, Mannish-Boy ), Howlin’ Wolf ( I again went nuts when I heard his righteous Little Red Rooster although I had heard the Stones version first, a version originally banned in Boston) and Elmore James ( his Dust My Broom version of the old Robert Johnson tune I used to argue was the “beginning” of rock and roll to anybody who would listen).
Then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis (stuff like One Night With You, Jailhouse Rock and the like before he died in about 1958 or whatever happened to him when he started making stupid movies that mocked his great talent making him look foolish and which various girlfriends of the time forced me to go see at the old Majestic Theater in downtown Olde Saco), Jerry Lee (his High School Confidential, the film song, with him flailing away at the piano in the back of a flat-bed truck blew me away although the film was a bust, as was the girl I saw it with), Chuck (yeah, when he declared to a candid world that while we all gave due homage to classical music in school Mister Beethoven better move on over with Roll Over Beethoven), Roy (Roy the boy with that big falsetto voice crooning out Running Scared, whoa), Big Joe (and that Shake, Rattle and Roll which I at one point also argued was the “beginning” of rock and roll, okay, I liked to argue those fine points) and Ike Turner (who I ultimately settled on with his Rocket 88 as that mythical beginning of rock and roll).
Then later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, the folk music minute before the British invasion took a lot of the air out of that kind of music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan (even a so-so political guy like me, maybe less than so-so then before all hell broke loose and we had to choose sides loved Blowin’ in the Wind), Dave Von Ronk (and that raspy old voice, although was that old then sing Fair And Tender Ladies one of the first folk songs I remember hearing) Joan Baez (and that long ironed-hair singing that big soprano on those Child ballads), etc.
I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Meaning rootless or not meaningfully or consciously rooted in any of the niches mentioned above. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music (paying final conscious tribute to the mountain DNA in my bones) and so on.
All those genres are easily classified as roots music but I recall one time driving Markin crazy, driving him to closet me with the “music is the revolution” heads he fretfully argued against when I mentioned in passing that The Doors, then in their high holy mantra shamanic phase with The End and When The Music’s Over epitomized roots music. That hurt me to the quick, a momentary hurt then, but thinking about it more recently Markin was totally off base in his remarks.
The Doors are roots music? Well, yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derived from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of The Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native- American culture that drove the beat of many of his trance-like songs like The End. More than one rock critic, professional rock critic, has argued that on their good nights when the dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired up The Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here, and it is not a far stretch to classify their efforts as in the great American roots tradition. I argued then and will argue here almost fifty years later when that original statement of mine was more prophetic The Doors put together all the stuff rock critics in one hundred years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men (and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll, played the people’s music, played to respond to a deep-seeded need of the people before them, for keeps.
So where does Jim Morrison fit in an icon of the 1960s if he was not some new age latter day cultural Lenin/Trotsky. Some icon that Markin could have latched onto. Jim was part of the trinity, the “J” trinity for the superstitious – Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young. The slogan of the day (or hour) – “Drugs, sex, and rock and roll.” And we liked that idea however you wanted to mix it up. Then.
Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most political among us, including Markin in his higher moments (you figure out what that “higher,” means since you are bright people) felt those cultural winds blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative vision as part of the chosen. The righteous headed to the “promise land.” Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.
Know this as well if you are keeping score. Whatever excesses were committed by our generation and there were many, many made by the generation that came of political and cultural age in the early 1960s, the generation I call the generation of ’68 to signify its important and decisive year internationally, were mainly made out of ignorance and foolishness. Our opponents, exemplified by outlaw big cowboy President Lyndon B. Johnson and one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, and their minions like J. Edgar Hoover, Mayor Richard Daley and Hubert Humphrey spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty plus years of “cultural wars” in revenge by their protégés, hangers-on and now their descendants has been a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. And Markin would surely endorse this sentiment. Enough.
Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Then, And Now-An Encore
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Several years ago, I guess about five years now, in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement with the shutting down of its campsites across the country (and the world) I wrote a short piece centered on the need for revolutionary intellectuals to take their rightful place on the left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines (or wherever they were hiding out). One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a certain stock-taking was in order. A stock-taking at first centered on those young radical and revolutionaries that I ran into in the various campsites and on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their Utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses. Now a few years later it is apparent that they have, mostly, moved back to the traditional political ways of operating or have not quite finished licking their wounds.
Although I initially addressed my remarks to the activists still busy I also had in mind those intellectuals who had a radical streak but who then hovered on the sidelines and were not sure what to make of the whole experiment although some things seemed very positive like the initial camp camaraderie. In short, those who would come by on Sunday and take a lot of photographs and write a couple of lines but held back. Now in 2017 in the year of the 100th anniversary of the Russian October Revolution it is clear as day that the old economic order (capitalism if you were not quite sure what to name it) that we were fitfully protesting against (especially the banks who led the way downhill) has survived another threat to its dominance. The old political order, the way of doing political business now clearly being defended by one Donald J. Trump with might and main is still intact. The needs of working people although now widely discussed (the increasing gap between the rich, really the very rich, and the poor, endlessly lamented and then forgotten, the student debt death trap, and the lingering sense that most of us will never get very far ahead in this wicked old world especially compared to previous generations) have not been ameliorated. All of this calls for intellectuals with any activist spark to come forth and help analyze and plan how the masses are to survive, how a new social order can be brought forth. Nobody said, or says, that it will be easy but this is the plea. I have reposted the original piece with some editing to bring it up to date.
*******
No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon, a founding member of the American Communist Party and the founder of the Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined. A century later with some tweaking, unfortunately, those same theories and the same need for organization are still on the agenda although, as Trotsky once said, the conditions are overripe for the overthrow of capitalism as it has long ago outlived its progressive character in leading humankind forward.
The conclusion that I originally drew from that observation was that the revolutionary socialist movement was not as desperately in need of theoreticians and intellectuals as previously (although having them, and plenty of them, especially those who can write, is always a good thing). It needed leaders steeped in those theories and with a capacity to lead revolutions. We needed a few good day-to-day practical leaders, guys like Cannon, like Debs from the old Socialist Party, like Ruthenberg from the early Communist Party, to lead the fight for state power.
In that regard I have always held up, for the early part of the 20th century, the name Karl Liebknecht the martyred German Communist co-leader (along with Rosa Luxemburg) of the aborted Spartacist uprising of 1919 as such an example. He led the anti-war movement in Germany by refusing to vote for the Kaiser’s war budgets, found himself in jail as a result, but also had tremendous authority among the left-wing German workers when that mattered. In contrast the subsequent leadership of the German Communists in the 1920’s Paul Levi, Henrich Brandler and Ernest Thaelmann did not meet those qualifications. For later periods I have, as mentioned previously, held up the name James P. Cannon, founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (to name only the organization that he was most closely associated with), as a model. Not so Communist Party leaders like William Z. Foster and Earl Browder (to speak nothing of Gus Hall from our generation) or Max Shachtman in his later years after he broke with Cannon and the SWP. That basically carries us to somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Since I have spent a fair amount of time lately going back to try to draw the lessons of our movement I have also had occasion to think, or rather to rethink my original argument on the need for revolutionary intellectuals. I find that position stands in need of some amendment now.
Let’s be clear here about our needs. The traditional Marxist idea that in order to break the logjam impeding humankind’s development the international working class must rule is still on the historic agenda. The Leninist notions that, since the early part of the 20th century, we have been in the imperialist era and that a ‘hard’ cadre revolutionary party is necessary to lead the struggle to take state power are also in play. Moreover, the Trotskyist understanding that in countries of belated development the working class is the only agency objectively capable of leading those societies to the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois revolution continues to hold true. That said, rather than some tweaking, we are seriously in need of revolutionary intellectuals who can bring these understandings into the 21st century.
It is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory mentioned above hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working class specific questions play in world politics (the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.
Since the mid- 20th century we have had no lack of practical revolutionary leaders of one sort or another - one thinks of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and even Mao in his less rabid moments. We have witnessed any number of national liberation struggles, a few attempts at political revolution against Stalinism, a few military victories against imperialism, notably the Vietnamese struggle. But mainly this has been an epoch of defeats for the international working class. Moreover, we have not even come close to developing theoretical leaders of the statue of Lenin or Trotsky.
As a case in point, recently I made some commentary about the theory of student power in the 1960’s and its eventual refutation by the May 1968 General Strike lead by the working class in France. One of the leading lights for the idea that students were the “new” working class or a “new” vanguard was one Ernest Mandel. Mandel held himself out to be an orthodox Marxist (and Trotskyist, to boot) but that did not stop him from, periodically, perhaps daily, changing the focus of his work away from the idea of the centrality of the working class in social struggle an idea that goes back to the days of Marx himself.
And Mandel, a brilliant well-spoken erudite scholar probably was not the worst of the lot. The problem is that he was the problem with his impressionistic theories based on, frankly, opportunistic impulses. Another example, from that same period, was the idea of Professor Regis Debray (in the service of Fidel at the time ) that guerrilla foci out in the hills were the way forward ( a codification of the experience of the Cuban Revolution for which many subjective revolutionary paid dearly with their lives). Or the anti-Marxist Maoist notion that the countryside would defeat the cities that flamed the imagination of many Western radicals in the late 1960s. I could go on with more examples but they only lead to one conclusion- we are, among other things, in a theoretical trough. The late Mandel’s students from the 1960s have long gone on to academia and the professions (and not an inconsiderable few in governmental harness-how the righteous have fallen). Debray’s guerilla foci have long ago buried their dead and gone back to the cities. The “cities” of the world now including to a great extent China had broken the third world countryside. This, my friends, is why today I have my Help Wanted sign out. Any takers?
“Corrina, Corrina, Gal Where Did You Stay Last Night?”-With Blues/Folksinger Taj Majal In Mind
2008
1968
By Music Critic Lance Lawrence
CD Review
Shoutin’ in Key, Taj Majal, 2000
Seth Garth the old time music critic for the now long gone alternative newspaper The Eye who had followed all the trends in the folk world in the old days once his friend from high school, Jack Callahan, had turned him on to the genre after having heard some mountain music coming on from a fugitive radio station one summer Sunday night still was interested in what was left of that world. More importantly who was still left still standing from that rough-hewn folk minute of the early 1960s. An important part of that interest centered on who still had “it,” who could still sing and not embarrass the stage, from among those who were still standing.
That was no mere academic question but had risen quite sharply in the early part of 2002 when Seth, Jack and their respective wives had attended a Bob Dylan concert up in Augusta Maine and had come away disappointed, no, more than disappointed, shocked that Dylan had lost whatever voice he had had and depended increasingly on his backup singers and musicians. Dylan no longer had it, both agreed that they would have to be satisfied with listening to the old records, tapes, CDs, and YouTube. That single shocking event led subsequently to an earnest attempt to attend concerts and performances of as many of the old-time folkies as they could before they passed on. They have documented elsewhere some of those others some who have like Utah Phillips and Dave Van Ronk subsequently passed on but one night recently, a few months ago now, they were discussing one Taj Majal (stage name for a folk and blues singer not the famous wonder of the world in India) and how they had first heard him back in the day since in anticipation of seeing him in person up at the great concert hall overlooking the harbor at Rockport on the coast of Massachusetts.
Naturally enough if you knew Seth and Jack they disagreed on exactly where they had first seen Taj after Jack had hear him do a cover of the old country blues classic Corrina, Corrina on that fugitive folk program out of Rhode Island, WAFJ. Seth said the Club 47 over in Harvard Square in Cambridge and Jack said they had gone underground to the Unicorn over on Boylston Street in Boston (that literally the club was below ground and you went down via a door in the middle of the sidewalk). Of course those disputes never got resolved, never got final resolution. What was not disputed was that they had both been blown away by the performance of Taj and his small backup band that night. His blues mastery proved to them that someone from the younger generation was ready to keep the old time blues tradition alive, including playing the old National Steel guitar that the likes of Son House and Bukka White created such great blues classic on. The highlight that night had been The Sky Is Crying which has been covered by many others since but not equaled.
The track record of old time folkies had been mixed as one would expect as the shocking Dylan experiences pointed out. Utah Phillips by the time they got to see him had lost it, David Bromberg still had it for two examples. The night they were discussing and disputing the merit of Taj’s case both agreed that he probably had lost it since that rough-hewn gravelly voice of his had like Dylan’s and Willie Nelson’s taken a beating with time and many performances. Needless to say they should not have worried since Taj was smokin’ that night (although they did when old be-hatted Taj came out and immediately sat down not a good sign for prior experiences with other old time performers). Played the old Elmore James Television Blues on the National Steel like he was about twenty years old. Did his old version of Corrina proud and his version of CC Rider as well. Yeah, Taj still had it. But if you don’t believe a couple of old folkies and don’t get a chance to see him in person out your way then grab this album Shoutin’ In Key from the old days and see what they meant when bluesy guys played for keeps. Got it.
Click on the title to link to a "Boston Indymedia" entry from the Boston Anarchist Black Cross seeking funds and support for political prisoners.
Markin comment:
'An injury to one, is an injury to all" is just what it means, and moreover, says it all here. Support all our political prisoners by donating funds and other acts of solidarity.
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.
*************** Those Who Honor Lenin, Luxemburg, And Liebknecht Are Kindred Spirits- From The Pen Of Rosa Luxemburg- A Guest Commentary
Click on the title to link to a Workers Vanguard article, dated January 29, 2010, honoring the 3 L's and a polemic from the pen of Rosa Luxemburg, the "Rose Of The Revolution", on the course of, and in defense of, the Russian Revolution then in full bloom.
Workers Vanguard No. 951
29 January 2010
For the Communism of Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht
In January we commemorate the “Three L’s”: Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, who died on 21 January 1924, and revolutionary Marxist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were assassinated on 15 January 1919 in Germany by the reactionary Freikorps. This was done as part of the suppression of the Spartakist uprising by the Social Democratic government of Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann and Gustav Noske. We reprint below an appreciation of Luxemburg excerpted from Max Shachtman’s “Under the Banner of Marxism,” which was written in response to the resignation of Ernest Erber and originally published in Volume IV, Number 1 of the internal bulletins of the Workers Party in 1949.
Shachtman joined the American Communist Party in the early 1920s. Along with James P. Cannon and Martin Abern, he was expelled in 1928 for fighting for the Bolshevik-Leninist line of Leon Trotsky against the Stalinist degeneration of the international Communist movement. For a decade he was, with Cannon, a leader of the American Trotskyist movement as well as a key leader in the International Left Opposition. However, following an intense faction fight in the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, Shachtman, along with Abern and James Burnham, broke from Trotskyism in 1940, refusing to defend the Soviet degenerated workers state in World War II. Shortly thereafter, he developed the position that the USSR was a new exploitative form of class society, “bureaucratic collectivism.” (For more on this fight, see Trotsky’s In Defense of Marxism and Cannon’s The Struggle for a Proletarian Party.)
Following this split, Shachtman formed the Workers Party, which was a rightward-moving centrist party that existed from 1940 to 1949, when it changed its name to the Independent Socialist League. Under the intense pressure of U.S. imperialism’s anti-Soviet Cold War, Shachtman came to see Stalinism as a greater danger than “democratic” imperialism. He ended his days as an open supporter of U.S. imperialism and a member of the Democratic Party, backing the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the vicious, losing imperialist war against the Vietnamese social revolution.
Shachtman’s 1949 reply to Erber (who went on to become an urban planner in Northern New Jersey) represented the last time he tried to defend revolutionary Marxism against a classical Menshevik. In resigning from the Workers Party, Erber, using stock-in-trade social-democratic arguments to justify support for one’s “own” bourgeoisie, denounced the Bolshevik Revolution and counterposed Luxemburg to Lenin, portraying her as a defender of classless “democracy.” Many self-styled leftists continue to do likewise, distorting Luxemburg’s 1918 criticisms of the Bolsheviks, which she never published in her lifetime and which were based on the very partial information to which she had access while imprisoned for her revolutionary struggle against the First World War. Using previously untranslated articles from the German Communist journal Rote Fahne written by Luxemburg near the end of her life, Shachtman demonstrated her support to the Russian Revolution and how she and Lenin stood shoulder to shoulder in the fight for socialist revolution.
* * *
Contrast Erber and every word he writes with the critical appraisal of the Bolsheviks written in prison by Rosa Luxemburg, who is invoked against revolutionary socialism nowadays by every turncoat and backslider who wouldn’t reach up to her soles if he stood on tiptoes:
“That the Bolsheviks have based their policy entirely upon the world proletarian revolution is the clearest proof of their political farsightedness and firmness of principle and of the bold scope of their policies.”
You will never see that quoted from the turncoats who have drafted Luxemburg into the crusade against Bolshevism against her will. Nor will you see this quoted:
“The party of Lenin was the only one which grasped the mandate and duty of a truly revolutionary party and which, by the slogan—‘All power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry’—insured the continued development of the revolution....
“Moreover, the Bolsheviks immediately set as the aim of this seizure of power a complete, far-reaching revolutionary program: not the safeguarding of bourgeois democracy, but a dictatorship of the proletariat for the purpose of realizing socialism. Thereby they won for themselves the imperishable historic distinction of having for the first time proclaimed the final aim of socialism as the direct program of practical politics.”
We can see now how much right Erber has to drag Rosa Luxemburg into court as a fellow-detractor of the Bolsheviks, how much right he has to mention her views in the same breath with his own. Fortunately, Luxemburg is not a defenseless corpse. She left a rich political testament to assure her name from being bandied about by soiled lips. Read this, directed right at the heart of Erber:
“The real situation in which the Russian Revolution found itself, narrowed down in a few months to the alternative: victory of the counterrevolution or dictatorship of the proletariat—Kaledin or Lenin. Such was the objective situation, just as it quickly presents itself in every revolution after the first intoxication is over, and as it presented itself in Russia as a result of the concrete, burning questions of peace and land, for which there was no solution within the framework of bourgeois revolution.”
Not much room here, not so much as a crevice, for Erber’s “alternative,” is there? Not much room here for his “capitalist economic relations.” This is a revolutionist writing—not an idol-worshipper of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, but still a revolutionist, a tireless, defiant, unflinching champion of the proletariat in the class struggle.
“In this, the Russian Revolution has but confirmed the basic lesson of every great revolution, the law of its being, which decrees: either the revolution must advance at a rapid, stormy and resolute tempo, break down all barriers with an iron hand and place its goals ever farther ahead, or it is quite soon thrown backward behind its feeble point of departure and suppressed by counterrevolution. To stand still, to mark time on one spot, to be contented with the first goal it happens to reach, is never possible in revolution. And he who tries to apply the home-made wisdom derived from parliamentary battles between frogs and mice to the field of revolutionary tactics only shows thereby that the very psychology and laws of existence of revolution are alien to him and that all historical experience is to him a book sealed with seven seals.”
Read it over again, especially that wonderfully priceless last sentence. And then tell us if it is not directed straight at Erber, word for word and line for line! It is much too exactly fitting to be quoted only once! “And he who tries to apply the home-made wisdom derived from parliamentary battles between frogs and mice to the field of revolutionary tactics only shows thereby that the very psychology and laws of existence of revolution are alien to him and that all historical experience is to him a book sealed with seven seals.” If ever Erber gets up enough of what he lacks to look into a mirror, there is a ready-made one for him. If anyone thinks he can improve on this stinging answer to Erber and his home-made wisdom, to his Grand Coalitions between frogs and mice, he is just wasting good time.
“Still, didn’t Rosa criticize the Bolsheviks for dispersing the Constituent Assembly?” No, she did not. She criticized them for not calling for elections to a new Constituent; she criticized them for the arguments they made to justify the dispersal. But in the first place, her criticism has next to nothing in common with that of the latter-day anti-Bolsheviks (or, for that matter, of the anti-Bolsheviks of the time). And in the second place, she was wrong, just as she was wrong in her criticism of the Bolshevik position on the “national question” and of the Bolshevik course in the “agrarian question.” And in the third place, what she wrote in prison, on the basis of “fragmentary information” (as the editor of the American edition of her prison notes admits), was not her last word on the question. Before her cruel death, she altered her position on the basis of her own experiences, on the basis of the living realities of the German revolution. Lenin’s State and Revolution was checked twice—first in the Russian Revolution and then in the German revolution! We will give the reader an idea of what she wrote before her death so that he may see why our present “champions” of Luxemburg never find time, space or inclination to quote her to the end.
The German workers, a year after the Bolshevik Revolution, overturned the Hohenzollern monarchy and, just as spontaneously as did the Russians before them, they formed their Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils (“Räte,” Soviets). The German Mensheviks—Scheidemann, Noske and Ebert—feared and hated the Councils just as much as did their Russian counterparts. They championed the National Assembly (German counterpart of the Russian Constituent) instead, calculating thereby to smash the Councils and the struggle for socialism. Haase and Kautsky, the centrists of the Independent Socialists, oscillated between the Councils and the Assembly. What position did Rosa Luxemburg take, what position did the Spartacus League and its organ, Die Rote Fahne, take? Here once more was the problem of workers’ democracy versus bourgeois democracy, the democratic republic of the Councils versus the bourgeois republic, dictatorship of the proletariat organized in the Councils versus the National Assembly—not in Russia but in Germany, not in 1917 but a year later, not while Rosa was in Breslau prison but after her release.
Here is Rosa Luxemburg in Die Rote Fahne of November 29, 1918, writing on the leaders of the Independents:
“Their actual mission as partner in the firm of Scheidemann-Ebert is: to mystify its clear and unambiguous character as defense guard of bourgeois class domination by means of a system of equivocation and cowardliness.
“This role of Haase and colleagues finds its most classical expression in their attitude toward the most important slogan of the day: toward the National Assembly.
“Only two standpoints are possible in this question, as in all others. Either you want the National Assembly as a means of swindling the proletariat out of its power, to paralyze its class energy, to dissolve its socialist goal into thin air. Or else you want to place all the power into the hands of the proletariat, to unfold the revolution that has begun into a tremendous class struggle for the socialist social order, and toward this end, to establish the political rule of the great mass of the toilers, the dictatorship of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils. For or against socialism, against or for the National Assembly; there is no third way.”
On December 1st, Luxemburg spoke on the situation at a meeting of the Spartacus League in the hall of the Teachers’ Union. At the end of the meeting, a resolution was adopted setting forth her views and giving approval to them:
“The public people’s meeting held on December 1st in the Hall of the Teachers’ Union on Alexander Street declares its agreement with the exposition of Comrade Luxemburg. It considers the convocation of the National Assembly to be a means of strengthening the counterrevolution and to cheat the proletarian revolution of its socialist aims. It demands the transfer of all power to the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, whose first duty it is to drive out of the government the traitors to the working class and to socialism, Scheidemann-Ebert and colleagues, to arm the toiling people for the protection of the revolution, and to take the most energetic and thoroughgoing measures for the socialization of society.”
In her first editorial in Die Rote Fahne of November 18, she writes under the title, “The Beginning”:
“The Revolution has begun.... From the goal of the revolution follows clearly its path, from its task follows the method. All power into the hands of the masses, into the hands of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, protection of the work of the revolution from its lurking foes: this is the guiding line for all the measures of the revolutionary government….
“(But) What is the present revolutionary government (i.e., Scheidemann & Co.) doing?
“It calmly continues to leave the state as an administrative organism from top to bottom in the hands of yesterday’s guards of Hohenzollern absolutism and tomorrow’s tools of the counterrevolution.
“It is convoking the Constituent Assembly, and therewith it is creating a bourgeois counterweight against the Workers’ and Peasants’ representation, therewith switching the revolution on to the rails of the bourgeois revolution, conjuring away the socialist goals of the revolution.”
[Shachtman mistakenly attributed the following quote to the article, “The Beginning.” It is actually from “The National Assembly” in the 20 November 1918 issue of Die Rote Fahne—ed.]
“From the Deutsche Tageszeitung, the Vossische, and the Vorwärts to the Freiheit of the Independents, from Reventlow, Erzberger, Scheidemann to Haase and Kautsky, there sounds the unanimous call for the National Assembly and an equally unanimous outcry of fear of the idea: Power into the hands of the working class. The ‘people’ as a whole, the ‘nation’ as a whole, should be summoned to decide on the further fate of the revolution by majority decision.
“With the open and concealed agents of the ruling class, this slogan is natural. With keepers of the capitalist class barriers, we discuss neither in the National Assembly nor about the National Assembly....
“Without the conscious will and the conscious act of the majority of the proletariat—no socialism. To sharpen this consciousness, to steel this will, to organize this act, a class organ is necessary, the national parliament of the proletarians of town and country.
“The convocation of such a workers’ representation in place of the traditional National Assembly of the bourgeois revolutions is already, by itself, an act of the class struggle, a break with the historical past of bourgeois society, a powerful means of arousing the proletarian popular masses, a first open, blunt declaration of war against capitalism.
“No evasions, no ambiguities—the die must be cast. Parliamentary cretinism was yesterday a weakness, is today an equivocation, will tomorrow be a betrayal of socialism.”
It is a pity that there is not space in which to quote far more extensively from the highly remarkable articles she wrote in the last few weeks of her life, before she was murdered by those whose “parliamentary cretinism” became the direct betrayal of socialism—by those for whom Erber has now become a shameful apologist by “showing” that the defeat of the revolution in Germany was as much the responsibility of the masses as it was of the Scheidemanns and Noskes! The articles as a whole show the veritable strides that Luxemburg took away from her prison criticism and toward a policy which was in no important respect different from the one pursued by the Bolsheviks toward the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democrats, toward the Mensheviks and other “socialist opponents,” toward the Constituent Assembly and the Soviets. With these articles of hers in print, to mention her today as an enemy of the Bolsheviks, as a critic of their attitude toward bourgeois democracy and the Constituent is excusable only on the grounds of inexcusable ignorance.
The course of the German Revolution, life, the lessons of the struggle—these left us the heritage of a Rosa Luxemburg who was, in every essential, the inseparable comrade-in-arms of the leaders of the Russian Revolution. To claim that this firm solidarity did not exist, is simply an outrage to her memory. What is worse, it shows that nothing has been learned of the lessons of the Russian Revolution and nothing of the lessons of the German Revolution—the two great efforts of the proletariat to test in practice what is, in the long run, the question of life and death for us: the state and revolution. And on this question, with Lenin and with Luxemburg, the real Luxemburg—we remain under the banner of Marxism.
It Ain’t The Singer It’s the Song-Townes Van Zandt’s A Far Cry From Dead (1999)-A CD Review
CD Review
By Zack James
A Far Cry From Dead, Townes Van Zandt, Arista Records, 1999
Recently in reviewing a bluesy CD by outlaw cowboy singer Willie Nelson (at least that “outlaw” designation was the basis for my introduction to him back in the early 1980s) I mentioned that I was reminded by my old high school friend, Seth Garth, that back in those late 1970s and early 1980s I was drawn to such outlaw cowboy music that had broken sharply with the traditional stuff out of Nashville that I could not abide, always associated with the Grand Ole Opry and stuff like that, redneck music.
I also noted that just then, just that late 1970s, early 1980s, rock and roll was taking one of its various detours, a detour like in the late 1950s when the soul went out of rock for a while before the storm of the British invasion and “acid” rock saved it which I could not follow, folk music, the social protest kind anyway that had attracted me in my youth was fading fast even among aficionados as more mundane concerns filled that niche, and the blues was losing its star mostly black performers by the day and the younger crowd, mostly black, was leaving the field to white aficionados like Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughn and heading to what would become hip-hop tradition so I was up for listening to something different. Something that might catch my ear for roots-based music, the music of the “big tent” American songbook beyond Tin Pan Alley.
What Seth hadn’t remembered was the genesis of that outlaw cowboy moment. My finding of an old used record by the artist under review Townes Van Zandt at Cheapo’s Records in Cambridge (still there) of all places to find such music. And of course once I get on to a sound I like I tend to look for everything I can find by the artist (film-maker or writer too). Done. But more than in that outlaw moment I actually saw Townes in person at, well, several places over a couple of years, but all of them in the heart of “outlaw country” music, ah, Harvard Square. So in those days I was not alone in looking for a new sound since all the venues were sold out.
What drew me Townes then, and drew me to this CD recently although it had been put out in 1999 a few years after his untimely death in 1996 was he command of lyrics that “spoke” to me, spoke some kind of truth of things that were bothering me just then like lost loves, not understanding why those loves were lost, and about just trying to get through the day. Yeah, that gravelly voice on that first record kind of fit my mood then, and it still sounds good although unlike that first Live in Houston album this one is much more a produced product of the studio. Still the searing burning messages and lyrics are there for to help you get through those tough days that creep up and pile up on you. Listen up.
Suddenly Is Right-Frank Sinatra’s “Suddenly” (1954)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Film Critic Sandy Salmon
Suddenly, starring Frank Sinatra, sterling Hayden, 1954, based on a 1943 story Active Duty by Richard Sales who wrote the screenplay, 1954
For my generation, the generation of ‘68 as one political pundit who I read occasionally called those of us who were involved in the great counter-cultural wave of the mid to late 1960s, November 22, 1963 the day President Kennedy was assassinated by an ex-military man, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a touchstone in our lives, as December 7, 1941 was for an earlier generation and 9/11 for a later one. Thus the subject matter of the 1954 film under review, Suddenly, an assassination attempt on the President of the United States as he passed through by train the Podunk fictional town of Suddenly out in California was a little shocking. If I had seen the film in 1954 at a time when I knee-deep, as were many of my fellow film critics, in attending Saturday afternoon matinee double features I probably would have passed it off as another great B-film noir effort. And at some level that was my reaction recently as well but the film brought to the surface more questions than I would have expected for such an old time film.
The plot-line was like this if it helps the reader understand my perplexity. In advance of the unnamed President (although if you go by the original 1943 story the film is based on Active Duty by the screenwriter here Richard Sales hard it would have been Franklin Delano Roosevelt but by the film’s release Dwight Eisenhower) heading to some Western mountain retreat the town of Suddenly was suddenly (I couldn’t resist that, sorry) infested with all kinds of cops, feds, Secret Service, naturally, state and local cops. The important one of the latter here is Sheriff Shaw played by gruff he-man type Sterling Hayden. With all this police action it was fairly easy for a bunch of guys led by John Baron, played by Frank Sinatra, to pose as FBI agents and gain access to a primo location at a house across from the railroad station where the President was expected to stop. That house also just happened to be the home of Sheriff Shaw’s hoped for paramour, a war widow, her son, and her ex-Secret Service father.
After a series of ruses Baron and his boys set up for the ambush in a position in the house and with a rifle that reminded me of what the situation was like at that 1963 Texas School Depository. But remember this is 1954 and fiction so that you know that this plot like many others before and since would be foiled before the dastardly deed was consummated. Foiled one way or another although not before a senior Secret Service agent was killed and Sheriff Shaw was wounded and taken hostage along with his sweetie and her family. The long and short of it was that the plot was foiled by the heroic action of that son, that paramour, her father and even the Sheriff. So you can see the film to get the skinny on the how of that.
What is of interest, beyond the excellent job that Frank Sinatra did of playing an ex-soldier who learned to love to kill, who gained self-respect and dignity during World War II when he could freely shoot on sight anything that moved and nobody thought anything of it and the good job Sterling Hayden did as the Sheriff also an ex-soldier trying to figure out Baron’s motivation for shooting the President. Baron was nothing but a flat-out psychopath who had no more feeling about what he doing and who he was doing it to than the Germans he wasted in the war. I have seen guys like that, saw them during my own military service, saw them at the VA hospitals too when they completely broke down. With this caveat in Baron’s case he was a hired killer, was being paid big money, half a million, no mean sum back then, by unnamed sources to perform his task and blow the country. Who was behind it and their motivation didn’t interest him.
In light of all the controversy surrounding the Kennedy murder by an ex-Marine soldier of unknown psychological stability and a million theories about whether he acted alone or as part of greater conspiracy that got me thinking about who might have hired Baron to do the dastardly deed. That was a matter of some speculation among the hostages in that ambush house and since it was the post-World War II 1950s and the heart of the red scare Cold War night the obvious possibility was the “commies” (although not the Cuban variety since their revolution was several years away). But that did not end the possibilities. It could have been some nefarious criminals, the mob, unhappy about their exposure to public scrutiny. It might have been the military-industrial complex unhappy about their contracts, or lack of them. It could not have been Lyndon Johnson since he was not Vice President then but it could have been the sitting Vice President. You know who I mean in 1954 if you are old enough. Yeah, Richard Milhous Nixon, later to be a President and a known felon. Don’t tell me he wasn’t mean and craven enough to order that hit. Don’t be naïve. Watch this film and develop your own conspiracy theory.
Mississippi Noir- William Faulkner's "Sanctuary"-A Book Review BOOK REVIEW
Sanctuary, William Faulkner, Vintage Books, New York, 1931
I have read my fair share of Faulkner although I am hardly a devotee. My main positive reference to him is concerning his role in the screenwriting of one of my favorite films- "To Have or To Have Not" with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. I have also, obliquely, run into his work as it relates to who should and who should not be in the modern American literary canon. Usually the criticism centers on his racism and sexism, and occasionally his alcoholism. Of course, if political correctness were the main criterion for good hard writing then we would mainly not be reading anything more provocative or edifying than the daily newspaper, if that.
So much for that though. Faulkner is hardly known as a master of the noir or 'potboiler' but here the genius of his sparse, functional writing (a trait that he shares with the Hemingway of "The Killers" and the key crime novelists of the 1930’s Hammett, think "The Red Harvest", and Chandler, think "The Big Sleep") gives him entree into that literary genre. And he makes the most of it.
The plot revolves around a grotesque cast of characters who are riding out the Jazz Age in the backwaters of Mississippi and its Mecca in Memphis. Take one protected young college student, Temple Drake, looking to get her 'kicks'. Put her with a shabbily gentile frat boy looking for his kicks. Put them on the back roads of Prohibition America and trouble is all you can expect. Add in a bootlegger or two, a stone-crazy killer named Popeye with a little sexual problem and you are on your way.
That way is a little bumpy as Faulkner mixed up the plot, the motives of the characters and an unsure idea of what justice, Southern style, should look like in this situation in the eyes of his main positive character, Horace, the lawyer trying to do the right thing in a dead wrong situation which moreover is stacked against him. As always with Faulkner follow the dialogue, that will get you through even if you have to do some re-reading (as I have had to do). Interestingly, for a writer as steeped in Southern mores, Jim Crow and very vivid descriptions of the ways of the South in the post-Civil War era as Faulkner was there is very little of race in this one. The justice meted out here tells us one thing- it is best to be a judge’s daughter or a Daughter of the Confederacy if you want a little of that precious commodity. All others watch out. Kudos to Faulkner, whether he wrote this for the cash or not, for taking on some very taboo subjects back in 1931 Mississippi. Does anyone really want to deny him his place in the American literary canon? Based on this effort I think not.
In Honor Of The 148th Anniversary Of The Paris Commune-On The Barricades- The Last Days-Long Live The Memory Of The Communards
Henri Languet, Jacques Monet, and Louis Dubois, three young proletariat stalwarts who were apprentices at Jean-Paul Balin’s saddle shop (and hence of stocky muscular builds to tackle the work and mild- mannered dispositions as befits future saddlers dealing with picky owners and recalcitrant horses) sworn an oath, a blood brotherhood oath (a workers’ brotherhood oath not uncommonly clinched in blood then) that they would be the last defenders, if possible, on the barricade Rue Marat (re-named from Rue Louis XIV with the establishment of the Commune to honor a fallen hero of ’89) which they had helpedbuild back in those heady March days. March days when after Thiers and his bloody troops had fled to Versailles all things seemed possible and they had constructed the barricade seemingly with their bare hands, grit and determinations to defend their project. Had taken a runty make-shift jumble of logs, wire, paving stones, bricks, old furniture and anything else they could scrabble for and turned it into a secure, covered and homey little guardhouse. Guarding as always in the first days against the perfidious Prussians who encircled the city and those damn savage Theirs mercenaries still on the loose.
But that was past and now in mid-May the three lads, lads who thought they would grow old in the splendor of their collective efforts and the efforts of others among the revolutionary working classes of Paris, were faced with the daunting and seemingly utopian task of fending off the counter-revolution brought forth by those same Theirs troops under the blood-thirsty General Gallifit. Still they had made their oath and the grimly determined look on their faces as they mounted the newly constructed parapet to take their turns at guard duty, arms in hand, to face the ever approaching boom of cannon and sound of rifle fire spoke of young men who were at peace with themselves.
The reports from the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Hotel de Ville were not good. The Prussians, in effect, had taken Thiers side (although the details of that collusion would not become known, known to them, anyway) and were letting his troops into the city through their lines. Most of the northern and eastern barricades had been smashed with heavy loss of life and serious recriminations. Summary executions and mass graves were already being reported throughout those sections of the city. Other acts of barbarity and atrocious behavior by Thiers mercenaries had also had an effect on morale and there had been some desertions and fleeing. Worse, ammunition and food supplies, always a problem from day one, were dwindling with no hope of replacements. Moreover there were signs that some leaders in military headquarters and some among the political leaders were panicking. Those reports, some true, some false, some just the normal fog of war had had small effect on the Rue Marat defenders, including our three stalwarts, since this section was the heart of the working- class where the heroic if tragic traditions of ’89 and ’48 were living memories, especially the latter and so there would be few defections, and less grumbling, grumbling about their fates here.
A couple of days after the solemn blood oath had been taken by the lads the roar of the cannons sent a shell with fifty meters of the barricade. Jean, on guard duty at the time, had seen the shell land and seen its effect blasting a huge hole in the lower floors of an apartment building nearby. That close cannon blast followed by the distant but audible tramp of marching feet meant only one thing, the defense at Rue Moulin had been breached and Theirs troops were headed to Rue Marat. They probably would be in front of the barricade, barring any guerilla skirmishes to hold them up, within an hour or two. The three young men and the approximately fifty other defenders, including some women, were all ordered to the barricade by Comrade Leclerc. Leclerc, who had shown himself to be recklessly brave in the past, in this case steadied his troops to the hopeless task in front of them. The tramping feet came closer.
In the event, true to their traditions of ’89 and ’48, the defenders of Rue Marat fought savagely to defend each inch of their precious barricade. We know now to no avail, we know maybe without even having to read about it, since we know how very few defenses by the oppressed of the world since Pharaoh’s times, maybe before, have been victorious. We know too that our three valiants fought savagely too, fought to the last paving stone. To no avail. The three, Jean grievously wounded, were captured by Thiers thugs, and marched about fifty paces from their beloved “home” and summarily executed. But note this-the three, knowing their fates were already sealed, defiantly shouted out Long Live The Paris Commune before the shots rang out. Yes, with the memory echo of such stout defenders in mind-Long Live The Paris Commune.
Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of a performance of "Joe Hill's Last Will".
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.
Joe Hill's Last Will
His will, which was eventually set to music by Ethel Raim, read:[8]
My will is easy to decide
For there is nothing to divide
My kin don't need to fuss and moan
"Moss does not cling to a rolling stone."
My body? - Oh. - If I could choose
I would to ashes it reduce
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow
Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again
This is my Last and final Will
Good Luck to All of you
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