Democrats, Trump Push Coup Down With U.S. War Moves Against Venezuela!

Workers Vanguard No. 1150	8 March 2019

Democrats, Trump Push Coup

Down With U.S. War Moves Against Venezuela!

MARCH 4—Under the guise of a “humanitarian aid” convoy, on February 23 the U.S. imperialists and their right-wing Venezuelan stooges tried to breach the country’s border with Colombia, that is, open Venezuela up to a potential invasion. Occurring one month after Juan Guaidó declared himself Venezuela’s president, this episode in the drive to bring down the bourgeois-nationalist regime of Nicolás Maduro was an abject failure. But Washington has vowed to press ahead. While Republicans and Democrats alike shriek about a humanitarian crisis, it is the U.S. that is strangling Venezuela’s people with savage, constantly escalating economic sanctions. We say: Hands off Venezuela! Down with the sanctions!

From Trump to self-described “socialists” in the Democratic Party, the entire spectrum of American bourgeois politicians declaims that Venezuelans need to be saved from an evil despot who is blocking aid and starving his own people. This is just “humanitarian” cover for U.S. attempts to install an utterly subservient government in this oil-rich country. Such attempts date back to a U.S.-engineered coup attempt against populist strongman Hugo Chávez in 2002. Trump’s aid convoy was openly billed as aiming to topple Maduro, Chávez’s successor, by sparking a mutiny among Venezuelan soldiers and splitting the officer corps, Maduro’s chief prop of support.

This ploy was handily dispersed by Maduro’s forces. In the aftermath, some U.S. allies who had wholeheartedly supported the “aid” effort are seriously worried about what comes next. Two days after the fiasco, a European Union spokesman amplified earlier warnings against direct military intervention. The right-wing Colombian president Iván Duque has reportedly also ruled out intervention, despite his government’s central role in the whole scheme. Meanwhile, capitalist Russia and the Chinese deformed workers state maintain their opposition to “regime change,” vetoing a U.S. resolution in the United Nations Security Council calling for new presidential elections and demanding that Maduro let in the Trojan Horse of “aid.”

A New York Times (16 February) article made Washington’s intent clear. It cited the head of the U.S. Southern Command, Admiral Craig S. Faller, who “said it would be premature to discuss whether American troops could be tasked with delivering aid on Venezuelan soil, a mission that would entail significant risks in a nation awash in weapons. But he said the American military has become experienced in getting aid to people under trying circumstances.” That’s one way of putting it. U.S. imperialism has long used aid agencies as tools for its machinations, such as to prevent the “spread of Communism” during the Cold War. Running the Venezuela operation is Elliott Abrams, who used a “humanitarian aid” program to funnel $27 million worth of weapons to the right-wing contra death squads fighting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government in the 1980s. And it was under the pretext of aid that Barack Obama sent troops to Haiti in 2010 to enforce imperialist order following the devastating earthquake.

Cautioning against a unilateral approach in Venezuela, Rebecca Chavez, who served as Obama’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Western Hemisphere, told the Times that while it was “very likely” that the U.S. would intervene militarily, it should be as part of a coalition. The Democrats feel that the campaign would have a better shot if it’s not just U.S. troops marching in to overthrow Maduro.

At most, the Democratic Party, the other party of U.S. imperialism, has minor tactical differences with the Trump administration over pushing through “regime change” in Venezuela. In a February 5 MSNBC interview, freshman New York Congresswoman and apprentice imperialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez echoed Trump by saying that what’s really going on is “an issue of authoritarian regime versus democracy.” For his part, Bernie Sanders dismayed many of his followers on the reformist left by tweeting, on the very day of the border provocation, that Maduro should “allow humanitarian aid into the country.” Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame shot back that if Sanders really does buy U.S. lies about humanitarian intervention and “collude in the destruction of Venezuela…maybe you’re the perfect stooge for the 1%.”

There’s nothing new in Sanders, a capitalist politician, supporting U.S. war moves. While the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Socialist Alternative (SAlt) were going gaga over his presidential bid three years ago, we pointed out that he had voted time and again to fund the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan (“Bernie Sanders: Imperialist Running Dog,” WV No. 1083, 12 February 2016). Now, while the SAlt faithful hail Sanders’s 2020 campaign as a “working-class fight back,” the ISO timidly complains that “he doesn’t challenge the Pentagon the way he calls out Wall Street” (socialistworker.org, 27 February).

The truth is that the Pentagon serves the interests of “Wall Street,” i.e., the capitalist ruling class. The reformists obscure the fact that imperialism is not a policy decision by one or another ruling-class party but the very essence of the decaying capitalist system, marked by the dominance of finance capital and competition among the advanced capitalist countries to control the world’s resources and exploit its labor.

As Marxists, our opposition to U.S. intervention in Venezuela in no way implies political support to the bourgeois Maduro regime. Far from representing any kind of socialism, the “Bolivarian Revolution” was premised on maintaining the capitalist profit system and its repressive state. At the same time, Chávez’s anti-imperialist rhetoric, support for the Cuban deformed workers state and anti-poverty programs earned him the enmity of the U.S. rulers and their local satraps.

As long as oil prices were high, Chávez had the means to fund social programs and ensure that Venezuelan capitalists got a sizable cut of oil profits. However, the collapse in oil prices after Maduro took the helm in 2013 led to a severe economic contraction. Ensuing shortages of food and medicine, which Venezuela largely imports, were exacerbated by crippling debt payments to the imperialist bloodsuckers and economic sanctions imposed by the Obama administration. The Venezuelan billionaires who have monopolies on food production and distribution also resorted to hoarding and profiteering. Reporter Max Blumenthal recently posted a video of himself in an upscale Caracas supermarket that was fully stocked with food and household goods. But with hyperinflation and general economic collapse, working people cannot possibly pay the prices being charged.

Both the traditional bourgeois oligarchy, which gave the U.S. free rein to pillage Venezuela’s oil wealth, and the boliburguesía, that section of the capitalists who enriched themselves under Chávez and Maduro, are class enemies of the workers and oppressed. Maduro and his bourgeois supporters, including in the military, are being targeted because they are not servile to Washington, not because they represent any challenge to capitalism. It is the proletariat that must lead the fight against the imperialists and their Venezuelan lackeys as part of the struggle to expropriate the bourgeoisie and take power in its own name.

After Guaidó’s self-proclamation as president, we stressed that “the working class in the U.S. has a particular duty to oppose the imperialist machinations of its ruling class, which for over a century has slashed a long and bloody trail of wars, military coups, death squads and embargoes to keep Latin America under its jackboot” (“U.S. Imperialism Hands Off Venezuela!” WV No. 1148, 8 February). Opposition to U.S. intervention crucially involves defense of Cuba, where capitalism was overthrown in 1960-61. Speaking in Miami just before the Colombian border stunt, Trump ludicrously labeled Maduro “a Cuban puppet,” making clear that Washington’s war moves against Venezuela also target Cuba.

Nearly a century ago, American Communist John Reed warned about the imperialists’ “humanitarian” deceit. Addressing the First Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, Soviet Azerbaijan, Reed explained:

“Uncle Sam is not one ever to give anybody something for nothing. He comes along with a sack stuffed with straw in one hand and a whip in the other. Whoever takes Uncle Sam’s promises at their face value will find himself obliged to pay for them with blood and sweat.”

— Baku: Congress of the Peoples of the East (New Park, 1977)

Reed ended by calling on the masses in countries oppressed by imperialism to “unite with the Russian workers and peasants,” who, led by the Bolsheviks, had overthrown capitalist rule in the 1917 October Revolution, as well as with the workers of the imperialist countries. As a section of the International Communist League, the Spartacist League/U.S. continues the fight for new October Revolutions to smash capitalist imperialism once and for all.

Traipsing Through The Arts-All 20th Century Art Is About Sex-Forget That Stuff You Learned In Art Class About The Sublime- A Kick In The Back To Art Critic Clarence Dewar-Sex And The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood-Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata (1859)

Traipsing Through The Arts-All 20^th Century Art Is About Sex-Forget That Stuff You Learned In Art Class About The Sublime-

A Kick In The Back To Art Critic Clarence Dewar-Sex And The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood-Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata (1859)

By Laura Perkins

Sometimes despite your best intentions or at least the direction of your initial intentions you get waylaid by something that you had not expected, something that came out of left field, some undead thing, what do the kids call it some zombie beast thing, let’s call it some undead thing and that will suffice, in middle of the night. I had originally intended this piece to be a homage to the sensuality of the art of Arthur Garfield Dove, a key pioneer in bringing serious sexuality to serious art. (I will only do this three-name moniker thing once which drives my plebian blood pressure through the roof making an exception to Dove because maybe he was living on that boat in the Hudson River with his mistress, fellow artist Helen Torr, or was tied up with farm chores once he broke from his upper middle-class existence and got the heave-ho from dear old Dad but only once nevertheless). Then one Clarence Dewar, you have heard that name before in this space, as a so-called art critic for Art Today mentioned by me as a foil for those rubes who think that all 20^th century was the search for the sublime. (Nobody not even Mr. Dewar could believe that 21^st century art as it evolves in the age of the Internet has anything to do with sex or eroticism except a few crazed curators trying to move up the food chain at the MoMA.)

I first took Mr. Dewar over the coals, no, rapped his knuckles like some wayward schoolboy when he argued that Jackson Pollack’s Number 31 from 1949 was the epitome of the sublime in the last half century of the 20^th century. I had assumed he was just clueless about the real import of the painting as the clarion call to sexual liberation before that was fashionable in staid post-World War II America as the Cold War heated up. I thought that maybe he had attended too many classes and dinner parties with his acknowledged mentor Clement Greenberg whose rants over the search for sublime whatever that is or was and removing the fight for line from form were some stone tablets from the hills (maybe Joseph Smith’s upstate New York tablets hills although Smith could be excused having been born during the Second Great Awakening when art was about Jesus and the brethren which disoriented lots of country folk).

(It bears repeating every chance I get to note that sycophant Dewar got his ass kicked out of a publication Sam Lowell was acting as art and cinema editor for out in alternative newspaper universe San Francisco back in the 1970s for retailing (read plagiarizing) the latest words from the mountain by Clement Greenberg as his own. Acting essentially as a shill and flak-catcher for the well-known wily Greenberg who used up a whole generation of boys that way and never got a scratch on him although today at least his opinions, his words from the mountains are used to wrap fish remains in.)       

Then I talked to Sam Lowell about this latest troll. (We have already had enough, more than enough about the high-brow ones like one Arthur Doyle (middle name Gilmore omitted on purpose) and the swarm of born-again evangelicals who inundated this space, this sacred space with about twelve million quotes from the Bible basically in order to justify calling me Keil, the devil’s servant. I am worried about their reemergence since now I have to go back into the 19^th century art scene for fear that this fool Mr. Dewar’s nonsense will have unleashed those dopes again) Sam laughed said not to worry Clarence hadn’t had an original though since he was born, maybe before. This did not make me laugh because in addition to that Sam claimed that Clarence had been nothing but Greenberg’s poodle, his go-fer and flak-catcher. What did make me laugh was when Sam told me he had known Clarence back in the 1970s and had had to fired him for plagiarism. For taking whatever was on Greenberg’s mind on any given day and either just did a thin re-write or cut the title off from a Greenberg piece in some other publication and sent it in as is. Sam said if Clarence wanted to go low we would discredit him with that otherwise we would meet him on our own self-selected ground of sex and eroticism as the driving force for 20^th century art.

First I threw the wrecking ball around that sublime silliness in Mr. Dewar’s interpretation of what Pollock was trying to release and then Sam put the whammy of whammies on him with the evidence that Pollock was according to recent high tech testing either having sex with somebody or himself (okay masturbating I was trying to avoid writing that in case the Primitive Baptists got wind of it and started going crazy again ranting against me using protecting their kids from such usage as cannon fodder for their weak foolishness) and had used a condom which became part of the painting out in that lonely shed on Long Island. Then when Mr. Dewar tried to play lawyer for Edward Hopper and his brilliant Nighthawks talking bullshit, Sam’s term, but I agree, about all the lonely people, about the loneliness of urbanization I had to yank him up again for being not just a poor example of an art critic but maybe having read whatever Hopper’s press agent had to say to prettify the fact that Hopper was a dirty old man who spent more time with some young honey in a well-known house of ill repute (okay whorehouse) than with his wife, Jo, who nevertheless told a candid world Eddie, her Eddie was hot for buxom young things in a fit or righteous anger. (Thereafter she refused to let her Eddie do any nudes-except her- an unwise decision since as Sam noted, and John Updike did too many years ago, that in sweet revenge he portrayed her as some old-time bent whore who had best been put out to pasture years before. Check Hooper’s Girlie Show for his revenge on Jo. Oh yes, and as another prime example of the scandalous fact that he had flunked doing faces classes under either William Merritt Chase, you can hear me grind my teeth writing this, or Bob Henri.)            

The current uprising of this fool, sending us back to the dangerous waters of the 19^th century art scene, is a post-mortem taking issue about Whistler’s The White Girl and our (Sam is included here) contention that Whistler was pimping his girlfriend to get out from under a mountain of debt. Mr. Dewar made the outrageous claim that Whistler was just conforming to the theories of his friends in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood comparing The White Girl to Brotherhood leader Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s Bocca Baciata. Jesus I though Sam was either going to have a stroke, or go to New York to see Mr. Dewar with murder and mayhem in his heart

Whistler may have been friends, may have had a few drinks at the Cock &Bull down by the waterfront in London on the Thames  where the liquor flowed and with the right connections you could feast on the flavor of the month lanadum which fueled more cultural careers than you could shake a stick at, name the artist, poet, in Rosetti’s case artist-poet and drugs were driving half their insights. Did poor crazy Ruskin Turner’s big-time patron in so that in the end he was blathering about all serious 19^th century being the search for the sublime. Drove a guy like art critic Bill Hazlitt straight to the nut house, straight to Bedlam talking about the need to go back to heroic historical paintings like the great David. Are you kidding?  But the drugs then, and now too check Grady Lamont’s admissions to illegal and extensive drug use before he hit the twelve- step road, weren’t for everyone.

Whistler and the brothers may have even shared, ah, what did they call them oh yes muses, wink, wink, models, for sure Fanny Cornforth who was free with her charms as long as they lasted before the drink and some sour DNA genes did her in. What they did no share, could not share was a vision about sexuality. Whistler as Sam and I have made clear in our studies of the predecessors of the 20^th century glut of sex and eroticism in serious art was about hustling his favorite muse of the month covering them in symphonies of colors, white, green, black, Sam, by the way says sym-phonies of color, language but frankly except The White Girl where he used an ancient from the days of the Whole of Babylon hsy symbolic trick with the wolf’s head and fur to draw attention to his wares his stuff is NOT sexual, is some drug-induced hazy mist at dusk or dawn nonsense. (By the way the Whole of Babylon, unlike pimp daddy James advertised her own wares, made her own way and didn’t need some humpty dumpty middleman to promote her cause.)           

Rosetti and the brethren though reeked of sex, reeked of the liberating spirit they found in early Renaissance painters before punks, Sam’s term not mine, like DaVinci and that no good bastard Raphael tried to suppress bringing everybody back to the crazy Mother Mary. Baby Jesus, Holy Family noise that crippled art for centuries except for Popes and the like who could afford the graft for real art, nudes and Grecian urn priapic material in their private apartments. The Brothers’ hero par excellence Botticelli and work like his divine Venus who Sam swears, this long before I knew him and while he was working his way through three marriages and three divorces, he had a “hippie chick” girlfriend who looked exactly like her, including the forever long hair and braids. Including those luscious ruby red lips that even I appreciated when Venus made a stop at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston a few years ago (and Sam pissed me off by staring at the painting for about an hour which wasn’t so bad but went on and on about that hippie chick, not a good move, not at all).

That is the rub, that is the clincher as to why a drug-infested pimp like Whistler could never make the cut, could never get into the Brotherhood for love nor money. Look at his so-called muses, look at their skinny pre-Angela Joie sullen sunken pinkish lips, even when he was hustling. Had no sense how important the lips were to sexuality and sensuality back in Botticelli’s golden age time. Then look at Bocca Baciata, or for that matter half a dozen Rosetti paintings using Fanny Cornforth, she with those big full ruby red lips not seen since Botticelli went through his paces. That should take care of one holy goof Clarence Dewar and his craziness, his half-baked theories. As Sam says on occasion though, enough.            

Hollywood Bingo-With Primo Detective Fiction Writer Dashiell Hammett In Mind And Nelson Algren On The Wire Looking For The Fixer Man For Frankie Machine

By Zack James

Matt Dolan was a “fixer” man. No, not the drug-dealer fixer man famous, or infamous, in mean streets lore or in the hard-edged short stories of addiction, mostly heroin (horse, H, boy) by the crusty writer Nelson Algren who had that scene down in an earlier age, an age when such addictions were sidebars and not front-page headlines like today. Matt Dolan, Mack for some reason buried so far back in childhood that nobody, including Matt knows how he came by that moniker, was a writer, is a writer who comes in and fixes up some film, some “picture” as they say in the trade when it is going off the wheels for any number of a hundred reasons that a script, even if the scriptwriter is the guy or gal who wrote the thing that the studio paid all that money for but was getting dragged down because somewhere after production had started the thing started turning in on itself and the studio, or more likely the producer of the particular film would call Mack in to bail the film out, bail the director and everybody who worked the sets who saw their wages ending if the damn thing wasn’t  “fixed” by guys and gals like Mack.

Sure there are a million writers, some good, some bad who write anything from multi-week best sellers on some publications lists to stinkpots (pardon the old-fashioned word but it applies to some of the thousands of writings Mack had run through in his time). Sure there are a million screenwriters, or it seems like it when they roll the credits, mostly good or were at one time good and were either protected by the Guild or by somebody in management who owed them something. But there were, are surprisingly few “fixers” in the whole of the film industry and so they command high wages (really these days some fixed amount usually in the six figures agreed to in advance and signed on the dotted line as per Guild agreement which covers fixers as well as all the other categories of writers and musicians). Mack was, is among the best and has been since the 1950s when he broke into the industry and after a few false starts, and disappointments, got his reputation cemented when he saved the “stinker” High School Confidential.  

Mack came up with the very bright idea that that worthless cautionary tale about high school kids succumbing to the lure of heroin provided by evil nightclub owners and other denizens of the back alleys. The way Mack saw it no kid in his or her right mind was going to sit through their precious Saturday afternoon double-feature at the local Majestic Theater to be told stuff they got at home every day for free, and endlessly too. So Mack, a little younger then than the average screenwriter on the Hollywood scene and savvy to the role that music, specifically rock and roll music after Elvis and others broke the ground, came up with the idea of putting the then “hot” rock and roll mad monk saint Jerry Lee Lewis on the back of a flatbed truck with his piano and his sidemen and have the truck tooling toward the high school as he played his flame-throwing song High School Confidential. The film grossed a ton of money off of a shoestring budget because all the kids cared about was that scene and then they could go back to whatever boy-girl thing they were doing the in the dark upstairs balconies. Mack could name his price after that, usually. All the studios wanted him after that.          

But the supply and demand stresses of being a fixer put a lot of pressure on Mack, especially when he was working on some play or screenplay of his own which he was looking to have produced. One night Mack, who besides being a fixer man loved the ladies, loved the young ones especially even as he got older, said they kept him young, or whatever reason older guys give these days for chasing young skirts (or for older gay guys and lesbian women these days when the great secret of Hollywood same- sex lives had become passe what the object of their affections might be wearing), was telling Jack Callahan, an executive at Excelsior Films, the company that he had the closest ties to over the previous  twenty years or over drinks at his favorite watering hole, The Dirty Duck, off of Vine Street, about how he got his first contract to fix a “stinker” at Excelsior.

At that time maybe the summer of 1972 Max Stein called him up when he was up in Big Sur trying to work out some kinks in a screenplay that would later be produced under the title Love In The Park (and which made that studio, the now defunct Blue Blaze Films, a ton of money but not enough to keep the wolves away when they produced a big series of flops, real stinkers, none of which they saw the wisdom of bringing him or any fixer in on) and told him that the latest film he was producing, Hurry, My Sweet, was losing steam, needed a fixer man and he had heard through Harry Swann at Delta Films that Mack was the man he needed. Mack pleaded prior commitment but Max threw up a number that Mack couldn’t refuse and so he committed to a two-week stint back down at La Jolla where the film was shot to try to work something out of the air once again. Max sent him along with the contract a copy of the screenplay as it was then being worked on.

What the script was about was an old-time kind of detective story, a genre that was making a comeback on the screen, after a long absence since the time of the great black and white film noirs of the 1940s and 1950s. The plotline involved as those type films always did some nefarious murder (or murders depending on how grizzly the producer and director though they could take the thing and not have irate parents banning their kids from spending their dough to see it) to be solved by a resourceful detective. One hook here was that the hard-boiled female detective, they always had to be hard-boiled whatever their gender since the days of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler switched things up back in the 1920s and 1930s, Patty Lane, being played by veteran screen actress Mara Whiting. Another hook was that the bad guy was a bad gal, Laura Devine, played by the beautiful Gina Saint-Germain, who had wasted her drug-dealing lover, Gary Lawlor, played by rising star Sam Lawrence, after he had turned Laura’s sister, Sarah, played by new comer Sissy Moore, on to drugs and to the streets doing tricks for short money to feed her habit.

The big hook though is that Sarah, after Laura wasted Gary, was holding five kilos of pure high-grade Columbian cocaine which she intended to sell to the highest bidder, Laura or anybody else, so she could get off the streets and feed her own habit. Laura putting pure greed over sisterly love sent some of her boys (and a girl sharpshooter as well) out to find the sister, find the dope really. Hard-pressed Sarah looks up in the Los Angeles telephone directory for a detective to help her out, for protection really, and to broker a deal if necessary and comes up with Patty who she thinks is a guy because the listing of the agency was Pat Lane and Associates. Pretty standard stuff but Mack could see where Max was a little panicky because if the theme reflected more contemporary times and concerns it was a “stinker” as far as he was concerned.                         

When Mack got to the set down in La Jolla not far from the university and close to the rock-strewn ocean that was playing a nice visual backdrop to the action he told the director, Josh Lannon well-known for working B films on short money, and short storyline filling out the meek dialogue with plenty of action, the thing was a stinker, no question and no amount of action was going to cover-up a beaten down storyline. Of course Josh took umbrage at that statement saying that he was given the thing for short money by Max and if Mack could bring it around well fine, if not then that was that. Mack was used to that kind of reaction and knowing he had money-man Max’s backing let it ride, let the ill-tempered director blow off steam.  

Of course Mack also knew that once production was started, once the actors had committed to their parts as best they could that all the interpersonal problems that face any collective effort, egos, bruised feelings, hostility, make-shift love, and desire for bigger roles in the film-and in future films if an actor showed promise, especially in a stinker came into play. That is where Mack’s fixer skills and love of younger women got a serious work-out.

About an hour and a half after Mack got on the set while sitting in an off-stage cubicle trying to figure out a new hook to make the audience interested enough in any character to take a chance and see the movie Sissy Moore came into his space. No question she was a good-looking young woman and as soon as she entered he had ideas, knowing she had ideas. Tall, slender, red-hair, long legs, not beautiful, not Gina Saint-Germaine beautiful for even a Hollywood novice knew, knows that you cannot have two beautiful women on one screen because they will not stand for it, and the audience won’t either even the women, but the kind of woman that once the film is over you think about, think about to the exclusion of the serious beauty.          

Sissy had heard that morning that the famous Mack Dolan was coming to fix the script and while she was only a new-comer people around the set and around Hollywood said with some proper training and proper roles she could be somebody. That was all she needed to know to get her small-town girl (Lima, Ohio) wanting habits on. She took dead aim at Mack, despite the fact that at the time she was maybe twenty years younger than him, and he had not due to that huge alcohol and lately drug consumption not aged gracefully, and coming right up to him so he could smell that gardenia perfume she was wearing mixed with thoughts of hard sex ahead she laid it on the line (she, as she told Mack after they had hit the satin sheets over at the Biltmore a few times, knew through the usually very reliable starlet grapevine that he had a thing for younger women, with or without the gardenia perfume). She wanted her part built up, thought bad ass bad girl Laura in the story, meaning really Gina, after she wasted Gary was nothing to the whole plot, that she should be seen more, have more lines around her ability to evade the bad boys Laura sent after her, played more of a role helping Patty take the heat off of her. In return Mack could have, as she rather coyly put it, given what she was offering, he could have anything he wanted from her, anything she had to give.

Now, as Mack told Jack that night the Dirty Duck, there are more urban legends about how famous stars, male and female, yes, males in the then male-dominated management end, worked their way up the cinematic food chain by “offering anything somebody in power wanted, anything they had to give” and a fair amount was just that-urban legend. But even then back in 1972 there was plenty of sex being traded for stardom, or hopes of stardom, or better somebody in power taking advantage of some youngster’s hopes of stardom before being shunted back to Topeka, Toledo, or Boise. (The later #MeToo revelations only showing how pervasive the nasty set-up was to get ahead.) So Mack made his pact with Sissy, made it tight, and for the length of his time on the set he got his ashes and whatever else he wanted hauled by her. This time, unlike a few times before when he was a guy in power himself playing on some young thing’s hope for stardom, his agreement to get Sissy more screen time, more to say, was based on what he had seen in the rushes, had seen that star quality, maybe not the top but she would not have to sit by the midnight phone hoping for work.    

Naturally the increase of one actor’s role at the expense of another, here Gina, caused an uproar on the set, caused Gina to say she would not perform at her usual high level. Mack knew he had Max’s okay, since he had called him after the pact with Sissy was consummated the first time so he was able to ride it out. Here’s how: Mack determined that what the film needed with so many good-looking females was more sex, or in those days when it was still dicey to get too graphic in sex scenes, was the allure of sex. Now it wasn’t going to be Patty as the crusading detective ready to save an errant young woman and Gina flat out refused to do any sex scenes but Sissy, well, Sissy really was up for anything that would get her up the food chain, especially after Mack put the bug in her ear that such efforts would enhance her career opportunities. There wasn’t much that Mack could do with the script with what was already in the can but that is when he came up with the idea that would save the damn thing.

Sissy early on as she got more addicted to the drugs Gary was feeding her and was out doing tricks on the streets got into a situation where some guys Gary knew propositioned her to come to a poker party with them. She agreed once Gary said he would “make her well.” So the scene got set up in a smoky hotel room, cards out, chips out, cigarettes out, drinks out on the table and then Sissy dressed scantily like a Playboy bunny, popular at the time, without saying a word starts going provocatively under the table. Nothing showing what is happening but obviously Sissy is going down to “play the flute” as Mack put it euphemistically in his stage directions. That B film made a ton of money for Excelsior because all the kids cared about was that scene once they heard about it and then they could go back to whatever boy-girl thing they were doing the in the dark upstairs balconies, go back with a vengeance. Made Sissy a “hot” property (and forced Gina in a later film to do a “play the flute” scene more graphically shown than anything Sissy had done although among the gossips of the town your average red-blooded males out in the hinterlands Sissy was almost always thereafter called “the flutist” and nobody had to ask twice who that was or what it meant). Brilliance, pure brilliance.

Lost In The Rain On The Carnival Ride Called Desolation Row Complete With Hamlet’s Ophelia And Doctor Filth Who Ruled That World-With Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited In Mind, No, With 1966 On The Road Visions In Mind

Lost In The Rain On The Carnival Ride Called Desolation Row Complete With Hamlet’s Ophelia And Doctor Filth Who Ruled That World-With Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited In Mind, No, With 1966 On The Road Visions In Mind

By Jack Callahan (who lived through it all and survived, barely, to tell the tale on the great big blue-pink American West sky night-Greg Green, site manager)   

“I’ve met Einstein disguised as Robin Hood, I’ve been in the tower with Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, “declared Robert South to no one in particular although Jake Devine was the only one in the room at the time. With those words Jake, Jake known as Jake since childhood to distinguish him from John Devine, Senior although his father a genial Irishman addicted to sports betting and drinking whiskey not always in that order was more the slap on the back Jake type while Jake in the throes of his high hippie moments was trying to shed that moniker for Be-Bop Benny but old habits die hard and his old high school friends called him Jake and when he went on the hitchhike road west with them in 1965,1966 the name stuck whether he liked it or not, knew that Robert was two things-one, high as a kite on either speed or LSD just then the drug of choice among the “hip” (not always the same as Hippie but Jake did not want to argue the fine points on that one since he himself had been on a two day speed high-low) on the mind-expanding conscious West Coast cohort of the brethren and two, Robert had been listening to the whole of Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row at least once, probably more than once if he was high since he would not have had the stamina to switch the sound system that Captain Crunch had installed in their “digs” now that they were off the road for the winter an settled into Diego’s mansion.

(Before we go further this little sketch is about the road, the road west, get here and we will do the rest, although Diego’s down in La Jolla where all the perfect wave guys then hung out looking, well looking for something just like we were, and their foxy perfect surfer girls then glistening in the sun, was a huge mansion to save weary souls from the onslaught of the 24/7 highway come what passed for winter in Southern California. They were, through Captain Crunch’s, at this late date you do not need to know his real moniker except he would wind up after the ebbtide of the 1960s took it all away as a professor of literature at Bard in New York City, “house-sitting” this Diego’s massive mansion while he was down in home country Mexico. Rumor had, and for every incident on the road there was always at least one rumor almost never verified, that he was the “hombre,” the guy bringing in enough righteous drugs to fill a battleship, and cheap too. When the wisely closed-mouth Captain was asked, repeatedly asked where all the righteous dope came from, he would always answer that he found it on the ground. After a while nobody asked him anymore.)              

By the way in compensation  for being called Jake by one and all on the bus, of which more in a minute, he had gathered some sense of respect because his latest flame, a serious “hippie chick” met on the road at Big Sur as they were heading south, Frilly Jilly, called him Be-Bop Benny,  called him a few other things once they high on grass, you know marijuana,  got down to the “do the do,” a term the guys still carried with them from the corner days in Riverdale after they had heard the bluesman Howlin’ Wolf do a song with those words in it, those words meaning hitting the sheets, having sex, what she called him in her high hormonal sweaty vaginal moments was left to them.              

Yeah, Robert, Jimmy Jenkins, Frank Riley, and a guy, a French-Canadian guy who is still with the crowd, they met from a mill town in Maine on Russian Hill in San Francisco where they were camped out in a small park when he stopped by the bus and asked for a joint had been on quite a ride since coming West to see what it was all about and were learning quickly it was all about “drugs, sex and rock and roll” at its core but also about getting out from under the old ways of thinking and living. (Nobody except maybe the undercover “narcs” was anything but no-plussed if some total stranger, total young stranger with long hair and even a wisp of a beard with some buckskin jacket and tired jeans came up and asked for dope, and seldom got a negative answer.) So when they hit Frisco they headed like lemmings to the sea to Golden Gate Park where all the hell was breaking loose met a few guys who “turned them on,” got them invited to a few parties, including one Captain Crunch was throwing around the new yellow brick road bus that he had just purchased (allegedly in a trade for a big sack of dope but all the time they were on the bus they never had that rumor confirmed by the Captain or anybody else and mainly it didn’t matter by then). This bus was nothing but an old school bus that had been turned into a moving commune after the seats had been torn out, mattresses thrown down, a storage area for family living material like utensils, dishes, and pots and pans, the thing had been repainted in every Day-Glo  psychedelic color under the sun and best of all hooked up with a great sound system Dippy Mike, the guy who did the sound system for Fillmore West and the Dead, put together for any trips they would take.

And almost from the start at Golden Gate Park the trips began once Captain had selected the Riverdale boys as part of his crew to head south with him. The reason for that heading south, the reason Robert was holding forth those lines from Desolation Row was to “house-sit” here in La Jolla at this mansion that belonged to Pablo Rios, always called Diego and maybe six other names, a friend of the Captain’s and a serious south of the border drug dealer who was in Mexico for the winter and the Captain had agreed to doing the sitting as we got into “winter quarters.” Now that the bus was not being used, was being refitted with a new engine and so not useable, the sound system had been transferred to the house for the weekly parties the Captain threw for his friends (and whoever happened to hear about the event and knew where to find the place, not as easy as it sounds when stoned in hideaway between the cliffs in La Jolla).                     

Robert, once settled in, once he got his own room with his lady-friend, Lavender Minnie, got heavily into the dope, got heavily into listening to the amped up music and Jake thought he had begun, like they had all heard about with kids who did too much dope, to go over the edge.      

Just as Jake thought that thought Robert rang out again with “they’re selling postcards of the hanging, they’re painting the passports brown,” and Jake knew that Robert had gone for the next plus minutes to his own world. Eleven plus minutes if he was lucky, since more than once Robert had decided that he needed to give his own take on what the whole thing meant, what the various references meant to him. For example, that business with Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, the two exile poets who almost single-handedly broke from the old forms and created modern poetry and were treated like gods among the hip at one point when Dylan was throwing down the gauntlet, telling those guys a new sheriff was in town. Well, maybe, if you think Dylan was a lyric poet rather than a song-writer, or maybe put the two together. For example, that postcards of the hanging stuff had been his political moment like Billie Holiday had with Strange Fruit about the scandalous open lynching of black men in the South put together with a new sense of masculinity turned in on itself with sailor boys caught out on the seven seas who transformed themselves in boy-girls with those all male crews. For example, that stuff about Ophelia, you know Hamlet’s chick and how she was giving up the ghost (committing suicide) not because of some lost love but because she was pregnant and was not sure who the father was. 

For example,

…and then Robert stopped. Stopped to do some thing or other with his Lavender Minnie and so that “teachable moment” was over for now. But if you hear a guy yelling about Casanova, the so-called legendary lover getting his comeuppance you know who is holding sway just like in the old days. Okay

God Walks the Dark Hills - Iris Dement

Leaning On the Everlasting Arms - Iris Dement

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-From The Archives- *Brother (Or Sister), Can You Spare A Dime?- A Personal Saga

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Clip Of Yip Harburg's Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?'" done by Tom Waits. Wow.

Commentary

Build A Workers Party That Fights For A Workers Government!


Banks are failing. Unemployment is way up. Housing values are headed toward the floor. Retirement accounts are taking a beating. And that is only the grim news on an average day. Other days ratchet up the doom and gloom from there. The whys and wherefores of that news, however, is not what I want to comment on today. One of the very few virtues of growing up 'dirt poor', first in an old housing project and then in an old shack of a house on the wrong side of the tracks in another part of town is that even now I am personally inured to the vicissitudes of the economy. Hell, when I was young hard times were the only times. I did not, except by rumor, know there were any other kinds. That came later.

All of the above is by way of making this point. I have been broke more times than I could shake a stick at, both by choice and by the fickleness of fate. I have been flat broke, dead broke, broke six ways to Sunday and every kind of broke you can think of. At one time I almost make a religion of it. I have been in the clover plenty too but that has always been a very near thing.

Let me put it this way. I have leisurely strolled across the Golden Gate Bridge. I have slept huddled, with a newspaper for a pillow, under the Golden Gate Bridge. I have eaten at restaurants where one does not ask the price, or need to. I have eaten gladly from Salvation Army soup lines. I have sat idly on hopeless park benches in nameless forsaken towns. I have sat idly, drink in hand, in a beach chair on some deck watching the surf rise and fall on the rocks at Bar Harbor. I could go on but you get the idea. Here is my accumulated wisdom though-it is much better to have the dough. But just in case the times get even worst than they are now I am keeping in shape. Brother (Or Sister), Can You Spare A Dime?


"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime," lyrics by Yip Harburg, music by Jay Gorney (1931)

They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,

When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.

They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,

Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.

Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;

Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,

Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,

Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,

And I was the kid with the drum!

Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.

Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,

Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,

Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,

And I was the kid with the drum!



Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.

Say, don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?

“Put Out The Fire In Your Head”- With Patti Griffin’s Not Alone In Mind

“Put Out The Fire In Your Head”- With Patti Griffin’s Not Alone In Mind 

By Bradley Fox, Junior

[Sometimes this generational divide between parent and child that occurs naturally once the younger generation comes of age and begins to make its own way, make its own mistakes, and have its own problems grappling with day to day life in a hectic, dangerous world can only be deciphered by someone from that generation. That is the case here with the story of Sam Lowell’s youngest son, Justin’s. Sam told me his side of the story, really his take on Justin’s story since Sam had had little directly to do with what got Justin into his difficulties. I tried to write it up as a cautionary tale of sorts to help inform Sam’s, my generation, the generation that the late Peter Markin, our mutual friend who passed on under mysterious circumstances down in Mexico after the 1960s had ebbed and we had lost the cultural battles, called the Generation of ’68  about what was troubling our children. I failed in that effort.

I told my son, Bradley, Junior (with Sam’s permission), who knew Justin when they were younger, the details to see if he could write something that would make sense to Sam and me about what makes their generation tick. As for the grandkids, forget it between the Internet and its subset social media and the trials and tribulations they confront in an extremely dangerous world going forward it would take, as young Bradley told me, the minds of Freud, Einstein, and Rapper Rocco combined to even know what subliminal language they were speaking. Here’s my Bradley’s take on the whole mess [BF, Senior]:      

Justin Lowell had been a late love child of Sam and his third wife since divorced, Rebecca, and as such, with eight years between him and the next youngest child, Brenda, and hence eight years of being the only child at home after she left for college, was pampered by her, cocooned Sam said.  And frankly had been by Sam as well although the number one thing all of his children from his three failed marriages said of him was that he was a good and generous father but he that was a distant figure always off doing some lawyerly business and not around enough to get rid of the that foggy picture of him. But enough of Sam Lowell’s failings since this is about how Justin navigated the world not Sam. 

Of course Justin had all the advantages that accrued to a financially successful small town lawyer’s son from living in a nice large house with his own room (and later own rooms since he took over Brenda’s as well), a good if not great college education (good since Justin was not a particularly studious type like myself and unlike Brenda who gained entrance to Harvard with no problem), and all the diversions that leafy suburban life in Riverdale could bring. All through high school at Riverdale High we were very close buddies so I knew a lot about his make-up, knew too that he resented his mother’s overweening attentions (and as already mentioned Sam’ distance which Justin called indifference unlike my father who went out of his way to be attentive and was a reason why we would spent much more time at my house than his). Many nights out with hot dates we would go wherever we went together, tried out and failed to make the championship Riverdale High School football team, things like that. Mostly though we talked serious stuff about dreams and what we would do when we flew the coop, when we had what Sam and my father always called when they got together and regaled us with their stories the “great jail-break.”          

Naturally after high school, members in good standing of the Riverdale High Class of 1992, when Justin went to State U and I went to NYU since I was desperate to live in New York City and breath the air there as part of my becoming a commercial artist we drew apart. Maybe we would call, see each other at Vinny’s Pizza in town and cut up old touches. That was mainly freshman year when everything was new and we were “free.” Then Justin kind of fell off my map as I got involved in some school projects and Justin from what he told me one time at Vinny’s got involved in the furious social life that dominates lots of school out in the boondocks and where kids are away from  home for the first time. That was when Justin, who had hated even the idea of liquor when we were in high school and wouldn’t speak me for a while after l got Kathy Callahan drunk (and horny you can figure the rest out yourselves) on a double date, started doing drugs. Started first I had heard on easy stuff marijuana to be sociable (Justin, me too, as much as we got along with girls were both kind of shy and inward at times which is probably why we gravitated toward each other beyond our fathers knowing each other since their youth) and bennies to stay up and study for those finals at the last moment. Later senior year I heard from Jack Jamison who had gone to high school with us and was also at State U Justin had graduated to cocaine, serious cocaine, serious enough to have to begin to do some small time dealing to keep up. He did graduate but it was a close thing, very close.         

After college Justin moved to Boston to take a job in a bank, work his way up in the banking industry to make lots of money. In any case in Boston is where he met Melissa, Melissa I won’t give her last name because now she is a big deal in the college administration of an Ivy League college. He met Melissa at the Wild Rose nightclub, the one just outside of Kenmore Square. Met here and quickly came under her spell (a lot of guys had, did, would do that before she was through). Melissa, not a beauty but fetching was one of those women who loved kicks, loved the attention her desire for kicks brought. Her kick at that time was heroin which some previous lover had turned her on to. She something of a manic-depressive as it turned out said grass, coke, pills didn’t do it for her, didn’t put out the fire in her head, the feeling that she could never get close to anybody. (Later it also turned out that she had been sexually abused by her drunken father and had had plenty of reason to want to put the fire out in her head.) She turned a very willing Justin to smack (it goes by several names, H, snow, the lid, sweet baby, and the like we will just call it smack). Se he had been having trouble adjusting to having to actually work his ass off to get ahead in the banking industry and he too needed something to put out the fire in his head.

Melissa, as far as anybody ever knew, never got seriously addicted to the smack, maybe cut it enough to keep from going to junkie heaven. Justin of course got himself a jones, a big sleep on his shoulders. He before too long got fired from his job, went on the bum, started muling down to sunny Mexico for the hard boys to maintain his habit, went back on the bum and finally got picked up by the cops on Commonwealth Avenue trying to break and enter some Mayfair swell condo. All he would tell them beside his name was that he “had to put the fire out in his head, needed to get well or he was going to jump into the Charles River. At that point, Sam, who was clueless about his son’s drug problems as most parents are until some tripwire turns the lights on had to come into the action, had to defend his youngest son on a damn B&E charge. Got him into a “detox” program too. Did what he could without recrimination, or just a little other than bewilderment that his son would succumb to drugs.                        

Well I wish that I could say that Justin turned it around after that first “detox,” effort but that was not the case. He went through programs for five years before he sobered up for good, or what Sam and Rebecca thought was for good. One night I was home to see my father and to attend our twentieth anniversary class reunion when I ran into Justin on the street who said he would rather not go to the reunion since he would have to explain too many things about his life. He suggested we go into Vinny’s a few blocks up the street and have a couple of slices of pizza and a soda for old times’ sake. We did so and while we were munching away Justin explained as best he could what had happened to him. He reminded me of that night senior year when we were sitting down by the river and he had told me how much he hated his father, hated Sam, since he was such a pious bastard, was almost non-existent in his life, yet tried to be cool about his own bogus jailbreak youth like they had changed the world, like his youthful coolness made everything alright. I had forgotten about that night, had had my own small (compared to him) troubles adjusting to my own father’s whims. Then Justin said he had spent all that time since that night trying to put out the fire in his head.           

Here comes the sad part, about a year later Justin met a woman, Selina, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire where he went to live to get a fresh start. They fell in love, planned to be married, and had made all the arrangements, the church, reception and all. The night before the wedding when he was out with some guys celebrating he went off the bus. Somehow he had made a connection, and before the night was over he was sitting in Prescott Park by himself as the cops came by based on a disturbance call yelling “I ‘ve got to put the fire in my head, I’ve got to put the fire in my head out.”                

For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution! (Quote of the Week) In commemoration of International Women’s Day, we reprint below an excerpt from a book explaining the program of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), written two years after the October Revolution smashed capitalist rule in Russia. Bolshevik leaders Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky addressed women’s oppression and how it was intrinsic to capitalism.

Workers Vanguard No. 1150 8 March 2019 TROTSKY LENIN For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution! (Quote of the Week) In commemoration of International Women’s Day, we reprint below an excerpt from a book explaining the program of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), written two years after the October Revolution smashed capitalist rule in Russia. Bolshevik leaders Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky addressed women’s oppression and how it was intrinsic to capitalism. They also laid out how the early Soviet workers state, despite material scarcity and devastation by imperialist and then civil war, took strides to free working women from the burdens of child-rearing and the institution of the family, the central source of women’s oppression. The working woman in capitalist society is peculiarly oppressed, peculiarly deprived of rights. In all matters she has even less than the beggarly rights which the bourgeoisie grants to the working man. The right to the parliamentary vote has been conceded in a few countries only. As regards the right of inheritance, woman everywhere receives the beggar’s portion. In family life she is always subject to her husband, and everything that goes wrong is considered to be her fault. In a word, bourgeois democracy everywhere exhibits as regards women laws and customs which strongly remind us of the customs of savages, who exchange, buy, punish, or steal women just as if they were chattels, dolls, or beasts of burden. Our Russian proverb runs, “A hen is not a bird, and a woman is not a person”; here we have the valuation of a slave society. This state of affairs is extremely disadvantageous to the proletariat. There are more women than men amongst the workers. It is obvious that the struggle of the proletariat must be greatly hindered by the lack of equality between the two halves of which it is composed. Without the aid of the women of the proletariat, it is idle to dream of a general victory, it is idle to dream of the “freeing of labour.” For this reason, it is greatly to the interest of the working class that there should be complete fighting comradeship between the female and the male portions of the proletariat, and that this comradeship should be strengthened by equality. The Soviet Power is the first to have realised such equality in all departments of life: in marriage, in the family, in political affairs, etc. In all things, throughout Soviet Russia, women are the equals of men.... The aim of the Soviet Republic and of our party must be, to deliver working women from such slavery, to free the working woman from these obsolete and antediluvian conditions. The organisation of house communes (not places in which people will wrangle, but places in which they will live like human beings) with central wash-houses; the organisation of communal kitchens; the organisation of communal nurseries, kindergartens, playgrounds, summer colonies for children, schools with communal dining rooms, etc.—such are the things which will enfranchise woman, and will make it possible for her to interest herself in all those matters which now interest the proletarian man. In an era of devastation and famine, it is, of course, difficult to do all these things as they ought to be done. Nevertheless, our party must in this manner do its utmost to attract the working woman to play her part in the common task. —Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism (1920)

Oakland Teacher Anger Over Strike Settlement Free, Quality Public Education for All!

[American Left History publishes or re-publishes articles and notices of events that might be of interest to the liberal, left-liberal and radical public. That has been the policy generally since the publication due to financial constraints went solely on-line in the early 2000s as the Internet has allowed new and simply outlets for all kinds of material that were almost impossible to publish when it was solely hard copy going back to the early 1970s.

Over the past couple of months American Left History has received many comments about our policy of publishing materials and notices of events without comment. More than a few comments wondered aloud whether the publication agreed with all, or most of what has been published. Obviously given that we will republish material from sources like the ACLU, the movement for nuclear disarmament and established if small left-wing organizations formally outside the main party system in America unless we were mere by-standers to the political movements many of the positions are too contrary to agree with all of them.   

Policy: unless there is a signed statement of agreement by one of our writers, me or the Editorial Board assume that the article or notice is what we think might be of interest of the Left-wing public and does not constitute an endorsement. Greg Green, site manager]   

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Workers Vanguard No. 1150	8 March 2019

Oakland Teacher Anger Over Strike Settlement

Free, Quality Public Education for All!

MARCH 4—The seven-day strike by 3,000 teachers, nurses and other school staff of the Oakland Education Association (OEA) ended today with a settlement that was opposed by 42 percent of the union members who voted. At a heated union meeting on March 3 attended by over 1,000 OEA members, the bargaining committee was heckled and the proposed contract denounced. The OEA leadership claimed the settlement with the union-busting Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) was a “historic contract.” But many teachers, nurses and others who had stood solid throughout the strike weren’t buying it. No wonder. The much-vaunted wage increase won’t even keep pace with inflation in a city where teachers already can’t afford to live; class sizes were reduced by a token one or at most two students; little to nothing was granted to relieve onerous caseloads of school counselors and nurses.

A letter signed by more than 200 OEA members pointed out that the settlement “includes nothing concrete to address school closures, allowing the School Board to push through its plans to close 24 more schools and opening the door for the continued privatization of Oakland education.” A key demand of the strike was an end to school closures, which currently threaten almost a third of Oakland public schools, mainly in black and Latino neighborhoods. Instead, the OEA leadership settled for a meaningless promise of a five-month moratorium on school closures, i.e., simply putting it off until August. As for the privately run charter schools, which already claim almost 30 percent of Oakland students, the agreement calls on the school board to request a moratorium on new charters from California’s Democratic Party governor, Gavin Newsom.

In a school district whose students are 89 percent Latino, black, Asian and other minority, many working-class and poor parents actively sympathized with the OEA strike. Despite the district’s efforts to intimidate parents and teachers, 97 percent of students stayed away, a number of them joining the picket lines. The Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which organizes clerical, paraprofessionals and other school employees, went out in solidarity for the duration of the strike.

On March 1, unionized building trades workers refused to cross a picket line at an OUSD construction site, shutting it down tight. The same day, a 1,000-strong picket line chanting “Get up! Get down! Oakland is a union town!” shut down the building where the OUSD was scheduled to vote $22 million in school budget cuts. But, just as union support for the teachers strike was building, the OEA misleaders announced they had a settlement.

Once again, struggle by the unions was subordinated to the trade-union bureaucracy’s fealty to the capitalist Democratic Party. Like their counterparts in the Los Angeles teachers union leadership who rammed through a similar agreement (see “Popular L.A. Teachers Strike Sold Short,” WV No. 1148, 8 February), the OEA misleaders peddle the treacherous delusion that the Democratic administration of California is going to defend public education. What a joke! For more than four decades Oakland’s public schools have been deliberately starved of funding and resources under various Democratic administrations, local and state alike. The California Democrats have also gone to great lengths to expand charter schools, with Oakland having a higher proportion of students in charter schools than any other district in the state.

In 2003, then Oakland mayor Jerry Brown, along with other Democrats, drove the OUSD into bankruptcy so that the state could take over the district, paving the way for the proliferation of charter schools. Today, the OUSD claims that its high debt to the state means there is no money for teachers, support staff or schools. The OEA leadership dances to this tune, accepting the limits on the school budget that are set by the capitalist rulers.

There is a crying need for a class-struggle fight for free, quality, integrated public education for all. But this just and basic demand runs directly up against the obscenely wealthy capitalist class that controls the means of production, distribution and exchange. Capitalists invest nothing in education for working-class and minority youth beyond what they expect to be able to recoup from exploiting their labor. How many resources for public education, decent medical care and housing can be wrested from the capitalist rulers depends on the relationship of forces in the class struggle.

The power to effectively wage such a battle lies with the working class. But the workers can’t do so when they are chained to their class enemies in the Democratic Party, no less a party of racist capitalist rule than the Republicans. What’s needed is a labor leadership that will arm the workers with the understanding that the only road to victory lies in mobilizing their power as a class against all the political parties and agencies of their exploiters. The fight to satisfy the needs of the workers and all the oppressed must be linked to forging a multiracial revolutionary workers party whose aim is the abolition of capitalist wage slavery and the institution of a workers government.

Education U.S.A.: Separate and Unequal

Universal public education in this country was the product of revolutionary struggle, the victory of the North over the Southern slavocracy in the Civil War and the ensuing period of Radical Reconstruction. Slaves were banned by their masters from reading and writing. Recognizing the importance of literacy, the black soldiers, who were critical to the Union victory, went into battle with spelling primers strapped to the same belt as their cartridge boxes. But the promise of black freedom was betrayed by the Northern bourgeoisie, who brought Reconstruction to an end with the withdrawal of the Union troops that had defended the black freedmen.

In the aftermath, the system of Jim Crow was established in the South. The segregation of schools and all aspects of public life was enforced through terror as black people were forcibly subjugated at the bottom of society. The mass struggles of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s brought down Jim Crow in the South. However, the pro-capitalist leadership of that movement, which looked to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, could not make a dent in the de facto segregation of black people in the North. Black oppression is rooted in the system of American capitalism which uses black people as a “reserve army of labor”—the last hired and the first fired.

Today, the war against public education is a measure of the decay of American capitalism. With the destruction of hundreds of thousands of unionized industrial and other manufacturing jobs, the poor have been all but written off as an expendable population. The passage of California’s Proposition 13 in 1978, which capped property taxes on which schools depended, was a watershed in the racist onslaught against social programs viewed as benefiting black people and Latinos.

By 1996, the last time the OEA had a significant strike, Oakland’s school district, then majority black, was in a dead heat with Washington, D.C., as the worst in the U.S. (which itself ranks well below most other advanced industrial countries). The same year, Prop. 209 abolished affirmative action in public education, slashing university admissions for black, Latino and Native American students. In 1998, taking aim at the growing population of Latino and other immigrants in California, Prop. 227 banned bilingual education in public schools, although its “English only” requirement was overturned in 2016. Today, half of Oakland public school students speak a language other than English at home. The fight for bilingual education is vital for immigrants, and beneficial for native-born students, who would gain from learning another language.

The same government forces that reduced public education for black and Latino youth to decrepit, heavily policed schools joined with billionaire “school reformers” to sell charter schools to desperate black and Latino parents as an alternative. In fact, charters increase racial segregation and class inequality while undermining teachers unions. Charter school teachers are forced to work hellish hours with no job protections. A fight to unionize charter schools would be a major step toward eliminating the charter industry and bringing charter teachers and staff into the public school system. Standing in the way of such struggle are the teachers union misleaders, who accept the existence of charters and make groveling appeals to the Democrats to simply regulate them.

Break with the Democrats! For a Class-Struggle Workers Party!

As the L.A. and Oakland teachers strikes clearly show, embracing the backstabbing “friend of labor” Democrats is a dead end. Yet a panoply of fake socialists works overtime to put lipstick on the Democratic donkey. Foremost among them in the teachers strikes has been the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which hailed the OEA settlement as a “huge victory” against “billionaires and their lackeys.” Itself an integral part of the Democratic Party, the DSA peddles the delusion that there is a fundamental difference between establishment Democrats and “progressive” Democrats. In fact, the role played by such progressives is to keep discontented workers and minorities shackled to the capitalist Democrats.

Meanwhile, taking their usual side with the union-busters were supporters of David North’s World Socialist Web Site. Purporting to offer “a fighting program for Oakland teachers,” this sinister outfit demanded that education workers “break with the unions.” This is an open call to bust the OEA. No one should be fooled by these scab socialists’ call for “rank-and-file committees.”

Unions are the basic defensive organizations of the working class; what is needed is a fight for a class-struggle union leadership. This must be linked to forging a workers party dedicated to constructing a socialist America. Only when those who labor rule can society be organized on an egalitarian basis, with quality housing, health care and education for all.