From The Archives -Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts

Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200^th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts  

A link to NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s Open Source 2018 program on the meaning of Karl Marx in the 21^st century on the 200^th anniversary of his birth:

http://radioopensource.org/marx-at-200/

By Seth Garth

Normally Frank Jackman would be the natural person to do his take on the name, the role, the legacy of one German revolutionary exiled to London after the revolutions of 1848 faded away, Karl Marx, on the 200^th anniversary of his birth in 1818. And Frank at first fought me a little, said he had grabbed a bunch of Marx’s books and pamphlets like the Communist Manifesto and the abridged Das Capital abetted by his friend and colleague Engels’ The Peasant Wars In Germany and Scientific Socialism. No question heavy lifting, heavy reading which our respective youths would have been read until early in the morning page turners but now would seemingly act as a sedative, a sleep aid, at least for me since Frank said it had made him more alert although agreeing that the works were not “read until early in the morning page turners.” Frank’s argument to me at least for his grabbing the assignment was that he had of the two of us been more influenced by Marx’s works and programs and had actually been a supporter of the old time Trotskyist organization the Socialist Workers Party for a while back in the early 1970s after he got out of the Vietnam blood bath American army and was ready to “storm heaven” (his words) to right the wrongs of this wicked old world (my words grabbed via Sam Lowell take) and as well had been doing leftwing commentary since Hector was a pup (somebody unknown’s expression).

Frank then went chapter and verse at me with what he remembered (both from long ago and the recent re-readings) about how he had all his life, all his early life looking for something, some movement to move him, to move us who grew up with him poor as church mice, maybe poorer to a more just world. Had made me laugh, since on some of the stuff I have been right alongside him, like when he mentioned the old Student Union for World Goals which a bunch of us had put together in high school. A grouping with a program that was inundated with all the anti-communist, red scare, Cold War platitudes we could find. We basically were a little to the left of Ike, Grandpa Ike, Dwight D. Eisenhower who was President of the United States (POTUS in twitter-speak) in our youth filled with bauble about the virtues of capitalism, although I think we would have been hard pressed to make that word connection and probably said something like prosperity which we had garnered very little of in the now fondly remembered golden age of the 1950s-for others not us.     

Then as the thaw came, or as people, young people mostly broke the spell of the red scare Cold War night, after we have sown our oats out in the Summer of Love, 1967 and saw some writing on the wall that we were ‘raw meat” for the draft come college graduation day getting hopped up about Robert Kennedy’s ill-fated, ill-starred bid for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 1968. I already mentioned the Army experiences which did both of us in for a while but which frankly drove Frank outside bourgeois politics (he had expected that he would tie his wagon to Robert Kennedy and when that idea fell apart with Kennedy’s assassination offering Hubert H. Humphrey his services against the main villain of the ear Richard M. Nixon in the expectation that he would ride that train out of the draft and/or begin the road to a nice sinecure via Democratic Party politics).

I am not sure if he began serious reading on Marx in the Army or not but when he got out in 1971 he certainly was doing the “read until the early morning” routine. I grabbed some of his tidbits, associated with some of the radical circles in Cambridge he started to frequent, went down the line with him in Washington on May Day, 1971 where we both got busted but soon after withdrew a bit from both him and serious leftwing politics. I was crazy, still am, for films, for seeking some kind of career as a film critic and so spent more of my time in the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square than protesting on Boston Common. He can address sometime his own withdrawal from left-wing organizational politics and moving on to journalism, political commentary on his own dime.

That is enough of the political justification for Frank’s fighting me on this assignment. Frank, however, took the unusual step, for him anyway, of mentioning his being pissed off about losing the Marx assignment and mentioned it to site manager Greg Green. The guy who gives out the assignments and who has had more than one person, me included, scratching their heads both in the assignments they have gotten of late or like Frank not have gotten. Whatever Frank laid out for Greg he had both of us come in to his office to discuss the issue. You know as much as you need to about Frank’s “cred.”

My frame of reference and what amounted to the winning argument was that I had been Peter Paul Markin’s closest friend in high school. Markin, forever known as Scribe for the obvious reason that he always carried a notebook and pen or pencil in his shirt pocket AND always, always had two thousand facts ready to throw at anybody who would listen, mainly girls, which drove more that one of our corner boy crowd to threaten grievous bodily is the real primary source for whatever we knew about Karl Marx before we went crazy later and started to seriously read the stuff. So I knew the details of how Frank, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon and maybe a couple of others first heard about the name and ideas of one Karl Marx and who would later act on them a little. This is where I was a little ahead of Frank knowing that Greg, after taking over as site manager when Allan Jackson was purged from that position, was interested much more in “human interest” stories than the “tiresome” (his words) esoteric left-wing jargon that he knew Frank would meandering into, no, would get into knee deep.     

(For the record some of the other guys who hung around with Scribe and the rest of us like Ricky Rizzo and Dave White, both who would lay their heads down in hellhole Vietnam and wound up on the town monument and Washington black granite, Red Riley and even Frank Jackman when he was hopped up on that Student Union thing almost lynched him when he started talking favorably about Karl Marx and the idea of red revolution in those dead ass red scare Cold War nights. All they wanted to hear about was whatever intelligence Scribe had on some girl they were interested in of which he somehow almost incongruously had plenty of information about or what his next plan was for the “midnight creep” which I assume needs no further explanation except he planned the capers but no way would Frankie Riley or the rest of us let him lead the expeditions-hell we would still be in jail.)

Others, including Frank Jackman, have now seemingly endlessly gone over the effect Scribe had on them a little later when the turbulent 1960s we all got caught up in, blew a gasket, in the Summer of Love, 1967 as the culmination of what he also had been talking about for years on those lonely forlorn weekend nights when we hung around good guy Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in the growing up Acre section of North Adamsville. What most of the guys did not know, or did not want to know, was that a little of what Scribe was thinking at the time, was that maybe Karl Marx might be proven to be right, might have been onto something when he spoke about the working classes, us, getting a big jump ahead in the world once things turned upside down. He held those views pretty closely then, especially when he was practically red-baited into silence by those guys who were even more hung up, as was Scribe in many ways, on the new normal American negative propaganda about Russia, Communism, and Karl Marx. Nobody, this from later Scribe once he flamed red, was born a radical, a revolutionary, and certainly not a Marxist but certain conditions, among them being as poor as church mice, gave a clue to where some people might go. The intellectuals, although Scribe did not call them that, would come to their Marxism more through books and rational thought than as prime victims of the usually one-sided class struggle of the rich against the poor. That was about as far as Scribe would go, wanted to go, because in many ways, although maybe a little less fulsomely, he wanted to go the same bourgeois politics path as Frank in politics.        

Like I say Scribe described to some of us a glimmer, a faux Marxist primer, then in high school, not at all thought out like it would be by him or us later in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we got back respectively from our tours to the “real” world from ‘Nam and knew we had been fucked over by our government. That the “reds” in Vietnam were poor folk, peasants, with whom we had no quarrel. But that was later.

Here is a better example of the glimmer Scribe shined on us back in the day. I remember one night, it had to be one high school night given the teacher and class he was describing, Scribe had told me that he had had to stay after school one day for Mr. Donovan, the World History teacher and football coach which tells you what he was about, when Scribe had given a surly answer about some question Mr. Donovan had asked. That surliness coming from two sources, one Donovan having members of the class endlessly reading aloud the freaking book boring everybody within a mile of the room and that he really believed he already knew more about history than Donovan and so was personally bored as well. The question had not been about Marxism but something else and during that afternoon detention Donovan had asked him if he was a “Bolshevik.” Scribe recoiled in horror he said knowing that to say yes would get him in some trouble (probably more after school time at least) and for the simple fact that he could not say truthfully whatever teen angst and alienation he was feeling was driven by that kind of understanding of the world-then.         

What this history teacher confrontation did do was get Scribe looking again, and this tells as much about him as any other anecdote, at his dog-eared copy of Karl Marx’s (and his co-thinker and financial “angel” Friedrich Engels) classic statement of his views The Communist Manifesto to confirm whether he was a “Marxist,” “Communist,” whatever and he came away from that re-reading knowing that he was not one of those guys, a red. That was the kind of guy Scribe was when he was confronted with something he didn’t understand. The rest of us would have said “fuck it” and let it go at that or have challenged old Donovan with a spurious “yeah, what about it.” Maybe some silly remark like “better red than dead” or “my mommy is a commie,” expressions making the rounds in that dead air time.

So this little sketch really is a “human interest” story and not all that much about Marx in any political sense and that is also why I think that Greg bought my argument over Frank’s. Whatever Marx, Marxism, hell, just general radical non-parliamentary socialism held for the 19^th devotees (and bloodthirsty enemies too) extending into the greater part of the 20^th century fell down, went to ground, with the demise of the Soviet Union back in 1991-92, and whatever intellectual curiosity Marx and Marxism held fell down too so other than as an exotic utopian scheme today there is no reason to go chapter and verse on the details of what Marx was programmatically projecting.

To finish up on this sketch though I should like to mention the way Scribe, which again will tell something about the mad monk when he was in his flower, got his copy of the Manifesto back when he was fourteen or fifteen. He had heard for some source, maybe some “beat” over in Harvard Square when he used to go there after a particularly bad day in the mother wars, it was a cool document or something, who knows with Scribe was kind of strange. He couldn’t find the book in either the school or town libraries for the simple fact that neither had the document nor did when he inquired they want to have it in circulation. Yeah it was that kind of time. A friendly young librarian suggested that he try the Government Printing Office which might have a copy if somebody in Congress (like the red-baiter par excellence Senator Joseph McCarthy) or some governmental agency had ordered it printed for whatever reason as part of an investigation or just to put it in the record for some reason. He got the address in Washington and the GPO sent back a brochure with their publications for sale. And there it was. He ordered a copy and a few weeks alter it came in the mail. Here’s the funnier part, funnier that the government providing copies on the cheap (or maybe free I forget what he said on that point) of such a notorious document the document had been placed on the publication list because it was part of the record for the raucous House Un-American Activities Committee meeting in San Francisco in 1960 when they were practically run out of town by protesters as the Cold War began to thaw in certain places. Of course that was a recollection by Scribe later when we were deep into the Summer of Love out in that very town and he had asked some older people what that protest had been all about.

Yeah, Scribe was a piece of work and he would eventually drag some of us along with him in his good days like the Summer of Love and later after Vietnam time running around with radical students in Cambridge when checking out Mark and Marxism was all the rage. Like I said old Marx has had his up and downs, has taken his beatings but some things Scribe said he said and which we later read about like the poor getting a better shake because they provided the value provided by their cheap labor were spot on. Worse, in a way when I looked, re-read, for this assignment some of the stuff it reads like it could have been written today. How about that.             

Searching 10,000 Years For A Hopi Warrior Dream-Once Again With The Late Native American Artist And Poet T.C Cannon In Mind

Searching 10,000 Years For A Hopi Warrior Dream-Once Again With The Late Native American Artist And Poet T.C

Cannon In Mind 

 

      

By Ronan Saint John

Gerald Scott was beset by ancient dreams of late, maybe not going back 10,000 warrior years like he liked to pretend, but maybe twenty years back (still you will know that he had ancient dreams, 10,000 year dreams when you bring a word like beset, his word, into the equation this early on). For back then, back in his youth he had dreamed the dream of 10,000 year warriors, along with his friends, Jack Lennon and James Lawson (not Jim or Jimmy not since childhood and mother’s call) when he first went west, went via some covered wagon dream as he and they, along with Sarah Mays (now Sarah Scott although she will when mad at Gerald revert to Mays but that is another story which she can tell at her leisure) landed in Joshua Tree out in the California high desert. The pack of them had just graduated from their respective colleges and as youth might do back then, now too, they decided to travel before settling down to whatever they would settle down to although college debt-bound these days probably not likely and rather work, work as a damn Starbuck’s barista if necessary to get the damn thing down before Social Security benefits come into play.

I won’t name the colleges, all four, since that too does not matter to our story and they can tell one and all about their four years at their leisure as well except that Gerald had taken a course in Native American history at his school. Had done so to fulfill an elective requirement at first but got so into what the real history of those many tribes were compared to the baloney he had been force-fed when he was a kid in school, on television and in the cinema when those benighted indigenous peoples were called Indians buying into the standard lie that these were the lost tribes of the Northwest Passage and Christopher Columbus’ misdirected signals to lay claim to the Americas (a name also reeking of illegitimacy but I will stop on this road for guys like Seth Garth and Frank Jackman of American Left History blog can run the rack on those injustices far better than I can). And so the trip with a few dollars, a few knapsacks, a few sleeping bags and a beat up but serviceable Toyota Camry purchased on the cheap from Sarah’s brother who was heading into the Army.      

I could probably spend a good portion of what I have to say running circles around how this quartet finally got to the high desert out in Joshua Tree but guys like Jack Kerouac, who influenced my father in his time to head out to California in the 1960s when he was young himself, Benny Gold, Lester Lawrence and a million other literary travelers have beaten the paths out to the west already. Like I say this is about a 10,000 year vision not some ill-begotten travelogue with AAA ratings. I do have to mention the last leg, the last leg before sunny and hot California desert because the route they travelled was through the states that are square, as the writer Thomas Wolfe put when he was noting something very different about the folk out there, the usurpers, those who stand on somebody else’s land and memory. They had done a circuitous route around the four states where Native Americans still had some existence, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona. At Gerald’s urging they stopped along the way at every reservation area they came across, especially the Hopi reservation which joins those four states together.

Gerald had told the other three that he had had a strange dream one night when they were outside Grand Island, Nebraska about a dance in which they, the three men, were participating in someplace in the West in some canyon where the night fire was flicking off the canyon walls and that flickering was driving the men to more fervent dancing. Beyond that Gerald did not, could not, find meaning in what that dream portended. Except he thought it had meant something about his growing affinity for those long-lost warrior kings who were crucified by the trail of tears the white man, he and his people, had brought upon some other people’s land. And so the search for what that all meant. Since nobody was in a hurry to get home or get to ocean California which meant at some point turning back East and whatever they were going to do lives, everybody consented to the route.             

That route would indeed portend something because along the way they wound up in Gallup, New Mexico during August and were just in time for the annual Intertribal gatherings at Red River Junction. They camped just outside the state park there on Friday and the next day spend the day learning about Native American tribal lore from the various tribes gathered at the site. One of the things that caught Gerald’s attention, as it did the others including Sarah, was the mesmerizing effect of the tribal dancing. Dancing that when it counted back in the day prepared the warriors to confront whatever enemy of the day was to be fought-other tribes or the encroaching white man with his womenfolk and youngsters. The rhythm, the warrior beat filled their heads, although this was not spoken of until later, until after they reached Joshua Tree, with their own warrior dreams, maybe pipe dreams is a better way to put the situation.      

Back at the campsite that night as the sun was setting and the heat of the dusty day was settling down when they came to their site they, Gerald first from the way I heard the story, noticed a medium-sized camper with many logos, or what looked like logos on it, a fire going and a few what looked like older men sitting around a big drum with sticks playing to a methodical beat and chanting something that he could not understand (and never did, then or later). They decided to get closer which none of the men around the drum objected to. When the men took a break one of the younger men waved the four devotees over and asked how they liked it, asked if they had gone to the Intertribal. Yes, on both counts. He introduced himself as Jack Two Feathers and asked their names, where they were from, and why they were there. Gerald explained the Native American interest part.

Then Jack Two Feathers mentioned that it was the tradition of his tribe, the Hopi, to enhance their drumming, enhance their connection with their ancestors, and, laughingly, just to get high to use peyote buttons. The Hopis had had trouble with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other law enforcement agencies over the use of the substance which they, the Hopis, claimed was part of their religious experience and thus protected under the white man’s United States Constitution. They would lose that argument in the United States Supreme Court but among the young, and some of the older fearless men they still carried out the peyote tradition.

Jack Two Feathers asked them if they had ever tried peyote and Gerald mentioned that his father had told him that he had as a proper 1960s young hippie type, but he had not. None of the others had either. They all agreed, once Jack Two Feathers calmed them down about the effects of the substance, to try some once he told them that it would increase their spiritual well-being to see what it was all about. Jack Two Feathers passed out some stuff that looked like mushrooms or something and told them to chew the stuff well. After about an hour, and after Jack Two Feathers had rejoined the older men around the drum who were ready to continue their drumming ceremony, the buttons began to kick in.

Nothing particularly dramatic happened that night except they were mesmerized by the beat of the drum, mesmerized by some younger Hopis who started to dance to the beat of the drums and would go into a fever pitch, and they did not come down from their highs to finally go to sleep until almost dawn. Packing up the next afternoon to head toward Joshua Tree via the Arizona desert and the Grand Canyon Jack Two Feathers came by their laden car and passed a small packet of peyote buttons to Gerald saying that maybe some time they too would see the face of sorrow, the faces of warrior-kings who had roamed at will in these their lands before the white man’s greed took it all away and left nothing good behind. Maybe even have a spiritual journey out of the experiences as well.               

Fast forward to Joshua Tree a couple of weeks later and a couple of late night until dawn peyote button rounds flames flickering against the grey, beige, red clay canyon walls, the three men bare-chested while some others met drummed and Gerald and the others finally found out what Jack Two-Feathers meant, felt that 10,000 year ancient warrior dream and would be forever changed by the experience. Gerald laughed as they started heading home about whether he should tell his father what happened. Nah, he would never believe the tale.

Once Again On The Dog Soldiers Of The Vietnam War Class Of 1969-When Frank Jackman Went Down In The Mud Refusing To Go To Vietnam-And Survived To Tell The Tale

Once Again On The Dog Soldiers Of The Vietnam War Class Of 1969-When Frank Jackman Went Down In The Mud Refusing To Go To Vietnam-And Survived To Tell The Tale

By Frank Jackman  

[As some readers know Frank Jackman the subject of this sketch is a writer at this publication. Full disclosure taken care of on that score I was in a quandary about who should write the piece which concerns Frank’s actions in the military back in the 1960s during the height of the Vietnam War. The natural selection would have been Sam Lowell or Si Lannon both men who knew the details of the story intimately once Frank, a few years after the experience in maybe 1976 they say, felt he could tell the story to guys he had grown up with. They were, having also served in Vietnam, as perplexed as Scribe who had just passed away down in Mexico had been when he was in Vietnam and had heard what Frank been up to back home.

Moreover Frank, after years, decades really of being quite about his story just like a lot of his fellow veterans who did go to Vietnam taking a page from the way their fathers had dealt with their World War II experiences, had when he “came out of the closet” for his own reasons retold them the story one night a few months ago when they were having a few drinks after a movie. This all led me to think that somebody else had to do the job, had to tell the story from a fresh perspective but who knew enough about the military from his own experience to not have to run to Sam or Si every minute to see what this or that meant. As it turned out the dime turned to one Francis James Jackman to tell the tale, to get the nod. Greg Green]  

On Vietnam War Class Of 1969

Funny these days, this year every other day it seems we are being inundated with 50^th anniversary commemorations of a hell of a lot of events. A lot of events in rapid succession for those of us who are of the Generation of ’68 who won our spurs that year. Starting almost as a portent of things to come the year started out with the anniversary of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam with a combination of North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese National Liberation Front fighters trying to decisively kick ass, kick the foreign presence out of their beloved country. Not succeeding in a direct sense, the war would drag on one way or another for another seven years but making it clear that there was no “light at the end of the tunnel” for the cocky American military commanders and politicians to crow about. Almost as an afterthought it forced the humiliating resignation of one Lyndon Baines Johnson, President of the United States (POSTUS in twitter-speak), and war-monger in chief. Then the other shoe seemingly dropped on all our best dreams for a newer world. First Martin, then Bobby. The horror of the Chicago Democratic National Convention which made the whole world watch while the country turned in on itself. Picked sides, a process which still not has abated as we step into a cold civil war which on a dime under the current regime could turn hot in an instant, and then the final humiliation of Richard Milhous Nixon, a confirmed Cold War warrior as POSTUS.      

So yes, plenty for the Generation of ’68, those still standing and those who still give a damn about those bloated youthful dreams to think about but today I want to speak of another generation. The Vietnam War Class of 1969 which I am a proud member of although not the way you might think. This remembrance comes by virtue of running into an extraordinary number of fellow veterans, not all Veterans for Peace or others who still adamantly keep their anti-war credentials out front and in public, whose time of service in Vietnam was somehow related to the year 1969. There must have been something in that period, there was in the aftermath of Tet and no victory, which clicked with me since it coincided with my time as well. I have until the last few years never spoken much about my trials and tribulations about my service during the Vietnam War period.

Kind of had done my own version of what got me to write this piece. The direct impetus has been a remark made by a couple of Marine Vietnam veterans who had known each through their wives for a dozen years yet never mentioned that they had both been in Vietnam. Another is a remark made by a fellow peace walker on the Maine Peace Walk in 2017 who had gone through two marriages without his now ex-wives knowing that he had been in Vietnam. It was that kind of war. Even for those who resisted.

Hell, it was only few years ago and only when she asked that my wife, Cindy, found out about the details of my own struggles with the war although she knew I had been in the Army, and that I had been a military resister. Yes, my class of 1969 story involves my going to the stockade for over a year (not including times during the actual year and one half of the struggle when I was confined to base, barracks, orderly room) for what amounted to refusing to go to Vietnam as an 11 Bravo, as an infantryman, as what we called “cannon fodder” after I had been given orders to report to Fort Lewis in Washington for transit to Vietnam.  I won’t go into the details of that experience for this sketch is about the class and not my personal travails other than this. I was never proud of anything more in my life than what I did with my “fifteen minutes” of fame and still feel that way as I hope the reader understands.  

Maybe I was quiet about my experiences since afterwards, and still somewhat today I think I made a mistake despite my personal pride in what I did, a political mistake in not going to Vietnam. Among other things 1969, maybe before but certainly post-Tet 1968 when even guys in the White House and Pentagon knew the game was up (they just dragged it out not wanting to be the guys who “lost” Vietnam a not unimportant consideration among that crowd), was a time when the American Army at home and in Vietnam started to see some serious blow-back from the ranks about what the hell they were fighting and dying for and getting kind of surly about it too. The more anecdotal evidence from guys who were there after they got back to the real world with everything from FTA on their helmets to not saluting officers( worse , worse for the officers, of fragging officers) to not going far when called to go on patrol to going AWOL in county to doing bags of dope to all kinds of individual acts of subordination putting them in jail harm’s way in infamous Long Binh Jail (LBJ after the POTUS), especially from that cohort that I have honed in on, guys from the post-Tet era the more I think I could have raised more than individual heartburn among the brass. Although half the brass at Fort Devens wanted to chew my ass in a grinder and tried to ship me out under armed guard but were folded by a judge in the Federal Court in Boston who granted a Temporary Restraining Order just as they were about to come after me. Even stateside I ran into guys who having done their tour in Vietnam were so angry about the deal they had been dealt they wound up in the Special Detachment Unit where I spent my non-stockade time for discipline.  So, yes, over the years I think I got a little quiet about the matter.   

Maybe ten, twelve years ago I started coming around Veterans for Peace, around after the second Iraq War when I had seen them on Armistice Day parading with their patented white on black dove embroidered flags flying in the wind going up Tremont Street in Boston and asked about why they were being separated from the main body of the parade by police motorcyclists, you know the average American Legion, VFW crowd that at least then formed the core of the march. The guy I talked said that the reason they couldn’t march with the main body of the parade was those guys didn’t want peace flags and “peaceniks” in their parade. Okay, my kind of people, sign me, well let me talk a while and then sign me up. The rest is history.

Well not quite because remember I am talking about the military class of 1969 which I am a part of. Over the years I found that despite my different Army experience that the guys who joined VFP were not all that different from me, from my growing up experiences and from my reluctance to resist the draft which I had thought about (although not Canada, not exile, I loved, love this country it is the damn governments I hate). Take Drew from Ohio who never told his two wives that he had been in Vietnam in 1969. Take David from out in Washington state, out in the Eastern Washington farm country part, apple country, who went into the Army in 1969 because that was the only way he was going to get to college. Take Peter from the corner boys down outside Philly who dropped out of college in 1968 and decided to join in 1969 to avoid the draft. Take Donald from Omaha who had never seen a black guy in person until the Army but who in ‘Nam, that is what they are entitled to call it not me, was as tight as tight could be with Tiny from South Side, Chicago until he got blown away saving Donald’s ass and whose name now is forever etched on a black granite down in Washington and forever in Donald’s heart. Take ‘Doc’ who in order to get his medical school bills paid got hoodwinked into going Army and wound up in a field hospital for the casualty-heavy 101^st Airborne Brigade. Sure, a ton of guys did what they did and came home and forgot it or tried to. Sure, a bunch of guys were proud of what they did and will let you know about it. But know this there were a bunch of  guys in that Class of 1969 who got “religion” on the questions of war and peace-and haven’t forgotten about that hard learned lesson.      

From The Marxist Archives- The 1953 East German Proletarian Uprising

	Workers Vanguard No. 1135	1 June 2018

TROTSKY

LENIN

The 1953 East German Proletarian Uprising

(Quote of the Week)

This June marks the 65th anniversary of the East German proletarian uprising, which, for the first time, posed the potential for working-class political revolution to sweep away Stalinist bureaucratic rule and establish a government based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism. Contrary to claims by bourgeois ideologues and the Stalinists, who portrayed the uprising as a pro-capitalist rebellion, the workers defended the collectivized foundations of the East German deformed workers state. They raised the call to their class brothers in West Germany: “Sweep out your crap in Bonn—In Pankow [East Berlin] we’re cleaning house.” In the excerpt below, published shortly after the suppression of the uprising, the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party emphasized the need to forge a Leninist-Trotskyist party. (For more on the subject, see “The East German Workers Uprising of 17 June 1953” in Workers Vanguard No. 332, 17 June 1983.)

The general strike was deeply rooted in the masses of East Germany. It was splendidly organized. Who were the leaders? Who were the workers that formed the strike committees, which numbered thousands of members, coordinated the actions of numerous cities, organized the storming of the prisons to free political prisoners, and displayed such heroism and organizing capacity in the face of the repressions? This workers vanguard is composed of trade unionists, communist and socialist workers, who acted with splendid revolutionary initiative despite the Stalinist and the Social Democratic leadership of the workers organizations.

The regroupment of this workers vanguard into a revolutionary Leninist party, that will organize the struggle and guide it to victory is the burning task of the hour. The perspective opened up by the beginning of the political revolution is thus the perspective of the reconstitution of the revolutionary socialist party of Lenin and Trotsky. The leaders of the East German workers are forging the basis for such a party in the heat of struggle. Brutal repressions by the Stalinists, however ferocious, will not prevent this indispensable and unpostponable task from being realized. There is only one banner under which such a revolutionary party can march, the banner of Trotskyism, the movement that today constitutes the organizing nucleus for the Leninist rearmament of the working class.

—“German Revolt—Beginning of End for Stalinism,” Militant (13 July 1953)