Tear Up Racist Elite High School Admissions Test! NYC Schools: Separate and Unequal Labor: Fight for Quality Integrated Public Education!

Workers Vanguard No. 1157	21 June 2019

Tear Up Racist Elite High School Admissions Test!

NYC Schools: Separate and Unequal

Labor: Fight for Quality Integrated Public Education!

A token proposal by New York City’s Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio to give a tiny fraction of black and Latino youth greater access to eight elite public high schools has touched a raw nerve in one of the country’s most racially segregated school systems. Underscoring the profound racial inequality intrinsic to education in capitalist America, the student body at NYC’s most prestigious public school, Stuyvesant, will this fall be less than 1 percent black. And the segregated schools are just one part of the living nightmare for black people who face daily police terror, low-wage jobs, abysmal housing, and little to no health care in a system founded on black oppression.

Wringing their hands over school segregation, liberal bourgeois politicians in the Democratic Party push diversity schemes—like a scattering of a few more black and brown faces—to sell the lie that they stand for the interests of the oppressed black and Latino masses. De Blasio has proposed phasing out the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), currently the only way to gain entrance to one of these elite schools, which are lavished with government funding and provide the kind of quality education and college counselor connections that offer a path to the Ivy League. Instead, seats would be given to the top 7 percent of students from each of the city’s middle schools, a measure that would increase black and Latino enrollment. Any such plan that provides even a modicum of greater access to quality education for these youth should be supported. Down with the SHSAT!

At the same time, in a school system of over 1.1 million students that is 70 percent black and Latino, the vast majority would still be confined to decrepit schools that are little more than holding pens with metal detectors, surveillance cameras and “zero tolerance” enforced by armed NYPD officers. De Blasio is well aware that his plan is unlikely to pass the NY State legislature in Albany, where many Democratic lawmakers voted to set up the SHSAT in the 1970s to exclude black youth from the top NYC schools. Predictably, even this minimal gesture has become a lightning rod for racist reaction. Filthy rich New Yorkers like billionaire cosmetics mogul Ron Lauder and the black former chairman of Time Warner and Citigroup, Richard Parsons, have poured millions into efforts to preserve the test.

Every child in New York City and across the country, whatever their background, deserves to attend a school with the level of resources allocated to Stuyvesant. There is a crying need for a class-struggle fight for free, quality, integrated public education for all up to and including the universities! This fight must include the demand for bilingual education in every language spoken by students, which is vital for all Spanish-speaking and immigrant communities, and would benefit native English speakers as well. Competitive screening, “tracking” systems and specialized schools, set up to enforce and exacerbate the class and racial divisions in this society, should be eliminated. To provide real access to higher education, we call for open admissions, no tuition and state-paid living stipends for all students, as well as the nationalization of the private universities.

There is no shortage of wealth in this country to massively fund public education. The problem is that the wealth and the reins of this society are in the hands of a tiny capitalist class, which spends on educating working-class and minority youth only what it considers necessary for maintaining the workings of the profit-driven system. With the destruction of hundreds of thousands of unionized industrial jobs in recent decades, the capitalist rulers have deemed the poor, especially black youth, an expendable population. The one force with the social power and interest to seize the wealth of society is the multiracial working class—and that can only be done by overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie through socialist revolution.

The fight to create genuinely equal education must be waged by working people independently of and in opposition to the Democratic Party. The Democrats, no less than the openly labor-hating, racist Republicans, are enemies of the exploited and oppressed. De Blasio has proven, time and again, that he is the mayor of Wall Street, ruling on behalf of NYC’s financial titans who lord it over the working class—white, black and immigrant. Meanwhile, liberal darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez couldn’t even muster a pretense of opposing the SHSAT at a heated Queens town hall meeting on public schools in March, and black NYC public advocate Jumaane Williams, who touts his “progressive” credentials, has vocally defended the test. Break with the Democrats! For a workers party that fights for a workers government!

Race, Class and Education

The appalling state of public education in the U.S. is the product of a social system built on the bedrock of black chattel slavery. Where it was once a crime punishable by death to teach a slave to read, the 1861-65 Civil War that smashed the Southern slavocracy opened the way for public education for all, including poor whites. The freed slaves and their allies made the fight for education central to their struggle for the full social emancipation of black people. But the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, the most democratic period in U.S. history, led to the consolidation of black people as a specially oppressed race-color caste, the vast majority of whom remain forcibly segregated at the bottom of U.S. society. While a thin layer of black people has achieved a degree of financial security, for the mass of the black population upward social mobility is nil.

The heroic struggles of the 1950s and ’60s civil rights movement attempted to remove the formal legal inequalities imposed on black people in America. The landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling struck down the doctrine of “separate but equal” for schools that had been segregated by law in the Jim Crow South. But the civil rights movement did not redress systemic racial oppression, not least in education, at the core of U.S. capitalism. Its liberal leadership, such as Martin Luther King Jr., sought legal reforms through pressuring the capitalist Democrats and courts, the very forces maintaining de facto segregation. In the North, the bourgeoisie kept black people out of the best jobs, housing and schools without resorting to Jim Crow laws. In 1965, black writer James Baldwin pithily remarked: “De facto segregation means Negroes are segregated, but nobody did it.”

New York City’s own battle for school desegregation reached a fever pitch in 1964 amid tumultuous struggles for decent housing and jobs and against rampant cop terror. A massive school boycott that year by black and Puerto Rican parents and students was one of the largest civil rights demonstrations on record. After a racist backlash, Democratic Party politicians and black civil rights leaders caved and abandoned the battle. As we noted at the time, when the struggle for black rights develops a mass character, it poses a direct threat to the capitalist system itself but cannot go forward without a revolutionary leadership (see “Negro Struggle in the North,” Spartacist No. 2, July-August 1964).

Today, over six decades after the Little Rock Nine broke through the color bar in an Arkansas school, New York’s school system is more segregated than those in the Deep South. Half of NYC schools are more than 90 percent black and Latino, where students have higher drop-out and lower graduation rates. From kindergarten, children are tested and tracked. In addition to the elite high schools, some 200 middle and high schools screen students for admission based on grades and test scores. The citywide system of “school choice” is a fraud—those parents and students with the means have choice, while those without the means have almost none.

At a May forum on school diversity in heavily Latino Washington Heights, youth called for eliminating the divide between their prison-like schools lacking basic supplies and the plush specialized schools. On June 6, in a multiracial rally in Manhattan, hundreds of students chanted: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, segregation has got to go!” Placards read, “Integration Is an Education,” drawing on some of the slogans from the 1964 school boycott.

Demonstrating his utter contempt for desegregation, last year de Blasio declared that the 1970s attempt to integrate the Boston school system through busing “absolutely poisoned the well.” Meanwhile, NYC education chancellor Richard Carranza, who claims to be for school desegregation, said that busing students from one part of the city to another was “way, way, way far away.” Although not a panacea, as a partial step toward equality busing would at least improve the school options for black and Latino students.

The Boston busing crisis was a front line in the fight for elementary democratic rights for black people. Busing in Boston was bloodily smashed by racist mobs in the streets abetted by liberal Congressional Democrats, who designed the program to fail by busing black children to poor white neighborhoods, and vice versa, rather than to wealthier suburbs. At the time, we called to extend busing to the suburbs so poor kids, black and white, could have a shot at a better education. In the face of the howling racists, we called on the integrated union movement to mobilize labor/black defense of besieged black youth. The defeat of busing opened the floodgates to a nationwide assault on school desegregation, foreshadowing the rollback of the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement.

No reform under capitalism can fundamentally transform the social conditions that continue to imprison the impoverished black masses in the segregated ghettos and inner-city projects, where the lack of affordable, quality housing is connected to the hellish conditions of schools. Showing his true colors on school desegregation, de Blasio in 2017 cried, “We cannot change the basic reality of housing” in the city. But de Blasio has very much intensified “the basic reality of housing” segregation. Billions are dished out by the city to real estate magnates who throw up luxury skyscrapers, while slumlords hike up rents and drive working people and the poor out of gentrifying neighborhoods. As the homeless population in NYC continues to swell, one in ten public school students is in temporary housing, including homeless shelters.

Against Capitalist Divide-and-Rule

Within the framework of the capitalist status quo, funding for education and other social services is rationed in a way that deliberately fans racial and ethnic tensions. The intense competition over the limited seats at the NYC specialized schools is a case in point. Today, nearly two-thirds of the current student body at these schools is Asian, and parental opposition to scrapping the SHSAT is strong among segments of this highly diverse population that traces its origins to the Far East or the Indian subcontinent. Last December, the Chinese American Citizens Alliance and Asian American Coalition for Education, backed by right-wing foundations, filed a lawsuit to block de Blasio’s interim plan to grant admission to black and Latino students who almost pass the SHSAT, claiming anti-Asian discrimination.

This country’s racist heritage includes the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Japanese American internment camps during World War II. Asians, as well as Latinos and other predominantly non-white minorities, suffer oppression in capitalist America. However, as an intermediate layer, they navigate a society where the main racial divide is between black and white, and every institution is permeated by anti-black racism. The enduring color bar has proved invaluable to the capitalist masters, serving to pit workers against one another and to obscure the class line between the working class and its exploiters.

To this end, the rulers have long invoked the myth of the Asian “model minority” as a wedge against black people. As part of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration during the civil rights era, future Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan infamously blamed black oppression on a supposed lack of family values, which he contrasted to the “enlightened family life” of Asian Americans. Such pernicious stereotypes also disappear national and class differences among Asians. In NYC alone, some quarter-million Asians live in poverty.

Marxists strive to break down the racial and ethnic divisions sown by the capitalist exploiters, which weaken the working class. Unity in struggle against the common class enemy is in no way automatic but must be fought for, including by combating both anti-immigrant chauvinism and anti-black racism. Working people must be won to the recognition that the fight for black freedom is in their interests and fundamental to razing the entire edifice of American capitalism. In turn, only the workers’ seizure of power and the establishment of their class rule can open the road to the eradication of all oppression.

For a Class-Struggle Perspective

Over the last four decades, public education has come under sustained bipartisan assault, from steep cutbacks to widespread school closures. The blame for the lack of learning and low test scores is cynically heaped on teachers and their unions. The Obama administration launched sweeping attacks on the public schools and the teachers unions packaged as education “reform,” which included a major expansion of the privately run charter industry.

Out of desperation over the deplorable state of inner-city public schools, many black parents have been manipulated into thinking that charters are some kind of answer. Notably, behind the Teens Take Charge program that organized the pro-integration rally on June 6 are alumni of Teach for America, one of the country’s largest pro-charter and anti-union forces. Opened in the poorest areas, and often on public school grounds, the overwhelmingly non-union charters are even more segregated than the public schools and notorious for vicious discipline and for excluding non-English speakers and disabled students. The charter industry must be smashed through class struggle and its teachers and staff brought into the public schools and the unions; an important step in this direction would be for labor to organize the charters.

In a series of strikes across the country, beginning in West Virginia 15 months ago, teachers have shown a real appetite to fight back against the union-busters and privatizers. These walkouts over better pay and conditions found wide resonance within poor and minority communities and attracted broad support among students and parents, as well as some expressions of solidarity from other unions. By waging class struggle on behalf of both their livelihoods and their students, teachers made their cause that of the working people as a whole.

But the potential impact of these battles was largely squandered by the trade-union officialdom. The labor lieutenants of the capitalist class hitch the fortunes of the unions to the Democratic Party, thereby compromising teacher strikes. NYC’s United Federation of Teachers bureaucracy is particularly venal in its subservience to the Democrats, and is against abolishing the SHSAT. What is needed is a fight for a class-struggle leadership of the unions—one based on complete independence from the bosses and their political parties. This leadership would have as its perspective the building of a revolutionary workers party.

We Need a Workers Party!

Black and Latino workers make up a core component of organized labor across the country, including among NYC transit, sanitation and other municipal unions, whose members could shut down the center of U.S. finance capital by withholding their labor. Many of these workers attended NYC public schools and now have children enrolled there. They represent a living link between the social power of labor and the anger of the downtrodden ghetto and barrio masses.

The multiracial working class as a whole confronts the same prospect of immiseration and hopelessness that is inflicted in a more intensified form on the bulk of the black population. Workers have every interest in mobilizing to fight for quality, integrated education and housing. But it will take a leap in consciousness and organization for the proletariat to bring its power to bear in the fight for such demands, which must be linked to the struggle for its own emancipation from capitalist wage slavery.

Namely, it will take the intervention of a vanguard workers party acting as a tribune of the people. Such a party would be guided by the program of revolutionary integrationism: a proletarian-centered struggle against every manifestation of racial oppression based on the understanding that the complete integration and equality of black people can be realized only in an egalitarian socialist society. Over 150 years since the Civil War, many black people despair of integration, which the rulers cynically equate with “diversity.” The Spartacist League is dedicated to forging the workers party that is 70 percent black, Latino and other minorities to sweep away the entire system of racist capitalist oppression. For black liberation through socialist revolution! Finish the Civil War!

Trump, Dems Push Anti-China Scare Campaign U.S. Imperialists Ramp Up Trade/Tech War Defend, Extend Gains of 1949 Chinese Revolution!

Workers Vanguard No. 1157	21 June 2019

Trump, Dems Push Anti-China Scare Campaign

U.S. Imperialists Ramp Up Trade/Tech War

Defend, Extend Gains of 1949 Chinese Revolution!

What began in January 2018 with U.S. tariffs against Chinese-made solar panels has since become a wide-ranging campaign to thwart China’s economic and technological rise. In a major escalation, on May 10 President Trump declared a further 25 percent tariff on $200 billion worth of imports from China. Five days later, he issued an executive order effectively banning the Chinese company Huawei, the world’s leader in next-generation 5G telecommunications hardware and second-largest smartphone maker, from the U.S. on the grounds of “national security.” The Commerce Department then barred American companies from selling chips and other goods to Huawei.

Capitalist financiers warn that Trump’s broad use of the tariff weapon—against purported friends as well as declared foes—threatens the supply chains that are crucial in modern manufacturing and might bring on a world recession. For the Republicans and also the Democrats, who have enthusiastically backed the White House against Beijing, this is a small price to pay for squeezing China, the most powerful of the countries in the world today where capitalist rule was overthrown. U.S. companies like shoe manufacturer Steve Madden and camera maker GoPro are shifting production away from China in order to evade import duties. Longshoremen at the Port of Los Angeles, where China represents 60 percent of trade volume, are already handling less cargo.

Chinese negotiators in the last round of trade talks refused to humiliate themselves by meeting Washington’s demands, which included that China’s laws be rewritten to American satisfaction. Trump vows to impose tariffs on another $300 billion worth of Chinese goods if Beijing does not buckle under. Throughout the trade war, the U.S. has pushed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime to relinquish state control of the economy. That would mean total surrender to the imperialists. As revolutionary Marxists, we say that the working class in the U.S. and internationally has a side in this conflict: with China, a bureaucratically deformed workers state, against imperialism. Down with the anti-China tariffs!

Washington’s diktat against Huawei was prepared by a propaganda blitz claiming that China was capable of spying on all and sundry through “backdoors” in its telecommunications equipment. Such surveillance, of course, is something the U.S. specializes in, from National Security Agency monitoring of personal communications to its hacking of Huawei’s internal network. The “Chinese spying” scare was jacked up after the arrest in December of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver, Canada, on the grounds that the company had evaded U.S. sanctions against Iran. She is currently fighting extradition to the U.S., which has issued indictments against Huawei for “theft of intellectual property” and other cooked-up charges. The drive against Huawei is just one part of a plot to stop China’s technological advance, which is crucial to its military defense. The Spartacist League/U.S. joins the Trotskyist League in Quebec and Canada in demanding: Free Meng Wanzhou! No extradition!

The boundless American arrogance toward China has touched off a fierce reaction on the mainland, where there are deeply entrenched memories of the “Century of Humiliation.” This was the period beginning with the 1839-42 Opium War when foreign powers carved the country into their own spheres of exploitation, which ended only with the 1949 Revolution. Chinese president Xi Jinping announced that China needs to treat the trade war as a real war. As trade talks collapsed, the state CCTV network dropped Hollywood films from prime time and played movies about China’s intervention in the 1950-53 Korean War—known to Chinese as the War Resisting America and Aiding Korea. “China already knows what it’s like to suffer under the yoke of a colonial master. No matter what the US or anyone else tries, it won’t do so again,” declared a column in the official China Daily (24 May).

Beijing has hit back with tariffs on $60 billion worth of U.S. products, although the impact of such tit-for-tat measures is limited because China imports far less from the U.S. than it exports there. China, which mines and processes a vast majority of the world’s rare earth metals, is threatening to withhold exports of these commodities, which are crucial for any number of high-tech items, from electric car motors and smartphones to missile guidance systems.

China has also reacted sharply to escalating military provocations by the U.S. and its allies. These include recent incursions into the Taiwan Strait by destroyers, as well as increased naval exercises and flyovers by B-52 bombers in the South China Sea, China’s maritime trade hub. At a military conference in Singapore this month, Chinese defense minister Wei Fenghe warned Washington: “A talk? Welcome. A fight? Ready. Bully us? No way” (Asia Times, 5 June).

It is crucial that the working class internationally stand for the defense of China in any military conflict with the imperialists or forces acting on their behalf. Our military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state is unconditional. Just as workers must always defend their unions, despite their pro-capitalist misleaders, against the bosses, we defend China against the capitalist enemy despite our political opposition to its Stalinist regime and no matter what the immediate cause of the conflict.

Anti-Imperialism and the Chinese Revolution

Bourgeois ideologues falsely describe the U.S.-China clash as a fight between rivals for economic and military supremacy. A commonly used catchphrase is the so-called Thucydides Trap, a term popularized by Harvard academic Graham Allison. Harking back to the war between Sparta and Athens in ancient Greece, which the historian Thucydides explained was based on the latter’s rise as a new power, Allison et al. project an inevitable clash between today’s rising power (China) and the declining hegemon (the United States).

Allison’s dime-store analysis is adopted wholesale by the ostensible socialists of Left Voice, a U.S. publication associated with the Trotskyist Fraction-Fourth International. Describing the trade war as “a competition between two capitalist powers,” these reformists opine that “China’s explosive growth and technological development puts it on a collision course with the United States for economic, political and military hegemony” (“The U.S.-China Trade War and the Race for Global Hegemony,” 12 June). For their part, the Committee for a Workers’ International (Socialist Alternative in the U.S.) has for years labeled China as not only capitalist but a rising imperialist force. The bourgeois ideologues and their chorus on the left provide cover for the U.S. rulers’ brazen aggression and obscure the class conflict driving the imperialists’ economic and military campaign against China.

The strategic goal of the U.S. and other capitalist powers is to overturn the 1949 Revolution that smashed capitalist rule and liberated China from their bloody claws. After years of peasant-based guerrilla war, the CCP under Mao Zedong came to power as Chiang Kai-shek’s reactionary, U.S.-backed Guomindang forces fell apart and fled to Taiwan. The new regime distributed landlords’ holdings to peasants and went on to expropriate the capitalists and build a collectivized economy with central planning. Although marked by bureaucratic caprice, the socialization of the economy led to enormous advances for the workers and peasants in what had been a miserably poor country. Some 40 years of “market reforms” have brought substantial foreign capitalist investment, galloping official corruption and a nascent indigenous bourgeoisie, along with significant economic growth. Nevertheless, China’s economy remains centrally based on nationalized industry and banking.

The 1949 Revolution was a historic gain for the world proletariat. But the workers state that issued out of it was deformed by the rule of the parasitic CCP bureaucracy, which from the beginning has politically suppressed the working class. Modeled on Stalin’s bureaucracy in the former Soviet Union, the CCP regime from Mao’s time on has sown the illusion that China on its own can achieve socialism—a society of material abundance—if only given the time. The necessary corollary to this dogma of “socialism in one country” is “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist world, especially the imperialist powers. The Stalinist program, a nationalist perversion of Marxism, is both utopian and reactionary, opposing the fight for workers revolution internationally in order to accommodate imperialism.

We Trotskyists of the International Communist League call for workers political revolution to oust the CCP bureaucracy and install a regime of proletarian democracy: the rule of workers and peasants councils. To defend and extend the gains of the 1949 Revolution, such a regime would strengthen central economic planning and re-establish a state monopoly of foreign trade while renegotiating the terms of foreign investment to benefit the workers. We also call to reunify China through socialist revolution in Taiwan and political revolution on the mainland, and to expropriate the tycoons in Hong Kong, which is an integral part of China. Our perspective hinges on the struggle for workers revolution in the U.S. and other capitalist countries, which would end imperialist domination once and for all and lay the basis for a world socialist order.

The CCP Regime and the World Capitalist Market

The trade/tech war against China illuminates the contradictions of a Stalinist-ruled workers state operating in a world dominated by a handful of advanced capitalist (imperialist) countries. Take, for example, the CCP’s “Made in China 2025” program. It aims for China, which currently relies on foreign manufacturers for 90 percent of the high-speed microchips it uses in its factories, to fabricate such items itself. A good part of this development would come through foreign acquisitions as well as trade. But as the campaign against Huawei shows, the U.S. is dead set on blocking that path. In response, Beijing is reportedly strengthening state control over its tech industry, and Huawei has plans to create its own smartphone operating system to replace Google’s Android.

The imperialists have their own contradictions in dealing with China. Unlike last century’s Cold War against the Soviet Union, a degenerated workers state, what has been widely dubbed a “new cold war” is aimed at a major trading partner of the capitalist countries. This gives Beijing room to maneuver, to a point. While some U.S. allies have joined in banning Huawei, Germany as of now continues to look to the company to build out its 5G network upgrade. At the same time, as a leading producer of precision machine tools, Germany howled when in 2016 a Chinese firm purchased the German Kuka robotics company, which outfits auto plants worldwide. Meanwhile, Germany and France have moved to stop China from buying more ports and other infrastructure in Europe as part of its One Belt, One Road program, an effort to massively expand trade avenues.

More to the point is the “Chinese Dream” announced by Xi Jinping when he took office in 2012: the goal of China becoming a xiaokang (moderately prosperous) society in the short term and eventually reaching parity with the advanced capitalist economies, hopefully by the 100th anniversary of the 1949 Revolution. There has been enormous development in the People’s Republic of China, as seen today in everything from steel and electric car manufacturing to its extensive high-speed rail system and even medical and space technology. This progress speaks to the superiority of a collectivized economy over the capitalist boom-bust system of production for profit.

Yet there remains a qualitative gap between the advanced capitalist economies and China’s. As of last December, China’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was 57 percent of that of the U.S., a massive rise over 20 years ago, when it barely topped 10 percent. But with four times the American population, China has a current per capita GDP that is only one-seventh of that of the U.S. That statistic is a true measure of the huge difference in labor productivity between the two countries. This disparity has much to do with the fact that despite recent rapid urbanization, a bit under half of China’s population still lives in the countryside, with its relatively backward farming methods.

From Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, communists have understood that achieving socialism requires surpassing the highest productivity of labor possible under capitalism in order to eliminate scarcity and thereby all class divisions. The prerequisite to such a leap forward is to sweep away the capitalist ruling classes through workers revolutions and to harness the most modern technology in a world planned economy.

Opposed to this perspective, the CCP bureaucratic caste plays a delicate balancing act, parasitically resting atop the workers state, from which it derives its privileges, while transmitting the pressures of the capitalist world market onto China. Thus, if the Xi regime caves in to the imperialists, this could cause an eruption of anger at home. Already, the CCP faces thousands of strikes and protests annually, due mainly to the effects of “market reforms.” The bureaucracy dreads the specter of the 1989 “Beijing Spring,” when student protests in Tiananmen Square developed into a broad working-class upsurge. The key missing factor in this incipient political revolution was a Leninist-Trotskyist party that could lead the workers to power (see "The Truth About the Tiananmen Uprising" in this issue).

Chinese in U.S. Face Racist Blowback

With the winds of economic war rising, Beijing warned Chinese citizens this month that U.S. law enforcement has been harassing Chinese nationals “through border interrogations, drop-in visits and various other means.” Chinese in the U.S. are indeed facing virulent racism stoked by the government. In February 2018, FBI director Christopher Wray lashed out at Chinese scientists, professors and students in the U.S. as potential spies for Beijing. As the White House tightened restrictions on their visas, Chinese students on American campuses have been victimized for just speaking their native tongue. A report on the harassment of Chinese speakers at Duke University posted on a website in China got millions of hits. We say: U.S. government hands off Chinese students, researchers, tourists!

The Committee of 100, an elite organization of Chinese Americans in business, government and academia, cogently compared Wray’s fearmongering to past racist campaigns, such as the World War II internment of Japanese Americans and the 1990s frame-up of Taiwanese-born scientist Wen Ho Lee. (On the latter, see “‘Chinese Spy’ Hysteria Whips Up Anti-Asian Racism,” WV No. 719, 17 September 1999.) Those atrocities were carried out under the Democratic Party administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Bill Clinton.

This time around, the Democrats are eagerly helping Trump’s Republicans foment anti-Chinese hysteria. One specific target is the China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC), a state-owned company that is producing rail cars for Boston, Chicago and other cities. CRRC is the world’s largest manufacturer of passenger rail cars, which the U.S. stopped making decades ago. After work began last year at a CRRC plant in Springfield, Massachusetts, making subway cars for Boston’s MBTA, Sheet Metal Workers Local 63 business agent John Scavotto worried that Trump’s China-bashing would lead to the plant being closed. “There’s over 120 union workers from Springfield,” he told WGBH radio in October. “You’re going to possibly put them out of work.”

Right. But it’s not just Trump. In March, a bipartisan Senate group introduced a bill that would restrict transit agencies from using federal funds to buy rail cars or buses made by companies linked to the Chinese government. CRRC has also won a design contest for upgrading New York City subway cars. Anyone who works on or rides that decrepit system, which the capitalists have starved of funds for decades, knows it desperately needs the company’s expertise. But up jumps Democratic New York Senator Charles Schumer to demand a “top-to-bottom review” so that CRRC doesn’t implant any espionage devices! The old Cold Warriors screamed about “reds under the beds.” Now it’s spycams on the A train.

However laughable, Schumer’s tirades have a purpose. Tales of Chinese spying are part of an ideological offensive aimed at getting American workers and the population as a whole behind the drive for capitalist counterrevolution in China. Leading that campaign is the same U.S. capitalist class that has waged decades of war against workers at home, driven by the same purpose of increasing their obscene profits and solidifying their rule. Schumer’s fellow Democratic Senator, Chris Coons of Delaware, chortled that being hawkish on China today is “comparable to the 1950s when there was no downside, politically, to being anti-Soviet” (Economist, 18 May).

The anti-China crusade is backed by the labor traitors at the top of the trade-union bureaucracy, such as the United Steelworkers leadership, which early on cheered the tariffs imposed on Chinese steel. Loyal to the capitalist system and to U.S. imperialism, the American labor officialdom sees a threat in the massive expansion of industrial production in China in recent decades. The labor movement needs a leadership based on a program of class struggle, opposition to the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties and militant solidarity with workers abroad. Such a leadership would welcome the growth of Chinese industry as enhancing the potential for a planned global economy with a rational division of labor under workers rule.

Marx and Engels closed the 1848 Communist Manifesto with the call, “Working men of all countries, unite!” This was not some pious wish but a statement that capitalism, in extending its reach globally, was creating an international proletariat with a common interest in replacing the system of production for profit with a collectivized economy. The October 1917 Russian Revolution led by the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky was the opening shot in the fight to realize that goal, which today requires socialist revolution in the U.S. and other capitalist countries and proletarian political revolution in China and the rest of the deformed workers states. The ICL dedicates itself to reforging Trotsky’s Fourth International to carry that struggle forward.

7/13 Action for Immigrant Lives

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When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973 -Carl Davidson's "Left in Form, Right in Essence:Origins of U.S. Trotskyism"

Markin comment on this series:

No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.

When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.

So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
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Carl Davidson's "Left in Form, Right in Essence:Origins of U.S. Trotskyism"

The Trotskyists have been known – both historically and in the present period – as “wreckers and splitters” of the people’s organizations and movements.

While they vociferously deny the charge, an examination of their history demonstrates that they have earned it. The Trotskyists themselves even celebrate their wrecking and splitting tactics as high points in their theoretical development.

This conclusion becomes particularly obvious in view of certain aspects of the history of the Trotskyists in the U.S.: their initial break with the Communist party and their “entry” into the Socialist party.

The Trotskyists were first organized in this country as a secret faction within the CP. They were led by James P. Cannon, active in the party’s defense work and a member of its central committee.

What was unique about this faction – and undoubtedly required its secrecy – was that it was formed after Trotskyism has been repudiated by the Communist International as a petty bourgeois trend, a variety of Menshevism. The question was discussed within the CPUSA as well. Cannon and his followers, however, never presented their views, but worked surreptitiously toward a split in violation of the basic democratic centralist norms of party organization. In his History of American Trotskyism, written in 1942, Cannon tries to justify this by pleading ignorance at the time.

“Someone may ask,” he writes, “‘why didn’t you make speeches in favor of Trotsky?’ I couldn’t do that either because I didn’t understand the program.”

This was in 1928, after he had voted in favor of resolutions against Trotskyism. Yet in the same book, Cannon states that in 1926 he had read Trotskyist documents attacking Soviet relations with British trade unions and agreed with them.

“It had a profound influence on me,” he said. “I felt that at least on this question ... the Oppositionists had the right line. At any rate. I was convinced that they were not the counter- revolutionists they were pictured to be.”

Why didn’t Cannon speak out on this point he was sure about? The answer he gives is instructive. It reveals the Trotskyist view of inner-party life, their contempt for criticism and self-criticism as a “self-denigrating” practice borrowed from the Catholic Church. It also shows why there are so many Trotskyist splinter groups today.

“A serious and responsible revolutionist,” says Cannon, “cannot disturb a party merely because he becomes dissatisfied with this, that or the other thing. He must wait until he is prepared to propose concretely a different program, or another party ... Of course, if one had no responsibility to the party, if he were a mere commentator or observer, he would merely speak his doubts and have it over with. You can’t do that in a serious political party. If you don’t know what to say, you don’t have to say anything. The best thing is to remain silent.”

But Cannon didn’t maintain his false naivete for long. As a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928, he claims to have come across a basic document of Trotsky’s, to which he was instantly converted. Still, he kept his mouth shut.

“We didn’t begin the fight in Moscow,” writes Cannon, “although we were already thoroughly convinced ... We couldn’t have best served our political ends by doing so.”

What were those ends? “The task was to recruit a new faction in secret before the inevitable explosion came, with the certain prospect that this faction, no matter how big or small it might be, would suffer expulsion ...”

By the time of his return to the U.S., Cannon’s activities had raised suspicions within the party. When a resolution against Trotskyism was raised within a party caucus in order to determine where his group stood, Cannon brags about his group’s deceitful methods in skirting the issue:

We objected on the ground...that the question of Trotskyism’ had been decided long ago, and that there was absolutely no point in raising this issue again. We said we refused to be a party to any of this folderol ...
They nourished the hope – oh how they hoped! – that a smart fellow like Cannon would eventually come to his senses and not just go and start a futile fight for Trotsky at this late day. Without saying so directly, we gave them a little ground to think that this might be so ...

Cannon’s ruse exposed

Cannon’s ruse didn’t last long. Within a few weeks he was exposed, brought to trial under the party’s rules and expelled.

Thus began American Trotskyism. At first there were only three: Cannon, Martin Abern and Max Shachtman. Within the next months, they only gathered a few dozen people around them. Through political propaganda and organizational measures, the CP had effectively isolated them as renegades.

“A wall of ostracism separated us from the party members,” says Cannon, “We were cut off from our old associations without having new ones to go to. There was no organization we might join, where new friends and co-workers might be found ... We lived in those first days under a form of pressure which is in many respects the most terrific that can be brought to bear against a human – social ostracism from people of one’s own kind.”

Cannon’s description of his movement’s “dog days” are a back-handed tribute to the CP’s political work and hegemony within’ the movement at the time. But his account also reveals the mistakes that were made – primarily the use of violence to disrupt the tiny Trotskyist meetings – and how these turned around to help the Trotskyists build their organization.

“We came back stronger after every fight,” Cannon writes, “and this attracted sympathy and support. Many of the radical people in New York, sympathizers of the Communist party, and even some members, would come to our meetings to help protect them in the interest of free speech. They were attracted by our fight, our courage, and revolted by the methods of the Stalinists. They would then start reading our material and studying our program ... We built these little groups in various cities, and soon we had the skeleton of a national organization.”

Nonetheless the Trotskyists remained a tiny sect. At this point they called themselves the “Communist League of America (Opposition).” In their view, they were not a party and engaged in no mass work, but an unofficial faction of the Communist party. All their propaganda work – which was all they did – was aimed at the CP rank and file and aimed at dividing them from their leadership.

They had little success. The progress of socialist construction in the Soviet Union, in the midst of capitalist crisis and proletarian upsurge throughout the world, attracted millions of people to the parties of the Communist International. The struggle against right opportunism within the movement also took its toll of the “opposition.”

“By this maneuver,” states Cannon, “they dealt us a devastating blow. Those disgruntled elements in the party, who had been inclined toward us and who opposed the opportunism of the Lovestone group, became reconciled to the party. They used to say to us: You see, you were wrong. Stalin is correcting everything. He is taking a radical position all along the line in Russia, America and everywhere else.”

Then Cannon adds: “We were utterly isolated, forced in upon ourselves. Our recruitment dropped to almost nothing ... Then, as is always the case with new political movements, we began to recruit from forces none too healthy ... Freaks always looking for the most extreme expression of radicalism, misfits, windbags, chronic oppositionists who had been thrown out of half a dozen organizations-such people began to come to us in our isolation, shouting, ‘Hello Comrades.’ I was always against admitting such people,. but the tide was too strong.”

Recruit from the right

Rebuked in their efforts to recruit from the left, the Trotskyists had only one place to go – recruit from the right. The victory of fascism in Germany had exposed the treachery of the leadership of the social-democratic parties of the Second International. Splits were developing. discontent was growing among social- democratic workers and many groupings among them were looking more and more to the leadership of the Communists. This was especially true following the Seventh Congress of the Comintern. which corrected a number of “left” errors in its call for the united and popular front against fascism.

The main historical responsibility for the victory of fascism in Germany had been placed squarely on the Social-Democrats. The main trend was toward unity with the Communists. What did the Trotskyists do? Exactly the opposite. They declared the Communists responsible for fascism, denounced the Comintern as hopelessly counter-revolutionary and moved to join the parties of the Second International.

In the United States this was accomplished in two steps, through the Trotskyist tactics of “fusion” and “entryism.” The first step consisted of joining with a group of reformist trade unionists led by A.J. Muste and forming the “Workers party.” After a short time it was decided that this group was too “sectarian” in its opposition to the Socialist party, which was even further to the right.

Actually the Trotskyists were intent on dissolving the Workers party into the Socialist party and destroying both organizations in the process, hoping they would raid enough recruits to form their own party after the dust had settled.

As in their break with the CP, the Trotskyists were completely dishonest in their approach. “We had join individually,” states Cannon, “because they wanted to humiliate us, to make it appear that we were simply dissolving our party. humbly breaking with our past and starting anew as pupils of the ‘Militants,’ caucus of the SP. It was rather irritating, but we were not deflected from our course by personal feelings. We had been too long in the Lenin school for that. We were out to serve political ends.”

What ends? Cannon mentions two. One was to recruit a liberal, petty-bourgeois base to defend Trotsky in the international arena from a platform of “respectability.” The other was to oppose developments toward a united front between the CP and the SP.

“We had stirred up the rank and file of the Socialist party,” Cannon says, “against the idea of unity with the Stalinists. This blocked their games and they took it out in increased resentment against us.”

But even serving these political ends was not necessary to justify the Trotskyist tactics. Cannon comments on Trotsky’s evaluation of the action “when we were talking with him about the total result of our entry into the Socialist party and the pitiful state of its organization afterward. He said that alone would have justified the entry into the organization even if we hadn’t gained a single new member.”

The Trotskyists did gain a number of recruits, however, and doubled their size. This still did not break their isolation from the working class. Their attitude toward the trade union struggle and the Afro-American people guaranteed that, despite their ensuing formation of the Socialist Workers party.

From The Wide-Wide Art World Of Arthur Carney-When The Professional Art Critics Got Egg On Their Faces

From The Wide-Wide Art World Of Arthur Carney-When The Professional Art Critics Got Egg On Their Faces

By Laura Perkins

I am feeling good today. For the first time since I have been giving my admittedly and proudly stated amateur art critic opinions I can go on the offensive. The recent sale of an Art Carney in New York for almost two million dollars has put some egg on the faces of those so-called professional art critics who previously sneered at me. I had been on the defensive, not for anything I did or expected to do, but because one Clarence Dewar, professional art critic for Art Today out of nowhere decided that as an amateur I was “soft” target for his venom. The flare-up started when I misidentified, a easy thing to do if you look at his work, Franz Golder as being not a modern artist but from one of the Flemish-Dutch 16^th century schools. Apparently adding insult to injury for the thin-skinned Dewar I also noted that one of the artists he was championing Freida Kane was boring and repetitive whatever virtues her “discover” might have for expanding our knowledge of almost forgotten women artists of the late 19^th century. The cardinal sin though was to comment that iconic Edward Hopper (he most famously and widely known for Nighthawks at the Diner) could not draw faces. I thought the world would explode with his long essay against my heresy on that one.          

But that was then. Today I am in fighting trim over the Carney purchase (by a major museum by the way and not something bought by a hedge fund billionaire on the advice of his art gallery advisor). About ten years ago one Clarence Dewar on his own hook meaning that he was not under the thumb of his mentor Clement Greenberg spent about five thousand words giving ten thousand reasons why Art Carney’s work would never sell and was passé. He noted along the way that Carney’s work seemed cartoonish, his drawings lacking precision, his characters seemed too outlandish and his sizings were wrong among other things.

At that time I sent an e-mail, a letter really to Art Today basically calling Dewar a holy goof for not recognizing that in the post-modern era, meaning in the era where his boss’ championship of abstract art had faded that a return to some form of representation art was in the cards. Not the old-timey stuff that the camera and now digital camera and processes has made obsolete but a fresh look at the world through outlandish figures and hand me done drawing. That sale put Art Carney on the map although I should note that the Harlowe Galleries in San Francisco had been promoting and selling its native son’s work for the past couple of years. Touché Clarence         

Oh What Might Have Been-When Irish-Town Tradition Couldn't Hold A Good Woman Down-Or Could It

Oh What Might Have Been-When Irish-Town Tradition Couldn't Hold A Good Woman Down-Or Could It

By Frank Jackman

Most of the time when you write stuff, particularly “slice of life” stuff it is based on a tip, maybe something you read or heard. Today though I am writing about the fate of one Delores Jamison (nee Riley) from the Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville where I grew up whose life took some small but decisive turns which despite the title of this piece did bring a good woman down. See Delores was the mother of a close friend, Kenny, who passed away from cancer many years ago but whose memory and then that of his mother got jogged when I heard a segment on the local NPR affiliate in Boston WBUR. That segment dealt with the 50^th anniversary of Life magazine’s controversial issue in which they had photographs of all those killed in Vietnam during a week in June of 1969. That segment centered on James Hickey who was several years younger than me and had grown up in Quincy a few towns over from my own hometown. His story was so familiar, so much like Kenny’s and my own that it started the memory in motion.       

I did not know Delores Riley really well since she was usually somewhat sickly (from having had four boys close together which her delicate frame never really recovered from) and overwrought with having to tend to too many children. Kenny and I would tend not to stay at his house for that very reason. Apparently though Delores had not always been so out of sorts and that is really what this remembrance is about. About decisions she made, or did not make, which led to her falling under the cracks in life. About decisions really that confronted almost everybody who lived or was raised in the Acre, in North Adamsville.

From what I could gather (Kenny never knew much and from a pretty early age stayed out of the house and over with his grandmother) about Delores’ early life it was conventionally middle class for the hellbroth 1930s Great Depression days. Her gruff, grumpy father Daniel had married late and had been an officer in the town fire department which meant he had a steady income all during the Depression. Owed the house he was born in over in the better Atlantic section of town, had married Anna and had three children with her. Anna by all accounts was “a saint” for putting up with him but also being a kind person to all in that neighborhood. That heavily Irish neighborhood, always called Irishtown by residence and strangers alike- which will play some small part in what happens later. Delores was a fairly bright and industrious student and graduated from North Adamsville High in 1942 and subsequently went to a business school in Boston.       

Normally, at least directly for a young woman, the war raging in Europe and the Pacific would not affect her as much as for the vast array of young men the military machine was eating up on two fronts. Once Delores finished that business school she got a job at the Hingham Naval Base about twenty miles from home. This is where the vagaries, maybe slightly the fog of war, came into play. Since the naval base needed protection, a detachment of Marines (really soldiers for the Navy) including rotated battle-tested young Prescott Jamison was stationed there. As things went Delores and Prescott met at a USO dance at the base on a Friday night (many details from this period are missing except Prescott must have had something since he was called ‘the Sheik” in gest by his fellows and in earnest by young women). Fairly shortly, although maybe not so for wartime, they were married since Prescott was scheduled to be discharged fairly soon after that.     

This is really where things began to fall apart (part of this from Kenny but also part from his pious grandmother when I would visit Kenny there as he sought shelter from the home storms). See Prescott was from coal country down in Kentucky, down in well-known Hazard, had dropped out of school in either the ninth or tenth grade to work the mines. When Pearl Harbor came in December 1941 he enlisted the next day in the Marines, saw the island-hopping battles of the Pacific with now hallowed names, and after suffering wounds was rotated to Hingham. He like many down in Appalachia was strict Primitive Baptist (meaning you had to take a dunking in the river to be baptized according to Kenny).   

That was the first strike. No, actually the first strike was when Daniel saw the good-looking Prescott and nixed the guy from day one. Reason: although Daniel was not a religious man he knew he hated Protestants of any kind and told Prescott so. (Anna the really pious of the pair would after a while ignore his religion but at the time supported her husband.) The second strike was that the couple under Roman Catholic doctrine could not marry in the church but only the rectory which occurred by their choice without her parents present (his parents by then both dead, he the youngest of eleven children). The third strike, the decisive strike was that he was uneducated for anything but coalmining not an industry found around North Adamsville.       

I guess they tried going down to Kentucky but that was worse than up North for work (and Prescott’s kin did not like Roman Catholic Delores anymore than her father liked Protestants) and so they returned. Returned and Delores started with much trouble having those four closely aged boys and to find shelter in the North Adamsville Housing Authority (the notorious “projects” evilly conjured up even today). Without help from her father. As the reader can imagine with work hard to get (Prescott last hired, first laid off a familiar refrain) things were always tight and Kenny believes something in her snapped early on and she decided to treat a hostile world including her sons hostilely (that verified by Kenny’s sibling recently).

We already know this story cannot end well (except Anna accepting Prescott and having them in when Daniel was not around and later when he was in a nursing home). And it did not end well. What has always intrigued me, always when Kenny would tell his tales of woe was why a young girl, probably pretty innocent as most Irish girls were, decided to forsake the neighborhood boys (some of whom were interested I gather) and stake her life on Prescott. One answer came to mind early on when I knew Kenny that grandfather Daniel drove his daughter from his door.  What has always also intrigued me is whether Delores ever regretted her decisions. According to Kenny no matter what was happening to the family Delores never regretted marrying her “Sheik.” Called his name from her death bed.     

50th Years Gone Jack Gone And What Might Have Been- The Lonesome Hobo-In Honor Of Ti Jean Kerouac’s “Lonesome Traveler”

50 Years Gone Jack Gone And What Might Have Been-  The Lonesome Hobo-In Honor Of Ti Jean Kerouac’s “Lonesome Traveler” 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Million-word pre-word processor so golf score pencil and Woolworth’s 5&10 cent store notebook fitted for flannel shirt pockets Jack (nee Jeanbon, nee Ti Jean, nee everyman, every man, and every woman with the fire in the belly to write) bellowed out in the good earth night, bellowed out in the night from the womb, bellowed about loneness, loneness in crowds, and sign of the age loneness. Not loneliness, not on the surface, not with Acre kidding corner boys crowding around (mostly French-Canadian boys who set the tone of the town, adieu this and that, but some Irish and Greek boys too, especially mad monk poet Sammy, hanging around Leclerc’s Variety Store), Jack-crowding, small-breasted F-C loves (oohing ,aah-ing in the dark- haired angel man thought ) swaying to Benny on the be-bop 1930s night and tossing and turning over Ti Jean words and clowning arounds (and secret Irishtown  girl love spoken of before and now done), Jack-crowding, Adonis full field, full football field heroics, crowds cheering against bread and roses fed arch –rivals, Jack-crowding, Village cafes, full, chock full of the hip, the want-to-be hip, the faux hip, waiting, waiting on some dark-haired golden boy to rescue them from the little box night, Jacking-crowding, ditto Frisco, ditto New Jack City redux, ditto Jack-crowding. 

So not loneliness he but lonesome cosmic wanderer from  youth as partner to the crowds, up in small, immensely small twelve- year old bedrooms playing full- fledged leagues of solo jack baseball, sitting solo in fugitive Lowell libraries reading up a storm from Plato to kinsman Voltaire (via Acadian Gaspe dreams), sitting solo in some sigma phi dorm room munching chocolate bars, vanilla puddings, great greasy sugared crullers after hearty beef meals, as companion pouring over tales of greek gods and Homer, sitting solo (hard to do, believe me ) astern ships on big wave oceans ready to devour man, beasts and ship whole, sitting solo in midnight slum New Haven rooms, small hot stove, coffee pot percolating, ditto later in Frisco town, ditto in big sur town, ditto in Tangiers town, ditto down in mere Florida town, ditto solo.

Ditto too solo adventures on west coast work ship piers, solo sweaty dusty south of the border Mexican nights adventures, solo brakeman of the world trackless night adventures, solo sea- sick sailor going to fugitive night adventures, solo weird New Jack City 1950s beat scene adventures, solo big rock candy mountain and the void adventures, solo stumble around Europe on a dollar a day adventures, and solo mad cap late night chronicler of the hobo jungle world vanishing adventures. And hence crowded solo lonesome karmic writings and big word blasts, and smiling, smiling, maybe Buddha-like, at the connected-ness of it, of the one-ness of it, of the god-like symmetry of it. And a Ti Jean kindred tip of the hat.             

Hard Times In The Country Down On The Farm-With Stephen Foster’s Hard Times Come Again No More In Mind

Hard Times In The Country Down On The Farm-With Stephen Foster’s Hard Times Come Again No More In Mind

By Bradley Fox

No one in Hazard, Hazard, down in Eastern Kentucky, Appalachia hard patch country which still has sections where the views would take your breath away just like it did those whose sense of wonder first brought them through the passes from the stuffed-up East, ever forgot the hard times in 1931, nobody. Not the coal bosses, actually coal boss since every little black-hearted patch belonged to Mister Peabody and company, who that year shut down the mines rather than accept the union, the “red union,” National Miner-Workers Union ( that “red” no euphemism since the American Communist Party was in its “ultra-left period of only working in its own “red” unions rather than as a faction of larger craft or industrial union) although Mister Peabody, given a choose, would have been under the circumstances happy to work out a sweetheart deal with John L. Lewis and his United Mine Workers. But the Hazard miners were a hard-nosed lot, certainly as hard-nosed as their more well-known cousins over in Harlan County who had songs sung and soft whispered words written about their legendary activities in taking on the coal bosses. (That cousin reference no joke since in hard times, and sometimes in good times you could not get a job in the mines if you were not vouched for.) Certainly no one in the Breslin clan ever forgot the 1931 hard times since they had lost a few wounded, a couple seriously in the skirmishes around the mine shaft openings  keeping the mines closed when the bosses, and not just Mister Peabody on that score, tried to bring in “scab” labor from West Virginia or Eastern Pennsylvania to work the mines.         

Of course the Breslin clans, the various branches gathered over the generations had been in the hills and hollows of Kentucky as far back as anybody could remember. Somebody said, some Breslin “historian,” that the first Breslin had been thrown out of England back in the early part of the 19^th century for stealing sheep and told never to return under penalty of death. And so he, Ike, or Icky, nobody even the historian was not sure which was the correct name hightailed it out on the nearest ship and wound up in Baltimore before heading west, ever westward as was the habit of lots of people, the plebes shut out of the big businesses and small craft shops by those whose people had come before, had come not long after the Mayflower, back then when the seacoast fame and fortunes were already locked and there was so much land to the west that it seemed a shame to see it go to another man, or his family.

So that first Breslin headed west and settled in the hills and hollows around Hazard, raised a big family, twelve who survived childhood and over a couple of generations helped populate the area. Here was the funny part, the part that would explain why there were still Breslins in Hazard after the land had petered out, and before coal was discovered as a usable mass energy source. Some of the Breslin clan had the wanderlust like old Ike/Icky and moved on when the land went fallow. Others took after that lazy, sheep stealing stay in one place part of the Breslin gene and refused to move expecting providence, or God, or something to see them through. The coal discovery to keep families from starvation’s door  helped but that didn’t change the sluggish no account ways of those who stayed, mostly.         

No question there was a certain amount of in-breeding which didn’t help the gene pool but was to be expected when you had people living in isolated pockets, more men surviving than women after childbirth. Some of it was a certain “don’t give a damn” attitude-as long as something was on the table for supper, as long as the roof of the shack, and most of the Breslins lived in the ubiquitous shacks seen in photographs of the times by photographers like Weston and Arbus. Places, tiny places, one or two rooms, a living area, a bedroom area, no windows to speak of, not made of glass anyway maybe waxed paper, just holes on the sides to let in air, those sides of the building protected by tar paper, ditto the roof, a porch with some old pappy sitting in a rocker, a parcel of kids, half clothed, and a lifetimes worth of junk scattered around the yard. Maybe a mangy dog, maybe some poultry. Some of the problem was lack of any education, or anybody to teach them the niceties of the right way to do things. Fathers would tell their sons that they didn’t need any education to pick coal out of the ground. And for a couple of generations that worked out, nothing good, nothing but short, brutish, nasty lives but there it was.             

That was the way it was in late 1930 in the Prescott Breslin clan, the great-great grandson of that original Breslin who had gotten himself unceremoniously kicked out of England. Living from hand to mouth with eleven children to raise like weeds. Then cousin Brody Breslin, who lived over in Harlan County, and was a son from the Jerimiah Breslin branch, came to organize for the NMU, for the “reds.” Organized the Breslins, the Johnsons, the Foxes and the Bradys mostly and when Mister Peabody refused to negotiate shut the damn mines down. Closed them tight, the Breslins took casualties to prove that point. And that was a very tough year as the company almost starved everybody out. But the union held, the companies wanted the coal produced and they settled (eventually with a lot of political maneuvering which nobody ever rightly figured out the NMU later joined the Lewis UMW and came under that leadership including NMU local president Brody Breslin).       

So thereafter in the 1930s the Breslins worked the mines, mostly, mostly except when there was “too much” coal and the company stopped production for short periods to drive the price up. Young Prescott Breslin, Prescott’s youngest son (not everybody gave the first born son the father’s name down there and hence junior but the pure truth was that old Prescott and his tired-out wife couldn’t think of another name and so Prescott), in his turn at fourteen dropped out of school and went to picking coal in the mines like his forbears (remember the epitaph-“you don’t need no education to pick coal” mentioned above) in about 1933 and worked there until the war came along, until the bloody Japanese bastards attacked Pearl Harbor. Three days after, December 10, 1941, young Prescott left the mines and headed for Prestonsburg where the nearest Marine recruiting station had been hastily set up.

When his father asked him why he did such a foolish thing since there were still young Breslin mouths including sisters to be feed and since he would have been exempted from military service because there was going to be a tremendous need for coal Prescott kind of shrugged his shoulders and thought for a minute about the question. Then he answered his father this way; between fighting the Nips (Japanese) out in the Pacific and shoveling Mister Peabody’s coal he would take his changes on survival to a ripe old age with the Marines. And he never looked back with the slightest regret for doing that despite the later hardships that would dog his life including more misunderstandings with his kids than you could shake at.            

Never looked back but as Prescott was leaving to head to boot camp a few days later he thought that it had not all been bad. There were those Saturday night dances down at Fred Brown’s old red barn where anybody with any musical instrument showed up and created a band for the evening playing the old mountain music songs carried over from the old country. (Stuff that a few spirited musicologists starting with Francis Child in the 19^th century collected and made more widely known.) Dancing his head off with Sarah Brown, Priscilla Breslin, a distant cousin, and Betty Shaw. As he got older  getting high on Fred’s corn liquor, remembering how sick he got the first time drinking too fast and not remembering the motto-this was Kentucky sipping whiskey, mountain style, so sip. When he came of age getting up his liquor courage to “spark” Sarah, Priscilla and Betty in that order causing real sparks when they found out that he had had his way with each of them by shyly saying they were each the first. When he thought about that predicament he began to think maybe he would be better off taking his chances fighting the Japs on that front too. But he was a man headed out into the great big world beyond the hills and hollows of home. So he left for good never to return except right after he was discharged from the Marines to pack up his few belongings not already passed on to some other siblings.           

This is the way the younger Prescott Breslin told the story to his youngest son Josh in 1966 when they were still on civil speaking terms as he was heading out into his own world leaving in the dust Olde Saco his growing up time up in Maine. (Prescott had been stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Base before being discharged, had met and married Delores LeBlanc from Olde Saco after meeting her at a USO dance in Portland and settled into that town when he returned from that brief sojourn back home.) And this is the way Josh remembered what his father said fifty years later. Yeah, those times in 1931 sure should have been hard. Hard like his father’s fate would be later. Damn, hard times come again no more.