A Writer’s Tale-Vincente Minnelli’s Film Adaptation Of James Jones’ “Some Came Running” (1958)-A Film Review

A Writer’s Tale-Vincente Minnelli’s Film Adaptation Of James Jones’ “Some Came Running” (1958)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Fritz Taylor    

Some Came Running, starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, Martha Hyer, directed by Vincente Minelli, adapted from the novel by James Jones, 1958  

No question I was first drawn to Some Came Running, a film based on the novel of the same name by James Jones whose more famous novel Here To Eternity also was adapted to the screen and stands as one of the great classic films of the modern cinema, by the ex-soldier’s story and then by his plight as a blocked writer. The draw of the ex-soldier’s story reflected something that had been in my own experience about coming back to the “real” world after the military. That seems to be the character played by Frank Sinatra Dave Hirsh’s situation. That inability to go to the nine to five routine, to settle down after military service had shaken him out of his routine rang a bell. In my own military service generation, in my own service, I ran across plenty of guys who couldn’t deal with the “real” world coming back from Vietnam and who tried to hide from that fact as “brothers under the bridges” alternate communities out in places like Southern California. I spent time in such places myself. I see and hear about young Iraq and Afghanistan War service personnel having the same woes and worse, having incredibly high suicide rates. So yeah, I was drawn to Dave’s sulky, moody, misshapen view of the world.           

The story line is a beauty. Dave, after a drunken spree, finds he was shipped by bus back in that state by some guys in Chicago to his Podunk hometown in Parkman, Indiana, a town he had fled with all deliberate speed when he was a kid orphaned out by his social-climbing older brother Frank because, well, because he was in the way of that social-climb after their parents die. Dave was not alone in his travels though since he had picked up, or had been attached to, a floozy named Ginny, played by Shirley MacLaine, who will make life hell for him in the end. As he became accustomed to his old hometown and while deciding whether to stay or pick up stakes (the preferred fate of his brother and his also social-climbing wife) he was introduced to a local school teacher Gwen, played by Martha Hyer, who will also make hell for him in the end since he was quickly and madly in love with her but she was seriously stand-offish almost old maid stand-offish since she had had a few tastes of his rough-hewn low life doings. Doings which were encouraged by a gambler, Bama, played by Dean Martin who became his sidekick.        

But here is the hook that almost saved Dave and almost lit a spark under dear Gwen. Dave was a blocked writer, had some time before written a couple of books that were published and had gathered some acclaim, were well written. Gwen attempted to act as his muse, and did prove instrumental in getting a work of his published. To no avail since Dave was not looking for a muse, well, not a muse who wasn’t thinking about getting under the silky sheets. No go, no go despite Dave’s ardent efforts. Frustrated Dave turned to Ginny and whatever charms she had-and the fact that she loved him unconditionally despite their social and intellectual differences. In the end Dave in a fit of hubris decided to marry Ginny after being rebuffed by Gwen enough times. The problem though was that Ginny had a hang on gangster guy trailing her who was making threatening noises about putting Dave, and/or Ginny, underground. In the end they were not just threatening noises as he wounded Dave and killed poor bedraggled Ginny. Watch this one-more than once and read James Jones’ book too which includes additional chapters about those soldiers who could not relate to the “real” world after their military experiences. This guy Jones could write, sure could write about that milieu based on his own military service. (There is a famous photograph of Jones, Norman Mailer, and William Styron, the three great soldier boy American literary lights of the immediate post-World War II war period with Jones in uniform if I recall.)                

Welcome Young-With Remembrances Of Golden Age Fourth Of July’s In Mind (2017)

Welcome Young-With Remembrances Of Golden Age Fourth Of July’s In Mind (2017)

By Prescott Blaine

Si Lannon had always been a man of unmitigated memories. Had always been the guy, the kid when that term was appropriate, who kept vigil over what had occurred and when from the surprise of the first conscious Christmas (and thereafter the unscrambling of the Santa question) to the scent of Laura Perkin’s perfume (or when she was a kid herself the smell, the intoxicating smell, of that bath soap that drove him crazy when they danced close in that first school days dance meant to keep unruly thoughts in check. He would, such was his memory drive, often later wonder whether she had used that article for a certain effect that far back in the boy-girl tango. He knew later she would do such things consciously and he was glad of it). Si, now having lived long enough to have a treasure trove of memories, had of late been drawn to the faraway events that made up his early childhood in the old neighborhood where he grew up, came of age (along with that Laura Perkins with whom he was an item all through high school but when he went off to college they broke up since she did not want to wait four years or more to get married-such were the times and expectations back then). Since it was that time of year he had been musing over the old days when the Fourth of July was something of a watershed in the summer.      

This series of recollections back in time to those particular times were no mere happenstances and it was a question in Si’s mind whether he would have been dwelling on this seasonal event if it had not been for the fact that he had recently moved back into the old neighborhood. As Si would say “to make a long story short” so we can get to the heart of what has possessed the man of late his marriage, his long-time marriage, to Lana Shea had ended when she decided that she had to go “find herself” and that adventure was not to include Si who she considered part of the problem for not having been able to “find herself” in some earlier time. (Admittedly Si did not, does not, understand how all they had together could blow away like some mistral wind since he believed, believes, that he never stood in her way to do whatever finding was to be found). He had spent some time up in Maine after the break-up in order to see if distance would help heal some wounds. They didn’t and one night, maybe less, he decided that he was not cut out for the isolation of the wilds of Maine and that he needed to get back around cities and some sense of rootedness. So back to the much changed old neighborhood-and memories.   

Si had adjusted pretty well to his return, knew some things like the change in the ethnic composition of his old working class neighborhood from overwhelming Irish to mostly Asian was a fact of life in mobile America. He could understand the Chinese exodus from Boston’s Chinatown and environs since the Irish and Italians had respectively exited the North End and South Boston in search of fresher air in his grandparents’ time but the Vietnamese migration had him baffled since there had been no previous indigenous grouping in the Greater Boston area. Moreover, Si, a Vietnam veteran himself although he had long ago made his peace with the Vietnamese if not his own government wondered how Jimmy Jenkins and Vince Riley two neighborhood guys who had laid down their heads in Vietnam would have reacted to the fact that right there on Kenny Street which he passed almost every day Vietnamese families were living in their respective growing up houses. Probably not any better than when they joined up to kill commies.

But Si also knew some things had been lost although he could not put his finger on exactly what that was until the Fourth of July. And then only by becoming aware of the absence of any celebration, a hallmark of the old neighborhood come America’s birthday. Such celebrations having gone the way of the horse and buggy it seemed in an age when people flee their neighborhoods on the holidays to vacation or “to summer” elsewhere, anyway perhaps. In the old days “to summer” was to hike the mile to Adamsville Beach to roast in the sun and roast weenies. Then people stayed put either because they had no car to flee with (Si’s family situation until he was a late teenager) and no additional funds beyond the weekly white envelopes to fend off the bill collectors-for a while.    

So much for the sociology and cultural aspects which really was not what was driving Si’s memory bank on reflection. All he could think about were those maybe half a dozen maybe eight years when his (and that of his four other brothers) Fourth of July centered on events not one hundred yards away from his family’s house. Si grew up and lived across from the Welcome Young ballfield (still there although shortened up with the addition of some tennis courts). Welcome Young an apt name and which was actually the name of the person who gave the town the property to be used for the young.  This Welcome Young field most of the summer was a hot, dusty usually during the day vacant lot (at night the local fathers and older brothers played softball there as an excuse  to have a few beers at the three barrooms located directly across from the field and those institutions collectively sponsored some of the teams in the makeshift league). But on the Fourth it was turned into something like a carnival. 

What would happen every year is that some of the guys who frequented the barrooms (and their owners’), including Si’s father, formed what was called the North Adamsville Associates whose members would comb the neighborhood in search of donations from residents and local businesses in order to put on “a time” (an old expression from the Irish diaspora not heard expressed in many a moon). That “time” included everything from food, drink, and prizes to paying for the band at the night’s end dance (mostly for adults and older kids). Si claims he never attended one but could hear the music from across the way as he drifted off to sleep after a hard day’s work at having fun.   

Si had to laugh to himself as he thought about the various silly kid escapades he had partaken in. The first in time was early on exploiting the fact that for once the tumbledown house where he and his siblings grew up actually proved of strategic importance. One of the highlights of the day was that twice, at ten and at one, members of the Associates would put up makeshift tables and distribute tonic (an old New England term for soda also not heard in many a moon) and ice cream to the throngs of kids milling about nervously waiting for the distribution. All well and good. The cause of Si’s laughter though was that he and his brothers would form a relay from those tables to their house. Or rather the refrigerator in the back hall of that house which before the day ended would be filled with enough tonic (remember soda) and ice cream to last the whole summer (or that was the idea). Kids holy goof stuff.             

Of course there were rides, baby carriage contests, singing contests, pie-eating contests, beauty contests and the like although Si never got a prize for anything like that. What Si remember though were the foot races (including the silly three-legged ones), the fifty yard dashes. He never won any of those either. But the last year that he attended the festivities, the summer of the year that he entered the ninth grade he did win a race. The vaunted, locally vaunted, six hundred yard race around several of the neighboring streets. This was for the older boys, boys and young men a lot older than him. He would always remember that race since he made a cardinal mistake of running too fast (out of fear of the older guys) at the beginning and running into oxygen debt toward the end. He won though, barely, and would wear the jacket that was the prize seemingly forever before it bit the dust.

Ah, such is memory…maybe next year he will check out and see if anybody wants to “put on a time” for the kids. Payback-okay.            

In Honor Of The King Of The Folk-Singing Hard-Living Hobos The Late Utah Phillips -From The Archives- For The Late Rosalie Sorrels-An Old Wobblie Goes Home- Farewell Working Class Warrior Utah Phillips

Click On Title To Link To Utah Phillips Web page.

If I Could Be The Rain I Would Be Rosalie Sorrels-The Legendary Folksinger-Songwriter Has Her Last Go-Round At 83

By Music Critic Bart Webber

Back the day, back in the emerging folk minute of the 1960s that guys like Sam Lowell, Si Lannon, Josh Breslin, the late Peter Paul Markin and others were deeply immersed in all roads seemed to lead to Harvard Square with the big names, some small too which one time I made the subject of a series, or rather two series entitled respectively Not Bob Dylan and Not Joan Baez about those who for whatever reason did not make the show over the long haul, passing through the Club 47 Mecca and later the Café Nana and Club Blue, the Village down in NYC, North Beach out in San Francisco, and maybe Old Town in Chicago. Those are the places where names like Baez, Dylan, Paxton, Ochs, Collins and a whole crew of younger folksingers, some who made it like Tom Rush and Joni Mitchell and others like Eric Saint Jean and Minnie Murphy who didn’t, like  who all sat at the feet of guys like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger got their first taste of the fresh breeze of the folk minute, that expression courtesy of the late Markin, who was among the first around to sample the breeze.

(I should tell you here in parentheses so you will keep it to yourselves that the former three mentioned above never got over that folk minute since they will still tell a tale or two about the times, about how Dave Van Ronk came in all drunk one night at the Café Nana and still blew everybody away, about catching Paxton changing out of his Army uniform when he was stationed down at Fort Dix  right before a performance at the Gaslight, about walking down the street Cambridge with Tom Rush just after he put out No Regrets/Rockport Sunday, and about affairs with certain up and coming female folkies like the previously mentioned Minnie Murphy at the Club Nana when that was the spot of spots. Strictly aficionado stuff if you dare go anywhere within ten miles of the subject with any of them -I will take my chances here because this notice, this passing of legendary Rosalie Sorrels a decade after her dear friend Utah Phillips is important.)

Those urban locales were certainly the high white note spots but there was another important strand that hovered around Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, up around Skidmore and some of the other upstate colleges. That was Caffe Lena’s, run by the late Lena Spenser, a true folk legend and a folkie character in her own right, where some of those names played previously mentioned but also where some upstarts from the West got a chance to play the small crowds who gathered at that famed (and still existing) coffeehouse. Upstarts like the late Bruce “Utah” Phillips (although he could call several places home Utah was key to what he would sing about and rounded out his personality). And out of Idaho one Rosalie Sorrels who just joined her long-time friend Utah in that last go-round at the age of 83.

Yeah, came barreling like seven demons out there in the West, not the West Coast west that is a different proposition. The West I am talking about is where what the novelist Thomas Wolfe called the place where the states were square and you had better be as well if you didn’t want to starve or be found in some empty arroyo un-mourned and unloved. A tough life when the original pioneers drifted westward from Eastern nowhere looking for that pot of gold or at least some fresh air and a new start away from crowded cities and sweet breathe vices. A tough life worthy of song and homage. Tough going too for guys like Joe Hill who tried to organize the working people against the sweated robber barons of his day (they are still with us as we are all now very painfully and maybe more vicious than their in your face forbear). Struggles, fierce down at the bone struggles also worthy of song and homage. Tough too when your people landed in rugged beautiful two-hearted river Idaho, tried to make a go of it in Boise, maybe stopped short in Helena but you get the drift. A different place and a different type of subject matter for your themes than lost loves and longings.  

Rosalie Sorrels could write those songs as well, as well as anybody but she was as interested in the social struggles of her time (one of the links that united her with Utah) and gave no quarter when she turned the screw on a lyric. The last time I saw Rosalie perform in person was back in 2002 when she performed at the majestic Saunders Theater at Harvard University out in Cambridge America at what was billed as her last go-round, her hanging up her shoes from the dusty travel road. (That theater complex contained within the Memorial Hall dedicated to the memory of the gallants from the college who laid down their heads in that great civil war that sundered the country. The Harvards did themselves proud at collectively laying down their heads at seemingly every key battle that I am aware of when I look up at the names and places. A deep pride runs through me at those moments)

Rosalie Sorrels as one would expect on such an occasion was on fire that night except the then recent death of another folk legend, Dave Von Ronk, who was supposed to be on the bill (and who was replaced by David Bromberg who did a great job banging out the blues unto the heavens) cast a pall over the proceedings. I will always remember the crystal clarity and irony of her cover of her classic Old Devil Time that night -yeah, give me one more chance, one more breathe. But I will always think of If I Could Be The Rain and thoughts of washing herself down to the sea whenever I hear her name. RIP Rosalie Sorrels 

Tribune Commentary

I have just received word that the legendary folksinger/ union organizer and old-fashioned Wobblie Utah Phillips has died out in California. Apparently he died on Saturday May 24th. Ironically, given some of my comments below regarding a review of his last CD, Starlight on the Rails, that date is also Bob Dylan's birthday. I have reposted commentaries that I have done over the last couple of years on Utah. Adieu, old class warrior


Commentary

I have just received this communication about Utah Phillips from a local folksong society newsletter. I would add that I saw Utah playing at a club in Cambridge last spring (2007) and he looked a little off then. I have reposted below a CD Review of his anthology Starlight On The Trail from 2006 for those unfamiliar with his music and his politics. We differ on the politics but please help this old class warrior. I have added a link to his website here.

I have also added a link to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) website.

Utah Phillips needs help

Unions Passing Resolutions to Honor, Assist Folksinger/Storyteller Bruce "Utah" Phillips

The great folksinger and storyteller Utah Phillips has had to retire from performing due to chronic and serious heart problems that have plagued him for years. In recognition of his great love for and work on behalf of the union movement and working people of the United States, several union locals have passed resolutions honoring Phillips and attaching donations for his "retirement fund." Unable to travel or stand the rigors of performing a two-hour concert, Phillips has seen his main source of income vanish just when his medical problems are demanding more money for treatment and medications.

In response, Local 1180 of the Communications Workers of America (NYC), and both the Detroit and the James Connolly (Upstate New York) Branches of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) have recently passed the following resolution:

Bruce "Utah" Phillips is a truly unique American treasure. Not just a great folksong writer and interpreter, not just a great storyteller, Utah has preserved and presented the history of our nation's working people and union movement for audiences throughout the world. His recorded work keeps these songs and stories alive. He has spoken up against the injustices of boss-dominated capitalism and worked for peace and justice for more than 40 years.

Now Utah finds himself unable to continue performing due to severe heart problems. We wish to honor and recognize his great talent, spirit and love for the working people and the union movement of the United States. Therefore, we move to pass this resolution in gratitude for all he has done and will continue to do in his
work and life. We also wish to contribute to Utah Phillips in appreciation and in solidarity as he and his wife, Joanna Robinson, deal with his health and the loss of his ability to work.

This news is being released with the hope that other unions, anti-war and labor-affiliated organizations will respond in kind by passing this or similar resolutions in appreciation for all Utah Phillips has done for the cause of unions and peace.

Another way that organizations and individuals can help is by purchasing some or all of Utah's vast catalog of songs and stories. All of his CDs and more information are available at his website, www.utahphillips.org, and Utah has begun posting pod casts up there that you can download and listen to! You can also order his CDs online (credit card sales) through www.cdbaby.com but be advised that prices are cheaper and more of that money will go into Utah's hands if you order directly from him. More info on his website.

Here's the address for CD orders and to send a donation: U. Utah Phillips, No Guff Records, P.O. Box 1235, Nevada City, CA 95959, (530) 265-2476

Utah has given so much of himself to the labor and peace movements. It is great news that some unions and many have chosen to give something back to him, to allow him and his wife, Joanna Robinson, to rest easy, work on his long-term health, and not have to worry about where money will come for the medicine and bills he has to pay.

In Solidarity, George Mann


AN UNREPENTANT WOBBLIE AT WORK

CD REVIEW

STARLIGHT ON THE RAILS- UTAH PHILLIPS, 2005

Although this space is mainly dedicated to reviewing political books and commenting on past and current political issues as a way to orient today’s alienated radical youth on the lessons of the past literary output is hardly the only form of political creation. Occasionally in the history of the American and international left musicians, artists and playwrights have given voice or provided visual reminders to the face of political struggle. With that thought in mind, every once in a while I will use this space to review those kinds of political expression.

My musical tastes were formed, as were many of those of the generation of 1968, by ‘Rock and Roll’ music exemplified by the Rolling Stones and Beatles and by the blues revival, both Delta and Chicago style. However, those forms as much as they gave pleasure were only marginally political at best. In short, these were entertainers performing material that spoke to us. In the most general sense that is all one should expect of a performer. Thus, for the most part that music need not be reviewed here. Those who thought that a new musical sensibility laid the foundations for a cultural or political revolution have long ago been proven wrong.

That said, in the early 1960’s there nevertheless was another form of musical sensibility that was directly tied to radical political expression- the folk revival. This entailed a search for roots and relevancy in musical expression. While not all forms of folk music lent themselves to radical politics it is hard to see the 1960’s cultural rebellion without giving a nod to such figures as Dave Van Ronk, the early Bob Dylan, Utah Phillips, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and others. Whatever entertainment value these performers provided they also spoke to and prodded our political development. They did have a message and an agenda and we responded as such. That these musicians’ respective agendas proved inadequate and/or short-lived does not negate their affect on the times.

My leftist political consciousness, painfully fought for in my youth coincided with an expansion of my musical tastes under the influence of the great blues and folk revivals of the 1960’s. Unfortunately my exposure to the blues greats was mainly on records as many of them had been forgotten, retired or were dead. Not so with the folk revival which was created mainly by those who were close contemporaries. Alas, they too are now mainly forgotten, retired or dead. It therefore is with special pleasure that I review Utah Phillips Songbook while he is very much alive.

Many of the folksingers of the 1960’s attempted to use their music to become troubadours for social change. The most famous example, the early Bob Dylan, can be fairly described as the voice of his generation at that time. However, he fairly quickly moved on to other concepts of himself and his music. Bob Dylan’s work became more informed by the influences of Rimbaud and Verlaine and the French Symbolists of the late 1800’s and thus moved away to a more urban, sophisticated vision. From the start and consistently throughout his long career Utah has acted as a medium giving voice to the troubles of ordinary people and the simpler ethos of a more rural, Western-oriented gone by day in the American experience. He evokes in song the spirit of the people Walt Whitman paid homage to in poetic form and John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck gave in prose. He sits comfortably in very fast company. Therefore, Utah Phillips can justly claim the title of a people’s troubadour.

A word about politics. Generally, one rates music without reference to politics. However, Utah has introduced the political element by the way he structured the Songbook. Each song is introduced by him as to its significance heavily weighted to his political experiences, observations and vision. Thus, political comment is fairly in play here. Utah is a long time anarchist and unrepentant supporter of the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World, hereafter IWW). Every militant cherishes the memory of the class battles led by the IWW like the famous Lawrence strike of 1912 and honors the heroes of those battles like Big Bill Haywood and Vincent St. John and the militants they recruited to the cause of the working class in the first part of the 20th century. They paved the way for the later successful organization drives of the 1930’s.

Nevertheless, while Utah and I would both most definitely agree that some old-fashioned class struggle by working people in today’s one-sided class war would be a very good thing we as definitely differ on the way to insure a permanent victory for working people in order to create a decent society. In short, Utah’s prescriptions of good moral character, increased self-knowledge and the creation of small intentional communities are not enough. Under modern conditions it is necessary to take and safeguard political power against those who would quite consciously deny that victory. History has been cruel in some of the bitter lessons working people have had to endure for not dealing with the question of taking state power to protect their interests. But, enough said. I am more than willing to forgive the old curmudgeon his anarchist sins if he’ll sing ‘I Remember Loving You’ the next time he tours the Boston area.

Poet's Corner- William Wordsworth's "Ode To The French Revolution"- In Honor Of Its Anniversary

On The Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution Of 1905-

By Frank Jackman

For the attentive reader of this unabashedly left-wing publication which moreover not only takes history seriously but commemorates some historical nodal points worthy of attention today I have drawn attention this month of January to the 100^th anniversary of the assassinations of key nascent German Communist Party leaders Rosa Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, and Karl Liebknecht the heart of the left-wing German workers movement. In that commentary I noted that history in the conditional, especially when things turned out badly as they did in Germany with the failure of the Communists to take power within a few years of the Armistice and aid the struggling isolated and devastated Russian revolution, is tricky business. There were certainly opportunities closed off by the decimation of the heads of the early German Communist Party that were never made up. That failure helps in its own way to pave the road to the Nazi takeover and all that meant for Europe and the world later. I also cautioned against stretching such conditionals out too far without retreating to an idea that the rise of the Nazis was inevitable. Give it some thought though.
History in the conditional applies as well to events that would in the future turn out well, well at the beginning in any case, and that leads to the role played by what many parties including Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky referred to as the “dress rehearsal” for the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. That was the Revolution of 1905 which although it was shattered and many of the leading participants either killed, exiled or banished still provided some hope that things would turn on that proverbial historical dime in the end. The key organization structure set up in 1905, the Workers Soviets, councils, which in embryo provided the outline for the workers government everybody from Marx and to his left argued for to bring socialist order to each country, to the world in the end almost automatically was reestablished in the early days of 1917. Who knows in conditions of war and governmental turmoil what would have happened if that organizational form had not already been tested in an earlier revolutionary episode. Again, let’s not get too wide afield on history in the conditional on this end either. Think about those episodes though as we commemorate that 1905 revolution. 


   

Poets' Corner- William Wordsworth's "Ode To The French Revolution"- In Honor Of Its Anniversary


Markin Comment:

Here is William Wordsworth's famous ode to the beginning of the French revolution full of all the youthful enthusiasm such a world historic event can elicit. That he, like many another former 'friend' of revolutions over the ages, went over to the other side when things got too hot does not take away from his efforts here.


The French Revolution as it appeared to Enthusiasts

. Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—

Oh! times, In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,

When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress--to assist the work
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,

The beauty wore of promise, that which sets
(As at some moment might not be unfelt
Among the bowers of paradise itself )
The budding rose above the rose full blown.

What temper at the prospect did not wake
To happiness unthought of? The inert
Were roused, and lively natures rapt away!
They who had fed their childhood upon dreams,

The playfellows of fancy, who had made
All powers of swiftness, subtilty, and strength
Their ministers,--who in lordly wise had stirred
Among the grandest objects of the sense,

And dealt with whatsoever they found there
As if they had within some lurking right
To wield it;--they, too, who, of gentle mood,
Had watched all gentle motions, and to these

Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more wild,
And in the region of their peaceful selves;--
Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty
Did both find, helpers to their heart's desire,

And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish;
Were called upon to exercise their skill,
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!

But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,--the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!

William Wordsworth

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-*From The Pages Of The Communist International- From The Third Congress- "On Tactics" (1921)

Click on the headline to link to the Communist International Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.


Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.

The Wrong Place At The Wrong Time- Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much”(1956)-A Film Review

The Wrong Place At The Wrong Time- Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much”(1956)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

The Man Who Knew Too Much, starring James Stewart, Doris Day, directed again (first time 1934) by Sir Alfred Hitchcock, 1956   

People, historians, especially counter-historians, often speculate if one little fact was changed then history would have taken a decisive turn the other way. You know stuff like if Hitler had been killed at the beer garden in Munich in 1923 or if Lenin could not have gotten back to Russia in the spring of 1917. That idea runs to the personal side of life as well, sometimes with strange results like being in the wrong place at the wrong time like the protagonists in the late Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s off-beat remake of his 1934 classic The Man Who Knew Too Much. So just like with great historical figures and events we can play the same game here what if Ben, played by Jimmy Stewart, Jo played by Doris Day and their young son had not been  heading from Casablanca to Marrakesh on some dusty woe begotten bus and run into a French intelligence agent whose dying words talked of an assassination plot against a big shot foreign dignity in bloody England.      

But, of course, they were and the chase was on from there ruining a perfectly respectable little family vacation and putting Ben and Jo on the edge-to speak nothing of their son who will eventually be kidnapped just because Ma and Pa knew too freaking much. Once the conspirators know they know that young son’s life isn’t worth much, maybe. He is kidnapped to insure Ben and Jo’s silence. But they trace the party to London where the action gets hot and heavy and the conspiracy to kill the foreign big wigs in is full gear. Except through keen analysis and some luck Ben and Jo figure out that the plot is going to be hatched, that dignitary is going to be killed while attending a symphony concert at Royal Albert Hall (where else). The long and short of it is that Ben and Jo discover where the kidnappers have taken their son, they struggle to get to him and eventually find out about the Royal Albert caper. They are able to foil the plot by a timely scream from Jo who sights the paid assassin as he attempts his dastardly work. After much ado their son is recovered and they can go on about their average American family life.

But let’s say that big wig was killed maybe there would have been another Sarajevo, 1914. There’s a little history in the conditional for you. See this one it is better that the 1934 version which as Hitchcock himself is quoted as saying was the work of an inspired amateur and the 1956 was done by a master artist, a pro. And that is right.   

On The Sixtieth Anniversary Of Her Death-Lady Day-Billie Holiday- She Took Our Pain Away Despite Her Own Pains- When Lady Day Chased The Blues Away, Again And Again-“The Quintessential Billie Holiday (Volume 1-1933-1935)”-A CD Review

When Lady Day Chased The Blues Away, Again And Again-“The Quintessential Billie Holiday (Volume 1-1933-1935)”-A CD Review 

CD Review

By Seth Garth

The Quintessential Billie Holiday, Volume 1, 1933-1935,

[Sometimes I get in a Nelson Algren moment as here. But that I mean I want to get down in the mud, get back to the roots, talk about the days when it was not clear which way I was heading-a life of crime or its cousin reading and writing to try to make sense of the world (just kidding on the cousin part, okay so avoid a tweet storm please). Want to talk about the blues since I am here reviewing a Lady Day, Billie Holiday of the orchid-ripped hair. Want to talk about the people like Billie who lived on the edge, who fell down, who got back up and fell down again. Yeah, the ones Nelson Algren he of the Walk On The Wild Side, Man With The Golden Arm talked about, the Frank Machines, the Dove Linkhorns, the people I came from if the truth be told.

I swear I don’t to this day understand what those people I talked to several years ago that I noted below who wrote Billie off as some long-gone junkie of no account. Not after she saved many a day for me when I was blue, maybe beyond blue, maybe ready to meet the dawn turned into night, if you really want to know. See even a stone-cold junkie has the capacity to give something-if she or he has some talent. But here is what the squares and by that I include those dunces who dismissed Billie out of hand, didn’t want to hear how she “saved” me on many a misbegotten tough day or estimate, fathom what pain she had to endure to give what she could give. Maybe some people have become so sanitized, so vanilla they know not of what I speak when I talks about Lester Young blowing that seldom attained high white note every instrumentalist seeks out to the damn China Seas. Don’t know what it took even on good days for Billie to run the rack, to pick up her head long enough to do what she had to. Who gives a fuck, the old corner boy from the hard-pressed Acre section of downtrodden North Adamsville coming out with that fuck word, whether she needed the fixer man to come and get her well when you think about it for a minute. Yeah, no wait let me go and listen to about two hours of Billie rather than slip into a blue funk and forget that Nelson Algren spoke for the little voiceless people who knew their Billie backward and forward. Knew her junkie pain, needed their own fixer man to get well.

For the record I will say it here again today-if I had had the capacity to do so I would have provided Billie with all the dope she needed-be her every loving fixer man just so she could chase my weary blues away. That’s the ticket. The hell with the squares. S.G.]               

Everybody, that meaning everybody who knows anything about the blues knows of legendary blue singer Billie Holiday. Knew she was tied up hard with junkie fever, knee deep in junk. Knew that information either from having read her biography, the liner notes on her records (vinyl for those who have not become hip to the beauties of that old-fashion way to produce recordings in the recent retro revival of that method), newspaper obituaries, or from the 1970s film starring Diana Ross (lead singer of Motown’s Supremes). So everybody knew that Lady Day had come up the hard way, had had a hard time with men in her life and had plenty of trouble with junk, with heroin. Had turned her into some hustling gal with dark lights out of a Nelson Algren story about her daddy making her blues go away, had the “fixer” man making the pain going away for a moment.

(I believe that the Prez, the great saxophonist Lester Young who himself blew many a high white note out to the China seas as the phrase went on the West Coast when he was “on” gave her that name. Put lady and day together and it stuck. He backed her up on many recordings, including here, and in many a venue, including New York café society before they pulled her ticket. The name fit her as did that eternal flower arrangement, sweet gardenia speaking of sexual adventures and promise, in her hair)     

Yeah, that is the sad part, the life and times part. But if you listen to this CD under review like the other ones in this series and other compilations that I am reviewing at this time while I am in a “from hunger” wanting habits mood about Lady Day’s work like I get into every once in a while about music that moved me, spoke to me. In this second volume in the series you will also know why in the first part of the 21^st century guys like me are still reviewing her work, still haunted by that voice, by that meaningful pause between notes that carried you to a different place, by that slight hush as she envelopes a song which kept your own blues at bay. I repeat kept your blues away whatever she suffered to bring that sentiment forward.

That last statement, those last two sentences are really what I want to hone in on here since Billie Holiday is an acquired taste, and a taste which grows on you as you settle in to listen to whole albums rather than a single selection spending half the night turning over vinyl, flipping tapes, changing CDs if you don’t have a multiple CD recorder, or grabbing the dial on an MP3 player. Here is my god’s honest truth though. Many a blue night when I was young, hell, now too, I would play Billie for hours, tune that vinyl over in my case, and my own silly blues would kind of evaporate. Nice right.

Here is the not nice part, maybe better the not respectful part for a sanctified woman’s voice and spirit.  Once a few years ago I was talking to some young people about Billie and, maybe under the influence of the Diana Ross film or from their disapproving parents, kind of wrote her off as just another junkie gone to seed. I shocked them, I think, when I said if I had had the opportunity I would have given Billie all the dope she wanted just for taking my own blues   away. That is why we still listen to that sultry, slinky, sexy voice today. 

Is everything in this CD or in her overall work the cat’s meow. No, toward the end in the 1950s you can tell her voice was hanging by a thread under the strain of all her troubles, legal and medical. But in the 1930s, the time of her time, covering Cole Porter, Gershwin and Jerome Kern songs with a little Johnny Mercer thrown in, the time of Tin Pan Alley songs which seem to have almost been written just for her she had that certain “it” which cannot be defined but only accepted, accepted gratefully. This first may be a little more uneven that her later work when she teamed up with serious jazz and blues players like the aforementioned Lester Young blowing out high white notes to the China seas while she basked in the glow of the lyrics. But just check out Miss Brown To You, What a Little Moonlight Can Do, and the classic Sunbonnet Blue and you will get an idea of what I am talking about. And maybe get your own blues chased away    

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-*From The American Communist Movement Archives- On The United Front Question- A View From History

Markin comment:

This post is presented as a contribution to the continuing discussion on the vital question of the united front tactic in the struggle for our communist future. On this question, as I know from bitter and frustrating personal experience, we need all the education we can get.

*********

On the United Front- based on the RCY "National Bureau Document on the United Front," 3 July 1973. (RCY is the Revolutionary Communist Youth, the then youth group of the Spartacist League/U.S.-Markin)

The united front (UF), as embodied in the work of the early Communist International (CI) and the subsequent struggle of Trotsky for a revolutionary international, grew out of the experience of building the Bolshevik party. The struggle over the UF in the CI was due to what might be called the "uneven and combined development" of the parties and groups, especially in Western Europe, which rallied to the Bolshevik Revolution and the CI. These parties and groups had their origins in social democracy (Germany, France, Italy) and often represented the fusion of left-wing social democracy with revolutionary syndicalism (U.S. and France). Their schooling in social democracy gave them a conception of the party as a "party of the whole class," or as one of the most articulate and left-wing exponents of this conception, Rosa Luxemburg, stated in Leninism or Marxism?:

"The fact is that the Social Democracy is not joined to the organization of the proletariat. It is itself the proletariat." (emphasis in original)

Although she was in the forefront of the fight against Bernsteinism which saw the transformation of capitalism into socialism as organic and evolutionary, yet, like Bernstein, she saw the transformation of consciousness within the working class, from capitalist to socialist consciousness, as an organic, evolutionary, undifferentiated process. Luxemburg saw the party and class consciousness emerging organically from "the struggle itself." For Lenin the "struggle itself," the experiences of the masses of workers, were shaped both materially and ideologically by bourgeois society. From the "struggle itself" at best only trade-union consciousness could emerge. Scientific socialism had to be brought to, joined to, the "struggle itself." For Luxemburg, the party represented the proletariat as it is. Such a party can at best be only a party of trade unionism, of reformism. For Lenin the party represented the proletariat as it must be if it is to carry through its historic mission of the socialist reconstruction of society.

Thus, the common error of left-wing social democracy was the liquidation of the party into the class:

"...the Social Democratic movement cannot allow the ejection of an air-tight partition between the class-conscious nucleus of the proletariat already in the party and its immediate popular environment, the nonparty sections of the proletariat."

—Leninism or Marxism?

The party is seen as an "all-inclusive" bloc of tendencies of which the central apparatus, the party functionaries, the party bureaucracy, is seen as the most conservative since it is the most distant from the "struggle itself," while the ranks of the party, and even the non-party workers, are seen as subjectively more revolutionary. This is, of course, often the case in social-democratic parties and reformist trade unions, but this is precisely because these organizations have merged with the "struggle itself" which, confined to the laws of the capitalist market, never transcend the simple battle to exchange labor power for its equivalent, i.e., never transcend wage slavery. Within this context, democratic centralism is seen simply as the subordination of the revolutionary ranks to the conservative apparatus. Indeed, democratic centralism is the appropriate form only for a revolutionary party. Luxemburg's fears that the German Social Democracy's (SPD) adoption of democratic centralism would mean simply the subordination of the revolutionary wing of the party to the Kautskyites was well-founded. But it was her responsibility, while struggling for the maximum freedom within the SPD, to build a revolutionary democratic-centralist faction within it.

Thus, while Luxemburg's history as a heroic revolutionary is unimpeachable (it is not accidental that our tendency has adopted the name "Spartacist"), her views on party discipline, party building and the relationship between the party and the class were simply the most left-wing expression of social-democratic organizational norms. These norms equated the party with the class or placed the class above the party, denied the necessary vanguard role of the party of proletarian revolution and, hence, were fundamentally liquidationist.

The UF: Class Unity and Communist Hegemony

For the CI and Trotsky the UF had two equally important and inseparable aims: class unity and communist hegemony. Flowing from the dual nature of the UF is the necessity to maintain both the complete organizational independence of the communist party and the complete freedom to criticize one's temporary allies within the UF. The dual nature of the UF is captured in the CI slogan, "March separately, strike together." Each participant in the UF retains its organizational identity; agreement in the UF need pertain only to the details of the specific action to be carried out and can only be reached through unanimous agreement. Another slogan which captures the dual nature of the UF is "freedom of criticism, unity in action." Organizations like the Class Struggle League which take the definition of the UF and substitute it for the definition of the combat party effectively liquidate the party into the UF. This is the very essence of centrism.

The struggle for the UF at the Third and Fourth CI Congresses represented the recognition that the post-WWI revolutionary upsurge had passed over the heads of many of its national sections because they were unable to lead a majority of the working class into battle for the conquest of power. By the Third Congress the upsurge had already begun to recede, taking off the agenda, at least for the immediate period, the conquest of power, and placing on the agenda the conquest of the masses.

The need for the UF flowed from the fact that the majority of workers in most countries had gone through the post-war revolutionary upsurge retaining their allegiance to the reformist leaderships in the trade unions and the social-democratic parties. At the same time, capitalism itself, in the wake of the receding revolutionary tide, went on the offensive. It was not a question of a "revolutionary offensive" as was seen by the "ultra-lefts" in the CI, but of a capitalist offensive that was forcing even the reformist-led organizations into partial and defensive struggles to fight for their life, to fight simply to maintain the organizational gains and standard of living they had won in the past. This situation placed on the agenda the need for a united workers front against the capitalist offensive.
The question was posed to the national sections of the CI: What was to be done in the face of the capitalist offensive which drove even reformist organizations to battle and intensified the objective need in the proletariat for class unity? The majority of the CI drew the conclusion that propaganda and agitation alone were not sufficient to break the mass of workers from their reformist leaderships. The infamy of the reformists, fighting capacity of the communists and viability of the communist program had to be demonstrated in action. A period in which the reformists are drawn into battle, albeit in a half-hearted, partial way, is precisely the best time to expose their infamy through common action side by side with them, where the workers can measure in their own immediate experiences and struggle the fighting capacity and program of the communists vs. those of their reformist leadership.

In the CI discussions a distinction was drawn between the "UF from above" which was an agreement reached between communist and non-communist leaderships to carry out a particular class action and the "UF from below" which was a direct appeal made to non-communist workers over the heads of their leaders. Certain members of the CI wanted the UF to mean only "from below" believing that agreements with opportunists must necessarily be opportunist agreements. Trotsky and others arguing against this viewpoint stated that if the rank and file of organizations were not ready to march under the leadership of the communists during the post-war upsurge, they would not break with their leaderships to march with communist calls to action now. Now that capitalism had taken the offensive and the revisionist and reformist leaderships of proletarian organizations were forced to call class actions or at least forced to talk of calling them, it was necessary to intersect this development. Communists should not only participate in partial and defensive struggles but should initiate them when necessary and fight to win the leadership of them when possible. Therefore, agreements with reformist and centrist leaders could not be precluded, though communists should be ever ready to break with the centrists and reformists when their vacillations become a brake on the struggle. In the course of such a break the communists might very well go over to a "UF from below." In any case either the reformists and centrists would refuse to enter into common struggle with the communists, in which case they would be discredited, or their pusillanimous behavior in the course of the struggle would tend to discredit them and enhance the authority of the communists.

The UF: Sharpening the Political Struggle

Thus the tactic of the UF should never be seen as a cessation of political struggle, as a non-aggression pact or mutual amnesty with other tendencies. The CI slogan for the UF—"freedom of criticism, unity in action"—anticipated that the UF would sharpen the political struggle and exacerbate hostilities between communist and non-communist leaderships. The UF as a political weapon in the struggle for communist hegemony is often put forth in anticipation that reformists and centrists will refuse to participate in common action with the communists, even though the former have committed themselves, at least verbally, to such actions. Whether these non-communist leaderships of proletarian organizations refuse to respond to the UF call or respond only in a half-hearted way, the call can serve to discredit their authority over the non-communist workers and "set the base against the top."

An important international application of the CI UF tactic was the CI call for common class action with the Second International and the Vienna Union or "Two-and-a-Half International." Negotiations for common action broke down, and the Two-and-a-Half International was forced to move to the right to prevent its membership from engaging in common battles with the communists. This eventually drove the Vienna Union into fusion with the Second International. While CI members who were skeptical about the UF policy considered the fusion of the Two-and-a-Half International and Second International a defeat, Trotsky and other CI supporters of the UF considered the fusion to be a positive gain for the communists in as much as it cleared the path of an obstacle between the communists and the reformists. There was no longer a third pole which claimed to be both "revolutionary" and non-communist, thereby confusing militant workers and creating obstacles in the class struggle.

Likewise, in the late '60s, Progressive Labor Party (PL) was an obstacle between the SL and those sections of the New Left which were moving leftward toward proletarian socialism. PL's verbal commitment to a pro-working-class and non-exclusionist Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) provided the framework in which the UF could be applied to a whole series of issues, from the question of military recruiting on campus, strike support and the question of unemployment, to whether SDS should be an explicitly socialist organization. The application of the UF tactic to PL essentially offered PL two choices. Either it could carry through with its verbal commitment to a pro-working-class non-exclusionist SDS and conduct common actions with the SL/RCY which would ultimately force it to break with its Stalinist heritage, or it could retreat to the right. PL took the latter course which, while dashing our hopes of winning a section of the PL cadre, removed PL as an obstacle to our recruitment of those sections of the New Left 'which were moving in a proletarian socialist direction.

The struggle for communist hegemony has as its aim the. political polarization of all ostensible revolutionary organizations into revolutionary and non-revolutionary components, and the regroupment of all organizations, tendencies and factions which stand for revolutionary Marxism into the united Leninist vanguard party. The UF is an important component of the regroupment tactic for it is precisely through common action that the political struggle of counterpoised programs can reach its sharpest expression. Thus, it was both full political discussion (Zinoviev's famous speech at Halle) and common action that won a majority of the German Independent Socialists over to the German CP. The center of our regroupment orientation during the late '60s was PL/SDS. PL/SDS' abandonment of a proletarian perspective and their capitulation to academic liberalism with the "anti-racist textbook" campaign combined with our acquisition of groups and tendencies from the PL periphery (like the Buffalo Marxist Collective) are both the negative and positive confirmations of the correctness of our regroupment perspective for that period.

Ultra-Left and Opportunist Opposition to the UF

Rejection of the UF or of the "UF from above," while often clothed in the rhetoric of revolutionary intransigence, in reality represented a kind of political passivity, conservatism and lack of revolutionary will. Such "leftism" was, in fact, an acceptance of the status quo and the division of the workers movement into the communists who had revolutionary intransigence and the reformists who had the working class. Opposition to the UF came not only from the left but also from the right, especially from those groups whose break with social democracy had been organizational but not methodological.

Most of Trotsky's CI polemics in defense of the UF were directed against centrist elements in the French CP which resisted communist organizational norms, refused to support international democratic centralism or Leninist functioning in their own party, refused to subordinate their press, parliamentarian or trade-union fractions to party discipline, publicly attacked the CI in their press and in public meetings, resisted carrying out communist propaganda in the military or in the trade unions and refused to take up the fight against French colonialism. It was the left wing of the French CP, those former Socialists and syndicalists who supported Lenin's break with social democracy during WWI and who immediately declared themselves for the CI who fought for the UF within the French party. It was those centrist elements whose break with social democracy was belated and who resisted affiliation with the CI and the purge of the social-chauvinist traitors from their ranks who also fought against the UF. Thus opposition to the UF produced its own "united front" running from Hermann Goiter and Bordiga on the left to Frossard on the right. Opportunist opposition to the UF like that of ultra-leftism is based on political passivity and conservatism. The opportunist projects his own opportunism on to the UF. He cannot conceive of alliances aside from the deals that are made in the back rooms of parliament and trade-union offices: mutual accommodation and non-aggression pacts. Trained in the school of social democracy where the party is conceived of as blocs of diverse tendencies, the centrist who holds a liquidationist conception of the party cannot conceive of the UF except as liquidationist. Reluctant to break with his reformist cronies, the centrist is now unwilling to turn around and do battle with them in common action. Hostility to the UF is simply an inverted non-aggression pact with the reformists, an implicit agreement not to fight them on their own turf.

Stalin and the UF

With Stalin's ascent to power and the conversion of the CI from an instrument of world revolution into an instrument of realpolitik diplomacy based on the narrow, conservative interests of the Soviet bureaucracy, the UF was degraded as a tactic for class unity and transformed into an instrument for class collaboration and counterrevolution. In China the "bloc from within" was transformed into the complete liquidation of the Chinese CP into the Kuomintang (KMT). The KMT was made a "sympathizer" section of the CI, Chiang Kai-shek was made a "fraternal" member of the I.E.C. and the KMT army was equipped with Soviet arms and trained by Soviet military advisors, but kept entirely in the control of the warlords like Chiang who ran the KMT. By the Second KMT Congress in January 1926 the Chinese CP held one-fifth of the total seats on the KMT Central Executive Committee, headed the Peasant and Organization Departments and (through Chou En-lai) Whampoa Academy which trained the leading military cadre. Even so, Chiang was able through his control over the army, beginning with the 20 March 1926 coup in Canton and culminating in the March 1927 suppression of the Shanghai uprising, to turn the "bloc from within" into the block upon which the Chinese CP was beheaded.

In Britain the CI UF policy was embodied in the "Anglo-Russian Trade Union Unity Committee" which was formed in May 1925 between the leaderships of the British and Russian trade unions. The Committee served to give a revolutionary cover to the British trade-union leadership's betrayal of the 1926 General Strike and the Committee broke up only after the British union leaders broke with it a year later. The position of the Trotskyist Left Opposition was that the original formation of the Anglo-Russian Committee was tactically defensible as the Committee represented a temporary alliance with British trade-union leaders who, under mass working-class pressure, were moving slightly leftward and were willing, for at least a short period, to come out for the defense of the Soviet Union and international trade-union unity, and it was necessary to hold them to these positions. Under the impact of the sharpening class struggle culminating in a pre-revolutionary situation it should have been anticipated that these reformist union leaders would be driven over into the defense of the bourgeois order. To maintain a bloc with them under these conditions was simply to lend the prestige of the Bolshevik Revolution and communism to these strike breakers.

The accumulating failures of Stalin's 1924-27 policies of conciliating the colonial bourgeoisie and trade-union reformists abroad and the kulaks at home led straight to the "third period" policies of liquidating the kulaks and completely undoing the work of the Third and Fourth Congresses in regard to the UF. The UF "from below" was proclaimed to be the only permissible tactic for the CI sections.

The UF: Strategy or Tactic?

There is a tendency to conclude from Trotsky's strong polemics in defense of the UF in his German writings that the UF is not simply a tactic but a strategy. For example, a 1966 International Committee document which was probably authored by the Organisation Communiste Internationalist states:

'"Class against class' is the very cement which binds together the transitional slogans as a whole. "That is why the Workers' United Front is not simply a slogan, but a strategic axis in the policy of Trotskyist organizations. The strategy of the United Front is embodied in various tactical expressions which range from limited agreements for united actions between different organizations to the Soviets, the 'natural form of the united front at the time of combat,' as Leon Trotsky said in Whither France?" —quoted in Spartacist Internal Information Bulletin No. 19

Trotsky repeats time and time again in What Next? (from which the "soviet is the highest form of the united front" quote is taken) that the UF is a tactic and not a strategy, and that to consider the UF a strategy rather than a tactic is the essence of centrism. What Next? is not only a polemic against the ultra-left sectarian policies of the Stalintern, but it is also a polemic against the UF and soviet fetishism of centrist groups like the SAP (Socialist Workers Party of Germany). For example, Trotsky states:

"In any case, the policy of the united front cannot serve as a program for a revolutionary party. And in the meantime, the entire activity of the SAP is now being built on it. As a result, the policy of the united front is carried over into the party itself, that is, it serves to smear over the contradictions between the various tendencies. And that is precisely the fundamental function of centrism."

—The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany

Even more succinctly Trotsky states in "Centrism and the Fourth International":

"A centrist swears readily by the policy of the united front, emptying it of its revolutionary content and transforming it from a tactical method into a supreme principle." —Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1933-34

In his polemic against the UF fetishism of groups like the SAP and the Brandlerites, Trotsky polemicized against the conception that the UF is for all times and all places, a kind of workers' parliament where the various tendencies hold endless debates and draw up endless resolutions (the fantasy world of the National Caucus of Labor Committees during its strike-support proto-soviet coalition days). The UF can only be a reality during periods of social struggle, when the need for sharp class battles makes class unity a burning objective necessity that shakes the ranks of the non-communist workers' organizations from their lethargy and day-to-day humdrum organizational parochialism, and places strongly before them the need for class unity that transcends their particular organizations; or during unsettled periods in the left movement when the possibilities of and necessity for regroupment clearly exist. Only then will the road be opened for the communist party to approach the non-communist worker and his organizations with the call for a real UF.

The trade unions, the workers militia, the Soviets are all forms of the UF precisely because they are organizations which stand above parties, and reflect the uneven development of the consciousness of the working class. At the same time they represent the needs of the class for unity in its struggle with capitalism. But to see only the class-unity side of the UF (whether in reference to unions or Soviets) is the mistake of centrism. The UF is equally important because it provides one of the roads for the communist party to conquer the class. "Class unity around a revolutionary program" necessarily means class unity led by the vanguard party which embodies that revolutionary program, or it is meaningless. Programs do not exist suspended in midair, they are necessarily embodied in parties. As Trotsky states in What Next?:

"The interests of the class cannot be formulated otherwise than in the shape of a program; the program cannot be defended otherwise than by creating the party. "The class, taken by itself, is only material for exploitation. The proletariat assumes an independent role only at that moment when from a social class in itself it becomes a political class for itself. This cannot take place otherwise than through the medium of a party. The party is that historical organ by means of which the class becomes class conscious. To say that 'the class stands higher than the party,' is to assert that the class in the raw stands higher than the class which is on the road to class consciousness. Not only is this incorrect; it is reactionary."

The question is not: What strategy for the party?—the UF. The question is: What strategy must be put forth in the course of the UF? This can only be answered by the struggle of parties. The answer to What Next? can only be programmatic and will be found in the party that embodies the necessary revolutionary program. As Trotsky points out, the Soviets by themselves are incapable of leading the proletariat to power. "Everything depends upon the party that leads the Soviets" (The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany).

The "People's Front"

It is important to answer certain questions that have arisen on the left concerning the relation between the popular front, which generally takes the form of a parliamentary bloc, and class-collaborationist non-parliamentary movements, like the Socialist Workers Party's (SWP) National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC). This question obviously has disturbed enough members of the SWP/YSA for the organization to issue an,"Education for Socialists" pamphlet entitled Alliances and the Revolutionary Party: The Tactic of the United Front and How It Differs from the Popular Front by Les Evans, and another pamphlet in the same series which included the first two chapters of James Burnham's The People's Front: The New Betrayal, which was first published by the SWP in 1937. What the SWP will no longer republish is the last chapter of Burnham's pamphlet which describes how the Stalinists applied the People's Front to the U.S. where they were not strong enough to bargain away proletarian revolution for ministerial posts. Burnham writes:

"Most significant of all is the application of the People's Front policy to 'anti-war work.' Through a multitude of pacifist organizations, and especially through the directly controlled American League against War and Fascism, the Stalinists aim at the creation of a 'broad, classless, People's Front of all those opposed to war.' The class-collaborationist character of the People's Front policy is strikingly revealed through the Stalinist attitude in these organizations. They rule out in advance the Marxist analysis of war as necessarily resulting from the inner conflicts of capitalism and therefore genuinely opposed only by revolutionary class struggle against the capitalist order; and, in contrast, maintain that all persons, from whatever social class or group, whether or not opposed to capitalism, can 'unite' to stop war."

The Trotskyist movement has long held that the application of the popular-front policy in the U.S. has always taken the form of "single-issue broad-based coalitions" against war, fascism, racism or some other injustice. The application of the "People's Front" strategy formulated at the Seventh Congress of the CI to countries where the CPs did not have sufficient strength to demand of the bourgeoisie ministerial posts, has always taken the form of "anti-imperialist," "antiwar," "anti-fascist," etc. coalitions.

The popular front is a political bloc, which may or may not take the form of a governmental coalition, in which the politics of the working-class component of the bloc are subordinated to the politics of the bourgeoisie, to the defense of the bourgeois state and capitalism. The bourgeoisie, as the ruling class, is supremely self-conscious of its own class interests. Any ongoing coalition or alliance with the bourgeoisie must necessarily take place on the bourgeoisie's own terms, and on the basis of their politics. It is not necessary for the bourgeoisie as a whole, or even a section of the bourgeoisie, to play an active role in the political bloc for the popular front to exist. Thus Browder, as a loyal technician of the popular front may have offered to shake hands with J.P. Morgan, but no one has ever accused Browder of breaking with the popular front when Morgan did not reciprocate. Likewise, during the Spanish Civil War, the bourgeoisie, by and large, supported Franco, not the Republican Popular Front. Azana and his Radicals were nothing more than a handful of lawyers and professors, nonetheless they constituted what Trotsky called the "shadow of the bourgeoisie," i.e., their presence in the popular front was the guarantee to the Spanish and world bourgeoisie that the Republic stood for the defense of capitalism and the bourgeois order:

"Politically most striking is the fact that the Spanish Popular Front lacked in reality even a parallelogram of forces. The bourgeoisie's place was occupied by its shadow. Through the medium of the Stalinists, Socialists, and Anarchists, the Spanish bourgeoisie subordinated the proletariat to itself without even bothering to participate in the Popular Front.

The overwhelming majority of the exploiters of all political shades openly went over to the camp of Franco. Without any theory of 'permanent revolution,' the Spanish bourgeoisie understood from the outset that the revolutionary mass movement, no matter how it starts, is directed against private ownership of land and the means of production, and that it is utterly impossible to cope with this movement by democratic measures.

"That is why only insignificant debris from the possessing classes remained in the republican camp: Messrs. Azafia, Companys, and the like—political attorneys of the bourgeoisie but not the bourgeoisie itself. Having staked everything on a military dictatorship, the possessing classes were able, at the same time, to make use of their political representatives of yesterday in order to paralyze, disorganize, and afterward strangle the socialist movement of the masses in 'republican' territory.

"Without in the slightest degree representing the Spanish bourgeoisie, the left republicans still less represented the workers and peasants. They represented no one but themselves. Thanks, however, to their allies—the Socialists, Stalinists, and Anarchists—these political phantoms played the decisive role in the revolution. How? Very simply. By incarnating the principles of the 'democratic revolution,' that is, the inviolability of private property."

—Trotsky, "The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning"

The mere fact that the Italian CP courts the bourgeois parties, though it is unable to capture even one lonely splinter left Christian Democrat, is sufficient to brand the CP's politics and appetites as for the popular front. Even before the Radicals entered the recent French "Union of the Left," the CP-SP bloc was popular-frontist both in its program and its appetites.

NPAC, WONAAC, SDS and Pop Frontism

The reason that we characterize NPAC, Women's National Abortion Action Coalition (WONAAC) and SDS (after SDS had locked onto its "anti-racist textbook" campaign) as popular fronts is precisely because they attempted to reduce the program for struggling against fundamental aspects of capitalism—imperialism, sexual and racial oppression—to campaigns which consisted primarily of parades in the case of NPAC, parades mixed with legislative motions that were beneath parliamentarian cretinism in the case of WONAAC, and the SDS caricature of parliamentarian cretinism (i.e., calling on Congress and state legislatures to censure racist textbooks). Thus, the SWP and PL offered themselves up to the bourgeoisie as safety valves for the popular discontent with various aspects of capitalist oppression, channeling social discontent into avenues which were both socially impotent and diffusive but which would serve to reinforce illusions about capitalist institutions, capitalist politicians and academic liberalism.

When the SWP first adopted the "single-issue" coalition gimmick in the anti-war movement, they claimed this strategy was not popular-frontist because no section of the bourgeoisie accepted the "single issue" of "Out Now." However, as soon as the U.S. bourgeoisie realized that a decisive military victory was impossible in Vietnam, and the bourgeoisie became defeatist, it was precisely the program of the SWP/NPAC they adopted. As more and more capitalist politicians not only endorsed the "Out Now" slogan and also NPAC parades, the SWP suddenly discovered that the bourgeoisie had "capitulated" to the SWP. But what was fundamental was the question of program, and the program of NPAC was not revolutionary defeatism but bourgeois defeatism, not utilizing imperialist war to advance the class struggle, but ending the war so as to disrupt U.S. imperialist hegemony as little as possible.

Likewise, WONAAC's successive dilutions of its program (from opposition to abortion laws to opposition only to "anti-abortion laws" in order to keep up with the parliamentarian maneuvers of Bella Abzug) was an explicitly conscious effort to tailor program to the needs of their bourgeois allies. PL and SDS went from getting thrown out of the July 1971 NPAC conference because of their vocal opposition to Vance Hartke's presence, to printing articles in support of McGovern for President in the pages of New Left Notes. The "anti-racist textbook" campaign, like NPAC and WONAAC, led straight to Miami Beach and the 1972 Democratic Party Convention, where the SWP/YSA could watch on television the consummation of seven years of "single-issue coalition" politics as the Democratic Party sucked in both the "activists" and issues of past campaigns. Even more despicable was the sight of SDS, on its knees before the entrance to the Democratic Party Convention, begging McGovern to adopt its "anti-racism bill" as a plank in the Democratic Party platform. The difference between the SWP and PL and the CP in Chile, Ceylon, post-WWII France and republican Spain is that the SWP and PL did not have social power to send delegates to the Democratic Party Convention, though their politics were clearly represented by their erstwhile allies within the convention hall. Also, the bourgeoisie did not need a McGovern-Gus Hall-Linda Jenness-SDS government.

A descriptive distinction can be drawn between popular-front alliances among two or more separate political parties (e.g., the French Union of the Left) and popular-frontist groups (e.g., NPAC, WONAAC, SDS). One can point to the 1930s, where the European CPs, for the most part, entered into popular-front alliances, whereas the CPUSA, lacking the mass working-class base to sell to the bourgeoisie in exchange for ministerial portfolios, built various antiwar, anti-racist, class-collaborationist front groups paralleling the activities of the European CPs. The attitude of Trotskyists, of course, is no different toward these socially weaker popular-frontist formations. We are as opposed to entry into SDS [see "SDS Destroyed by Liberalism," RCY Newsletter No. 12, May-June 1972] as into the Union of the Left, whose size and social roots, however, make it a greater obstacle to the growth of revolutionary consciousness within the working class than the former. The People's Front was never conceived of as only a government coalition, although that is, for the Stalinists, the "highest form" of the People's Front. The People's Front has always meant the political subordination of the left to the program of the liberal bourgeoisie.

Excluding the Bourgeoisie

The "exclusion of the bourgeoisie" has been one of our key demands at anti-war and women's liberation conferences. The exclusion of the bourgeoisie from social movements which claim to fight the basic injustices of capitalism has been a fundamental position of the Marxist movement since Marx polemicized against those Utopian Socialists such as Robert Owen who thought the bourgeoisie could be won to socialism. Ending imperialist war and the oppression of women and blacks means ending capitalism, and what was simply Utopian for the predecessors of Marx, becomes in the mouths of those who claim to be Marxists rank opportunism.

The prerequisite for an organization to be characterized as part of the working-class movement, even if it is thoroughly reformist, is the exclusion of the bourgeoisie. Even here there are exceptions, for the European CPs may occasionally attract a petty capitalist into its ranks. However, this is most clear with an organization like the British Labour Party whose leadership has a perennial appetite to administer British imperialism, but whose formal politics claim to stand in the tradition of class-struggle socialism and whose by-laws exclude members of the bourgeoisie. Thus, we distinguish the reformist politics of the Labour Party program, which it will betray when it gets into power, from the explicitly capitalist politics of the popular front, which are beneath reformism, and which the popular front will carry out if it gets into power. Thus both the Labour Party and the French Union of the Left had the same appetite to administer their respective national capitalisms, but in order to do so the Labour Party must betray its program when in power, while the Union of the Left will carry it out. Thus, with the Labour Party campaigning in its own name and on its own program, we can give it critical support, pointing out that its program is partial, limited, reformist, etc., and that the Labour Party will betray this program once in power. But for the Union of the" Left there is no such contradiction to exploit. The Union of the Left will simply carry out the program it promises, for all it promises is to be better defenders of the bourgeois order than the explicitly capitalist parties. Critical support is an application of the UF, the counter-position of the program of proletarian revolution to that of reformism, a momentary pact from "above" to put the Labour Party into power, which very soon goes over to a UF "from below" when the Labour Party calls out the cops and army to defend the factories, when the workers through industrial action, try to collect on the Labour Party's electoral promises.