Oh, Rosalita-With Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable’s Film Adaptation Of Arthur Miller’s “The Misfits” In Mind

Oh, Rosalita-With Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable’s Film Adaptation Of Arthur Miller’s “The Misfits” In Mind     

By Reviewer Zack James

[Frankly I was a little hesitate to approve the following piece by long- time contributor Zack James who I have known through the old neighborhood where we grew up by my friendship with his oldest brother, Alex. The reason for my hesitancy was my concern for the relevancy of bringing in old time film sex appeal women stars from the 1940s and 1950s in a piece essentially about the trials and tribulations of inter-generational sex these days if you come right down to it. For the most part this site has been populated by pieces and sketches done by members of the generation of ’68 that is post-World War II “baby-boomers,” more often than not male, who are now at an age where they have the time and inclination to wade through some reflections of the past. To keep them warm as they grow old I guess.

A look though at the demographics and the traffic flow provided by the producers of this blogging apparatus shows that the audience for this site is dipping toward a much younger cohort based on their devotions to social media, especially Twitter. Given the demographic trend I was not sure that readers would get the connection between 1940s and 1950s screen queen stars and what was bothering Lou Lyons, a certified member of the generation of ’68 with battle scars to prove the point, who Zack had interviewed for the piece. No question ‘68ers would know of Lauren Bacall if for no other reason than she would be familiar to those who craved those retrospectives revival theaters like the Brattle in Cambridge, the Aurora in the Village and the Majestic in Frisco who endlessly played Humphrey Bogart and pals films. In the case of Ms. Monroe she would be familiar from around the house as fathers and older brothers of that generation saw her as the epitome of 1950s American female blonde sex appeal. To ask Generation X and millennials to draw that same connections seemed fat-fetched to me. Then Zack challenged me to let the reader decide the value of the article and get over my faint-heartedness. So here it is. Peter Markin]      

Maybe it was something in the drinking water but Louis Lyons was beside himself once he figured out the real reason why he spent a couple of weekend nights watching a couple of old-time flicks, films which he had gathered in from his Netflix service. Lou had been on a long term kick about watching, or rather re-watching, films, mostly black and white from his checkered seedy random youth. In those youthful days he would have viewed such films not on his HD television or via the stream of his computer but at his local theater, The Majestic, in his hometown of Oxford out in Western Massachusetts now long since closed and converted into a small tech company office park where he would spent many an ungodly Saturday afternoon viewing the current fare. The use of the “ungodly’ expression was for real since his parents were devout Sixth Day Anabaptists whose day of worship started at midday Saturday and ended at dawn Sunday morning. Although they were liberal enough to see that Lou would have snuck out to the movies anyway they always cast that epitaph his way when he came sheepishly through the door after having been hunkered down with a box of “made last” popcorn (there was a whole art to keeping an eye on the concession stand clerk to see when he or she would get ready to replenish the popcorn machine and avoid getting the last of the “stale” leavings maybe from the night before) and some candy bars purchased at Billy’s Variety and “snuck” in under the watch-less eyes of the ushers (who were usually high school kids who could using and expression common at the time as it turns out “ a rat’s ass” about what the audience did or didn’t do except throw stuff at the screen).  

Later in high school, having grown out of kids’ clothing and Saturday matinees about the same time, he let those “ungodly” epitaphs flow off his back like water off a duck’s back after coming in late on Saturday nights. Reason: or one of the reasons, Lotty Larson who was the first girl who accepted his invitation when he asked her the locally famous, locally famous high school movie date night, question-balcony or orchestra? Orchestra meant maybe one date and out but balcony meant promise of anything from a “feel” inside or out of some girl’s cashmere sweater to a tight space blow job. Lotty said balcony although Lou only got to cope a feel outside her sweater which kept him going for a while (of course he claimed Lotty “played the flute” for him, also a common expression at the time for a blow job to his friends but he, and they, knew he was lying, lying that first night anyway. Later, well, you figure it out).                

This trip, this diversion down rural hills nostalgia road, has a purpose since it was on the same track that was bothering Lou’s old mind. The eternal, infernal, ways of sex which had one way or another bothered Lou’s mind since puberty, maybe before if Doctor Freud and his acolytes were right. The association played out this way. On that recent movie freak Friday night he had watched for the umpteenth time one of his all-time favorite films the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have And Have Not starring Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. One of the reasons that he favored that film is that although he did not see it when it had come out since he was only a dream in his parents’ way of life in the wartime 1940s when the film had come out when he did see the film in retrospective in college at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square he had told his date, name now long forgotten in memory, that some of the scenes in that classic were as hot, maybe hotter, between two people with their clothes fully on than half the porno being featured in the Combat Zone in downtown Boston. (Lou vaguely remembered that night was a “hot” date night with that unremembered young woman when they had gone back to her place on Commonwealth Avenue although he did not think what she had seen on-screen had gotten her all horny. Probably the dope after the film did the trick)

After that recent viewing though he had remarked to his wife, his third wife, Moira, that given the best of it Captain Morgan, Bogie’s role, a craggy sea salt, and the young if wayward Marie, the Bacall role, that he had to be at least twice her age, maybe more. (He had actually looked it up on Wikipedia and found Bogie was forty-five and Bacall nineteen at the time so the “maybe more” was definitely in play). That started a short discussion between them about younger women being attracted to older men (as a sign of some kind of distorted social norm older men, “dirty old men” a common way to put the proposition,  being attracted to younger women never made it to the conversation table). No conclusions were drawn at the time by Lou.                   

Saturday night Moira was out attending her weekly bridge party with some of her girlfriends and Lou wound up watching the other film he had ordered from Netflicks the film adaptation of Arthur Miller’s The Misfits starring Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable (with serious supporting roles by Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, and Thelma Ritter). Once again maybe giving Clark, playing the last of the old-time cowboys who drank, whored and got saddled-sored with the best of them Gaye, a decided edge in the looks department over Bogie and the fact of being a real cowboy over a sea captain an older man was attractive to a younger woman, Rosalyn, played by Marilyn Monroe. Lou, a little younger than the older brothers and fathers who saw Ms. Monroe as the epitome of 1950s sexual allure and beauty, had seen the film when he was in high school, alone if he recalled.        

The question of younger women being attracted to older men would not have stuck out as much as it had on those recent nights as it had on the first viewing of the films back in the day but since then there had been Rosalita, his second wife, the wife that Lou had left for Moira. The main reason, although not the only reason, had been the wide gap in age between them, Rosalita had been twenty-five and he almost fifty when he spied her one night in San Francisco at the City Lights Bookstore, the famous one run by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the big “beat” hang-out back in the 1950s when being “beat” mean something socially unlike later when he tried to emulate them with black beret, logger’s boots and flannel shirt , and got nothing but laughs from his high school pals and worse from the gals for digging something so passe.

He had been trolling the bookstore, literally, since he had just gotten divorced back in Massachusetts from his first wife, Anna, and after the acrimonious settlement decided he needed to head west and make a new start. Once he got West he figured he needed the company of a woman as well and somebody he had run into at Ginny’s Bar in North Beach had told him that if you were looking for a certain type woman, intellectually curious, maybe a little off-kilter, maybe “easy” too then in San Francisco you hit the bookstores and City Lights was a magnet. (That “custom” was not confined to Frisco Town he had met Moira at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston under the same imperative).          

Lou had been looking for a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl (in a paperback book format which came with other poems as well including Ginsberg’s homage to his tragic mother-Kaddish) since that was one of his favorite poems, if not his most favorite at the time. Then this thin, brown-eyed, black-haired good-looking young woman whom he at first thought was Spanish, maybe from Mexico given where he was came up behind him and started going on and on about Ginsberg who had just died a few years before. (Rosalita was not Spanish at all but Irish her mother just liked the name.) He was shocked that anybody under the age of forty would know anything about Ginsberg and the importance of his poem not only as a break in the kind of poem that was acceptable in polite society but the harsh social message Ginsberg was laying down. She, not he, asked if he would like to stop at the café and have a cup of coffee. He figured why not (he did not find out until after they had a couple of subsequent dates that women, women of all ages, also trolled the bookstores looking for men, men who say would be looking at something like Howl which told them the guy could at least read unlike some of the beasts they had run across in the bars or at some off-the-wall party).      

That afternoon started their affair but Lou was from the start apprehensive about their differences in ages which came up often along the way, for example, when he mentioned that he had been in Washington on May Day, 1971 and had been arrested in the dragnet that the cops and military had set up that day she didn’t understand, could not get around the idea that people would try to shut down the government if it did not stop the Vietnam War. At times they could work through it like that first day with Ginsberg (she turned out to have been an English major at Berkeley) but other times, times when she tried to coax him into jogging which she was crazy about they would fight civil war worthy battles. He always had the sneaking suspicion that Rosalita was not telling the truth when she mentioned that she had had trouble with her male peers, boys she called them, and had been attracted to older men ever since her father had abandoned her family when she was twelve. She had told him repeatedly that she was looking for the maturity and security that an older man would bring. Lou could never really get that through his head and eventually his tilted his behavior toward giving dear Rosalita reason to boot him out the door. (On top of meeting Moira closer in age to him at the museum when for one last effect to reconcile he and Rosalita had moved to Boston to get a fresh start).

That night after watching those two films and their messages Lou thought though maybe Rosalita had been just like Marie and Rosalyn just needing a safe harbor. Damn.       

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys- The Night When Doo-Wop Swayed To And Fro-For Frankie Lyman And The Teenagers

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys- The Night When Doo-Wop Swayed To And Fro-For Frankie Lyman And The Teenagers    

By Sam Lowell

Recently out of the deep recesses of my mind I have dredged up some memories of my earliest corner boy experiences from down in the mud of the Adamsville Housing Authority apartments, let’s not kid each other “the projects” which strikes fear in the now, as it did then. Part of those memory jogs revolve around getting together with the still standing members of my high school corner boy gang for drinks and a little food at Jimmy Jack’s Lounge a few towns over from where we grew up, came of age. That in turn got me thinking about genesis and the guys I hung with early on doing the “best we could,” legally or legally. Here is what I had to say in the prior piece to fill in some background as to why I have decided to take the trip way back:      

“Of all the corner boys (read: juvenile delinquents in some quarters a big term, a big concern in 1950s sociologist, criminologist, school administration, court and cop circles; sullen schoolboys seriously in feeding their “wanting” habits in an age when all around them was plenty so maybe not so much sullen as angry in some; and,  misunderstood youth in others the bailiwick of concerned teachers, social workers, and library personnel- all three probably true in some senses) who hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor while we were going to North Adamsville High in the early 1960s I am the only one still standing who started his corner boy career at Carter’s Variety Store across town in the Adamsville Housing Authority apartments (read: “the projects” and although I have already made the point a million times the unwanted fate of plenty down at the base of society, down in the mud where things and people are not pretty). That experience started when I was a student at the Snug Harbor Elementary School located just outside the projects. The school had been built to meet the needs of the burgeoning school age population of both the young families who found themselves in need of cheap housing at the recently built projects and the influx of families who were filling in the extensive 1950s-style new ranch houses up the road. That should do for background for now.

“I mentioned that I am the only Carter’s boy still standing but I was not the only one. There was one other one Peter Paul Markin who at Tonio’s was always known as the Scribe and I will use that name here rather than that pretension-filled moniker his mother laid on him. Now much ink (and many tears, many tears still) has been spilled in this publication about his latter exploits and the craziness of the Scribe when he was in high dudgeon at Tonio’s and a little later but little has been noted about the early days, the early corner boy days in elementary school when most of the Tonio’s boys were clueless about the value of desperately poor kids joining together, hanging out to do, well to do the best they could.             

“I am not quite sure how the Carter corner boys started since it was already formed when I started hanging out along with the Scribe. Let’s leave it that this store was the only one in the whole projects area (and sadly still is) where residents without cars, including my family many times, or in need of some quick item could shop. That it has penny candy (yeah, I know inflation) and other sweets galore probably added to the allure. That and Mister Carter did not mind us hanging out as long as we didn’t block anything and didn’t do anything crazy (we never did-there).        

“I met the Scribe the first day of school in fourth grade after my family had moved to the projects from another project in Riverdale west of Boston when my father’s company moved to the area and he needed the work. That was in Miss Sullivan’s class, an old biddy who trucked no nonsense and who made it her profession to keep us after school for detention-even that first day which was supposed to be easy stuff. The Scribe was looking at some book, forgotten now, and I commented that it looked interesting to start a conversation. That was all the Scribe needed as he wowed me with the contents. And didn’t wow Miss Sullivan who kept us after for the continuous talking. After that after school detention business we went to Carter’s to see what was up once he told me fourth and fifth grade guys hung out there and it was okay.

“Later and elsewhere the Scribe, and to some extent me, would be the leaders of various corner boy combinations, would plan whatever needed to be planned, legal or illegal but then we were frankly naïve and really just foot soldiers. The deal was already set for leadership with Ronnie, George, Rodger, Lenny and a little later the also legendary Billy Bradley running the operations (all would later do various stretches of time in county and state prisons I think except Lenny who laid his head down in Vietnam during that war). We had no problem with that since we were in thrall to the whole aura of the thing.”

In the first piece I mentioned how one pissed off Ronnie, Ronnie Mooney to give a last name since he is long dead from some failed armed robbery, gathered us together to seek revenge for some slight some teacher had given him, and he was going to burn down the school. Which one Sunday night, he, we tried to do grabbing wood from a nearby forest and placing the material near a darken set of doors after which Ronnie doused with gasoline and then set on fire. The school did not burn since some neighbor called in an alarm and those doors turned out to be flame-resistant. Thinking about it the other night it still is amazing that we had no problem ethical, moral, legal or anything going along with the caper just because Ronnie was a corner boy. Hell, as much as I love education and learning even today half of me thinks that the attempt was fitting under the circumstances.      

I have mentioned on a number of occasions that they say, maybe they said is better, that juvenile delinquents are born not made. Have some genetic kink missing which throws everything off. That was true of Ronnie I believe for he had a really devious and sadistic bent but that was not all of what Ronnie was about then, if more so later. He, and we did especially the Scribe and Billy Bradley, loved the emerging rock and roll that would define our generation’s main musical thrusts. Better still he had a natural feel, a natural beat for the music and a very good voice. The same was true of Billy but more on him some other time when I want to develop the bond between the Scribe and Billy. In any case Ronnie lived to play the latest tunes for us by Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly and what is important here the rise of doo-wop be-bop music.

Funny, having just told the tale about our attempts to burn the school down, that the back of the school, that darkened secluded corner area near the forest after Carter’s Variety would close became our hang-out area (the cops in their cars couldn’t see that area and so no police take notice jive bothered us). We would spend our summertime nights there working out various songs that Ronnie (and Billy once Ronnie accepted that he too had musical talent) wanted to rehearse. This stuff is between fifth and sixth grade when those pesky “stick” girls from last year started some of us seeing that maybe they were interesting after all (and eventually all of us including me a late bloomer).      

As late June turned into July word got around that we were doing musical rehearsals, were singing pretty good stuff including the latest craze doo-wop learned from WMEX radio in Boston. One night one girl, no, that can’t be right there never was one girl doing anything anytime by herself then, so two girls anyway could be seen at some distance kind of swaying to the music and over the next several days were joined by several other girls who were progressively getting closer. Then one night, and this is why this piece is dedicated to Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers, Ronnie and Billy started their doo-wop swoon singing the now classic Why Do Fools Fall In Love (good question) and the girls joined in the inner circle clapping and tapping like the rest of us. I don’t know that night who was better Ronnie or Billy but the presence of the girls had them on fire. I am not sure that we knew that Frankie and the gang were black although maybe we did from American Bandstand but what did that matter if a group of from hunger white kids had the beat, were tapping and clapping (although it would matter a little later).

All I know is this shy Sam Lowell benefited despite my low gravelly voice since I got Billy’s “rejects” in the girl department. Enough said.    

[I should point out for future reference that the Scribe and I hung out together until he moved crosstown to his grandmother’s house after his grandfather died in seventh grade. There he joined up with the corner boys who hung around Doc’s Drugstore which I also joined when my family bought a little shack of house in the Bottoms section of the Acre, the working poor section of North Adamsville at the beginning of ninth grade.]         

Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Utah Phillips' "Nevada Jane"

Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Utah Phillips' "Nevada Jane"

A YouTube film clip of utah Phillips perfroming his song in honor of Big Bill Haywood's wife, Nevada Jane 


In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.

An Encore- Coming Of Age, Political Age, In The 1960s Night- A Baptism Of Fire-Making War On The War-Makers

An Encore- Coming Of Age, Political Age, In The 1960s Night- A Baptism Of Fire-Making War On The War-Makers



From The Pen Of Frank Jackman


He was scared. All of fourteen year old Peter Paul Markin’s body was scared. Of course he knew, knew just as well as anybody else, if anybody thought to ask, that he was really afraid not scared, but Peter Paul was scared anyway. No, not scared (or afraid for the literary correct types), not Frannie De Angelo demon neighborhood tough boy, schoolboy nemesis scared, scared that he would be kicked in the groin, bent over to the ground in pain for no reason, no reason except Frannie deep psycho hard boy reasons known only to himself. Markin was used to that kind of scared, not liking it, not liking getting used to it but he was not tough, not even close although he was wiry, but not Franny heavyweight tough, but used to it. And this certainly was not his usual girl scared-ness on the off chance that one, one girl that is, might say something to him and he would have no “cool” rejoinder. (Yes, girls scared him, not Franny scared but no social graces scared, except in the comfortable confines of a classroom where he could show off with his knowledge of two thousand arcane facts that he thought would impress them but no avail then, later he would be swarmed, well, maybe not swarmed but he didn’t have to spend many lonely weekend nights studying to get to three thousand arcane facts) This was different. This, and his handkerchief-dabbed wet palms and forehead did not lie, was an unknown scared.

See, Peter Paul had taken a bet, a “put your money where your mouth is" bet, from best freshman high school friend Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, if you want to know the full name. Now these guys had previously bet on everything under the sun since middle school, practically, from sports game spreads, you know Ohio State by ten over Michigan stuff like that, to how high the master pizza man and owner at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, Tonio, would throw his pizza dough one strange night when Frankie needed dough (money dough that is) for his hot date with girlfriend Joanne. So no bet was too strange for this pair, although this proposition was probably way too solemn to be bet on.



What got it started, the need for a bet started, this time, really had to do with school, or maybe better, the world situation in 1960. Peter Paul, a bundle of two thousand facts that he guarded like a king’s ransom, went off the deep end in 9th grade Civics class when he, during a current events discussion, exploded upon his fellow classmates with the observation that there were too many missiles, too many nuclear bomb-loaded guided missiles, in the world and that both sides in the Cold War (The United States and the Soviet Union and their respective hangers-on) should “ban the bomb.” But you have not heard the most provocative part yet, Peter Paul then argued that, as a good-will gesture and having more of them, the United States should destroy a few of its own. Unilaterally.



Pandemonium ensued as smarts guys and gals, simps and stups also, even those who never uttered a word in class, took aim at Peter Paul’s head. The least of it was that he was called a “commie” and a "dupe" and the discussion degenerated from there. Mr. Merck was barely able to contain the class, and nobody usually stepped out line in his class, or else. Somehow order was restored by the end of class and within a few days the class was back to normal, smart guys and girls chirping away with all kinds of flutter answers and the simps and stups, well the simp and stups did their simp and stup thing, as always.



Frankie always maintained that that particular day was one of the few that he wasn’t, and he really wasn’t, glad that Peter Paul was his friend. And during that class discussion he made a point, a big point, of not entering the fray in defense of his misbegotten friend. He thought Peter Paul was off the wall, way off the wall, on this one and let him know it after class. Of course, Peter Paul could not leave well enough alone and started badgering friend Frankie about it some more. But this was stone wall time because Frankie, irreverent, most of the time irreligious, and usually just happy to be girl-smitten in the world, and doing stuff about that, and not worried about its larger problems really believed, like the hard Roman Catholic-bred boy that he was underneath, that the evil Soviet Union should be nuclear fizzled-that very day.



But Peter Paul kept egging the situation on. And here is the problem with a purist, a fourteen year old purist, a wet behind the ears fourteen year old purist when you think about it. Peter Paul was as Roman Catholic-bred underneath as Frankie but with this not so slight difference. Peter Paul’s grandmother, Anna, was, and everybody who came in contact with her agreed, a saint. A saint in the true-believer catholic social gospel sense and who was a fervent admirer of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker for social justice movement started in the 1930s. So frequently The Catholic Worker, the movement newspaper, would be lying around her house. And just as frequently Peter Paul, taking grandmother refuge from the hell-bend storms at his own house, would read the articles. And in almost every issue there would be an article bemoaning the incredible increase in nuclear weapons by both sides, the cold war freeze-out that escalated that spiral and the hard fact that the tipping point beyond no return was right around the corner. And something had to be done about it, and fast, by rational people who did not want the world blown up by someone’s ill-tempered whim. Yah, heady stuff, no question, but just the kind of thing that a certain fourteen year old boy could add to his collection of now two thousand plus facts.

Heady stuff, yah, but also stuff that carried some contradictions. Not in grandmother Anna, not in Dorothy Day so much as in Peter Paul and through him Frankie. See, the Catholic Worker movement had no truck, not known truck, anyway with “commies" and "dupes”, although that movement too, more than once, and by fellow Catholics too, was tarred with that brush. They were as fervent in their denunciation of the atheistic Soviet Union as any 1950s red-baiter. But they also saw that that stance alone was not going to make the world safer for believers, or anybody else. And that tension between the two strands is where Frankie and Peter Paul kind of got mixed up in the world’s affairs. Especially when Peter Paul said that the Catholic Worker had an announcement in their last issue that in October (1960) they were going to help sponsor an anti-nuclear proliferation rally on the Boston Common as part of a group called SANE two weeks before the presidential elections.

Frankie took that information as manna from heaven. See, Frankie was just as interested in knowing two thousand facts in this world as Peter Paul. Except Frankie didn’t guard them like a king’s ransom but rather used them, and then discarded them like a tissue. And old Frankie, even then, even in 1960 starting to spread his wings as the corner boy king of the North Adamsville high school class of 1964, knew how to use his stockpile of facts better than Peter Paul ever could. So one night, one fiercely debated night, when Frankie could take no more, he said “bet.” And he bet that Peter Paul would not have the courage to travel from North Adamsville to Park Street Station in Boston to attend that SANE rally by himself (who else would go from old working- class, patriotic, red-scare scared, North Adamsville anyway). And as is the nature of fourteen year old boy relationships, or was, failure to take the bet, whatever bet was social suicide. “Bet,” said Peter Paul quickly before too much thinking time would elapse and destroy the fact of the bet marred by the hint of hesitation.

But nothing is ever just one thing in this wicked old world. Peter Paul believed, believed fervently, in the social message of the Catholic Worker movement especially on this nuclear war issue. But this was also 1960 and Irish Jack Kennedy was running, and running hard, to be President of the United States against bad man Richard Milhous Nixon and Peter Paul was crazy for Jack (really for younger brother, Bobby, the ruthless organizer behind the throne which is the way he saw his own future as a political operative). And, of course, October in election year presidential politics is crunch time, a time to be out hustling votes, out on Saturday hustling votes, especially every Irish vote, every Catholic vote, hell, every youth vote for your man.



On top of that Jack, old Irish Jack Kennedy, war hero, good-looking guy with a good-looking wife (not Irish though not as far as anyone could tell), rich as hell, was trying to out-Cold War Nixon, a Cold War warrior of the first degree. And the way he was trying to outgun Nixon was by haranguing everyone who would listen that there was a “missile gap,” and the United was falling behind. And when one talked about a missile gap in 1960 that only meant one thing, only brooked only one solution- order up more, many more, nuclear-bomb loaded guided missiles. So there it was, one of the little quirks of life, of political life. So, Peter Paul, all fourteen year old scared Peter Paul has to make good on his bet with Frankie but in the process put a crimp into his hoped-for political career. And just for that one moment, although with some hesitation, he decided to be on the side of the “angels” and to go.

That Saturday, that October Saturday, was a brisk, clear autumn day and so Peter Paul decided to walk the few miles from his house in North Adamsville over the Neponset Bridge to the first MTA subway station at Fields Corner rather than take the forever Eastern Mass. bus that came by his street erratically. After crossing the bridge he passed through one of the many sections of Boston that could pass for the streets of Dublin. Except on those streets he saw many young Peter Pauls holding signs at street corners for Jack Kennedy, other passing out literature, and others talking up Jack’s name. Even as he approached the subway station he saw signs everywhere proclaiming Jack’s virtues. Hell, the nearby political hang-out Eire Pub looked like a campaign headquarters. What this whole scene did not look like to Peter Paul was a stronghold place to talk to people about an anti-nuclear weapons rally. Peter Paul got even more scared as he thought about the reception likely at the Boston Commons. He pushed on, not without a certain tentative regret, but he pushed on through the turnstile, waited for the on-coming subway to stop, got on, and had an uneventful ride to the Park Street Station, the nearest stop to the Common.

Now Park Street on any given Saturday, especially in October after the college student hordes have descended on Boston, is a madhouse of activity. College student strolling around downtown looking for goods at the shops, other are just rubber-necking, other are sunning themselves on the grass or park benches in the last late sun days before winter arrives with a fury. Beyond the mainly civilized college students (civilized on the streets in the daytime anyway) there are the perennial street people who populate any big city and who when not looking for handouts, a stray cigarette, or a stray drink are talking a mile a minute among themselves about some supposed injustice that has marred their lives and caused their unhappy decline. Lastly, and old town Boston, historic old town Boston, scene of many political battles for every cause from temperance to liberty, is defined by this, there are a motley crew of speakers, soap-box speakers whether on a real soap-box or not, who are holding forth on many subjects, although none that drew Peter Paul’s attention this day. After running that gauntlet, as he heads for the Francis Parkman Bandstand where the SANE rally was to take place he was amused by all that surrounds him putting him in a better mood, although still apprehensive of what the day will bring forth.

Arriving at the bandstand he saw about twenty people milling around with signs, hand-made signs that showed some spunk, the most prominent being a large poster-painted sign that stated boldly, “Ban The Bomb.” He is in the right place, no question. Although he is surprised that there are not more people present he is happy, secretly happy, that those twenty are there, because, frankly, he thought there might be just about two. And among that crowd he spotted a clot of people who were wearing Catholic Worker buttons so he is now more fully at ease, and was starting to be glad that he came here on this day. He went over to the clot and introduced himself and tells them how he came to be there. He also noted that one CWer wore the collar of a priest; a surprise because at Sacred Heart, his parish church, it was nothing but “fire and brimstone” from the pulpit against the heathen communist menace.

Get this-he also met a little old lady in tennis sneakers. For real. Now Frankie, devil’s advocate Frankie, baited Peter Paul in their arguments about nuclear disarmament by stating that the “peaceniks” were mainly little old ladies in tennis shoes-meaning, of course, batty and of no account, no main chance political account, no manly Jack Kennedy stand up to the Russians account. Peter Paul thought to himself wait until I see Frankie and tell him that this little old lady knew more about politics, and history, than even his two thousand facts. And was funny too boot. Moreover, and this was something that he had privately noticed, as the youngest person by far at the rally she, and later others, would make a fuss over him for that very reason talking about young bravery and courage and stuff like that.

Over the course of the two hours or so of the rally the crowd may have swelled to about fifty, especially when a dynamic black speaker from the W.E.B. Dubois club at Harvard University linked up the struggle against nuclear weapons with the black struggle down South for voting rights that those in the North had been hearing more about lately. It was not until later, much later, that Peter Paul found out that this Dubois club business was really the name of the youth group of the American Communist Party (CP) at the time but by that time he was knowledgeable enough to say “so what.” And it was not until later that he found out that the little old lady with the tennis sneakers was a CPer, although she had said at the time he talked to her she was with some committee, some women’s peace committee, within the Democratic Party. Oh, well. But then he would also be able to say “so what” to that accusation in proper “family of the left” fashion.



But forget all that later stuff, and what he knew or did not know later. See, that day, that October 1960 autumn day, Peter Paul learned something about serious politics. If you are on the right side of the angels on an issue, a central issue of the day, you are kindred. And although there were more than a few catcalls from the passers-by about “commies”, “dupes”, and “go back to Russia” he was glad, glad as hell that he came over. Although nothing turned inside him, noticeably turned inside him that day, about his politics and his determination to see Jack Kennedy and the Democrats take the White House he thought about those brave people at the bandstand and what they were standing for a lot for a long time after the event faded from memory. Oh yah, it was good to be on the side of the angels. And it didn’t hurt that he won that Frankie bet, either.

On The Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love 1967-Riverdale Blues-For Allen Ginsburg On The 60th Anniversary Of “Howl” (1956)

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*The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons- From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Trotsky Was Right: How Stalinism Undermined Legacy of October Revolution- A Guest Commentary

*The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons- From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Trotsky Was Right: How Stalinism Undermined Legacy of October Revolution- A Guest Commentary


Frank Jackman comment:

The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Winter 1991-92, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

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Trotsky Was Right: How Stalinism Undermined Legacy of October Revolution

The following speech, edited for publication, was given by Spartacist League Central Committee member Jim Robertson at a 17 November 1991 meeting in the Bay Area for the Lenin-Trotsky fund.


There are two great Westernizers in Russian history: one was Peter the Great and the other was Lenin. They were Westernizers not in the sense that they wanted to create colonial dependence for the Russian areas, but seeing the immense backwardness of Russia—one in a period where autocracy was the order of the day and one where the proletariat had become a significant factor—each reached out, in his own way and in his own time, to modernize Russia.

In the case of Lenin, this was not on a nationalist basis, not in order to beat the Turks, the Prussians and the Swedes, but to create a new world order that Marx and Engels had sketched out, in which one would abolish the struggles for ascendancy between imperialist powers and the necessity for national struggles for self-determination or independence. That laid the basis for the Communist International. 1 use Lenin's name as shorthand for the entire Bolshevik Party, of which he was the undisputed leader. He had a great many colleagues in this endeavor.

Modern Russian history opens with the Decembrist Uprising in 1825, when sections of the officer corps and the first sprouts of the Westernizing intelligentsia, facing the implacable opposition of tsarism, thought in terms of a coup, and were executed or deported to Siberia for the result. The Decembrists did not look toward the tsarist intrigues in Europe—you know, how to play the Austrians against the French against the Prussians and the rest. They had drawn conclusions from Russia's expansion indigenously several thousand miles to the east; for example, they enthused over the eastward expansion into Siberia and all the way to Alaska. I don't know if they appreciated the reason why Russia could expand indigenously for thousands of miles, simply absorbing native peoples. The reason was that the Russians were involved in the fur trade, and they did not try to exterminate the natives or to culturally transform them, but to hire them as assistants to do what they already had done all their lives for many generations. It was simply an accelerated hunting/gathering activity, only this time for the world market. For related reasons, but very contrary to British imperialist practices, the Russians sexually intermingled with the natives, and the children were named Ivan and baptized. So there was a process of organic absorption, and thus the Russian Socialist Republic extends all the way to the Kamchatka Peninsula, to the Pacific Ocean. To this day American Baptist missionaries have trouble with the Aleuts in the Aleutian Islands, who insist on clinging to their ancient ancestral Bible that goes back into an infinity of time, which happens to be in Cyrillic.

The tsarist court and its entourage went another way. Russia had been a strong state certainly since the time of Peter the Great. The autocracy and the church were subordinated to the tsarist empire itself, and the nobility's titles were generated from service to the imperial court and the imperial administration. In the 19th century, an intelligentsia grew up, along with a countercurrent of Slavic mysticism; That's why I can call Lenin, validly, a Westernizer, because he fought this very reactionary current that said there's a special Slavic soul and we must eschew all things Western.

Lenin wrote a little essay, "The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism," in which he said the Marxist movement "is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism," referring to the repeated revolutions that had taken place in the metropolitan areas of France since 1789. And he focused on the new, but very concentrated, proletariat that was growing up in the various parts of the tsarist empire.

Through the 1905 revolutionary experience and the disasters that the Russian government experienced in World War I, the Bolsheviks regrouped in the course of a general social revolution, a prolonged popular revolution. The October 1917 insurrection was a coup planned after all the intermediate forces had tried to make various kinds of compromises between the old order and the appetites of the working class and, to a considerable extent, of the peasantry, which were never to be satisfied. Each government (most typically Kerensky) had continued to honor its treaty obligations to the Allies and had continued to endlessly send millions of men against the all too murderously efficient German army.

The coup was very successful—rapidly and highly peacefully in Leningrad, and equally rapidly but not quite as peacefully in Moscow—and was simply accepted all across the Soviet Union, all the way to Vladivostok. It took about six months for the White Guard officers and their Allied advisers and financial suppliers to begin to develop effective White armies, which were put in the field in the summer of 1918. Russia experienced a terribly debilitating civil war. The Bolsheviks won it: they had interior lines of communication, and when it came right down to it, although a good many of the ideas of the Bolsheviks were not too appetizing to the mass of the Russian peasantry, it was a better deal than the tsarists were offering.

But Russian industry, badly deteriorated, virtually ceased to exist. The few hundred thousand workers who had been in the vanguard of the 1917 Revolution ceased to exist, by and large, as a working class. They died or they were pulled into the administration or especially into the army. There were no raw materials for factories anyhow, except those that were diverted exclusively to the Civil War. When the Civil War was about won (under the policy of War Communism, which was simply a ruthless seizure of peasant products), the end of the war and the growing disgruntlement of the peasantry were signaled by the Kronstadt uprising. It was an uprising of sailors, peasant boys who had been put in this safe area during the war to replace the Bolshevik sailors who had gone to the front or otherwise served the revolution.

The Bolshevik Party at the time was and had been debating a new course, but meanwhile was inertially carrying out the policies of War Communism. The Kronstadt uprising marked the first of about 50 years of alternative interpretations of the Soviet Union as something other than a workers state. At that point, the anarchists began calling for a third revolution. One theoretical interpretation after another that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers state became current. In renouncing the Soviet Union as a workers state, the state capitalist currents have based themselves on about three different—and more or less mutually counterposed—points of qualitative departure.

Meanwhile, something very bad was at work in the USSR. Without the political ballast of the proletariat, all parties other than the Bolsheviks, more or less, were undergoing polarization (with the exception of Martov's Left Mensheviks, who still staggered down the middle of the road). Some groups were simply becoming counterrevolutionary, while the other wing, like some Left Social Revolutionaries and a few Left Mensheviks, went over to the Bolshevik Party. So the Bolshevik Party became the repository of such revolutionary virtues as continued to exist in the Soviet Union. But meanwhile deterioration was taking place within the Soviet Union, along with various personal transformations.

The death of Sverdlov and the illness of Lenin vastly facilitated the concentration of administrative powers in the hands of a fairly minor figure known as J.V. Stalin. Actually, he was a Georgian named Djugashvili, but like some semicolonial individuals, he was a greater exponent of Great Russian chauvinism than the ordinary Russian. In the fall of 1923, the growing pressures of economic dislocation, the disorganization of the peasantry and the lack of industrial production created what Trotsky called the "scissors crisis." When the scissors are closed, the prices of industrial and agricultural goods are close together. But with prices for industrial goods rising and for agricultural goods falling, the scissors open, and there is growing discontent among the peasants.

So there was a big debate in the Bolshevik Party. The debate was slammed shut; by then the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union had acquired a sufficient consciousness to begin to act in concert. There was a party conference in January of 1924 where, as a way to shake the fist of the bureaucracy at the party, the representation proportions were completely out of line. Substantial forces in the Leningrad and Moscow Communist parties were in opposition to the administration, which was then, with Lenin out of action, concentrated in the hands of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin, who constituted a "Troika," as it was called, a team of three.

With this administrative control ensured, the boys at the top began rapidly to develop new theories. The failure of the German Revolution—which Lenin had looked to as the beginning of the necessary extension of the revolution internationally—in 1918-19 and in 1923 propelled the move to the right in the Soviet Union. In the fall of 1924, Stalin advanced the extremely characteristic idea that "we will build socialism in Russia alone." In this miserable, wracked country, somehow socialism was to be built. The ideologist Bukharin found favor. His idea was that not only can you build socialism in one country alone, but you can build it at a snail's pace, entirely independently of the world market and imperialist economic and military appetites. It was isolationism with a great vengeance.

There was a very considerable regroupment of those who rejected this and insisted that the fate of the Soviet Union was intimately associated with international and revolutionary developments. Trotsky was simply the best-known figure. The balance of the '20s consisted in power maneuvering: first, the isolation and downgrading of Zinoviev, and then, eventually, of Bukharin. But it was a period of relative mass social freedom, while the administration at the top was fighting it out, and the Stalin faction emerged triumphant.

Its triumph, at the end of the 1920s, generated a considerable totalitarian grip on Soviet society which rapidly spread into practically every field of human endeavor. (The only one that I can think of that was excluded was music. Stalin executed a lot of poets, because he could kind of figure out what the poetry meant; if it meant the wrong thing, you got eliminated. He could never quite get the composers, because that was a little obscure. But he imposed such a structure on the musical arts that the bitter joke was that if Stalin couldn't whistle it, you couldn't get it published.) So this rather frothy bureaucracy had consolidated around a faction, and this added impetus to Mensheviks or anarcho-syndicalists who wanted to find new reasons to write off the Russian state as at bottom not a working-class state.

Seen through Stalin's eyes, the whole thing was terribly difficult. First he had to deal with his allies, who had bigger names than he did, and he got rid of them. Then his own faction more or less believed the doctrines of socialism in one country as they were first enunciated, and were somewhat idealistic. They began to like a chap named Kirov, who in 1934 was shot to death, which was of great convenience to Stalin. He immediately blamed his opponents. In 1934 the Russian CP had the 17th Party Congress, in which a lot of votes were not cast for Stalin. The party didn't have another congress until 1939, and hardly anybody was still alive who had been to the 1934 congress. The consolidation of a totalitarian bureaucracy of a very brittle and murderous sort, along with extensive, enormous purge trials, meant the liquidation of the tops of the economy and the army and the like. It resulted in the sentencing of many millions of men and women to time in forced labor camps, which became a significant factor.

So again new interpretations of the Soviet Union were made. In the early New Deal, two guys named Berle and Means wrote an influential book saying that American capitalism is no longer owned by the capitalists, but instead by the managers of American industry, and the capitalists who own the shares are merely parasites. As a description of the day-to-day operations of American capitalism, this is as suitable as any other. But when you get into a factional struggle in a corporation, you very rapidly learn it is not the managers, but the holders of the common shares, that in fact do own. But that was probably the germ from whence Shachtman and Burnham in the American Trotskyist movement got their idea that the people who were managing Soviet society are the owners of the means of production. In America this was a prevailing idea—called "bureaucratic collectivism"—among revisionist elements for quite a while. It never took hold in England, where various forms of state capitalist ideas dominated: that is, that the Soviet state itself is the one capitalist. I was never attracted to this idea, because capitalism is associated with the development of surplus value, of exploitation, and the Soviet Union allocated its labor on the basis of administrative decisions and quite
independently of the possibilities of financial return. But right down to this day, the current British centrists and left critics of the Labour Party and New Leftists think along the lines of "state capitalism,"

Trotsky was developing an analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state, in which the political commanding heights had been seized by a bureaucracy which was inherently unstable and polarizable. This bureaucracy represented a kind of a bridge between the base, which was the Soviet Union that had issued out of the revolution and Civil War, and a series of accommodations with the imperialist powers. So socialism in one country has a very important corollary. If socialism is going to exist only in one country, what is the role of the working class in the rest of the world? The answer is, to defend socialism in that one country, by supposedly finding friendly capitalists to make common electoral blocs and parties with, as opposed to the hostile and evil capitalists who want to do something bad to the Soviet Union. That's the root theory that still operates in the American Communist Party today, which sees progressive Democrats and evil, reactionary Republicans.

All this was a very slow process. Stalin died, they got a semi-reformer, actually personally a decent chap, Khrushchev. He seems to have been the only top Soviet leader who was not personally involved in the mass, bloody terror. But perhaps he wasn't too apt. At least he didn't remain in power very long, but he told a good bit of the truth about the past. All of this, of course, is implicitly immense evidence that the bureaucracy was and is not a possessing class. In order to possess, you have to be able to inherit. But in Russia if a bureaucrat gets fired from his job, it's like working for the Ford Motor Company—you're fired, you're out, and that's it. And you end up at best with a very small pension, and at worst shot as a traitor. So this was not a class in that it did not offer the perquisites of ownership, which are very real and have been real in every society hitherto.

Under Brezhnev, which they now call a period of stagnation, things ran pretty well. But there was no more real terror. If you were a dissident, you might be abused a bit, deprived of your job, sent off for a few months of re-education, then you would come back and hang around in Moscow writing samizdat. In general there, had been a multilateral agreement that with Stalin gone, and his henchman Beria (the head of the KGB) having been shot as a British agent since 1919, they weren't going to do this to each other anymore, that it was too hard.

Furthermore, changes had taken place. They'd already gone through a generation of bureaucrats, who started out as rather bright, uneducated, ambitious peasants who found favor in the eyes of their chiefs. They went out and worked hard, but then they too had children—and the children hung about in the main centers of the country, because they didn't want to go back to the farm. They got high-grade degrees from Moscow U. and places like that. They are the new intelligentsia. And they look to the West, not in the sense of learning from it, but of conciliating it and becoming consumers, with a house in the hills somewhere near Los Angeles. And that explains, by and large, the social base of Yeltsin.

The Russians have been sealed off for a very long time, and they're quite innocent. They believe that any criticism of the United States is a lie by the bureaucracy, because they've been lied to a lot, as well as told the truth a lot. They think that one can simply join the West. Well, one can join the West, all right, like Brazil or Mexico. And that's what the world bourgeoisie would like to do with the Soviet Union. But they have a problem: it was profitable for the United States to spend tens of billions of dollars a year in war preparations against the Soviet Union, but nobody wants to put capital into Russia because the prospect of extracting profit is very uncertain. So very little money is flowing into East Europe as a whole, except the Germans are maintaining and rebuilding an infrastructure in East Germany, after having destroyed its industrial base. And if the Poles can't get money, it's not going to be so easy for the Russians either.

The East European countries now are neocapitalist without capital. It doesn't matter that they haven't managed to denationalize any plants because nobody wants to buy anything—the industrial capacities are not particularly good—and furthermore it's a stormy area. But Russia had an indigenous proletarian revolution. The historical memory of the proletariat is badly but not entirely impaired. Stalin created the Stakhanovite program, in which people are supposed to be paid for how hard they work. The idea of equality is a pervasive feeling among huge masses in the Soviet order. To them, the idea of private ownership of the means of production looks quite literally like sheer theft. So that has been for the Russian proletariat, which is now a much larger section of Soviet society, something that never caught on. Meanwhile the Yeltsin forces are fast accruing everyone who wants to introduce inequality and impoverishment for the masses, and status as a bourgeoisie co-equal with the West (a semi-Utopian aspiration) for the few. Yeltsin is a really despicable character who has long had relations with the anti-Semitic fascists of Pamyat, for example. His main drive is for an early, fast, brutal capitalization of the USSR, at the expense of the constituents that stand outside of Russia itself.

So the issue has not yet been completely joined in the Soviet Union. On the 74th anniversary of the October Revolution, in defiance of the authorities and without official authorization, the working class began to raise its head and come forward with slogans. Not all of them were so appetizing, because there are some nationalists there who want to blame the Jews for everything, as well as Wall Street. But there are also some internationalists, so when we intervene, when we have trouble with some people who want to beat us up, there were always groups that come and defend us, too. The mobilization in Moscow in particular was very large, around 90,000. And this was in spite of the threats by Popov, the liberal mayor of Moscow, who up until the last couple of hours said that he wasn't going to let the march happen.

It's quite important to get the Soviet working class into action, and along intensely political and Bolshevik lines. The issues do not lend themselves to simple economism: a better deal with the trade union to get a few more rubles from management. Because obviously—and it's obvious to the Russians, too—the whole of the country hangs in the balance. While Gorbachev's earlier appointees were liberals, the late ones were rather conservative, and they split off and last August they tried to stage a coup, which was a disastrous, isolated failure. They turned their backs on the working class, and the coup collapsed. But the Yeltsinites do not have complete control yet. We are dealing not with a totalitarian bureaucracy, but a decomposed one. There is every kind of bureaucratic obstacle while at the same time very shady operators will print our stuff for a very considerable amount of dollars—anything!

There is a window of opportunity; the police do not knock on your door. We want to exploit this very much against the capitalist-restorationists, and to engage in a struggle among those who oppose the capitalist-restorationists and against those, like the Great Russian chauvinists, who believe in Mother Russia, "beat the Yid," and the suppression of the constituent republics. We find a considerable base of support for our position for a Leninist-Trotskyist party, which means for a political revolution in the Soviet Union.

From The Marxist Archives-Karl Liebknecht-No Unity With The Class Enemy-Build The Resistance

From The Marxist Archives-Karl Liebknecht-No Unity With The Class Enemy-Build The Resistance  

Workers Vanguard No. 1104 27 January 2017 TROTSKY LENIN No to Unity with Class Enemy! (Quote of the Week) Today, the reformist left calls for “unity” to fight against Trump. This boils down to uniting behind the Democratic Party, political representatives of the class enemy. Writing in 1918, as the German Revolution was unfolding, revolutionary leader Karl Liebknecht warned against the dangers of unity with those defending the capitalist order. Liebknecht, along with Rosa Luxemburg, belatedly split with the socialist conciliators who wanted to unite with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which had betrayed the working class by supporting German imperialism during World War I. In January 1919, shortly after founding the German Communist Party, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered by right-wing paramilitary forces at the behest of the SPD government and the revolution was defeated. Unity! Who could yearn and strive for it more than we? Unity, which gives the proletariat the strength to carry out its historic mission. But not all “unity” breeds strength. Unity between fire and water extinguishes the fire and turns the water to steam. Unity between wolf and lamb makes the lamb a meal for the wolf. Unity between the proletariat and the ruling classes sacrifices the proletariat. Unity with traitors means defeat. Only forces pulling in the same direction are made stronger through unity. When forces pull against each other, chaining them together cripples them both. We strive to combine forces that pull in the same direction. The current apostles of unity, like the unity preachers during the war, strive to unite opposing forces in order to obstruct and deflect the radical forces of the revolution. Politics is action. Working together in action presupposes unity on means and ends. Whoever agrees with us on means and ends is for us a welcome comrade in battle. Unity in thought and attitude, in aspiration and action, that is the only real unity. Unity in words is an illusion, ​self-​deception, or a fraud. The revolution has hardly begun, and the apostles of unity already want to liquidate it. They want to steer the movement onto “peaceful paths” to save capitalist society. They want to hypnotize the proletariat with the catchword of unity in order to wrench power from its hands by reestablishing the class state and preserving economic class rule. They lash out at us because we frustrate these plans, because we are truly serious about the liberation of the working class and the world socialist revolution. Can we unify with those who are nothing more than substitutes for the capitalist exploiter, dressed as socialists? Can we, may we join with them without becoming accomplices in their conspiracies? Unity with them would mean ruin for the proletariat. It would mean renouncing socialism and the International. They are not fit for a fraternal handshake. They should be met not with unity, but with battle. The toiling masses are the prime movers of social revolution. Clear class consciousness, clear recognition of their historic tasks, a clear will to achieve them, and unerring effectiveness—these are the attributes without which they will not be able to complete their work. Today more than ever the task is to clear away the unity smokescreen, expose half measures and halfheartedness, and unmask all false friends of the working class. Clarity can arise only out of pitiless criticism, unity only out of clarity, and the strength to create the new socialist world only out of unity in spirit, goals, and purpose. —Karl Liebknecht, “The New ‘Civil Peace’” (19 November 1918), printed in The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power (Pathfinder Press, 1986)