Bet, Bet Straight Up-With The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood Corner Boys In Mind

Bet, Bet Straight Up-With The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood Corner Boys In Mind

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

[This little piece of fluff, this little boyhood remembrance had originally been written as my swan song as a film reviewer, as the film editor here. And to an extent that is /was true when I penned the stuff. That before the big internal struggle that roiled this publication for several months and which finally led to the purge and exile of Allan Jackson, long-time site manager and my oldest friend from high school days. “Purge” and “exile” no exaggeration although I don’t have time for the details here except that when the deal went down I voted with the rebel younger writers to give my old friend the boot under the idea that as with my own retirement it was time to “pass the torch.” I still think I was right and that although Allan and I have reconciled things probably better today under the new leadership. The part that is wrong though is that my swansong was premature. As part of the dust up the younger writers (and here I was neutral) insisted that new site manager Greg Green have an Editorial Board that he would run things by unlike the one-man rule of Allan Jackson. I was tagged for the chairmanship of the Board and so since I am still around I have decided on occasion as here that a few pithy words might come from my pen. S.L]

As everybody familiar with this space knows (or with the on-line version of the American Film Gazette )I have retired from the day to day grind of writing film reviews and have handed over that chore, at least temporary, to my in the not too distance future retiring old friend, colleague and competitor Sandy Salmon. I noted when I posted my retirement notice that I, like old time military men, would just fade away. I also noted that I would as the occasion warranted write a little something, a little commentary if the subject interested me. That is my purpose today.        

Recently Sandy Salmon reviewed a 1947 film, a murder mystery of sorts that had a long prior pedigree, Seven Keys To Baldpate, which had been based on a play by the same name back in the early 20^th century which in turn was based on a crime novel by the great crime writer Earl Derr Biggers (whose popular Charlie Chan series is perhaps much better known). Sandy did a good job of reviewing this film which hinged on the idea of a guy, a crime writer, making a bet with his publisher for five thousand cash that he could write a crackerjack mystery novel in twenty-four hours. As he attempted to do such out in the boondocks at an allegedly closed down inn with the only key to the place all hell broke loose, a couple of off-hand murders and such, by people who had collectively mysteriously come up with the six other keys of the title. One of those six people was a ringer, was the good-looking blonde with well-turned legs secretary to the guy who the crime writer made the bet with. No, not a sex lure like would be included in such a plotline now, at least not publicly, not in 1947 but to distract him anyway she could to make him miss his deadline. What the hell that ain’t fair, no way, especially when after the smoke cleared and the crime writer solved the whole mystery of why the other five people were there she flopped herself on his lap when he went to write that story to win the bet and dared him to ignore her. Needless to say the other guy won the bet        

Sandy mentioned at the start of his review that some guys will bet on anything, any proposition to pass the time. That got me to thinking after I had read the review about what the deal was in the old days in my growing up hometown of North Adamsville about forty miles west of Boston when me and my high school corner boys who hung around Sal’s Pizza Parlor would to while away the lonesome, girl-less, no dough, no serious dough to not be girl-less bet on all kinds of propositions for a couple of bucks, maximum five probably. Certainly not five thousand which as Sandy mentioned is nothing but walking around money now but then was a number which we could not get around, couldn’t believe existed, not in our neighborhood where rubbing nickels together was a tough enough battle.

Now a lot of the bets with guys like Sammy Young, Billy Riley, Jack Callahan the great school football player before Chrissie McNamara did her own flop down on his lap and dared him to move her which he had had absolutely no inclination to do, Sid Green, Pat Murphy and Ian Smith were on the outcome of various sports events. You know back in those days whether the hapless Red Sox would finish last in the American League (or how long a losing streak the team would go on once they started their inevitable losing), how many points would the golden age Celtics score (or allow). We also did our fair share of betting on football games, no so much the games themselves as each play, pass or run, stuff like that, which sounds exotic but except for one time when I got on a bad streak and lose twenty-two bucks which took me about six weeks of caddying for the Mayfair swells to pay was usually the difference of two or three dollars.         

Other bets were a bit racier. Like whether Sally, who was going out with Pat, would let him “touch” her, and you know what I mean and don’t ask how we verified such bets but just know that we did do so. Or whether such and such a girl, a hot girl usually, would take the bait and give one of us a date. Hell, sometimes when the girls came into Sal’s to have some pizza, Cokes and to play the great jukebox that he had over in the corner we would bet on what song a girl would play. There was a certain art to that proposition for instance if a girl had just broken up with her boyfriend there would likely be some slow sad song chosen. You get what I mean. Sometimes it would be whether the notoriously late local bus would arrive on time or not. So anything was up for betting purposes.          

         

That ringer secretary in the film though got me thinking about the strangest bet I ever made back then, maybe ever. One Friday night, another one of those girl-less ones, Jack Callahan, this is before fetching Chrissie McNamara snagged him, bet me on how high Sal would toss the pizza dough when he was kneading and stretching it to make his great pizza pies. Jack’s idea for calling the bet, mine too for taking it, was that one of us but not both could have enough kale for a date with Laura Lawrence on Saturday night. We were both interested in her and she liked us both well enough although Jack as the football hero probably had the edge aside from the money factor. So the bet was on. Oh, I forgot to tell you that if one of the corner boys made a proposition the other guy (or guys depending on the nature of the bet) had to take the bet, or lose and pay up anyway. So naturally I said “bet.”      

The time of the bet was probably about seven o’clock so we had to wait a bit for Sal to start making more pizzas for the crowd that would be coming in around eight or so for their slice and soda before heading to some date or to the local lovers’ lane. Sal did eventually get going, maybe a half an hour later. The idea for who would win any individual bet on the toss was whether Sal flipped the dough above or below the Coke sign directly behind him. I got to call the first bet. Low. I won and the race was on taking my shots at high or low. I did pretty well for a while, was up maybe seven or eight dollars which would be enough to take Laura out, maybe a movie and something to eat. I figured I was in. Then my luck began to change, change dramatically and before long I was down about ten bucks before Sal stopped tossing the goddam stuff.

Jack smiled a knowing smile, knowing that he was going to escort Laura around and maybe get to “touch” her and you know what I mean by that and I don’t have to spell it out. Here’s where everything about that film review by Sandy comes into play. Sal was the ringer. Remember Jack was a football hero and Sal loved football, loved Jack’s prowess on the field and Jack had told him the situation earlier in the day before I showed up there. They had planned to let me win early to draw me in and had set up a silent signal about which position I had taken. How about that. Don’t you think now that I am thinking about it and getting burned up all over again that the next time I go over to Jack and Chrissie’s house in Hingham that I should ask for that ten bucks back-with interest. Yeah, Sandy had it right some guys will bet on anything.             

You Can’t Always Get What You Want -A Devil’s Bargain-With Bette Davis’ “All About Eve” In Mind

You Can’t Always Get What You Want -A Devil’s Bargain-With Bette Davis’ “All About Eve” In Mind

By Sandy Salmon

[When I first took on this assignment which was in an unusual case assigned to me by the Editorial Board and specifically from its chair Sam Lowell (whom in the interest of transparency I knew in the old days when we were both stringers at American Film Gazette) rather than directly from site manager Greg Green there was talk around the water cooler that this piece would really be autobiographical. That is emphatically not the case.

To give a little biography in high school in Newark, New Jersey I developed a very strong interest in art, in being an artist. That interest was nurtured and inflamed by Mr. Jones-Henry a transplanted Englishman whose roots included some now forgotten connection with the artist Burne-Jones. He was an alumnus of the Massachusetts School of Art in Boston and had assured me that I could get into that school on his recommendation and that the all important question of scholarship money would also be forthcoming since he had some connections in the Financial Affairs Office.     

As is hopefully clear from this vantage point I did not pursue that route, although some fifty years later I, at times, wish I had gone the “starving artist” in the Soho garret route. What happened to block me from going to art school was a very determined mother who feared unto the high heavens that I would stay down in the mud, stay poor for the rest of my life if I became a struggling artist. That factor was important to her since I was the one child in the family who looked like he (or she) would get out from under the grinding factory worker history of our extended family with its periods of unemployment and always, always, wanting habits for stuff we did not have, would never have. Although I was not as frantic as her about my future success that tipped the scales away from art school. But as can also hopefully be seen from this vantage point I did not become a civil servant which was my mother’s, and not only my mother’s, idea of success.      

I eventually came to this publication though through a connection with art so maybe I am sanctified. Back in the early 1970s while in college I got involved with an alternative newspaper, The East Coast Eye, which carried many articles and such that mainline newspapers wouldn’t or didn’t touch. I became something like the art reporter for the publication although unpaid as most of us were. That in turn after I graduated got me a job as a stringer for American Film Gazette (where I met Sam) doing all kinds of assignments including reviewing films a subject I hadn’t previously touched. I eventually became film editor there before my retirement, or rather before I was lured over to this publication as a half-way house to retirement once Sam persuaded me to finish my career on what he called a high note. Still some days, some pencil in hand doodling days during conferences, I wish I had chosen another road like old Robert Frost said in his famous poem. S.S]       

Confession: I, Jeffery Jaspers, had never wanted to be a film critic, or any kind of critic at all. What I wanted, what I dreamed of from an early age, maybe ten or eleven, after seeing a stage production of The Wizard Of Oz was to be an actor, a stage actor the only kind. To be on the Great White Way, on Broadway in New York City far away from my Cannon’s Bend, Pennsylvania roots. They say that politicians, successful politicians have made a devil’s bargain to get where they are, to gain power over people and projects but that profession is not the only one where individuals willingly consort with the devil, gladly, make their bargain for fame and a little stardom. I was willing to strike such a bargain to gain the bright lights but I never got that far, never got to go mano y mano with Satan for my soul against earthy paradise. Instead I have labored in the field of film criticism as something like the booby prize since I shared, still shared, what used to be called the legitimate theater’s, Broadway’s disdain for cinematic and television actors (to speak nothing of the contempt for huckster actors shilling for some godawful commercial products). I have never gotten over my failure to smell the sawdust and dabble with the greasepaint.             

There is a story behind this failure, a failure that I had some what suppressed for many years or so I thought until I did a recent re-watching, no, re-re-watching of a DVD of the classic inside Broadway film All About Eve starring Bette Davis, Anne Bancroft, George Sanders and a host of other very fine performers. When I was a senior in highs school I grabbed the lead in the senior year play Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I was so thrilled to get the Hamlet role that I asked my mother, nee Harriet DeWitt, to ask her uncle to come to the play and see if I had any serious acting ability. (Of course I thought I did and that uncle would only confirm such truths.)

See my granduncle was none other than the famous Broadway theater critic Addison DeWitt. For those who don’t remember that name for many years before he died about twenty years ago he was the critic for the Broadway Call. More importantly by that time he had been syndicated in most of the major newspapers in the country so that what Addison DeWitt had to say about a play carried much weight for anybody coming to Broadway or viewing an on-the-road production of such plays. If he left during the first act to relieve himself in the men’s room (really to have a cigarette for he was a serious chain-smoker in an age when such practices were considered manly and cool) the play would probably close that night. Although not before he had raked the dead thing over the coals for the next five days to make sure it never arose from that death spiral. If he liked a play or an actor, actress really, then he would smother with praise. As I will mention shortly there were ways, non- theatrical ways, to get that praise beyond honest work. He really was a Class A scoundrel.

So one Friday night he came up from New York (he dearly loved my mother, or maybe better, his sister and through her my mother) to see the production. Although he sat through the production I could see that he was fidgety, that he kept taking his cigarette case out and looked at it longingly. I think in retrospect I was only saved by the “no smoking” rule on school property. That and maybe an extra size devotion to my mother one of the few people he was kind to without regard to interest. Now that I have mentioned that tell-tale cigarette signal I don’t have to explain that he put two thumbs down on my acting career that night. Said I should be an English major since my mother (who secretly did not want me on the stage and had asked him once she knew he had panned me to plug that English major idea) had asked him to help along that path. Strangely he would be the person who got me my job at the American Film Gazette through some connections he had developed over the years although his contempt for film actors (and later television actors) was even greater than mine in those days.

The strange part of his part in my career is that when Broadway had gone through one of its down cycles (due to those films and television and later the cost of production and lack of deep pockets investors who were going elsewhere) he had actually been forced to get a second job at the Gazette where he bombed. Had on a whim I think or maybe as I found out more about the way he operated later, that non-theatrical way to get his attention something more he had touted the film To Tell No Lie when every other critic had deep six panned it. Had, and here is my non-theatrical speculation at play, touted Lola Moran as the greatest actress since Sarah Bernhardt. She was never heard again after that disaster and Uncle Addison probably moved onto the next best thing.            

                    

That school play night though he not only gave me my acting career walking papers but tried to put things in perspective- that was his word. Gave me a very long talk about having to make a devil’s bargain to get those stars beside your name on your dressing room door. He sensed I didn’t have it in me. I wasn’t hungry enough like he had been. He told me straight up that he had made his own devil’s pact and that was only so that he would be the number one theater critic. Had gladly done it. Then he proceeded to give me what I later realized, much later, was a cautionary tale. That was the night he told me about how he had ridden Eve Harrington’s talent to solidify his positon in the Great White Way. I had heard of Eve Harrington vaguely when I was researching and reading plays in high school and had remembered that she had lit up Broadway with her performance as Cora in I Remember The Night according to the liner notes after each play and the chronology of who performed various parts over time in the productions.     

Uncle Addison had a gleam in his eye when he mentioned her name that first time and made me think maybe he loved her, something like that. I was probably wrong, and it doesn’t change the story but here goes. Margo, yes, Margo no last name needed in the old days, in the 1940s, when her star flamed white hot on the Great White Way, but now Margo Channing for readers who are rightly clueless about who I am talking about, was truly the queen bee of Broadway with a series of hits beginning with her breakthrough role as the young ingénue in You Reap What You Sow. Like every other profession worth fighting over for number one status the contenders came early and often. Most fell down, went back to the small town or out of town theater circuit but some and Eve, Eve no last name needed in the old days when her star flamed white hot on the Great White Way, but now Eve Harrington for readers who are rightly clueless about who I am talking about did not, did give Margo one hell of a battle.         

Such rises and falls do not occur all at once or by happenstance as Uncle Addison would be the first to tell you. Tell you that a very well-placed critic or producer can pave your way with his favors for your favors (then women mostly for men but today who knows with all the possible sexual preferences abound in the land). What Uncle Addison failed to tell me, would fail to tell anybody especially those impressible ingenues blinded by the bright lights is that some actors will harness their own energies to step more quickly up the food chain. That may have been Margo although my uncle never mentioned her roots since he had not made her a star as he did with Eve but it defined Eve to a tee. From the minute she entered Margo’s life, as a dresser at first and go-fer too, every move she made was to both undermine Margo’s theater reputation-and her personal life including throwing herself at Margo’s well-known director writer fiancé. This was a no holes- barred metaphorical fistfight to the death with plenty of barbs and trickery and while Margo held her own for a while the new blood Eve rose to the top based on talent and talons.

That is the public story but Uncle Addison gave me the back story now that both Margo and Eve have passed. Eve, on her way up, had planned to take a well-known Broadway writer away from his wife but he cut Eve short. Eve had created, as many have for lesser reasons, a whole sob story previous life which was all fairy tale. After failing to lure Margo’s fiancé away from her she went after that married writer who was smitten by her. Uncle had found out the real shady story behind Eve’s façade and used that to keep her back from the writer and all for himself. (When I asked if Eve had gone to bed with him Uncle demurred but that meant to me that he had). Here is where things got weird though. Since fame is fleeing I asked Addison what happened to Eve whom like I said before I had never really heard of. He told a very chilling tale about how a young wannabe actor in her turn befriended Eve and would go on to undermine Eve and rise to the top herself. Since she is still alive Uncle would not give her name but from his look I knew too that he had something to do with her rise-and her bedding by him too.                     

Remember Attica Blood in the Water The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson (Pantheon, 2016) A Review

Remember Attica Blood in the Water The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson (Pantheon, 2016) A Review Workers Vanguard No. 1103	13 January 2017

Remember Attica

Blood in the Water

The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

by Heather Ann Thompson

(Pantheon, 2016)

A Review

On the morning of 9 September 1971, nearly 1,300 inmates—predominantly black and Puerto Rican—took over the state prison at Attica, New York. Four days later 29 of them lay dead, cut down in a hail of bullets fired by New York State Police, sheriffs and corrections officers. Governor Nelson Rockefeller gave the order. President Richard Nixon cheered them on. In the aftermath, the surviving prisoners were subjected to hideous torture and later charged with a total of 1,300 crimes. Among these were kidnapping and, most obscenely, unlawful imprisonment based on taking prison guards hostage, ten of whom were gunned down by Rockefeller’s stormtroopers when they retook the prison.

For many years, Democratic and Republican administrations in Albany, along with the courts, have covered up much of the truth of what took place at Attica, assisted by the same capitalist press that peddled the lie that the prisoners shot the guards. A significant part of that shroud has been peeled back by Heather Ann Thompson in her recent book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Thompson’s book brings to life the dignity and humanity of the prisoners who were treated as little more than dirt by Rockefeller and his ilk. She describes in vivid detail the dehumanizing conditions that gave rise to the rebellion and the racist venom that ran from the governor’s mansion down to the cops and prison guards who hunted down the uprising’s leaders. Thompson got her own sampling of that venom for naming the prison guards who carried out assassinations and torture.

Thompson’s comprehensive history is a result of her many years of diligent archival research and a bit of good fortune in uncovering key sources that had been suppressed. As she notes, “The most important details of this story have been deliberately kept from the public. Literally thousands of boxes of documents relating to these events are sealed or next to impossible to access.” Regarding the most explosive documents she uncovered, Thompson says, “All of the Attica files that I saw in that dark room of the Erie County courthouse have now vanished.”

For millions around the world, Attica became a potent symbol of rebellion against brutal repression—and a stark emblem of racist state murder. To this day it continues to inspire struggles against the racist degradation of black people inside and outside of prison walls. The first issue of Workers Vanguard (October 1971) led with the headline “Massacre at Attica.” We stated bluntly: “The brutal, bloody murderers of Attica are none other than the ruling class of this society,” saying further:

“Rockefeller cut down the Attica prisoners in the manner of his father and grandfather before him—ruthlessly and to protect the system from which his profits spring. From the murder of the Ludlow miners to the present, this family has carried the policies of the armed fist over the entire globe.... The Rockefeller name and the Rockefeller practice symbolize, more than any other, the American capitalist class—a class that will stop at nothing to extend and protect its profitable holdings.”

Attica was an explosion waiting to happen. The 2,200 men warehoused in a facility built for 1,600 were routinely beaten by guards, locked in cells 16 hours a day, rationed one sheet of toilet paper daily, one bar of soap a month and one shower per week—even in the heat of summer. Among the main grievances was censorship of reading materials—no newspapers, very few books, and nothing at all to read in Spanish. It wasn’t an absolute ban—the prison authorities mocked the prisoners by supplying magazines such as Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, American Home and House Beautiful.

Hours after the revolt began, L.D. Barkley, a 21-year-old Black Panther Party member imprisoned for violating parole by driving without a license, read out the prisoners’ powerful declaration: “We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such.”

The prisoners called for the minimum wage for prison work (they were paid slave wages of between 20 cents and one dollar per day), accompanied by an end to censorship and restrictions on political activity, religious freedom, rehabilitation, education and decent medical care. They expressed solidarity with the Vietnamese workers and peasants as well as others fighting U.S. imperialism. The main demand was amnesty for participating in the rebellion, along with “speedy and safe transportation out of confinement, to a Non-Imperialist country.” Most likely in mind were Cuba, where the capitalist rulers had been overthrown and a bureaucratically deformed workers state led by Fidel Castro established, or Algeria, a capitalist state governed by left nationalists that had given refuge to Black Panthers in exile.

As Thompson points out, many of the prisoners at Attica were veterans of eruptions over similar conditions at Manhattan’s Tombs detention center and the prison in Auburn, New York, the prior year. The bitter anger that was about to explode at Attica was displayed 19 days earlier when word spread through the cells that prison authorities at California’s San Quentin prison had assassinated Black Panther Party member George Jackson on 21 August 1971. The next day, over 800 Attica inmates marched silently into breakfast wearing black armbands and held a fast in protest. California prison officials had targeted Jackson, along with W.L. Nolen and Hugo Pinell, for forging solidarity of black, Latino and white prisoners. New York officials were no less alarmed by the interracial unity growing among Attica’s inmates.

The prison revolt reflected the growing ferment and struggles taking place outside prison walls, not least the “black power” movement and radical protests against the war in Vietnam. Many of the black inmates identified with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) and Puerto Ricans looked to the Young Lords, which was inspired by the Panthers. Playing a leading role in the rebellion was Sam Melville, a white member of the Weather Underground who was serving 18 years for placing explosives in government buildings in protest against the war in Vietnam. As Thompson observes, the presence of such activists “offered Attica’s otherwise apolitical men—like [Frank] Big Black Smith—a new understanding of their discontents and a new language for articulating them.” Smith ended up leading the prisoners’ security force, made up largely of Black Muslims. His group treated the prison guards taken hostage with a humanity that the prisoners had been denied.

For a long time before Blood in the Water, the biggest window into what took place at Attica came from Tom Wicker’s A Time to Die. Wicker, a New York Times reporter, along with radical attorney William Kunstler, was among the outside observers whom the prisoners demanded to negotiate through rather than directly with prison and state authorities. Prison officials granted this one demand, intending to use the observers to convince the prisoners to release the hostages and surrender without amnesty. To his credit, BPP leader Bobby Seale, whom the prisoners also sought as an observer, uniquely refused to be involved in attempts to nudge the inmates toward surrender. Seale made clear the BPP position that “all political prisoners who want to be released to go to non-imperialistic countries should be complied with.”

The retaking of Attica began in the morning of September 13 with a cloud of CN and CS gas dropped from a helicopter that covered every prisoner with a nauseating, incapacitating powder and it ended with a bloodbath. The rebellion’s leadership paid dearly. Barkley, Melville and others were assassinated in the prison yard. Surviving prisoners, including the wounded, were stripped naked, made to crawl through the mud and the blood, then lined up to run a gantlet over broken glass and be beaten by cops and guards wielding what they called their “n----r sticks.” After being threatened with castration, Big Black Smith was forced to lie on a table for five hours with a football tucked under his chin, under threat of being shot if it rolled loose.

For the capitalist ruling class, Attica had to be crushed with particular vengeance because the rebels had begun to see their struggle in political and even revolutionary terms. One of Thompson’s discoveries is Nixon’s celebration of the bloodbath: “I think this is going to have a hell of a salutary effect on future prison riots.... Just like Kent State had a hell of a salutary effect” (referring to the 4 May 1970 National Guard killing of four students protesting the invasion of Cambodia—an extension of U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants). Nixon added, “They can talk all they want about force, but that is the purpose of force.”

Attica Nation

Thompson, a historian at the University of Michigan and expert on mass incarceration, is particularly motivated by prison reform. She notes that the immediate aftermath of the Attica revolt saw some improvements in food, medical care, clothing, mail censorship and number of showers permitted. However, as she points out, this was followed by an “unprecedented backlash against all efforts to humanize prison conditions in America.”

Inmates today continue to be used as slave labor, face censorship of political literature and conditions at least as dehumanizing and sadistic, including the increasing use of solitary confinement—universally recognized as a form of torture. Brutality by prison guards is a daily fact of life, especially for the black and Latino victims disproportionately singled out for discipline.

The backlash to which Thompson refers is one expression of the bipartisan rollback of the limited democratic gains for black people attained by the liberal-led civil rights movement. Its most glaring manifestation for the past three decades has been the mass incarceration of black people, largely a consequence of the “war on drugs.” This overt war on black people was accompanied by escalating cop terror against the ghettos and barrios.

Today’s plethora of drug laws is an outgrowth of the state repression under the “war on crime” kicked off by Democratic president Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 “Safe Streets Act” and Nixon’s 1970 “Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act” and carried on by Democratic and Republican administrations since. The number of people languishing in U.S. prisons and jails, 2.2 million, is six times what it was in 1971. The costs of maintaining this vast prison complex have led to calls for easing up on the war on drugs.

Prisons are the concentrated expression of the depravity of this society. They are a key instrument in coercing, torturing and brutalizing those who have been cast off as the useless residue of a system rooted in exploitation and racial oppression. The deindustrialization of much of the U.S. that began in the late 1960s drove millions of black people out of the workforce and into the ranks of the permanently outcast. In the calculations of the American bourgeoisie, a substantial part of the black population, who used to provide labor for the auto plants and steel mills, is simply written off as an expendable population. Having condemned black as well as Latino youth to desperate poverty, the rulers whipped up hysteria painting the ghettoized poor as criminal “superpredators,” whom cops can gun down with impunity, and for whom no sentence is too long, no prison conditions too harsh. This demonization of the black population has served to deepen the wedge between white and black workers in a period of virtually no class struggle.

Marxists support the struggle for any demand that meets the immediate needs of prisoners. But under capitalism no reforms can fundamentally alter the repressive nature of the prisons. Along with the cops, military and courts, prisons are a pillar of the capitalist state, whose basic function is to maintain, through force or threat of force, the rule of the capitalist class and its economic exploitation of the working class. In the U.S., where racial oppression is at the core of the capitalist system, any alleviation of prison conditions must be linked to the fight against black oppression in general. We fight to abolish the prison system, which will be done only when the capitalist order—with its barbaric state institutions—is shattered by a proletarian socialist revolution that establishes a planned, collectivized economy with jobs and quality, integrated housing and education for all.

Thompson’s sympathies clearly lie with the Attica prisoners. Yet she evinces a soft spot for the prison guards, whom she sees as victims as well. Her poster boy for humanizing the guards is Mike Smith, a 22-year-old former machinist apparently liked by the prisoners and sympathetic to their demands. Smith, after being taken hostage by the prisoners, was shot by the cops and grievously wounded. Thompson writes, “Like so many other small town boys who had grown up in rural New York Mike needed to make a living, and prisons were the going industry.” Thompson also gives voice to the guards taken hostage and the families of the ten of them whom Rockefeller’s assassins gunned down, who resent the fact that the surviving Attica prisoners won a paltry monetary settlement from the state after nearly three decades.

As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky pointed out 85 years ago, the worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state is a bourgeois cop, not a worker, an admonition no less applicable to prison guards. As we noted at the time of the Attica massacre, “These despicable racist guards are despised even by the ruling class that cynically uses them. The governor not only served notice on the prisoners that rebellion does not pay, and rebellion linked with revolutionary ideas means certain death, but he had a message for the guards too: Keep the upper hand or else!”

The basic function of the prisons is lost on the liberal academic Thompson, whose call for prison reform envisions a commonality of interests between inmates and prison guards—a relationship akin to that of slave and overseer. In a 2011 paper, “Rethinking Working-Class Struggle Through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards,” she declares, “It is time once again for the American working class to pay attention to penal facilities as sites of productive labor and wage competition and to recognize that its destiny is tied in subtle but important ways to the ability of inmates as well as prison guards to demand fair pay and safe working conditions.” Thompson lauds the return of prison guards to municipal unions, such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

What, then, are “safe working conditions” for prison guards? In our 1971 article, we sharply criticized Jerry Wurf, the AFSCME president, as he threatened a “slowdown” by union guards after the Attica massacre:

“Wurf demanded more and better riot equipment—helmets, tear gas and masks, to be borrowed from police departments if necessary, and hiring of more guards. Yet he had the effrontery to maintain, ‘We’re not at war with the inmates; the state of New York is at war with them.’ What forces does the state of New York employ to make war on the inmates if not the cops and guards Wurf is happy to represent?... No union can represent both workers and the sworn servants of the capitalist class, the police and prison guards.”

The increasing prominence of cops and prison guards—workers’ class enemies—in the shrinking union movement underscores the need for ousting the pro-capitalist bureaucrats and forging a class-struggle leadership in the basic organs of workers struggle.

Three years before L.D. Barkley read out the Attica Brothers’ powerful declaration, striking black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, famously walked picket lines with signs declaring, “I am a man.” Today, the racist capitalist ruling class continues to treat black people as if they were less than human and their lives don’t matter. But there is a reservoir of social power in the organized working class, in which black workers, who make up the unions’ most loyal and militant sector, remain disproportionately represented. Under revolutionary leadership, black workers, who form an organic link to the anger of the oppressed ghetto poor, will play a vanguard role in the struggles of the entire U.S. working class. It is the purpose of the Spartacist League to build a workers party that links the fight for black freedom to the struggle for proletarian state power. Workers rule on a world scale will open the road to a communist future in which the modern instruments of incarceration and death will be discarded as relics of a decaying social order that deserved only to perish.