Once Again On History In The Conditional-Or In The Spy Thriller Conditional-The Film Adaptation Of Ken Follet’s “Eye Of The Needle” (1981) -A Film Review

Once Again On History In The Conditional-Or In The Spy Thriller Conditional-The Film Adaptation Of Ken Follet’s “Eye Of The Needle” (1981) -A Film Review

DVD Review

By Will Bradley

Eye Of The Needle, starring Donald Sutherland, Kate Nelligan, 1981

No question, although one might posit that we or they should move on, the whole Hitler saga from World War II has made many a writer, spy thriller writer, producers and directors plenty of gold, plenty of coin. Especially around the question of what would have been the response if, well, let’s say Hitler had known definitively that the Allied invasion to free Occupied Europe (occupied by Hitler and his minions) was to be at Normandy Beach rather than elsewhere come D-Day. That is no abstract question for the protagonists and their foes in the film under review the adaptation of Ken Follet’s Eye Of The Needle. Moreover not only are profession academic, men of learning and such, smitten with such speculations but your average thriller writer had taken up the cudgels big time. Of course history in the conditional is always tricky for the academic, for the professor with one big idea contingent on that vague conditional but apparently is the fount of wisdom for the thriller boys and girls.

Here is why for Follet devotees. Henry, I will follow Lance Lawrence’s’ recent trope of saying somebody, so Henry somebody in this case, played by pliable Donald Sutherland,   who the hell knows since he is a high-end, high-born German spy, placed in England even before World War II started that Auden September 1939 when he, Auden, blew town, the agent using a million aliases when it suited him was a key operative keeping tabs on what the freaking Brits were doing for war preparations. He would not let anything get in his way including nosey landladies and the trademark way of dealing with such trouble at the end of a stiletto, hence needle, the eye part you can figure out. He was able to operate free as a bird for most of the war until things got dark in Germany, better, took a turn for the worse on the Eastern Front where the Russians, who bore the brunt of the action against madman Hitler and his crowd, started their long journey to Berlin and the raising of the red flag over part of that city. What they wanted to know, what Hitler wanted to know, and this is good military policy mad men or not, was where General Patton was going to launch what even Hitler knew was a run to Berlin from the West. But where. That was Henry somebody’s task-to find out and to deliver the proof to the big boss himself in Berlin via a convenient U-boat off the Scottish coast.

Normally such an operation by a pro like Needle would be a piece of cake and in real life maybe that would settle things but this is spy thriller theater, so everything has to be a travail-and it is. Needle got the definitive proof on film and that was the start of his journey home. The problem was the Brits, Scotland Yard, were on to him, knew he has done some nasty things to get and keep Father Hitler in power- and information. The chase was on with the coppers about two, maybe seven steps behind the elusive Needle. Until he reached Storm Island, well-named having been shipwrecked with a stolen boat during a storm, a trawler, as that U-boat waited impatiently for his call. The Storm Island situation despite its isolation though would be Needle’s downfall once he encountered an embittered former Royal Air Force pilot who lost his legs in a civilian automobile accident of his own mistaken doing, his wife and child all who have left sweet home London for the boondocks and stormy weather.

Needle figured to be on easy street via this nice quiet hellish homestead as he waited for that U-boat. Problem though is grilled by that embittered pilot, and bedded if you can believe this, by that neglected wife, played by Kate Nelligan, who was just lonely because of hubby’s neglect as was Needle since he was a loner. Along the way said pilot got wise to our Needle but paid the price for that knowledge with a dip face-down in the cliff-drenched waters. Wifey, after a few rolls in the hay with Needle which she did not complain about, finally learned the truth when she discovered her husband’s body and subsequently Needle made what would be his fatal mistake by saying he had just seen her husband alive. Knowing he was nothing but a German agent she went mano a mano with him to protect herself and her son. In the end that is enough to seal Needle’s doom long before the coppers showed up. Still I wonder if Needle had gotten to the U-boat and gotten to see his master in Berlin whether Hitler knowing the route of the invasion would have changed things. Better ask a military historian. 

When Sylvia Sidney Battered Her Eyelashes-The Once And Future…Princess- Ms. Sidney and Cary Grant’s “Thirty-Day Princess” (1934)- Film Review

When Sylvia Sidney Battered Her Eyelashes-The Once And Future…Princess- Ms. Sidney and Cary Grant’s “Thirty-Day Princess” (1934)- Film Review

DVD Review

By Lance Lawrence

Thirty Day Princess, starring Sylvia Sidney, Cary Grant, Edward Arnold, 1934

Lest one forget this country, this United States in a republic, yes, republic with a small “r,” despite what fragility that designation has come upon of late, of the past fifty or sixty years. Our forebears, oh you know this but let me get it off my chest, our winter soldiers when that meant something, drove the British, dear Mother England, into the deep blue sea, into the Atlantic and thereafter, what did Ben Franklin say, formed a republic-if we could keep it. But there has been a lot of backsliding on the question, on the question of giving a pass to every royal Tom, Dick and Harry. Of every Kate, Jane and Mary. Of worrying to a frazzle about what Princess somebody was wearing, or not wearing, of giving a pass to all kinds of stuff our forebears, rightly, would have blanched at while decayed royalty goes about its unsavory business. There I have it off my chest. What brought me to the froth was a look at the movie under review, The Thirty-Day Princess, where in the heart of the Great Depression, in 1934, in this country (and worldwide), fairy tale princesses had center stage. Which told me before I remembered about Henry James and his robber baron era novels which had plain, ordinary, rich Americans, male and female, pining away for some title, some sign if formal nobility to separate them from the hoi polloi, that this infatuation has a long pedigree.

I have left the reader in the lurch enough let’s get down to brass tacks. The off-kilter king of Taronia, Tiberia, something like that, some mythical European country does it really matter since it is mythical needed cash, big amounts of cash, to do the kingship business up right and to live in the splendor he was used to in the old days. Along comes Mr. American Moneybags, Mr. Plutocrat, does it really matter his name, played by perennial unlikable guy Edward Arnold, a guy who didn’t jump out the window in 1929 and had been working the chump bond market to get back on easy street offered to get the king 50 mil, 50 million just walking around money now that even pan-handlers would turn their nose up at now but big dough back then.

The problem: times were tough, and investors were wary of foreign market bonds after all kinds of floats had gone bust so they needed a hook, needed a front. The front turned out to be the king’s daughter Princess something does it really matter the name, royalty okay, played by battering eyes Sylvia Sidney who could tidy things up with a trip to America to hustle the bonds, put the king and commission crazy Moneybags back on jump street. She went but early on in New York she contracted mumps and would be out of action for, okay, thirty days if you read the title of the film before reading this screed. The deal was off, done, forget jump street. In that case though you would have underestimated commission crazy Moneybags. He came up with the bright idea of getting a substitute who looks like the princess. Guess what he finds- one who looks amazingly like the princess, Nancy something, does it really matter her name, played by a woman who really did look like Sylvia Sidney but who was a down at the heel actor living on cheap street between skimpy parts. She grabbed the role, the dough and maybe something for the resume after playing hard to get.

Enter Marshall, does it really matter the name as you can now guess, a muckraking newspaper publisher who has a bullseye on the back of crooked Mr. Moneybags, played by pretty Cary Grant in his early career, who was ready to move mountains to squash Moneybags’ operation. Until he met the “princess.” Then all caution was thrown to the winds and he acted like any other American who has forgotten that this country is a republic with a small “r.” He fell for her big-time and in an unseemly manner if you asked me. The “princess” fell for him hard too so what we have here is the two millionth variation on the old Hollywood tried and true “boy meets girl” trope that that glamor town made into a very profitable art form. Problem: princess turned actress was living a lie, was just a hireling once Marshall somebody gets on to the grift.       

Don’t worry though things smoothed out a little when Marshall ( I don’t have to say “somebody” at this late part of the piece, do I) realized that he loves that democratic down at the heels actress whose heart really was of gold and that was that. Needless to say although Taronia got its bonds money Mr. Moneybags got his comeuppance too. Only in America.

Down And Dirty In The Acre-North Adamsville Style-Circa 1960-When The Corner Boys Were Corner Boys For Real Back In The Day

By Bart Webber

No, by no stretch of the imagination as the ex-editor of this publication and now some kind of “of counsel” contributing editor Allan Jackson has speculated even if in some personal nightmarish dream am I sleeping with the fishes. (Contributing editor means that even hard-boiled current editor Greg Green will have a hard time reining Allan in since there is no word limit or apparently no slander or libel, depending on the source, that such special creatures can spew forth without correction, at least after reading that last piece of Allan’s which was nothing but a no-brain bunch of bullshit on a stick aimed at my head). My watery fate deemed appropriate by Mr. Jackson courtesy of the fact, if it is a fact this late in life, that after almost sixty years I have “spilled the beans,” hell snitched, finked, dropped a dime I think we used to call it on an episode where he almost drowned as a kid and I was sworn to secrecy as the sole witness to the event. At the time I believe, and I think he will agree as well, it was about keeping that knowledge from his mother who would probably have grounded him from the beaches and the ocean at least through high school.      

I won’t, no, I refuse to, bore the reader with a recap of the events which led up to Allan’s silly experiment which led him to be rescued before he went down the third time by the on-duty life guard, a young mother rather than the average muscle-bound college guy or buxom college co-ed who craved those jobs to wile away the summer days and pocket coin for nighttime expenses. The key to Allan’s anger and his strange elderly dreams is what this is all about, the so-called breaking of the Code of Omerta that we lived and died by back in the day and which made plenty of sense then when we were about some stuff that the public coppers and other authorities would not have approved of. But to get into a snit over some long-gone event (especially with his mother who passed away over a decade ago is no longer around), to “threaten” hit men and much else seems excessive at this point. So I will tell you the real point of why Allan in in a doldrums huff.

That day, that day which I think Allan is right about being somewhere when we were around eleven, possibly twelve not the eight of my original piece not only had that young mother life guard been on duty to save Allan’s ruddy ass but had brought as was her practice her young daughter Ginny along. This Ginny was a lanky kind of raw-boned tallish girl who I had a serious crush on at the time. So naturally when I saw her I went over to make “my moves,” those being some silly schoolboy talk about whatever eleven, maybe twelve- year olds would talk about. So in a way Allan is right when in his now infamous rebuttal is right that I was not observing every freaking action he was taking but I will state for the record, will swear on seven sealed Bibles that I am the guy who heard his faint cries for help and alerted that young mother life guard who saved his sorry life.      

The reader should know that the so-called crush on Ginny did not go anywhere at the time since she was a Squaw Rock girl. The Nollie Point assignment her mother drew was connected with the housing projects where Allan and I grew up (and Pete Markin and Sam Lowell too), the low rent end of town. Squaw Rock was, and I believe still is, the high-toned end of town where those who in the 1950s were living some aspect of the golden age, or at least had the wherewithal to buy the new ranch houses that were all the rage then as a sign that they had become the vaunted middle class. So no way was that young mother, for that matter was Ginny once the peer pressure was exerted if necessary, going to go for some projects boy. And she didn’t. I will admit that when Ginny and I got to high school (we went to different junior high schools) at North I tried again to see what was what but the code of the Squaw Rock girls (and maybe her mother too) was still in force.           

Here is where the rubber meets the road, the real reason that Allan has daggers in his eyes these days. Recently I went to an ad hoc class reunion (ad hoc because after the 50^th reunion all agreed that something every couple of years and less formal was more appropriate) where I ran into Ginny. We got to talking about this and that until we kind of worked our way back to the day when her mother had saved Allan down at Nollie Point. Ginny laughed when I told her that I had been sworn to secrecy by Allan not to mention the incident to anybody under our boyhood code and that speaking about it to her was the first time I had done so in that some sixty-year period. The laugh was because she was particularly aware of the incident and who was saved, had known that Allan had gone on to some kind of career in the publishing business. So, until I read his lame so-called rebuttal I thought not much about having mentioned it to Ginny.    

The reader can guess, or I hope should guess, that Ginny and I continued talking not only that class reunion night be thereafter and have had several dates (although her two marriages and my three make “date” a little passe) to see what is what. Her girlish Squaw Rock code now long gone, thankfully. If you want to really know why Allan is wishing me in the ocean depths, digging whatever in Neptune’s patch here is what Ginny told me. In high school as I was ardently pursuing her to no avail Allan also was trying to get to first base with her. Closer to the nub though, closer much closer to the truth Allan had met Ginny at a previous ad hoc class reunion I had not attended and had gotten nowhere with her. Strange doings, life.        

The Junkies Were Valiant-Crying Out For Repentance And God Save Us Sinners-The Junkies Have Always Been With Us-The Fixer Man Too

The Junkies Were Valiant-Crying Out For Repentance And God Save Us Sinners-The Junkies Have Always Been With Us-The Fixer Man Too

By Fritz Taylor

The one thing I hate, and maybe the biggest reason I only read police procedurals under duress or when hot summer comes, is how fake the scenarios are, how so very competent the coppers are, the public coppers in any case. (This will be blasphemy to guys like Rav Wilson, Seth Garth and Sam Lowell but in my book the private dicks are almost as unreal except they draw something of a pass since at least they are willing to draw some fire their way, take a fist or a slug for the employer if it comes to that wrapping it around their dailies and expense something the coffee and cruller coppers would never do, not in real life anyway.) The reason all this comes up is that after I read Rav Wilson’s review of a Lem Kane police procedural Hotel New Yorker I got tired of his belly-aching about how silly the stuff displayed was against his “heroic” private coppers like Phil Larkin and Danny Collins and early hard-boiled detectives like Miles Archer and Phil Marlowe. Like I said the private dicks aren’t anything to write home about, but the public coppers portrayed are truly unreal.

What is real is what happened every day down in Fulton County, down in Georgia where I grew up in deeply segregated Mister James Crow country in the 1950s although that factor does not really enter into my story. What does enter is the Fort Point Estates, yes, that is really what they called them which were as many older readers will almost automatically recognize were “the projects” the government subsidized housing set up after World War II for mostly veterans, white veterans exclusively so Mister James  Crow does as always at least make cameo appearance, and their young families as a spring board to better housing later but necessary then after the housing crunch caused by the war.

The Fort Point Estates were the southern version of what guys like fellow Vietnam veteran Seth Garth were talking about in growing up in the north in North Adamsville and ditto the veteran status Ralph Morris out on Tappan Street in Troy, New York. In short places where the most vulnerable and desperate denizens of society found themselves or else they would have been reduced to the really dreaded county farm or utter homelessness (which according to family legend my family was in right after World War II when we lived out of a car, a clunker car before hitting the Estates).  

Desperates, desperadoes probably are as good as any operative words to describe life in those conditions (and Seth wrote about more eloquently than I ever could, and a guy named Pete Markin who they all still venerate who had the pulse of that existence down pat before his own early death partially attributed to the emotional ravages of growing up in the projects). But to the point, the anti-belly-aching point about the public coppers and what they did or did not do in real life. In a place like the Estates which like many such projects were established on what amounted to wasteland and isolated away from the good citizens public services were minimal and private services depended on how much risk some private parties were willing to take to eke out a massive profit from the misery of the poor denizens of such places. Enter Jimmy Bob Carter, the Carter family name if you can believe it either somehow related through marriage to the famed Carter classic country music family based out of Clinch Mountain in Virginia or Judge Jacob “Death Penalty” Carter who would go on to become some high state official in Georgia spawning a political dynasty before he was through.

This Jimmy Bob had a few bucks I guess and decided that since there no serious supermarket for several miles around that he would open up what amounted to a Mom and Pop Variety Store. Would provide the unwashed with small amounts of goods, this before food stamps bailed people of few resources out of the worse of their situations, for too much money. Except and who knows what drove him, or his wife Vivian who had been some kind of degree daughter of the Confederacy in her maidenhood to some small kindnesses there would always be very, very cheap candy to keep us coming in (and probably mother in tow as well).

Of course, that was all so much bull, so much eye wash. What Jimmy Bob and Lady Vivian (she picked that moniker up somewhere along the line but don’t ask me how or why) really were up to was using that funny little storefront at the entrance to the Estates (everybody with or without an automobile had to pass the place on the way in or out) to “make book,” illegal betting, to run a bunch of the neighborhood girls (some young mothers under duress too with say a husband who spent the weekly paycheck on liquor maybe some other woman having to put out to keep the bill collector wolves from the door) out of the upstairs rooms, called the game rooms, Vivian’s operation from what I later came to understand when I stopped thinking candy was all that was sweet in the world. Worse of all in the long haul I guess was Jimmy Bob proved to be the “fixer man,” the drug dealer of choice with whatever drugs could heal some broken down spirits.

Like I said most of this stuff I had no clue about until I was maybe ten, way too young to know about the seamy side of life but we knew it, and in the end probably just assumed that bookies, whores, pimps, fixers, and junkies were an ordinary part of every town. Here is where the stuff gets sick though, the copper stuff. The guys who ran and operated out of the police substation were “on the take” from Jimmy Bob and nobody thought anything of it. I remember a few incidents. Once Jimmy Bob had his “book” laying right out on the counter and Officers Hamilton and Dixon came in saw the book and proceeded to write  down their bets in that leather-bound book. Another time Captain Dorian laughed when Vivian said she had a nice piece (of ass) for him and to head upstairs. Naturally the coppers grabbed their fair share of free drugs (then mainly opium and morphine, not heroin as far as I know) for their little parties, or for their honeys. Yeah, so lay off me about coppers and solving crimes and if anybody asks just point them to the still standing Fort Point Estates filled to this day with junkies, whores, fixer men… and coppers who look the other way.              

   

On The 60th Anniversary Defend The Gains Of The Cuban Revolution- - From The Archives- Do Not Cry For Me, Argentina- Remembering Che Guevara

In Honor of Anniversary Of The July 26^th Movement

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman (2015)

Every leftist, hell, everybody who stands on the democratic principle that each nation has the right to self-determination should cautiously rejoice at the “defrosting” of the long-time diplomatic relations between the American imperial behemoth and the island of Cuba (and the freedom of the remaining Cuban Five in the bargain). Every leftist militant should understand that each non-capitalist like Cuba going back to the establishment of the now defunct Soviet Union has had the right (maybe until we win our socialist future the duty) to make whatever advantageous agreements they can with the capitalist world. That despite whatever disagreements we have with the political regimes ruling those non-capitalist states. That is a question for us to work out not the imperialists.

For those who have defended the Cuban Revolution since its victory in 1959 under whatever political rationale (pro-socialist, right to self-determination, or some other hands off policy) watching on black and white television the rebels entering Havana this day which commemorates the heroic if unsuccessful efforts at Moncada we should affirm our continued defense of the Cuban revolution. Oh yes, and tell the American government to give back Guantanamo while we are at it.    

Commentary

A recent news item out of Argentina concerning the dedication of a memorial to Che Guevara caught my eye. Apparently forty years after his death the legendary guerrilla fighter and hero of the Cuban Revolution is being honored with a statute in his hometown of Rosario. This event has not been without controversy, nor should it have been if one understood Che’s life at all, among residents there over the appropriateness of the gesture. That controversy is nevertheless neither here nor there for those of us still trying to make the revolution. Whatever political differences Che and this writer had over the questions of the right strategy for pushing the fight for socialism forward we would, I am sure, agree today that a fitting memorial for a revolutionary is not some slab of stone or metal in Argentina but to get out and organize the struggle. With that in mind a couple of comments about Che’s influence and about the real way to honor Che are in order.

Political activists of many persuasions including at that time this left liberal writer, not just radicals and revolutionaries, saw Che coming out of the Cuban Revolution as a figure larger than life. Trained as a doctor he could have pursued that career and carved a small niche for himself in the medical profession in the Argentine. He nevertheless rejected that path as too narrow for his huge appetites for life. Moreover the Argentine itself was eventually too narrow for his interests.

I have mentioned elsewhere in reviewing one of the of the many biographies about him that, in the end, he was that classic Latin revolutionary in the mold of the 19th century revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui- the man of the barricades (or rather one of its modern equivalents- the hills). And so a quick outline of the saga of Che’s life would indicate- the eye-opening travel chronicled in the Motorcycle Diaries, Guatemala during the CIA coup against the Arbenz government, on the lamb in Mexico, the decisive Cuban revolutionary experience by linking up with Fidel Castro in the mid-1950’s, the hard fought, if fruitless, efforts to push African liberation struggles forward and, finally, death in the god-forsaken hills of Bolivia- fighting to the end. A post- war American youth generation (the Generation of ’68) deeply influenced by Jack Kerouacs’s On The Road and ready to ‘storm heaven’ politically could relate to that resume. Combine that with Che’s deeply held moral sense of justice (although, obviously marred by that Stalinist voluntarist streak that he also exhibited) and you have a very appealing political role model.

As mentioned above the political gap between Che and this writer over time only got wider as I got closer to understanding the necessity of relying on the centrality of the working class in the struggle for socialism and he went in search of the “new” socialist man out in the foothills in some adventure seemingly driven by Jean Jacques Rousseau rather than Karl Marx. Yet this writer, and any thoughtful person could, and can, admire a man who out of an intense sense of the injustices of the world sees the need to pick up the gun in order to slay the dragons. Yes, this man Che deserves some honor but not that one that they have erected to him in Rosario. Here is how one can really honor Che. Fight to Free The Cuban Five. Fight to Defend the Cuban Revolution. Most importantly though, fight the struggle here in the “belly of the beast”. That would be more than enough to truly honor this subjective revolutionary.

She Came Out Of The Karoo-The Music Of Tony Bird-A Review

She Came Out Of The Karoo-The Music Of Tony Bird-A Review

CD Review

By Zack James

Sorry Africa, Tony Bird, 1986

During the 1980s Seth Garth had been taking on more and more purely political assignments for the New Times Gazette, a successor newspaper to the old alternative The Eye for which he had gotten his first jumps in journalism as the film and music critic. It wasn’t that he had lost interest in covering the happenings in the world of independent cinema and the edges of popular music but that in that period there were political trends around the struggles for liberation in Central and South America and Southern Africa that for the first time since the slowdown of the Vietnam War back in the early 1970s required attention. And so Benny Gold, his editor from back in The Eye days who had moved on with the Gazette assigned him more and more of those political assignments with the idea that he would weave those in with some off-beat cultural pieces.    

One night he had been in the Open Space, a new music club in the Village [Greenwich Village]that had previous been a coffeehouse, a popular one, the Unicorn, to hear a new guy out of Africa who Seth was told had an interesting beat, had combined the sounds of Mother Africa with more popular Western music. This was the kind of off-beat combination that he was sure Benny Gold would go for. As the MC for the evening announced the performer, Tony Bird, he was surprised that out came on the stage a young white man backed up by an all black group of sidemen. Seth had known that there were some, not enough, white youth who were supporting the various black liberation struggles in Southern Africa, particularly in South Africa but he was not prepared for a white musician to surface who supported those struggles although he should have known that fact going in.    

Tony Bird let everybody in the place know where he was coming from when he started singing a very heartfelt and upbeat song, Sorry Africa, taking on the burden on his shoulders of expressing sorrow at the way the white man, the way his people had treated the ones they had conquered one way or another. Very moving. 

What had gotten to Seth that night though and he was as surprised at this as he was that Tony Bird was a white African man was a song that he finished up with, She Came From The Karoo. The Karoo being the outback in the country he came from. What was strange about the song was that except that the locale was Africa it could have been a song of love and lost in America. More to the point was the vision that Seth had of the woman Tony was speaking of, a woman who came out of the mist with a red sundress on and effected all around her with her bright Botticelli smile and demeanor. Seth thought that little idea, the idea that a woman could spark such imagination out in the bush was the hook that he would use in his article. That and that Tony Bird, a black liberation  struggle fighter in his own right had no apology to give to Africa.     

On The 81st Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky- Fourth International-We Need A Socialist International More Than Ever

On The 81st  Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky- Fourth International-We Need A Socialist International More Than Ever 

By Harry Sims

Usually I am a behind the scenes guy dishing out anniversary dates and other facts and figures to site manager Greg Green and/or the recently created Editorial Board but I felt compelled to write a little something about the anniversary, the 80^th anniversary this month of September, of the Fourth International that will be forever linked to the name of the great Russian Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky. In accordance with the seemingly obligatory notice of transparency that accompanies anything today greater that what you had for breakfast at one time I was close to those who were carrying on the wilted tradition of the Fourth International after Trotsky was assassinated by a Stalinist agent down in Mexico in the summer of 1940. Aside from that though, as the headline to this introduction telegraphs, we are still in need of an international that will lead the way forward for humankind’s hopefully more equitable future. Such progress as we are now painfully aware does not happen automatically but must be planned and led by people committed to such aims. The same is true for those who want to revive the night of the long knives that was the hallmark of the 20^th century and now the first couple of decades of the 21^st century. So the die is cast.

Here is a short primer for those legions who do not have the foggiest notion of a what an International, Fourth or otherwise, is or was. These institutions are associated with various historical epochs of the socialist movement in all its struggles-victories and defeats. The first short-lived International was associated directly with the personages of the socialist revolutionaries Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of the Marxist wing of socialism back in the middle of the 19^th century. The two important events beyond the fact of creating the first international devoted to the struggle for socialism were the support for the Northern side led by Abraham Lincoln in the American Civil War and the stalwart defense of the Paris Commune, the first workers republic, of 1871 which was drowned in blood by Thiers and his mercenaries. The Second International before it became a “mail drop,” before it dropped the ball in not opposing World War I on any side, an event we are commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the Armistice this year as well, was the first mass organization of international socialism toward the end of the 19^th century. With the rapid rise of industrialization under late capitalism working people swarmed to this organization to defend them. In 1914 with the aforementioned failure to oppose the bloody war which decimated the flower of the working classes of all European nations its historic important as a serious force for social change much less socialism was finished even if the shell lingered, still lingers on today.

The Third International, Communist International, Comintern, and the Fourth share not only the personage of Leon Trotsky but purported to have the same aims at various points up to World War II. The Comintern was created as a direct result of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 by leaders Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky among others for the direct purpose of leading the world socialist revolution. When that task was abandoned in practice under the Stalin regime in Russia Trotsky in exile and with not enough resources called for and established the Fourth International we are commemorating.

Traces of that Fourth International like the Second still exist but unlike the first three Internationals it was essentially still-born in a time of defeats, serious defeats for the working classes especially with the rise of Hitler in Germany. So why beside nostalgia for an old International associated with the name of an honest revolutionary do I write this short piece today. Like I said the headline has telegraphed what is needed, what I think is needed today-another International, a fifth International if you like to lead the fight against the one-sided class struggle that is being waged by the international capitalist classes. While Trotsky’s organization for many reasons including the decimation of its cadre in Europe during World War II never got off the ground some of its programmatic points in the key document that came out of the conference which established the organization-the Transitional Program- read like they could have been written today.

Beyond the program though cadre, new cadre are needed to continue the forlorn fight against the greedy vultures who control the means of production and finance and that is where Leon Trotsky’s desperate and usually lonely fight to bring the 4^th International to the light of day can still serve as a model going forward. He, Trotsky, a man who has led the Russian Revolution of 1905, has subsequently been exiled and escaped the Czarist prisons when that revolution was crushed, had been central to the seizure of power in the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, had been Commissar of War during the bloody civil war against the counter-revolutionary Whites and their international imperialist allies, and had led the fight to save the revolution when the dark hand of Stalin and his henchmen pulled the hammer down stated unequivocally at the time in 1938 that establishing a new international to fight the dark clouds coming over Europe was the most important task he had done in his life. In our own epoch we are looking for such men and women to continue the task. They will have to read about and look at these 1938 documents and that very uneven struggle along the way.

Workers Vanguard No. 1139	7 September 2018

TROTSKY

LENIN

Reforge the Fourth International!

(Quote of the Week)

Eighty years ago, on 3 September 1938, the Fourth International was established under the leadership of Leon Trotsky. In opposition to the reformism of the social-democratic Second International and the Stalinized Communist International (Comintern), its founding document, excerpted below, provided the framework for building a new world party of socialist revolution. It is the task of the International Communist League to reforge the Fourth International, which was destroyed by a revisionist current under Michel Pablo in the early 1950s that renounced the need to build Trotskyist parties.

It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.

Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program, which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program, which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying. The Comintern has set out to follow the path of Social Democracy in an epoch of decaying capitalism: when, in general, there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and the raising of the masses’ living standards; when every serious demand of the proletariat and even every serious demand of the petty bourgeoisie inevitably reaches beyond the limits of capitalist property relations and of the bourgeois state.

The strategical task of the Fourth International lies not in reforming capitalism but in its overthrow. Its political aim is the conquest of power by the proletariat for the purpose of expropriating the bourgeoisie.

—Leon Trotsky, “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International,” commonly known as the Transitional Program (1938)