Friday, December 06, 2019
Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac-Four Dreams-Finding Whistler’s Mother-Gazing On The Girl With The Bette Davis Eyes-Following Allan Ginsberg’s Flowers-Searching For The Father We Never Knew
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The Last Of The Classical Lyric Poets?- Bob Dylan’s 121st Dream-With Professor Richard Thomas’ “Why Bob Dylan Matters” In 2017 In Mind
The Last Of The Classical Lyric Poets?- Bob Dylan’s 121st Dream-With Professor Richard Thomas’ “Why Bob Dylan Matters” In 2017 In Mind
[During the past several years, which has built up some extra stream the past couple of year, there has been a storm brewing among the writers who write for various departments in this space, for the American Left History blog (and the on-line Progressive American, American Film Gazette and American Folk Gazette websites with which we have fraternal relations including cross-publication of certain articles). Since a great deal of the storm has subsided after we have now reached agreement on some decisions about the road forward I feel it is appropriate as the about to retire administrator to let the reading public know what those decisions entail, what way we are heading. Over the past few years we have brought younger writers like Zack James, Bradley Fox, Jr., Alden Riley and the writer of the article below, Lance Lawrence, in to begin the transition away from writers, including myself, who were totally “washed clean” as one of the older writers Fritz Taylor is fond of saying by the turbulent 1960s, a watershed in American culture, politics and social arrangements.
While it has been entirely possible to read plenty of other material including older films, music and books over the years the strongest component, the subject that has held sway more often than not has been somehow involved with the growing up days in the 1950s and coming of age in the 1960s of the first wave of writers. That has tilted all have agreed, although I have dissented, vigorously dissented as to the degree and to the extent of my alleged role in the process, the axis of the American Left History experience we are trying to educate people about and preserve too one-sidedly around experience from fifty or sixty years ago when we came of age as if nothing has happened since then beyond the long haul rearguard actions against the reactionary trends of the past forty or so years when we have taken it on the chin once the “60s” ebbed.
Almost naturally the storm (what my old high school friend and low time associate here oldster Sam Lowell called a “tempest in a teapot” as he sided with the younger writers against the old guard, against my leadership casting the decisive vote against me) reflected the generational divide-the sensibilities of the old guard against the very different perspectives of the younger writers who were plainly way too young to have appreciated except second-hand all the tales and lies that we older folk have imposed on them. This whole dispute came to a head, although other similar disputes this year played a role, over the figure of Bob Dylan not what Lance will write about below but an earlier dispute over our tendency to have a music review on every one of the seemingly never-ending, seemingly never-ending to me as well, bootleg series volumes including Volume 12 which Zack had considered nothing but a commercial rip-off and composed of nothing but a million out takes and other crap and not worthy of giving review space here.
That dispute was the beginning of our awakening to the fact that not everything the man (our “the Man”) did was pure gold something which would have been blasphemy if one of older generation had uttered those words. The hard fact, as the younger writers were at pains to explain, younger writers who self-styled themselves as the “Young Turks,” Bob Dylan to the extent than any of them listened to him or saw him as anything but some old fogy who will probably die on the road doing his two hundred boring concerts a year, to draw anything from his music was something like our reaction to Frank Sinatra when we were young. Square, too square. That comment by I think Bradley Fox cut me especially to the quick. In any case other writers can give their respective takes on what has gone on of late. Since I am headed for retirement which just this minute feels like some kind of exile that seems best rather than my going on and on in defense of various objectionable actions I have taken over the past few years. Soon to be retired administrator Peter Paul Markin]
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By Writer Lance Lawrence
I suppose if a man, if a man like Bob Dylan the subject of this short piece, has lived long enough, has been in the public eye, mostly in his case the public eye of a dwindling number of hard core folkie aficionados then somebody will write what he or she thinks is the definitive say on the subject. Especially some academic somebody like Harvard Professor Richard Thomas who has indeed written a treatise called “Why Bob Dylan Matters” where he regales the brethren, the devotees who will buy the book because they buy everything Dylan-etched including bogus Bootleg series volumes some of which are nothing but stuff better left on the cutting room floor. The good professor’s premise is that Mister Dylan is the second coming of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, who knows maybe Cato and Cicero too in the “big tent” lyrical poet pantheon.
Originally this piece was going to be written by I think Bart Webber, one of the older writers who would probably like a number of the older writers in this space, on this American Left History blog drool on and on in agreement with the good professor. (This is nothing personal against Bart which has pulled me out of more dead-ends on stories than I care to count but he unlike the more thoughtful Sam Lowell who was like a breath of fresh air in the dispute Markin mentioned above in that quasi-introduction was his most rabid supporter.) Would have make up a laudatory piece which according to my archival research on this site has had over four hundred Bob Dylan-related articles almost all of them “soft-ball puffs” like Dylan was the King of the world and not the nightshade of the old guard. Looking over the archives nobody except Leon Trotsky, who after all was a world historic revolutionary, led a real revolution, and was a key historic figure even if he seemed to have been snake-bitten in his struggle to keep the faith in the Bolshevik future when old “Uncle Joe” Stalin bared his fangs in public has more entries.
Markin, I might as well say it since we have all been given the go ahead to give our respective takes on the internal fight now that the smoke has apparently cleared, mercifully soon to be retired Markin, or is it “purged” like his buddy Trotsky, started the whole madness early in his regime on when he wrote a ton of his own stuff rather than just run the site and hand out assignments as he was supposed to do. He lashed together extensive 3000 word reviews of Dylan’s five or ten first albums and then went over the top when he decided several years ago to write a series entitled “Not Bob Dylan.” That series seemingly endless series about the ten million or so it seemed male folkies who had not been dubbed by Time magazine to be the “King” of the 1960s folk minute (and it was only a minute despite all the hoopla here making it seem like some world-historic event like Trotsky’s Russian Revolution which even I could see had some merit for that designation rather than a tepid passing fad) and who had gone on to something else or who still inhabit the nether-world of the backwaters folk venue world.
I swear Markin must have written up the employment bios, resumes, and fates of every guy who knew three chords and a Woody Guthrie song learned in seventh grade music appreciation class with the likes of Mister Larkin at my middle school who walked into a coffeehouse back then. Even guys I had never heard of in passing like Erick Saint Jean who was supposed to be big in Boston and New York and Manny Silver who was supposed to be the greatest lyric writer since Woody (and probably if Professor Thomas took a whack at it probably since Milton or somebody like that). If I hear one more word about those guys, hell now that I think about it he also added insult to injury by doing a series on the ten million folkie women who were “Not Joan Baez” Dylan’s paramour and the queen of that 1960s folk minute (according to omnipotent Time).
But enough of taking cracks at the folk aficionados wherever they are who saw Dylan as a god, a guy who wrote lyrics better than he could sing. Frankly the guy was a has-been by my time, a leader of the folk minute that had passed mercifully away. We used to laugh at the graying long-haired guys guitar in hand in the subway still singing covers of his songs while the trains roared by. Would drop a dollar in the guitar case if they DID NOT sing Blowin’ In The Wind or The Times Are A-Changin’ one more freaking time remembering Mr. Larkin that music teacher in seventh grade, another guy from the 1960s line-up, trying to get us to sing that crap since the words were so meaningful, so important to know and remember according to him.
Finally since I am supposed to be an objective reporter of sorts, supposed to give all sides a short at reasoned opinion let me take Professor Thomas’ thesis at face value. Now my take on Homer is that he wrote pretty good stories made up of whole cloth no crime and created quite an oral tradition. Same with plenty of Greeks and Romans we read about in high school and college. They survived the cut, they represented some pretty high standards for the lyric form. Got quite workout by Miss Laverty my high school English teacher who was crazy for those guys and the way she read their words out loud you could see why they lasted. Literary comparisons aside about who was the king the lyrical poetic hill who except those guys like Markin and Sam Lowell, despite his honorable part in our internal fight, and who I do not believe know one song later than maybe 1972 which everybody will admit is a long time to be stuck on an old needle even listens to Dylan anymore except for old nostalgia trips.
For those three people who may be interested in exploring Professor Thomas’s ideas, see what makes him tick, see why he seemingly a rational man is a Dylan aficionado who probably one of the two guys who bought that dastardly Volume 12 which started this “revolution” here is a link to an NPR On Point broadcast hosted by Tom Ashbrook where the good professor holds forth:
https://www.npr.org/2017/11/21/563736161/a-classics-professor-explains-why-bob-dylan-matters
[Although Professor Thomas’ thesis about Dylan’s place in the pantheon was not central to the recent disputes among the coterie of writers who ply their trade here Dylan did figure in the mix when all hell broke loose the day Zack James refused to write a review on Volume 12 of the never-ending Bootleg series. I would still be surprised if going out the door Pete Markin will let my “venomous” words see the light of day. As is. If he does then maybe we will have new day after all.]
From The Partisan Defense Committee- Honoring a Class-War Prisoner Tom Manning 1946–2019-All honor to Tom Manning! Free Jaan Laaman- He Must Not Die In Jail ! The Last Of The Ohio Seven -Give To The Class-War Political Prisoners' Holiday Appeal
From The Partisan Defense Committee- Honoring a Class-War Prisoner Tom Manning 1946–2019-All honor to Tom Manning! Free Jaan Laaman- He Must Not Die In Jail ! The Last Of The Ohio Seven -Give To The Class-War Political Prisoners' Holiday Appeal
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On The 60th Anniversary Defend The Gains Of The Cuban Revolution
Defend the Gains of the Cuban Revolution!
(Quote of the Week)
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Bolivia: Down With U.S.-Backed Right-Wing Coup! For an Indigenous-Centered Workers and Peasants Government!
Workers Vanguard No. 1166
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29 November 2019
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Bolivia: Down With U.S.-Backed Right-Wing Coup!
For an Indigenous-Centered Workers and Peasants Government!
NOVEMBER 25—The U.S.-backed coup that forced bourgeois-populist president Evo Morales to flee and installed an anti-indigenous regime of Catholic extremists has plunged Bolivia into chaos. Insurgent protesters and supporters of Morales have been met with brutal repression—many have been arrested or disappeared, dozens massacred and hundreds wounded, with the toll climbing. Demonstrators waving the multicolor native Andean Wiphala flag have bravely confronted military and police shock troops in the streets of La Paz and elsewhere, demanding that Morales be allowed to return from exile in Mexico and finish his term. In a sinister act last week, the interim government accused Morales of sedition and terrorism for supposedly fomenting the unrest.
Self-appointed president Jeanine Áñez, notorious for branding indigenous religious practices as “satanic,” rejoiced that “God has allowed the Bible to come back” to Bolivia. Áñez granted the armed forces immunity to carry out more bloodshed, targeting the heavily indigenous working and peasant population, trade unionists and leftists. With cities facing shortages of food and fuel as a result of protest blockades, the situation remains unstable. In an attempt to defuse the crisis, Congress approved new elections open to candidates from Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Toward Socialism—MAS) but excluding Morales himself.
The U.S. bourgeois establishment disingenuously denies that there was any coup, with its media steadfast behind the narrative that the Bolivian president “resigned.” On November 10, the military abandoned Morales and demanded that he step down amid a growing mutiny by police, who joined anti-government protests spearheaded by far-right opposition forces in the Bolivian oligarchy. The police/military coup was the culmination of weeks of mobilizations that accused Morales of stealing the October 20 election. The fact that he was able to win, not to mention run for, a fourth consecutive term, incited his hard-line opponents, who cried “fraud.” Racist mobs and fascistic gangs went on a rampage, ransacking and burning the homes of MAS politicians, torturing women and peasants’ leaders and burning the Wiphala.
In a White House statement, President Trump applauded the toppling of Morales, and ominously warned the “illegitimate regimes” of Venezuela and Nicaragua that “the will of the people will always prevail.” The U.S. imperialists have been itching to reverse the “pink tide” that brought in a number of bourgeois-nationalist and populist Latin American regimes over the last couple of decades starting with Hugo Chávez and including Morales. Such motives also drove the Obama administration in 2009, when then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton endorsed the military coup that ousted Manuel Zelaya of Honduras.
The Republicans and Democrats alike are parties of imperialism and war, with a common class interest in maintaining U.S. political and economic supremacy in its “backyard.” Liberal-left darlings Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned the Bolivian coup; but it should be noted that these “progressives” are dutiful shepherds for U.S. imperialism, as shown by their support for “regime change” in Venezuela against President Nicolás Maduro.
Morales, initially elected in 2005, rode to power with a significant social base among the indigenous masses and peasant social movements following the water and gas wars—mass upheavals against privatization and IMF-dictated austerity measures. The country’s first indigenous president, Morales was a former leader of the cocalero union that organized indigenous coca leaf farmers. While he posed as a friend of workers and the oppressed and occasionally acted as a thorn in the side of the U.S. overlords, his radical-sounding rhetoric was used to co-opt and contain working-class and plebeian discontent. All the while, his bourgeois MAS government was a loyal servant to the capitalist ruling class, administering the repressive state apparatus on its behalf, which necessarily meant subordination to the world imperialist system.
It is urgently necessary for the Bolivian proletariat to oppose the coup without giving any political support to Morales or MAS. We take a side with the anti-coup protesters and defend Morales supporters against murderous state repression and reactionary mobilizations. At the same time, we fight for the proletariat, leading behind it the rest of the besieged indigenous masses, to emerge independently under its own banner. As revolutionary Marxists in the U.S., we call on the working class here to oppose the bloody machinations of its imperialist ruling class.
U.S. Imperialism and “Andean Capitalism”
It was the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS), a tool of U.S. imperialist domination, which spun the dubious charge of fraud in the October 20 election. The OAS claimed “irregularities” in the vote count without providing a shred of evidence. Since its origins in the Cold War, the OAS has been Washington’s “ministry of colonies.” It sought to quash Communist and leftist movements south of the border, aiming at the Cuban Revolution, which led in 1960-61 to the expropriation of the capitalist class there and the creation of a bureaucratically deformed workers state. Recently, the OAS promoted the U.S. puppet Juan Guaidó during the White House’s failed coup attempt against Maduro in capitalist Venezuela. Not coincidentally, one of the first acts of Bolivia’s post-coup regime was to expel hundreds of Cuban doctors and Venezuelan diplomats.
For decades, the U.S. State Department has directly and indirectly intervened in Bolivia, supporting previous coups, promoting right-wing “civic committees” and providing funding to opposition leaders like Carlos Mesa. A Grayzone article (13 November) notes that Bolivia’s head of the army and chief of police, who participated in the coup, had both been attachés in Washington. At least six of the key coup plotters were alumni from the School of the Americas, infamous for its death squad butchers.
The central political figure who drove the overthrow of Morales is ultra-right Catholic millionaire Luis Fernando Camacho. Camacho represents the powerful agricultural oligarchy from the eastern lowlands of Santa Cruz. A mineral-rich region with a white-minority secessionist movement, it was a staging ground for a 2008 “civil coup” attempt against Morales. Camacho got his start in a fascist paramilitary organization called the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista (Santa Cruz Youth Union), the separatist movement’s “brass knuckles” that terrorizes indigenous peasants, leftists and journalists. He went on to head the infamous comité cívico (civic committee) of Santa Cruz. There he was groomed by the Christian separatist and magnate Branko Marinkovic, whose family is reported to have ties with the Croatian Ustasha, which collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
The racist elites in eastern Bolivia hark back to the days when the lighter-skinned (Spanish-descended) rulers kept the boot on the neck of the indigenous majority—mostly Quechua and Aymara, with smaller populations like Chiquitano and Guaraní, among many others. The landowning class resents the fact that the “plurinational state” established under Morales used proceeds from royalties of natural gas—one of Bolivia’s main exports—to improve the conditions of the indigenous and poor population. The 2006 so-called “nationalization” of gas was actually a renegotiated partnership with the foreign gas firms, under which they paid higher rents to the government. The state used a portion of these payments, together with other commodity revenue, to invest in social programs and infrastructure.
As a result, during nearly 14 years under Morales and Vice President Álvaro García Linera, the country experienced a decline in extreme poverty, unemployment and illiteracy. An expanding economy made it possible for MAS to implement popular measures and appease the demands of various social sectors, while immense wealth was left in the hands of the tiny bourgeoisie.
Today, Bolivia remains one of the most impoverished nations in South America. The bulk of the indigenous population is still left to subsist as poor campesinos or low-wage workers in the mines, factories and oil fields. Many are in the informal sector—including women street vendors and domestic workers—as well as a significant percentage of child laborers. At the same time, Bolivia has seen the emergence of an indigenous entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. This stratum of urban petty capitalists is showcased in the few colorful mansions scattered in the overwhelmingly working-class and poor city of El Alto outside of La Paz.
Some in this layer are committed to reaping the lion’s share of benefits from extractive industry like lithium mining. The Potosí region sits on one of the world’s largest reserves of lithium, the crucial element in batteries for cell phones, computers and electric vehicles. Initial plans by the Morales government to mine lithium through joint ventures between state-owned companies and German and Chinese firms enraged the indigenous leader of the Potosí civic committee, Marco Antonio Pumari, who wanted higher royalties from the project. Pumari worked in close alliance with Camacho during the coup.
While Morales was heralded by much of the international left as a socialist, he made no bones about overseeing “Andean capitalism” and upholding private property and profit. The policies of the MAS government have always benefited the transnational corporations involved in the extraction of the country’s energy and mineral wealth. MAS also incorporated substantial elements of the agribusiness and ranching elites into its ranks, and made compromises with the same right-wing and secessionist forces that sought the demise of Morales.
For many years, Morales had the allegiance of the leaders of the main labor confederation, the COB, and controlled indigenous movements. But some of this support has frayed, if not cracked. The MAS government carried out brutal state repression against the same “popular movements” it has purported to represent. In 2011, the federal police attacked indigenous protesters marching against the building of the TIPNIS highway through a rain forest reserve, and their protected homeland, in the Bolivian Amazon. During the 2013 national strike, riot police assaulted miners, teachers, health care and factory workers demanding higher pensions.
For a Trotskyist Workers Party in Bolivia!
Bolivia is a case of combined and uneven development, where modern industry like natural gas extraction coexists alongside rural backwardness. In this Andean country, varying forms of bourgeois rule—from military dictatorships and “neoliberal” regimes to populist governments—have demonstrated their subordination to the imperialist order. Indeed, throughout Latin America, the weak national bourgeoisies are incapable of breaking with the imperialists, to whom they are bound by a thousand threads. To the extent that a nationalist-populist government rallies the toiling masses and offers some resistance to imperialist diktats, it does so to advance the interests of the domestic bourgeoisie. Both neoliberal regimes and populist ones fear the force that is capable of throwing off the imperialist yoke: the working class.
Leon Trotsky spelled out the perspective of permanent revolution, which applies to countries of belated economic development, and found confirmation in the experience of the October 1917 Russian Revolution. In the age of imperialism, only the proletariat, standing at the head of the oppressed masses, can carry out key tasks—like agrarian revolution, national emancipation from imperialist subjugation and fulfillment of the democratic aspirations of the masses—by overthrowing the capitalist rulers and their state. Through expropriating bourgeois private property, the working class would establish the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry, that is, a workers and peasants government based on the collectivization of the means of production.
In Bolivia, such a government would necessarily be centered on the deeply oppressed indigenous majority. For such a revolution to survive and open the way to a socialist future, it must be extended beyond the borders of Bolivia and spread internationally, ultimately to the imperialist centers.
Our last article on Bolivia, “Trotskyism vs. Bourgeois Nationalism,” (WV No. 868, 14 April 2006) pointed to the material and political decimation of the tin miners, who had once been some of the most class-conscious workers in Latin America, and asserted that “the proletarian instrumentality for overturning capitalism has been qualitatively diminished.” While it is true that the tin mining industry was devastated decades ago, and that some 20,000 miners were fired and displaced and their radical union gutted, our article essentially denied that there was a working class in Bolivia and thereby argued that the basis for workers revolution did not exist in the country. The article also wrongly implies that struggle is futile in Bolivia unless it is sparked in countries with more “viable concentrations of the proletariat.” These assertions amounted to a rejection of permanent revolution as applied to Bolivia.
As laid out in Trotsky’s The Permanent Revolution (1930), it is incorrect to approach the question in the framework of “mature” and “immature” countries. He wrote:
“Insofar as capitalism has created a world market, a world division of labour and world productive forces, it has also prepared world economy as a whole for socialist transformation.
“Different countries will go through this process at different tempos.”
Young and relatively small proletariats can take power if they develop allies among broad layers of the oppressed, which in Bolivia includes rural toilers and urban slum dwellers.
A core of the Bolivian working class remains in extractive industry. This August, some 830 unionized miners at Bolivia’s San Cristóbal mine, the third-biggest producer of silver in the world, went on a three-week strike against its owner, the Japanese company Sumitomo. Strikers won their wage and other demands, but continue to battle with the bosses, who want to nullify the settlement by having the strike declared illegal.
Due to its centrality in capitalist production, the working class has the strategic social power to overthrow capitalist rule, but it must be made conscious of the need to harness that power. The key question is leadership. The tumultuous struggles of the proletariat, centered on the tin miners, sparked revolutionary and prerevolutionary situations in 1952, 1970-71 and 1985. However, the workers’ misleaders directed them to form alliances with the supposedly “anti-imperialist” bourgeoisie, thus tying them to the class enemy and betraying those revolutionary opportunities.
To fight for victory, it is necessary to build a Trotskyist party, as a national section of a reforged Fourth International, in sharp political struggle against reformism and bourgeois-nationalist populism. A revolutionary workers party would act as the tribune of the people, fighting to mobilize the proletariat as the champion of all the oppressed—especially indigenous women, who are enslaved in the family and subjected to brutal exploitation and daily violence. It was on the basis of such a perspective that our forebears in Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party successfully led the proletariat to power in Russia. And it is only on this basis that Bolivia’s “wretched of the earth” will be liberated.
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