Tales From The 'Hood- An Introduction

Commentary

This entry announces what promises to be the start of another short series of commentaries like my recently completed History and Class Consciousness- A Working Class Saga (hereafter H&C). Those who followed that story (see archives) know that I have been, for a whole number of reasons both personal and political, on the trail of my roots, including trips to the old working class neighborhood where I came of political age. There through various methods, including extensive use of the Internet, I was able to track down a couple of guys from the old neighborhood whose family story had gripped me and whose personal stories I presented as part of that series.

As an unintended result of that research I have also come in contact with some helpful old high school classmates. One such helpful person, a class officer, asked me to answer some questions that her committee is putting together for our class, the Class of 1964.I have posted some of the more pertinent answers here, although this is getting to be a seemingly endless task as the more questions I answer the more they keep sending me. Such is life. But, now I have uncovered more information about my roots coming from an earlier period.

I mentioned in H&C that my family had started life in a housing project with all that implied, then and now. By the beauties of the Internet I have now come in contact with someone who remembers me (or rather my brother- she was sweet on him in elementary school), lived in that housing project during our stay there and for many, many year after my family left, and saw its transformation from a way station for returning World War II veterans to a classic ‘den of iniquity’ as portrayed in media accounts. She has agreed to be my ‘hood historian for this series. Moreover she has brothers, sisters, children and grandchildren who have memories from that place.

If thing work out this could very well be a slice of life series on the trials and tribulations of members of the marginally working poor, a section of the working class with which I am very familiar. And from my political vantage point can produce a study, with all its inherent limitations, of the decline and disintegration of working class political consciousness in America since World War II. In H&C that played out one way with a section of the class that is slightly above the one that will be featured here. That saga did not paint a pretty political picture. Nor will, I fear, this one. But, damn, why shouldn’t these people have their stories told, warts and all.

Again, like with H&C, this series will really narrate a very prosaic working class set of stories. I will, however, organize these stories differently because now I know what I am looking for and each story will be able to stand on its own. In H&C the story as it unfolded piecemeal, frankly, got out of control and I do not believe that when I put all the parts together at the end that it had the power that I wanted it to have, and that it did have as it unfolded.

That said, if this time last year somebody asked me if I would be doing a series like this I would have said they were crazy. I then wanted to discuss the finer theoretical points of organizing for withdrawal from Iraq or building a workers party. But now this is like finding the philosopher’s stone. This is the real deal down at the base of society.

I am now preparing the first story that will deal with how this poor woman Sherry, my ‘hood historian, was humiliated by other students at our elementary school for the mere fact of being from ‘the projects’. This writer is painfully aware of that type of humiliation as he faced the same thing later when he moved to the neighborhood featured in H&C. Again, will there be political lessons to be learned? I do not believe so, directly. However, real stories about the fate of the working class down at the base can help explain the very real retardants to working class political consciousness that we face as we try to organize here in America. I can quote socialist principles, chapter and verse, elsewhere in this space. These stories desperately need to be told here.

Once Again, A Short Note on Iraq- "Cut and Run Now"

Commentary

Well, we have just passed the commemoration of five years of war in Iraq. We have also, sadly, passed the 4000 mark of those American soldiers killed there. Now comes news that the civil war has flared up again in Baghdad and Basra. This time from a different source, the Madhi Army. My friends this is serious. If there are any serious, disciplined militia fighters in Iraq it is this group. Several months ago I warned that come spring we would see the real ‘fruits’ of the military surge of the past year that was to make everything ‘nice’. Well, the bandage seemingly has lost its adhesion. Plan as if all hell is going to break loose. It probably will.

I mentioned last week in commemorating the 5th Anniversary of the Iraq invasion that I was momentarily just a little fatigued by our failure, that is the anti-war movement's failure, to force an immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. You can forget that fatigue factor now. All out into the streets under this slogan- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All American/Allied Troops And Their Mercenaries From Iraq!! - “Cut and Run Now”

*A Short Look At The American Civil War- Professor David's View

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Confederacy President Jefferson Davis.


BOOK REVIEW

APRIL IS THE 147TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE START OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR- HONOR THE UNION SOLDIERS- WHITE AND BLACK

Why the North Won The Civil War, Donald Herbert David, Simon and Schuster, New York,
1962, 1996

I have used this space over the past couple of years to commemorate many events important in working class history, leftist history and just plain democratic history (hey, that is our heritage too). My idea, as explained in my profile, is to try to transmit to the younger generation of leftist militants a sense of the rich, if many times misunderstood, history of our movement. With that in mind, I have noticed recently that while I have spilled a certain amount of justifiable ink on honoring John Brown and his band at Harpers Ferry and on the personage of Abraham Lincoln, also justifiable, I have not spent nearly enough time on some of the other great issues of the Civil War period itself. I begin to rectify that error here. And it is an error. A lot of what the United States have become in the world, for good or evil, stems from the events of that period.

Some of the books that I review in this space as I introduce subjects that I think will be of interest are those that first got me interested in the subject. Thus, the books tend to have older copyright dates and, in many cases, have been superseded by more recent (and generally, better) work on the subject. But I still see value in them as a starting point. That is the case here. I distinctly remember, after having gone through the basics of the American Civil War in my high school history class, going out to buy this book in order to better understand the question posed by the title of this book- why did the North win the Civil War? Although this book does not directly address some of the reasons that I would give now for why the North succeeded it nevertheless gave some, to me, provocative thoughts about the issues then.

This short book is a result of a conference held in the late 1950’s at Gettysburg, in preparation for celebrating the Civil War Centennial, which discussed various historical points of view as to the basis for the Northern victory. Now there have been innumerable books on every conceivable aspect of the Civil War, from songs to sewing, so by this year 2008 so it is hard to say that this book sticks out. However this book represented the best thinking of the last generation of Civil War scholars on the general trends of the times.

The subjects delved into-Northern and Southern economics, generalmanship, diplomacy, effects of war- weariness, and Southern character defects have all been expanded on since. But here is a place to start an outline of the subject. This book also helps to understand one of the positive consequences of the Northern victory-the consolidation of a unitary trans-continental state. Of course, readers, let us keep our eyes on the prize- the real import of studying about the Civil War is to see how the great social issue of that day-the abolition of slavery got fought out to the finish.

*History and Class Consciousness- A Working Class Saga

Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive copy of his 1923 article "Habit And Custom" that, I think, helps explain the mountains we have to move in order to create that socialist future that humankind so desperately needs.


This saga began life almost a year ago as a short, supposedly one time, commentary about a childhood friend from my old working class neighborhood who I found out had passed away several years ago in a state mental hospital after a life long battle with his inner demons. At a basic level the story of the family and its destruction drew hold of me and I began to investigate, along with a neighborhood woman (who is cited in the story as the neighborhood historian), the fates of the other members of the family. I have edited the five stories that make up the saga to avoid the repetitions inherent in presenting each story individually as it unfolded but have left the bodies essentially as presented. Nevertheless it is a little jagged in spots. Needless to say I continue to stand by the ‘political’ lessons to be drawn. Read on.

Story #1- An Uncounted Casualty Of War

This space is usually devoted to ‘high’ politics and the personal is usually limited to some experience of mine that has a direct political point. Sometimes, however, a story is so compelling and makes the point in such a poignant manner that no political palaver is necessary. Let me tell the tale.

Recently I returned, while on some unrelated business in the area, to the neighborhood where I grew up. The neighborhood is one of those old working class neighborhoods where the houses are small, cramped and seedy, the leavings of those who have moved on to bigger and better things. The neighborhood nevertheless reflected the desire of the working poor in the 1950's, my parents and others, to own their own homes and not be shunted off to decrepit apartments or dilapidated housing projects, the fate of those just below them on the social ladder.

While there I happened upon an old neighbor who recognized me despite the fact that I had not seen her for at least thirty years. Since she had grown up and lived there continuously, taking over the family house, I inquired about the fate of various people that I had grown up with. She, as is usually the case in such circumstances, had a wealth of information but one story in particular cut me to the quick. I asked about a boy named Kenny who was a couple of years younger than I was but who I was very close to until my teenage years. Kenny used to tag along with my crowd until, as teenagers will do, we made it clear that he was no longer welcome being ‘too young’ to hang around with us older boys. Sound familiar.

The long and the short of it is that he found other friends of his own age to hang with, one in particular, from down the street named Jimmy. I had only a nodding acquaintance with both thereafter. As happened more often than not during the 1960’s in working class neighborhoods all over the country, especially with kids who were not academically inclined, when Jimmy came of age he faced the draft or the alternative of ‘volunteering’ for military service. He enlisted. Kenny, for a number of valid medical reasons, was 4-F (unqualified for military service). Of course, you know what is coming. Jimmy was sent to Vietnam where he was killed in 1968 at the age of 20. His name is one of the 58,000 plus that are etched on that Vietnam Memorial Wall down in Washington. His story ends there. Unfortunately, Kenny’s just begins.

Kenny took Jimmy’s death hard. Harder than one can even imagine. The early details are rather sketchy but they may have involved illegal drug use. The overt manifestations were acts of petty crime and then anti-social acts like pulling fire alarms and walking naked down the street. At some point he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. I make no pretense of having adequate knowledge about the causes of mental illnesses but someone I trust has told me that such a traumatic event as Jimmy’s death can trigger the condition in young adults. In any case, the institutionalizations inevitably began. And later the halfway houses, and all the other forms of control for those who cannot survive on the mean streets of the world on their own. Apparently, with drugs and therapy, there were periods of calm but for over three decades poor Kenny struggled with his inner demons. In the end the demons won and he died a few years ago while in a mental hospital.

Certainly not a happy story. Perhaps, aside from the specific details, not even an unusual one in modern times. Nevertheless I now count Kenny as one of the uncounted casualties of war. Along with those physically wounded soldiers who can back from Vietnam service unable to cope with their own demons and sought solace in drugs and alcohol. And those, who for other reasons, could no adjust and found themselves on the streets, in the half way shelters or the V. A. hospitals. And also those grieving parents and other loved ones whose lives were shattered and broken by the lost of their children. There is no wall in Washington for them. But, maybe there should be. As for poor Kenny from the old neighborhood. Rest in Peace.


Story#2- The Working Class Buries One of Its Own

In the 20th century January was traditionally the month to honor fallen working class leaders such as Lenin, Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. That tradition still goes on, however, more in the European working class movement than here. January can and should, however, also be a time to honor other working class people, those down at the base, as well. Over the last year I have posted a couple of such stories (See Hard Times in Babylon and An Uncounted Casualty of War in the May 2007 archives.) Here in its proper place is another about a fallen daughter of the class who died this January.

In An Uncounted Casualty of War (hereafter, Uncounted), written last May, I noted that I had then recently returned to the old working class neighborhood where I grew up. Maybe it is age, maybe it is memory, maybe it is the need at this late date to gain a sense of roots but that return has haunted me ever since. I have gone back a couple of times since then to hear more of what had happened to those in the old neighborhood from a woman who continues to live there and had related the above story to me. This one is about the fate of my childhood friend Kenny's (the subject of the Uncounted commentary) mother Margaret. Read it and weep.

As I also mentioned in Uncounted in my teens I had lost track of Kenny who as he reached maturity took the death of a friend who died in Vietnam very hard. Harder than one can even imagine. The early details are rather sketchy but they may have involved drug use. The overt manifestations were acts of petty crime and then anti-social acts like pulling fire alarms and walking naked down the street. At some point Kenny was diagnosed as schizophrenic. The institutionalizations inevitably began. And later the halfway houses and all the other forms of control for those who cannot survive on the mean streets of the world on their own. Apparently, with drugs and therapy, there were periods of calm but for over three decades poor Kenny struggled with his inner demons. In the end the demons won and he died a few years ago while in a mental hospital.

Needless to say Kenny’s problems were well beyond his mother and father’s ability to comprehend or control. His father, like mine, had limited education and meager work prospects. In short, there were no private resources for Kenny and he and they were thus consigned to public institutionalization schemes. The shame of this, among other things, led to his father’s early death many, many years ago. His mother, strong Irish Catholic working class woman that she was, shouldered the burden by herself until Kenny’s death. The private and public horrors and humiliations that such care entailed must have taken a toll on her most of us could not stand. Apparently in the end it got to her as well as she let her physical appearance go down, became more reclusive and turned in on herself reverting in conversation to dwelling on happier times as a young married woman in the mid-1940’s.

Kenny’s woes, however, as I recently found out were only part of this sad story. Kenny had two older brothers whom I did not really know well because they were not around. Part of that reason was they were in and out of trouble or one sort or another. My neighborhood historian related to me that at some point both sons had dropped out of sight and had not been seen by their mother for over thirty years. They are presumed to be dead or that is the story Margaret told my historian. In any case, since Kenny’s death Margaret’s health, or really her will to live went down hill fairly rapidly. Late last year she was finally placed in a nursing home where she died this month. Only a very few attended her funeral and her memory is probably forgotten by all except my historian friend and myself in this poor commentary.

I am a working class political person. That is the great legacy that my parents left me, intentionally or not. Are there any great political lessons to be learned here? No, but I swear that when we build the new society that this country and this world needs we will not let the Kennys of the world be shunted off to the side. And we will not let the Margarets of the world, our working class mothers, die alone and forgotten. As for Kenny and Margaret may they rest in peace.

Story# 3-History and Class Consciousness

Despite the highly theoretical sounding title of this commentary this is really a part of the very prosaic working class story that I have written about in several earlier commentaries in this space. This is the third part of what now has turned into a trilogy of the fate of a working class family from my old neighborhood. Let me continue the tale.

As I related in Uncounted and reemphasized in Working Class my own family started life in the housing projects, at that time not the notorious hell holes of crime and deprivation that they later became but still a mark of being low, very low, on the social ladder at a time when others were heading to the Valhalla of the newly emerging suburbs. By clawing and scratching my parents saved enough money to buy an extremely modest single-family house. The house was in a neighborhood that was, and is, one of those old working class neighborhoods where the houses are small, cramped and seedy, the leavings of those who have moved on to bigger and better things. The neighborhood nevertheless reflected the desire of the working poor in the 1950’s, my parents and others including Kenny’s parents, to own their own homes and not be shunted off to decrepit apartments or dilapidated housing projects, the fate of those just below them on the social ladder. That is where I met Kenny and through him his family, including his mother Margaret and his father James. She seemed like a nice woman although I never got to know her well. His father is just a distant, vague memory.

Needless to say Kenny’s problems were well beyond his mother and father’s ability to comprehend or control. His father, like mine, had a limited education, few marketable skills and meager work prospects. They were always, as many workingmen in the neighborhood were, on the edge-last hired, first fired when an economic downturn came. Thus, there were no private resources for Kenny and he and they were thus consigned to public institutionalization schemes. The shame of this, among other things, led to his father’s early death many, many years ago in the mid-1980’s. This is where James’s story comes into focus.

Kenny’s woes, as I found out this January, were only part of this sad story about the fate of Margaret and James's sons. Kenny had two older brothers, James, Jr. and Francis, whom I did not really know well because they were not around. Part of the reason for that was they were in and out of trouble or one sort or another and were not around the neighborhood much. My neighborhood historian mentioned in January that at some point both sons had dropped out of sight and had not been seen by their mother for over thirty years. They are presumed to be dead or that is the story Margaret told my historian. If I have time at some point I may try to track down what happened to them and then we will have a five-part story. At that point I will surely need the literary resources of someone like James T. Farrell in his Studs Lonigan trilogy for guidance.

For now, however, let me continue with James’s fate. My historian friend told me that James and my father when they were young married men were very, very close buddies, something that I was totally unaware of. Thick as thieves, as the old adage goes. Apparently they liked to go drinking together, when they could afford it. Nothing startling there. I do find it odd though that a South Boston-raised Irishman and my father, a Kentucky-raised hillbilly, hit it off. However, as James lost control over the behavior of his sons he became more morose and more introverted. At this point their long friendship faded away.

James, apparently, was like many an Irish father. His sons, good or bad, were his world. Hell, they were his sons and that was all that mattered. They were to be forgiven virtually anything except the bringing of shame on the household. I know the intricacies and absurdities of that shame culture from my own Irish mother. The boys in their various ways nevertheless did bring shame to the household. Kenny we know about. It is hard to tell but from what my historian related to me for James, Jr. and Francis there were bouts of petty and latter grand thievery and other troubles with the law. She was vague in her recollections here although crimes, great and small, were not uncommon in the neighborhood. The old ironic saying in the neighborhood that a man’s son was destined to be either a thief or a priest ran truer here than one might have thought.

Well, the long and short of it is that James started to have severe physical problems, particularly heart problems and had trouble holding a steady job. In the end the shock of his sons' disappearances without a word literally broke his heart. Anything, but not abandonment. His end, as my historian related the details, was not pretty and he suffered greatly.

As I said in Working Class I am a working class politician. That is the great legacy that my parents left me, intentionally or not. As I have asked previously at this point in relating the other parts of the story -are there any great political lessons to be learned here? No, I do not think so but this family’s saga of turning in on itself in the absence of some greater purpose and solution goes a long way to explaining why down at the base of society we have never had as much as nibble of independent working class political consciousness expressed in this country. That, my friends, is why this saga can aptly be entitled history and class-consciousness, but let us put them in small letters. As for Kenny, Margaret and James may they rest in peace.

Story#4- Markin Takes A Turn As Neighborhood Historian

Despite the somewhat academic- sounding title of this commentary this is really a part of the very prosaic working class story that I have written about previously in several earlier commentaries in this space. This is the fourth part of what, as I will explain in the next paragraph, now has now turned into a five part saga of the fate of a family from the old working class neighborhood that I grew up in. Let me continue that tale.

In part three of this story, History and Class Consciousness (hereafter, History), about the fate of my childhood friend Kenny’s father I mentioned that if I had time I would try to find out the fates of his two long missing older brothers, James, Jr. and Francis, who had not been heard from by the family in over thirty years. My invaluable neighborhood historian had related to me that Kenny’s recently deceased mother, Margaret, had assumed they were dead, or that is what she told my historian. I have become so intrigued by this family’s story that I have made time to dig deeper into it. Now I know, or will soon know, both their fates. They, in any case, are not dead.

In detecting information about the whereabouts of the two brothers did I need to be a super sleuth? No. Did I need to spend hours poring over documents? No. I have in this space, on more than one occasion, railed against the information superhighway as a substitute for political organizing but for finding public records that lead one to missing people it cannot be beat. That source, and using the old telephone did yeoman’s service here. I have thus now found the brothers, or at least the whereabouts of the oldest one James, Jr. whom I have already interviewed and who has promised me in his cryptic way to lead me to his younger brother Francis. Francis’s story will be detailed in a separate commentary after I interview him.

I found James, Jr. (hereafter, just James) living alone in seedy, rundown rooming house in a transitional Boston neighborhood. Strangely, he was more than willing to talk to me about his life and family although he was only vaguely aware of my family, except that he remembered that I was somewhat political. His story, in general outline, is not an unfamiliar one, at least not to me.

Early on James got into petty crime and then more serious crime. As a teenager during the early part of the Vietnam War era, after dropping out of school despite having previously been something of an honors student, he got into enough trouble that he was given a choice by the court system to ‘volunteer’ for military duty or go to jail. He took the military service, for a while. Given orders to Vietnam, he went AWOL not for any political reason but just, as he said, “because”. Later, after time in a military stockade and a civilian jail (for other, unrelated acts) James got ‘religion’-that is he figured the percentages of keeping up his then current ‘lifestyle’ did not add up to a long and happy life.

Based on that street wisdom James became a drifter, grifter and midnight sifter (his words) but stayed on the legal side of the line. The inevitable failed marriages, lost jobs and financial problems as a result of such a lifestyle followed, in their seemingly monotonously natural course. This harsh lifestyle, moreover, ultimately wore down his psychological capacities and at some point he was diagnosed as clinically depressed, unable to hold a steady job and was put on welfare. He has subsisted at various times on day labor wages, welfare of one sort or another, and handouts ever since. That pretty much sums up the balance of his life for our purposes here.

Now, about the question that must be on the reader’s mind, as it surely was on mine. What in James’s biography warrants going underground from one’s family for over thirty years? The answer James gave-shame. James just flat out got tired of taking a psychological beating every time his mother Margaret berated him in his early youth for some seemingly trivial mistake. To not have to deal with that, as he started to get into real trouble, James just walked away from his family. His rationale was that if they did not know about it then he was doing them a favor. Strange reasoning, perhaps. However, I too know, and perhaps you do also, the wrath of an Irish mother when she gets into the shaming ritual. I faced that more than one time myself. It is not pretty. And I consider my mother something of a saint! James may have stayed away too long and, in the end, broke his father’s heart, but I found nothing inherently absurd about his response. We all face our demons in our own particular ways.

I make no claims that James's is a typical working class story. It is not. Nor is this a typical working class family saga. But there are just enough of the pathologies that I have over a lifetime of observation noted about working class existence to make the story serve my purpose. It can serve as a descriptive, if not, cautionary tale about the plight of working people in modern American society. Think about it that way, if you will.

I commented, off-handedly, in History that at a point where I had been successful in locating the two older brothers I would I will surely need the literary talents of someone like James T. Farrell in his Studs Lonigan trilogy for guidance. That has proven, thus far, to not be necessary as this is a most ordinary story. What this story really calls for is the skills of someone like the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, or better yet a Lenin, to try to analyze and to generalize how a couple of fairly smart working class kids like James and his brother turned the wrong way and in the end turned inward rather than become class fighters. It needs an appraisal of how the transmission belt of working class political consciousness that broke down in our fathers’ generation (the so-called “greatest generation” that survived the Great Depression and fought World War II) remained broken in the baby-boomer generation (our generation, the generation of ’68). There is thus something of a ‘lost’ political generation after ours that is not there to give guidance now that today’s youth look like they, at least some of them, are ready to ‘storm heaven’.

As I have said in the previous commentaries on this story I am a working class politician. That is the great legacy that my parents left me, intentionally or not. As I have asked previously in relating the other parts of the story -are there any great political lessons to be learned here? No, I do not think so but this family’s saga of turning in on itself in the absence of some greater purpose and solution goes a long way to explaining why down at the base of society we have never had as much as nibble of independent working class political consciousness expressed in this country. Think about that.

Story#5-And the tin pan bended.. and the story ended

The title of this commentary takes its name from what turned out to be the late folksinger and folk historian Dave Van Ronk’s last album. This seems as an appropriate last title as any for the twists and turns of this series. Despite Van Ronk’s alliterative title this is really part of the very prosaic working class story that I have written about in several earlier commentaries in this space. This is the fifth and final part of what, as I will relate in the next paragraph, has now turned into a saga of the fate of a working class family from my old neighborhood. Let me finish the tale.

In part three of this story, History and Class Consciousness (hereafter, History), about the fate of my childhood friend Kenny’s father I mentioned that if I had time I would try to find out the fates of his two long missing older brothers, James and Francis, who had not been heard from by the family in over thirty years. I had become so intrigued by this family’s story that I have made time to dig deeper into it.

During my interview with James he was somewhat mysterious in his agreement to get me in touch with Francis. I thus expected that Francis’s story would be similar (or even more depressing than his). That was entirely not the case. Apparently Francis is to be considered the 'success' of the family. I mentioned in the last part that I found James to be smart, if more on the street side than academically. Well, Francis seemed to have traversed both sides. I interviewed him in a law office in Boston, his law office.

Somewhere along the way Francis figured out faster than James and with somewhat more determination that unless your heart is totally into it a life of crime just takes too much energy. But here is the odd part. He had total recall of me as a kid, including my politics. He even remembered something that I had not-he was my captain in canvassing for John F. Kennedy for President in 1960. I am not sworn to secrecy and I checked out the information independently so that I can add that today he is a fairly influential, if not widely known, member of the Massachusetts Democratic Party establishment.

That poses two questions. The first and obvious one, that I also posed when I interviewed James, is one that must be on the reader’s mind, as it surely was on mine. What in this biographic sketch warrants going underground from one’s family for over thirty years? Francis answered that unless he got a fresh, totally fresh, start that he would have wound up like his brother James. Fair enough. Moreover he just flat out got tired of taking a psychological beating every time his mother, Margaret, berated him in his early youth for some seemingly trivial mistake.

To not have to deal with that as Francis started to get into real trouble he just walked away from his family. His rationale, like his brother's was that if they did not know about it then he was doing them a favor. Strange reasoning, perhaps. However, I know, and perhaps you do also, the wrath of an Irish mother when she gets into the shaming ritual. I faced that more than one time myself. It is not pretty. Francis may have stayed away too long and, in the end, coldly broke his father’s heart, but there is nothing absurd about his response. We all face our demons in our own particular ways.

The second question is why, if he were so politically knowledgeable and alienated, did he become, from my political perspective, a class traitor. As mentioned above Francis knew that I had gone ‘commie’ so that was no big deal to him but here is where the cautionary tale for working class kids comes in- he saw his best chance of advancement for himself by working his way up the Democratic Party hierarchy. This, my friends, is ultimately the problem we have to deal with if we are ever to get our own workers party with some bite. The Francis types that clutter the American political landscape can be had but not until we have leverage.

I commented, off-handedly, in History that at a point where I had been successful in locating the two older brothers I would I will surely need the literary talents of someone like James T. Farrell in his Studs Lonigan trilogy for guidance. That has proven to not be necessary as this is a most ordinary story. What this story really calls for is the skills of someone like the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, or better yet a Lenin, to try to analyze and to generalize how a couple of fairly smart working class kids turned the wrong way and in the end turned inward rather than become class fighters.

It, further, needs an appraisal of how the transmission belt of working class political consciousness that broke down in our fathers’ generation (the so-called “greatest generation” that survived the Great Depression and fought World War II) remains broken in the baby-boomer generation (their and my generation, the generation of ’68). There is thus something of a ‘lost’ generation that is not there now that today’s youth look like they are ready to ‘storm heaven’. We better act on this question.

As I have said in the previous commentaries on this story I am a working class politician. That is the great legacy that my parents left me, intentionally or not. As I have asked previously in relating the other parts of the story -are there any great political lessons to be learned here? No, I do not think so but this family’s saga of turning in on itself in the absence of some greater purpose and solution goes a long way to explaining why down at the base of society we have for a long time never had as much as nibble of independent working class political consciousness expressed in this country.

*And the tin pan bended...and the story ended- A Working Class Saga

Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet archive's copy of his 1923 article "Habit And Custom" that, I think, helps explain the ,mountains we ave to move in order to assure that socialist future that humankind desperately needs to go forward..

Commentary

The title of this commentary takes its name from what turned out to be the late folksinger and folk historian Dave Van Ronk’s last album. This seems as an appropriate last title as any for the twists and turns of this series. Despite Van Ronk’s alliterative title this is really part of the very prosaic working class story that I have written about in several earlier commentaries in this space. As I have mentioned in them, this space is usually devoted to ‘high’ politics and the personal is usually limited to some experience of mine that has a direct political point. Sometimes, however, a story is so compelling and makes the point in such a poignant manner that no political palaver is necessary. This is the fifth and final part of what, as I will relate in the next paragraph, has now turned into a saga of the fate of a working class family from my old neighborhood. Let me finish the tale.

In part three of this story, History and Class Consciousness (hereafter, History), about the fate of my childhood friend Kenny’s father I mentioned that if I had time I would try to find out the fates of his two long missing older brothers, James and Francis, who had not been heard from by the family in over thirty years. I had become so intrigued by this family’s story that I have made time to dig deeper into it. In Markin Takes a Turn as Neighborhood Historian (hereafter, Markin) I related how I found James, the older brother, and told his story. When I interviewed James he said that he would put me in contact with Francis. He has kept his word. Here to complete the saga I will end with the younger brother Francis’s story.

To refresh the story for those who make have not read the previous parts let me summarize. In the near future I will rewrite this whole thing as one story to avoid the somewhat confusing repetitions inherent in presenting each part in piecemeal fashion. Even I get balled up in the various parts. For now though, dear reader, bear with me. In previous commentaries I have mentioned that I had then recently (May 2007) returned to the old working class neighborhood where I grew up after a very long absence. I also mentioned that maybe it was age, maybe it was memory, maybe it was the need at this late date to gain a sense of roots but that return has haunted me ever since. I have gone back a few times since last May to hear more of what had happened to those in the old neighborhood from a woman who continues to live there and had related the above stories to me. (The first story was about the fate of my childhood friend Kenny. A second in January 2008 recounted the fate of Kenny’s mother, Margaret, and History, written in February 2008, mentioned above, presented the story of Kenny’s father, James. Check the archives for these three stories.)

My own family started life in the housing projects, at that time not the notorious hell holes of crime and deprivation that they later became but still a mark of being low, very low, on the social ladder at a time when others were heading to the Valhalla of the newly emerging suburbs. By clawing and scratching my parents saved enough money to buy an extremely modest single-family house. The house was in a neighborhood that was, and is, one of those old working class neighborhoods where the houses are small, cramped and seedy, the leavings of those who have moved on to bigger and better things. The neighborhood nevertheless reflected the desire of the working poor in the 1950’s, my parents and others including Kenny’s parents, to own their own homes and not be shunted off to decrepit apartments or dilapidated housing projects, the fate of those just below them on the social ladder. That is where I met Kenny and through him his family, including his mother Margaret, his father James and his two brothers, James, Jr. and Francis.

In my teens I had lost track of Kenny who as he reached maturity took the death of a friend who died in Vietnam very hard. The early details of his behavior changes are rather sketchy but they may have involved illegal drug use. Apparently, with drugs and therapy, there were periods of calm but for over three decades poor Kenny struggled with his inner demons. In the end the demons won and he died a few years ago while in a mental hospital.

Needless to say Kenny’s problems were well beyond his mother and father’s ability to comprehend or control. His father, like mine, had a limited education, few marketable skills and meager work prospects. Thus, there were no private resources for Kenny and he and they were thus consigned to public institutionalization schemes. The shame of this, among other things, led to his father’s early death many, many years ago in the mid-1980’s. His mother, Margaret died in January 2008.

During my interview with James he was somewhat mysterious in his agreement to get me in touch with Francis. I thus expected that Francis’s story would be similar (or even more depressing than his). That was entirely not the case. Apparently Francis is to be considered the 'success' of the family. I mentioned in the last part that I found James to be smart, if more on the street side than academically. Well, Francis seemed to have traversed both sides. I interviewed him in a law office in Boston, his law office.

Somewhere along the way Francis figured out faster than James and with somewhat more determination that unless your heart is totally into it a life of crime just takes too much energy. But here is the odd part. He had total recall of me as a kid, including my politics. He even remembered something that I had not-he was my captain in canvassing for John F. Kennedy for President in 1960. I am not sworn to secrecy and I checked out the information independently so that I can add that today he is a fairly influential, if not widely known, member of the Massachusetts Democratic Party establishment.

That poses two questions. The first and obvious one, that I also posed when I interviewed James, is one that must be on the reader’s mind, as it surely was on mine. What in this biographic sketch warrants going underground from one’s family for over thirty years? Francis answered that unless he got a fresh, totally fresh, start that he would have wound up like his brother James. Fair enough. Moreover he just flat out got tired of taking a psychological beating every time his mother, Margaret, berated him in his early youth for some seemingly trivial mistake.

To not have to deal with that as Francis started to get into real trouble he just walked away from his family. His rationale was that if they did not know about it then he was doing them a favor. Strange reasoning, perhaps. However, I know, and perhaps you do also, the wrath of an Irish mother when she gets into the shaming ritual. I faced that more than one time myself. It is not pretty. Francis may have stayed away too long and, in the end, coldly broke his father’s heart, but there is nothing absurd about his response. We all face our demons in our own particular ways.

The second question is why, if he were so politically knowledgeable and alienated, did he become, from my political perspective, a class traitor. As mentioned above Francis knew that I had gone ‘commie’ so that was no big deal to him but here is where the cautionary tale for working class kids comes in- he saw his best chance of advancement for himself by working his way up the Democratic Party hierarchy. This, my friends, is ultimately the problem we have to deal with if we are ever to get our own workers party with some bite. The Francis types that clutter the American political landscape can be had but not until we have leverage.

I commented, off-handedly, in History that at a point where I had been successful in locating the two older brothers I would I will surely need the literary talents of someone like James T. Farrell in his Studs Lonigan trilogy for guidance. That has proven to not be necessary as this is a most ordinary story. What this story really calls for is the skills of someone like the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, or better yet a Lenin, to try to analyze and to generalize how a couple of fairly smart working class kids turned the wrong way and in the end turned inward rather than become class fighters.

It, further, needs an appraisal of how the transmission belt of working class political consciousness that broke down in our fathers’ generation (the so-called “greatest generation” that survived the Great Depression and fought World War II) remains broken in the baby-boomer generation (their and my generation, the generation of ’68). There is thus something of a ‘lost’ generation that is not there now that today’s youth look like they are ready to ‘storm heaven’. We had better act on this question.

As I have said in the previous commentaries on this story I am a working class politician. That is the great legacy that my parents left me, intentionally or not. As I have asked previously in relating the other parts of the story -are there any great political lessons to be learned here? No, I do not think so but this family’s saga of turning in on itself in the absence of some greater purpose and solution goes a long way to explaining why down at the base of society we have for a long time never had as much as nibble of independent working class political consciousness expressed in this country.

*From The Pages Of "Women And Revolution"-"The Roots Of Bolshevism: The Russian Revolutionary Tradition"-A Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the heroic 19th century early Russian revolutionary, Vera Figner, mentioned in the article below.

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Summer/Autumn 1992 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest for all those who wish to learn about our militant forbears. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.

The Roots Of Bolshevism:The Russian Revolutionary Tradition

W&R is pleased to present the edited transcript of a talk given by a member of our editorial board, Joseph Seymour, at an educational conference of the Spartacist League/US, held in the Bay Area on 2 May 1992.

The origins of this talk go back a few years to conversations I had with two comrades who were most directly and actively involved in seeking to build a section of the International Communist League in the Soviet Union. We talked about how wretched the present-day Russian intelligentsia was, both the pro-Wall Street self-styled "democrats" and the Stalinist self-described "patriots." Particularly disturbing was the depth of women's oppression and the pervasive¬ness of male chauvinism, not only in Soviet societyat large but even amongpeople who considered themselves communists, Leninists, would-be Trotskyists.

As we were talking, it occurred to me that the present-day Russian intelligentsia is not only profoundly alienated from Bolshevism, but from the many generations of Russian revolutionaries who preceded and culminated in Bolshevism. If the ghost of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who was the greatest Russian socialist of the pre-Marxist era—a man who had a profound influence on Lenin—could return to his old intellectual haunts in the universities and editorial offices of Russia today, he would not be able to understand how anyone who called himself a democrat could want to transform Russia along the lines of Western capitalism. For him, to be a democrat meant to be for social equality. It meant to be for the rule of the lower classes in society. The Russian revolutionaries despised the bourgeoisie, both the Russian version and the Western version.

Chernyshevsky would be even more uncomprehending about how anyone could call himself a communist and yet be a Russian nationalist, a male chauvinist and an anti-Semite. Because to be a communist meant by definition that you were an internationalist, you were an extreme partisan of women's equality and liberation, and you welcomed Jews as equals and as comrades. From the 1870s onward, Jews played a prominent role in all of the Russian radical movements, all of the wings of populism and later all wings of Marxism.

And women played a far more prominent role in the Russian revolutionary movement than they did in any other country in the world. Women like Vera Zasulich and Sofia Bardina of Land and Liberty, which was the principal populist organization, were hard, tough, dedicated revolutionaries. From the shooting of the police commandant Trepov in 1878 to the assassination of the tsarist general Luzhenovsky by Maria Spiridonova in 1906, Russian women carried out some of the most spectacular acts of terrorism. After the
Revolution of 1905 a tsarist prison official in his own way recognized the equality of women: "Experience shows that women, in terms of criminality, ability, and possession of the urge to escape, are hardly distinguishable from men."

If we could get into a time machine and go back to the world of Chernyshevsky and Land and Liberty, we would have big fights about peasant socialism and the efficacy of terrorism. But at a deeper level we would feel ourselves among comrades. So what we are trying to do is to reinstill in Russia today its own great revolutionary tradition, a tradition which has been perverted and degraded or simply forgotten after decades of Stalinist rule and the pressure of Western imperialism on the Soviet bureaucratically degenerated workers state.

French Jacobins and Russian Decembrists

That tradition begins with the Decembrists, a group of revolutionary democratic military officers who sought to overthrow the tsarist autocracy in December 1825. But the Decembrists themselves begin with the French Revolution, which is the fountainhead of radicalism in the modern world. It is one of the ironies of history that the Russian army which the tsar sent into West Europe to crush the French Revolution in its Napoleonic phase became a transmission belt back into Russia for the ideals of that revolution. One of the Decembrists later wrote:

"During the campaigns through Germany and France our young men became acquainted with European civilization, which produced upon them the strongest impression. They were able to compare all that they had seen abroad with what confronted them at every step at home: slavery of the majority of Russians, cruel treatment of subordinates by superiors, all sorts of government abuses, and general tyranny."

So the Decembrists were a belated attempt to extend the French Revolution into Russia. One of their principal leaders had been the son of the Russian ambassador to Napoleonic France; he grew up in a milieu shot through with former Jacobin revolutionaries, among them Napo¬leon himself. Another prominent Decembrist, when he was stationed in Paris in 1815, went around to the leading intellectuals, among them Henri Saint-Simon, a pioneer
theorist of socialism. Saint-Simon attempted to convince this young Russian nobleman to introduce socialism into his homeland.

The most radical of the Decembrists, Pavel Pestel, had not personally been to France although he identified himself wholeheartedly with the French revolutionaries. But he went beyond Jacobinism. By the 1820s the ideas of socialism were beginning to gain currency among the European intelligentsia. Pestel attempted to combine a radical bourgeois-democratic revolution with elements of socialism. He proposed that the land be taken from the nobility and given to the peasants—half given to the peasants to farm privately, the other half to farm collectively so that no peasant family would go hungry. And Pestel called this the Russian Law. After the insurrection was suppressed, the tsarist authorities discovered the Russian Law among Pestel's private papers. Instead of publicizing it at his trial, they thought it was so inflammatory and attractive that they buried it in a secret archive. It did not see the light of day for almost 100 years.

An old reactionary general was on his deathbed when he heard of the Decembrist uprising, and it perplexed him. He said: before we have had uprisings of peasants who want to become noblemen; now we have an uprising of noblemen who want to become shoemakers. The Decembrists did not want to become shoemakers; they were not concerned with their future personal status. But this old reactionary understood something: that this was a movement of an elite, isolated from the peasant masses in whose interests they spoke and attempted to act. And this would be true of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia throughout the 19th century. Initially this milieu consisted mainly of the sons of noblemen, later on the sons and daughters of what was called the "middle class," the children of tsarist bureaucrats or like Chernyshevsky, of Russian Orthodox priests. It was only at the end of the century, in the mid-1890s, that the Marxist wing of the intelligentsia acquired a mass base among the rapidly growing industrial proletariat.

The Decembrists were the first revolutionary bourgeois-democratic movement in Russia. They were also the last such movement. That is, they were the last movement that attempted to overthrow the tsar in order to remodel Russian society along the lines of contemporary West Europe or North America. After that, those people who wanted to transform Russia along the lines of Western capitalism did not call themselves democrats because they were not democrats; they called themselves liberals. They did not want to overthrow the tsarist autocracy. Rather they wanted to pressure the tsarist autocracy to modernize Russia from above. Their goal was a constitutional mon¬archy in which the monarch remained strong and the constitution guaranteed the rule of the propertied classes. As Chernyshevsky put it: "The liberals absolutely refuse to allow the lower strata any preponderance in society."

The First Russian Socialist Movement

Following the suppression of the Decembrists it took another generation for a new revolutionary movement to emerge. This was the so-called Petrashevsky Circle, a group of a couple of hundred radicals around Mikhail Petrashevsky. At that time the Russian Orthodox Church was sexually segregated, and in order to show his support for the equality of women and his defiance of the state church, Petrashevsky donned women's clothing and he attended a ceremony of the church exclusive to women. However he had forgotten to shave off his beard! He was approached by a policeman who said, "Madam, I think you are a man." Petrashevsky replied, "Sir, I think you are an old woman." The policeman was so flustered, Petrashevsky made his getaway.

Whereas the Decembrists had viewed West Europe in the afterglow of the French Revolution, a generation later Petrashevsky and his comrades only saw in West Europe an arena of the horrible exploitation of the lower classes by the propertied classes. They identified with the socialist opposition to Western bourgeois society and defined their goal as the application of Western socialism to Russia. In light of everything that's happening in Russia today, it's important to emphasize that this very first Russian socialist movement was implacably opposed to Russian nationalism in all its manifestations. They of course opposed the Slavophiles, who idealized Russia before Peter the Great and counterposed the spirituality of the Russian people to the crass materialism of the bourgeois West. But Petrashevsky and his comrades also opposed radical democrats like Belinsky who argued that the progress of humanity goes through nations, not by transcending nations. Against this view they argued, "Socialism is a cosmopolitan doctrine, which stands higher than nationalities...for socialists differing nations do not exist, there are only people."

The Petrashevsky Circle was the exact contemporary of the German League of the Just, out of which came the Communist League for which Marx wrote the Com¬munist Manifesto. Like Marx, Petrashevsky and his com¬rades believed that the spectre of communism was haunt¬ing Europe. And Russia was part of Europe. They looked forward, in the near future, to a pan-European socialist revolution, predominantly proletarian in the West, predominantly peasant-based in the East. They believed that the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848 in West Europe was the beginning of that development, and they immediately wanted to get in on the act. They started discussing how they were actually going to overthrow the tsar. But before they got very far, the tsarist authorities simply crushed them. Nicholas I was panicked in his own way by the spectre of communism and moved to destroy its meager reflection among a small section of the Russian intelligentsia.

The Origins of Populism

The revolutions of 1848 and the ensuing counterrevolutions by the combined forces of bourgeois and monarchical reaction are the great historic watershed of 19th century Europe. Among other things they gave rise to Russian populism as a distinct current of European socialism. Petrashevsky and his comrades had believed that socialism would come to Russia as part of a general European revolution. That vision was defeated on the barricades in Paris, Vienna, Rome and elsewhere.

A witness to that defeat was Alexander Herzen, the founder of Russian populism. Herzen had been a radical democrat who emigrated to West Europe, and he experienced the revolutions of 1848 in France and Italy. But Herzen remained optimistic about the prospects of revolution in Russia. If Russia was going to have a revolution in advance and independently of West Europe, however, it would have to be a predominantly peasant revolution because the industrial proletariat was minute. A German conservative, Baron Haxthausen, who had visited Russia in the 1840s, wrote a book saying that Russia didn't need a socialist revolution, it already had socialism in the form of the traditional peasant commune. After 1848 Herzen accepted this premise and argued that what would require a proletarian revolution in the West could be achieved on the basis of Russian rural institutions if the society were sufficiently democratized.

It is important to emphasize that while the Russian populists saw a different path to socialism in Russia, they had the same goal as Western revolutionaries. Thus Marx was always held in extremely high regard in the Russian populist movement. One of the early under¬ground populist groups wrote to Marx in London and proposed that he represent Russia as well as Germany in the leading council of the First International. The first language into which Capital was translated was Russian. It got through the tsarist censors, who figured that a book so dry and abstract as Capital could not inspire anyone to revolutionary passion, and it became an instant best seller. At the end of his life, Herzen stated that he had always been faithful to the ideas of Saint-Simon, who had an extremely technologically advanced conception of socialism.

Herein lay the fundamental contradiction of Russian populism. The populists projected onto the peasant commune not only economic egalitarianism, but social equality at all levels—the equality of women, a libertarian conception of sexual relations, a belief in materialism and the progress of science. They believed that the tsar-worshipping, priest-ridden, wife-beating Russian peasant could be won to the outlook of a Saint-Simon or a Marx. Such an illusion could survive only as long as the populist movement was exclusively a movement of the intelligentsia. And in fact the "To the People" movement marked the beginning of the end of Russian populism.

Revolutionary populism went through four distinct phases. The first phase was ushered in by the Crimean War of 1853-55 in which Russia was defeated by England and France. This defeat sent shock waves through the Russian upper classes. Tsar Nicholas I died in 1855 (some say he committed suicide out of a sense of shame). His successor, Alexander II, appeared to be a liberal, and in the late 1850s Russia experienced the tsarist version of glasnost and perestroika. Censorship was relaxed very considerably, and the tsarist government began talking about fundamental reforms of the system of serfdom.

Initially populist intellectuals like Herzen and Chernyshevsky demanded that the tsar expropriate the landed nobility and give the land to the peasantry. Some believed that the tsarist autocracy would achieve from above what the French Revolution had achieved from below. However, it soon became clear that the legal emancipation of the serfs was going to be done in a way which perpetuated the exploitation of the peasants at the hands of the landlords and the absolutist state. In the first years after the abolition of serfdom, the economic conditions of the peasantry were actually worse than they had been. When the Emancipation Edict of 1861 was read, it provoked scattered peasant uprisings; the peasants thought it was a counterfeit document by the local bureaucrats and the landlords. The so:called Emancipation Edict marked the beginning of revolutionary populism. The intelligentsia became convinced that in order to establish peasant-based socialism they would have to overthrow the tsarist autocracy and create a democratic republic.

The "Common Cause":
Women in the Revolutionary Movement

In the 1860s the first underground revolutionary organizations came into existence. These were easily crushed. Chernyshevsky himself was imprisoned and then exiled. Yet the tsarist repression in no way suppressed the revolutionary populist movement. Over the course of the next decade, a group of perhaps two or three hundred intellectuals became a mass movement of the intelligentsia numbering thousands of activists and perhaps ten times as many sympathizers.

A three-sided political struggle developed during this period within the Russian intelligentsia who opposed the existing social and political order to some degree: the Slavophiles, the liberals, and the revolutionary populists. In this struggle the populists won hands down, and by the early 1870s Russian universities were a bastion of revolutionary populism.

Perhaps the decisive reason for the victory of populism is that they were able to mobilize the vast reserves of the women of the educated classes. This movement literally liberated thousands of women from the shackles of the patriarchal family. A woman was not legally allowed to live on her own without the permission of her parents, or her husband if she was married. To circumvent this, the fictitious marriage became a sort of standard activity within the radical movement. Some young male student would be told by a friend that he knew of a woman of advanced views who wanted to go abroad to study medicine (a woman couldn't study medicine in Russia). And they would meet for the first time in front of a church; they would go in, get married; they would come out, and he would hand her her passport, of which he had control, and say, "Now you are free to go and study medicine and do what you like."

During the 1860s the Russian revolutionary movement acquired the participation of women to a far greater degree than their counterparts in Western Europe. These women at the same time consciously rejected Western-style feminism, that is, the idea of building a separate movement predominantly of women in order to pressure the existing government to pass laws in favor of women's equality. They saw women's equality coming about through what was called the "common cause," a total social revolution in which they would participate on an equal footing with male revolutionaries. Vera Figner, who became the principal leader of the terrorist People's Will in its final phase, recounts how she and her fellow Russian radical students at the University of Zurich viewed this question:

"Generally speaking, as a group the female students abroad were not advocates of the woman question and smiled at any mention of it. We came without thought of pioneering or trying to solve the woman question. We didn't think it needed solution. It was a thing of the past; the principle of equality between men and women had been achieved in the sixties."

Now of course what Figner meant was that it had been achieved within the revolutionary movement, not in Russian society at large. The Russian populists, called "Narodniks" in their own language, were acutely aware of the terrible oppression of women. At a mass trial of populists in 1877, the tsarist prosecutors denounced them for undermining the family. Sofia Bardina replied to this:

"As far as the family is concerned...isn't it being destroyed by a social system which forces an impoverished woman to abandon herself to prostitution, and which even sanctifies this prostitution as a legal and necessary element of every civilized state? Or is it we who are destroying the family? we who are trying to root out this poverty—the major cause of all society's ill, including the erosion of the family?"

"To the People"

In the mid-1870s the populist intelligentsia who were organized in Land and Liberty, which was an all-Russian, fairly highly centralized organization of the Narodnik vanguard, made a heroic 'attempt to overthrow what Bardina called the "social system." This was the "To the People" movement. Thousands of revolutionary intellec¬tuals flocked to rural villages trying to incite the peasants to rise up in a radical democratic and social revolution. The response was not favorable. One of the leading veterans of this movement reported:

"I noticed that any sharp sallies against the Tsar or against religion made an extremely disagreeable impression on the peasants; they were just as deeply perplexed by energetic appeals for a rebellion or uprising."

When the Narodnik intellectuals said that the peasants should have the landlords' land, they got a favorable hearing. But the peasants were unwilling to defy the state to achieve this end.

While the main body of Narodnik intellectuals went to the rural villages, some remained in the cities and sought to agitate and organize among factory workers. Here they were distinctly more successful. They were able to win over some advanced workers, such as Stepan Khalturin, who joined the leadership of Land and Liberty and set up small but significant allied organizations of workers.

One of the leading populist intellectuals involved in organizing the workers was Georgi Plekhanov. Initially Plekhanov accepted what could be called the conventional populist line: factory workers are simply peasants doing seasonal vyork in the factories, which had no effect on their sympathies and ties to the rural villages. But Plekhanov's own experience caused him to question this. In 1879 he wrote:

"The question of the city worker is one of those that it may be said will be moved forward automatically by life itself, to an appropriate place, in spite of the a priori theoretical decisions of the revolutionary leaders."

The "To the People" movement, which necessarily operated quite openly, exposed the Narodniks to massive state repression. This repression, combined with the frus¬tration that the movement had not achieved its basic aim, paved the way for the last phase of revolutionary populism: the turn toward terrorism.

In 1878 Vera Zasulich heard that one of her comrades had been almost beaten to death in prison. She put on her best clothes, walked to the prison, requested that she present a petition to the head of the prison, and when she went into his office she pulled out a gun and shot him pointblank. She did not however kill him. The tsarist authorities thought this was such an open-and-shut case that instead of trying her for a political crime before a special tribunal, they tried her on an ordinary criminal charge before a jury drawn from the St. Petersburg upper classes. And she was acquitted, because the jury found this a justifiable act of moral outrage!

The acquittal had a far more shocking impact than the shooting. Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace, expressed the views of the educated elite when he called Zasulich's acquittal "a harbinger of revolution." The populist leaders drew the same conclusion: that if even an upper-class jury will acquit an overt terrorist, then a cam¬paign of terrorism would have enormous popular support. Marx and Engels in London similarly concluded that in the particular conditions of Russia a campaign of terrorism could incite a popular revolution.

The one populist intellectual who dissented was Plekhanov, who warned that the only effect of shooting Alexander II would be to replace him with another Alexander with another digit after his name. He wanted to continue to propagandize and agitate among the rural had been in prison and then in exile for almost 20 years. The tsarist regime had sufficient respect for the effectiveness of People's Will that they did in fact free the old man of Russian socialism. But in the following years Russian populism was basically broken, not so much by the tsarist repression as by demoralization. Neither mass agitation nor terrorism had seriously affected the tsarist autocracy, which emerged if anything even more reactionary than ever.

From Populism to Marxism

The 1880s were the low point of the Russian revolutionary movement. In 1889 a student in St. Petersburg, just ten years earlier a hotbed of revolutionary activism, reported: "There were few self-sacrificing participants who completely consecrated themselves to the cause.... All wanted to finish the course as soon as possible and then to live entirely within the law." Yet just a few years later, a new generation of Russian revolutionaries would enter the scene and finish off the tsarist autocracy
once and for all.

Most accounts of the transition from populism to Marxism within the Russian intelligentsia focus exclusively on Plekhanov and his comrades. It's important, however, to place this transition in its international context. During the 1870s Russia appeared to be the one country on the verge of a radical upheaval. The bomb-throwing Russian Narodnik seemed the model of the European revolutionary. When Zasulich fled to West Europe after being acquitted for shooting Trepov, she was greeted as a heroine not only by socialists, but even by many Western liberals who hated the tsarist autocracy. Yet a decade later the Russian populist movement had almost evaporated. In 1878, the same year that People's Will was formed, the Bismarck regime in Germany passed the so-called Anti-Socialist Laws aimed at breaking the power of the German Marxist movement. The leaders, Bebel and Kautsky, were driven into exile and many activists were imprisoned. Yet unlike the Russian populists, the Marxists became the mass party of the German proletariat despite the repression. So Plekhanov's influence among a new generation of Russian revolutionaries-was not merely because of the intrinsic brilliance of his polemics against populism, but also because he was a cothinker of the strongest, most effective socialist movement in Europe.

After the split in Land and Liberty, Plekhanov attempted to establish a small propaganda group called "Total Redistribution," but the tsarist persecution was so intense that he and his comrades were forced into exile. This compelled them to rethink their basic theoretical premises and strategic perspectives, and in the early 1880s Ple¬khanov made the transition from populism to Marxism. That transition contained two basic elements, one negative, the other positive. Instead of just idealizing it, Plekhanov looked at what was happening to the peasant commune, and he saw that since the emancipation of the serfs, the collective elements of the Russian peasantry were rapidly being undermined. A new layer of rich peas¬ants, known by the insulting term kulaks, or "fists," was increasingly dominating the life of the village because they had the money. That was the negative element. The positive element is that Plekhanov generalized from his own experiences in the 1870s that there was a fundamental difference between workers and peasants, that they were not just part of the narod, the "people," and that only the workers in their mass were receptive to the socialist program. He concluded that a socialist party in Russia must be based centrally on the slowly but steadily growing proletariat.

In rejecting the conception of peasant-based socialism, Plekhanov concluded that Russia at that point in its economic development could not have a socialist transformation of any kind. He conceived a theory of what later came to be called the "two-stage revolution." In the first stage the working class, guided by the socialist intelligentsia, would lead the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy. The liberal bourgeoisie, such as ruled in the West, would then come to power. In turn the workers would gain the political freedom to build a mass proletarian party and allied trade-union movement. Plekhanov also believed that a radical democratic revolution in Russia would enormously accelerate capitalist development, thus increasing the numerical weight of the industrial proletariat and creating the objective economic conditions for a socialist revolution in the future. Thus the program of the Eman¬cipation of Labor group, formed in 1883, stated:

"Present-day Russia is suffering—as Marx once said of the West European continent—not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from insufficiency of that development.

"One of the most harmful consequences of this backward state of production was and still is the underdevelopment of the middle class, which, in our country, is incapable of taking the initiative in the struggle against absolutism. "That is why the socialist intelligentsia has been obliged to head the present-day emancipation movement, whose immediate task must be to set up free political institutions in our country...."

Plekhanov's two-stage revolutionary schema was accepted within the Marxist movement until the beginnings of the Revolution of 1905, when it was confronted, as Plekhanov would have said, "by life itself." It was then challenged in different ways by Lenin's conception of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry and Trotsky's conception of permanent revolution.

"From a Spark a Flame Shall Be Kindled"

In the first decade of its existence, the Emancipation of Labor group was a mere handful of exiles. This reflected both the apolitical mood of the Russian intelligentsia and the continuing dominance of the populists over the diminished radical movement. Slowly Plekhanov began to influence a new younger generation of Russian intellectuals, personified by Vladimir llyich Ulyanov. According to his own account, the future Lenin was an apolitical youth until 1887, when his older brother was executed for participating in one of the last populist attempts to take the tsar's life. Alexander Ulyanov's execution radicalized his younger brother, who, however, did not follow the same path in a programmatic and strategic sense. In the early 1890s the young future Lenin consciously rejected populism in all its contemporary manifestations, and consid¬ered himself a Marxist.

By the mid-1890s, revolutionary populism was a thing of the past and what passed for populism had merged with liberalism. In the 1890s the only people who were calling for a democratic republic were the Marxists, called the Social Democrats. Thus Lenin could write at this time: "All true and consistent democrats in Russia must become Social Democrats." The Russian Marxists had achieved a position in some ways comparable to the revolutionary populists of a generation earlier. They had become the dominant current among that section of the Russian intelligentsia which was fundamentally hostile to the existing social and political order. They had also acquired a small layer of advanced workers. But they had to break outside the narrow circle. This was called the transition from propaganda to agitation. Plekhanov defined propaganda as the explanation of many complex ideas to the few, and agitation as the explanation of a few basic ideas to the many.

The attempt of the Marxist propaganda circle to involve itself in agitation among the workers happened to coincide with a major strike wave. As a result they got a far more favorable hearing and greater influence among the workers than they had initially expected. Lenin, Martov and the other leaders of the movement sought to direct the workers' economic resistance to the employer toward the ultimate goal of a radical democratic revolution against the tsarist autocracy. In a popular pamphlet on factory fines written in 1895, for example, Lenin wrote:

"[The workers] will understand that the government and its officials are on the side of the factory owners, and that the laws are drawn up in such a way as to make it easier for the employer to oppress the worker."

The turn toward agitation incurred increased tsarist repression. Lenin, Martov and the other leaders of what were called the first generation of Russian Marxist "practicals"—that is, the Russian Marxists who actually organized the workers, as opposed to the older veterans like Plekhanov and Axelrod who provided the theoretical direction from exile—were arrested. The movement passed into the hands of younger people whose formative experience was their involvement in the mass strikes. They became so enthralled with increasing their influence among the workers that they decided to drop the demand for a democratic republic, which they argued was remote from the immediate concerns of the workers and was unpopular among the more backward sections who still had illusions in the tsar's benevolence.

Plekhanov denounced this tendency as "economism," which a colleague of Lenin, Potresov, defined as the Utopian notion of building an effective trade-union move¬ment under tsarist absolutism. Nonetheless in the late 1890s economism became the dominant current within Russian Social Democracy, both the underground circles in Russia and the exile organizations in West Europe.

In 1900 Lenin, Martov and Potresov were released from Siberia, where they had been sent into exile. They joined Plekhanov and his comrades in West Europe to form what was called the Iskra group. "Iskra," meaning "spark," was taken for their journal; it derived from a letter that was written 75 years earlier by the imprisoned and condemned Decembrists to their friend, the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. In justifying their actions, the Decembrists said: "From a spark a flame shall be kindled." In choosing this name the Iskra group was stating that the proletariat was and must be the heir to the tradition of revolutionary democratic struggle against the tsarist autocracy. The very name was an attack on economism.

Although Plekhanov was one of the towering figures of European socialism, it was Lenin who was the real driving force and principal organizer of the Iskra group. Its immediate goal was to wrest control of the movement from the still dominant economists. The Iskra group won rather rapidly, in part because Russian society was beginning to experience revolutionary ferment at all levels. Factory workers in large numbers spontaneously joined student strikes and protests, thereby giving the lie to the economist notion that workers would take to the streets only when their own personal livelihood was involved—a very narrow and degrading conception. The narrowness of the economist perspective was discredited even among the economists themselves.

For Lenin, the leadership of the movement was only the first step. The second and decisive step was to cohere the localized propaganda circles into a centralized party with a clearly defined program, strategic perspective and leadership. Describing the need for a such a party in his principal work of the Iskra period, What Is To Be Done?, Lenin used a metaphor from construction:

"Pray tell me, when a bricklayer lays bricks in various parts of an enormous structure, the like of which he has never seen, is it not a 'paper line' that he uses to find the correct place to lay each brick and to indicate the ultimate goal of his work as a whole.... And aren't we passing now through a period in our party life, in which we have bricks and bricklayers, but lack a guiding line visible to all?"

To establish such a guiding line and a centralized party, the Iskra group called a congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in mid-1903. As is well known, this congress ended in a deep split between the Bolsheviks (the majority, or "hards"), led by Lenin, and the Mensheviks (the minority, called at the time the "softs"), whose principal leader was Martov. At first it appeared that the split was over narrowly organizational grounds: whether to have a highly centralized party consisting of people who are committed revolutionaries, or, as the Mensheviks wanted, a looser party open to all workers and intellectuals who actively supported the movement in some degree. However, as Russia moved toward a revolutionary crisis it became increasingly clear that the difference over the internal nature of the party was linked to differences over the course of the role it would play in the revolution, in fact differences over the revolution itself.

The Permanent Revolution

In 1904 Russia engaged in a war with Japan over which country would control the Far East. The tsarist autocracy had expected that a wave of popular patriotic solidarity would dampen the growing social discontent. Instead the defeats of the Russian army at the hands of the Japanese further undermined the tsarist autocracy. "Bloody Sunday," the January 1905 massacre of peaceful workers who were petitioning the tsar, ignited a wave of mass workers strikes, peasant uprisings and military mutinies throughout the year. The Romanov throne tottered wildly, although in the end it did not fall. However, in the early months of 1905 the demise of the autocracy seemed imminent, and therefore the various factions and tendencies of Rus¬sian Social Democracy were forced to spell out much more concretely their conceptions of the course of the revolution and its aftermath.

The Mensheviks translated Plekhanov's initially rather abstract conception of a two-stage revolution into support for the liberal wing of the Russian bourgeoisie, organized in the Constitutional Democratic party or Cadets. The last thing that the Cadets wanted was a popular insurrection to overthrow the tsar. What they aimed at was to use the turmoil from below to pressure the tsarist autocracy to create quasi-parliamentary bodies in which the propertied classes would have the dominant place. In practice the Mensheviks' adherence to a two-stage revolution, in which the first stage meant the workers were supposed to march arm in arm with the democratic bourgeoisie against tsarist reaction, turned out to be a no-stage revolution because there was no democratic bourgeoisie with which to march.

Lenin recognized that all wings of the Russian bourgeoisie were anti-democratic and anti-revolutionary, that a radical bourgeois-democratic revolution therefore would have to occur against and not in alliance with the Russian bourgeoisie. This was the core of his conception of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. He projected that a workers party, supported by the mass of the peasants, would be able to purge Russia of all the feudal-derived backwardness, the tsarist autocracy, bureaucracy and the state church. It would eliminate the oppression of nationalities as well as of the Jews and end the exploitation of the peasants by the landed nobility.

This conception was clearly influenced by the Jacobin dictatorship in the Great French Revolution. Yet the ques¬tion remained: could the proletariat replay the Jacobin dictatorship in the Russia of 1905; was it possible to take economic actions which would harm the interests of large sections of the propertied class and at the same time not economically expropriate the bourgeoisie? Lenin insisted that this was not a stable form of government, but rather "only a transient, temporary socialist aim." He argued a' the time (although he later changed his view) that in thi absence of proletarian revolutions in West Europe, a rev¬olution in Russia, no matter how radical, could not go beyond the framework of capitalist economic relations.

The person who uniquely argued arthe time that th Russian Revolution could and had to go beyond bourgeois economic relations was Leon Trotsky. Trotsky had bef one of the younger leaders of the Iskra group; in the split he initially sided with the Mensheviks. He played prominent role in the Revolution of 1905, and in the course of that revolution developed what he called the doctrine of permanent revolution, in part based on Marx's writings in the immediate aftermath of the revolutions of 1848. In a preface which he wrote in 1921 to his writings on the Revolution of 1905, Trotsky summarized the doctrine of permanent revolution:

"This rather high-flown expression defines the thought that the Russian revolution, although directly concerned with bourgeois aims, could not stop short at those aims; the revolution could not solve its immediate, bourgeois tasks except by putting the proletariat into power. And the proletariat, once having power in its hands, would not be able to remain confined within the bourgeois framework of the revolution. On the contrary, precisely in order to guarantee its victory, the proletarian vanguard in the very earliest stages of its rule would have to make extremely deep inroads not only into feudal but also into bourgeois property relations....

"The contradictions between a workers' government and an overwhelming majority of peasants in a backward country could be resolved only on an international scale, in the arena of a world proletarian revolution. Having, by virtue of historical necessity, burst the narrow bourgeois-democratic confines of the Russian revolution, the victorious proletariat would be compelled also to burst its national and state confines, that is to say, it would have to strive consciously for the Russian revolution to become the pro¬logue to a world revolution."

In 1905 the permanent revolution did not go further than the beginnings of dual power between the proletariat and the tsarist autocracy. However, Russia's defeats in the first imperialist world war broke the back of the tsarist autocracy and paved the way for the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, the greatest victory of the world pro¬letariat in history. Today that victory is being desperately threatened by the ascendancy of capitalist counterrevo¬lutionary forces.

But I would like to end this talk rather with a story. After the assassination of Alexander II the leadership of People's Will came into the hands of Vera Figner. It was she who negotiated with the tsarist regime for the release of Chernyshevsky, and she managed to hold together an underground group in Russia for the next two years. The police official who finally tracked her down had gained so much respect for her that he requested to kiss her hand before sending her to prison. But sent to prison she was, where she stayed for the next 22 years. She was only released in the amnesty of 1905. When she came out of prison she was a kind of Narodnik Rip Van Winkle; she could not understand or orient to the radically changed political and social conditions.

Nevertheless, she remained active within the left, where she was universally respected.
In 1917 many prominent old populists joined the counterrevolutionary camp and went into exile. Figner, the old Narodnik terrorist, faced with a fundamental choice of political loyalties, chose to stay in Soviet Russia. In the 1920s she devoted herself to writing her memoirs and to an organization called the Society of Former Political Prisoners, who were old populists who considered themselves loyal citizens of the Soviet Union. In that capacity she sought to induce populists who had emigrated to return to Soviet Russia and to serve the interests of the workers state. This eminently worthy organization was disbanded by Stalin in the early '30s.

Figner was still alive and kicking at the age of 89, living in Moscow, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. As the Wehrmacht approached Moscow, the Russian authorities turned to Figner and said, "We will move you to safety further east." She refused, saying, "I am very old. I will die soon anyway. Save your efforts for people who are living, who still have a life to give to the cause." So the last member of the famous Central Committee of the People's Will died the following year in Moscow, a heroic and self-sacrificing revolutionary right to the end, and in that sense an inspiration for us all.

*March 17th or Easter, 1916?- A Note On The Irish Diaspora

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the Irish Easter 1916 Rising for their right to national self-determination against British imperialism.

Commentary

Over the past few weeks I have been answering a questionnaire (and posting some of the relevant responses on this site) given to me by a member of my high school class (of 1964) committee. I, innocently, took on this task in gratitude for some help she had given me in searching for a couple of guys from my old working class neighborhood. At some level this task is a monstrosity but, at another level, it is actually fun. I am far enough removed from that time to not be offended by any question thrown at me but also have become thoughtful enough about the questions to be able to present a few conclusions here once in a while.

The original question had two parts, only the second part of which is presented here. I am omitting most of the first part, the funny part. It involved answering a question about whether we skipped school on March 17th (Saint Patrick's Day) to go into Boston for the parade. If I did not mention it before my neighborhood, and the area serviced by my high school was, while not "Little Dublin", honeycombed with families with some degree of Irish descent. Unlike the City of Boston, where it is a holiday, we inner suburbanites did not get the day off and needed to be 'sick' to attend the parade.(Note: Boston, officially, celebrates the day as Evacuation Day. I would argue that any day one can celebrate the defeat of an imperial army, in this case the bloody British, under any circumstances is a day worthy of celebration in its own right.)

Today’s Question: What part, if any, did your ethnic heritage play in your growing up?

“A Terrible Beauty Was Born” the last line from William Butler Yeats- Easter, 1916

In my last posting I mentioned that I would give my answer to the question of whether I skipped school to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day in the next posting. Part of my reasoning for not answering the question fully then was to answer the more general question posed above using my own background as a foil. By a coincidence of nature this year Saint Patrick's Day and Easter, two 'high holy days' on the Irish cultural calendar, fall on successive weeks and therefore permit this comparative analysis. Here goes.

In the interest of full disclosure I confess here (and will provide the requisite transcripts) that I never skipped school on March 17th to go to the Saint Patrick’s Day parade in Boston. I do not, moreover, recall then ever really wanting to go to the event, although plenty of people in my old neighborhood did so. That is the rub. I, along with many of you, have some degree of Irish in us (just look at the names of the members of our class on the class list). Quincy was a first steppingstone in the second Diaspora (out of Ireland, out of South Boston/Dorchester) on the way to ‘lace curtain’ respectability (although my own family never made it pass 'shanty'). Today Asian Americans, particularly the Chinese and Vietnamese, have followed that well-trodden path from Boston to Quincy. In the case of my family, however, those historical roots were submerged in an American vanilla assimilationism. We never got much past the desperate fight against being dirt poor to think of such high subjects as ethnic solidarity or identity.

I have been a partisan of a just solution to the national question in Ireland and justice for the Catholic minority (and any Protestant worker who would listen)in the North almost my whole adult life. For this class member, then, the more important question has been one of not ridding Ireland of snakes but ridding it of the bloody English Army. Thus, the above-cited line commemorating Easter, 1916 and the beginning of the modern national liberation struggle in Ireland is what I would skip school for, gladly. I now take a certain pride in the accomplishments of our common Irish cultural heritage. However, it has been only very recently that I have found out that my long-departed maternal grandfather was an ardent, if quiet, Irish nationalist. It is in the blood, apparently. However, this new knowledge kind of puts one of the sources of my youthful indifference into a different perspective, doesn’t it? Chocky Ar La (Our Day Will Come) Give your story, please.

*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- The Grimke Sisters- Fighters For Slavery Abolition And Women's Rights

Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the 19th century American radicals, Sarah And Angelina Grimke.

February Is Black History Month

March Is Women's History Month

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

**********
Women And Revolution, Volume 29, Spring 1985

The Grimke Sisters:
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights

By Amy Rath

"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours." —Angelina Grimke', address to Women's Loyal League, May 1863

Angelina and Sarah Grimke' were two of the earliest fighters for black and women's rights in America. Although far from being socialists or revolutionaries, the Grimke' sisters of South Carolina were among the foremost fighters for human equality of their time, the 1830s and the tumultuous era which saw the birth of the abolitionist movement, foreshadowing the great Civil War which freed the slaves. They were also among the the first women to speak publicly on political issues. "Genteel society" objected to the fact of their public appearances—and even more to the content of their speeches. Thus the first serious, widespread discussion of women's rights in the United States was directly linked to the black question and the liberation of the slaves, questions which 25 years later would tear the nation apart in civil war.

Further, the Grimke' sisters' almost visionary commitment to the fight for the liberation of all, exemplified in Angelina's famous statement to the Women's Loyal League, stands in stark contrast not only to early abolitionist anti-women prejudices, but also to the later, shameful betrayal of black rights by feminists during the Reconstruction era. "The discussion of the rights of the slave has opened the way for the discussion of other rights," wrote Angelina to Catherine E.Beecher in 1837, "and the ultimate result will most certainly be the breaking of every yoke, the letting the oppressed of every grade and description go free,—an emancipation far more glorious than any the world has ever yet seen."

The sisters and Theodore Weld published American Slavery As It Is (1840), the most influential anti-slavery document until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Though they had essentially retired from active politics by the time of John Brown's courageous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, the actual opening shot of the Civil War, they deeply believed in his cause. Angelina's stirring "Address to the Soldiers of our Second Revolution" (given at the May 1863 Women's Loyal League convention) advocated massive arming of the former slaves as part of the Union Army, and remains today a remarkably radical and prescient analysis of the implications of the Civil War:

"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government... are driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war— The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."

Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights

On February 21,1838, hundreds of people swarmed to the great hall of the Massachusetts State Legislature. Angelina Grimke", the first woman ever to address an American legislative body, would argue for the most controversial subject of the day: the immediate abolition of slavery.

This speech—which continued over three days, despite efforts by pro-slavery forces to stop it—was the culmination of a nine months' tour by Sarah and Angelina Grimke', the first women agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), founded in 1833. While their speeches began as "parlor meetings" in private homes or church halls for women only, such was the power and growing fame of Angelina's oratory that men began to slip into the back to listen, and the Grimke' sisters became the first American women to address what were then called "promiscuous" audiences.

Uproar swept genteel society across the nation. The Grimke' sisters were breaking the rules of ladylike decorum by their "unwomanly" displays. Angelina was popularly called "Devilina"; "Fanny Wrightists!" screamed the pro-slavery press. (Fanny Wright was a Scots Utopian socialist who toured the U.S. in 1828 for abolition, public education, women's rights, the ten-hour day and "free love"; she set up an anti-slavery commune and edited a newspaper. When these projects failed, she left the country, having made little impact.) "Why are all the old hens abolitionists?" sneered the New Hampshire Patriot: "Because not being able to obtain husbands they think they may stand some chance for a negro, if they can only make amalgamation [interracial sex] fashionable."

The Congregationalist church, the descendant of the New England Puritans, issued a "Pastoral Letter" condemning the Grimke's for leaving "woman's sphere" and going against the biblical injunction, of Paul: "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." Sarah answered this, and other attacks, in the brilliant Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, the first American book on the rights of women, predating Margaret Fuller's more famous work by six years.

In her arguments Sarah relied extensively on biblical sources, for to her it was important to prove that the equality of the sexes should be a Christian belief, and she wanted to show that women had the right and duty to work for the emancipation of the slave. Her concrete solutions to women's oppression were naive: for example, she suggested that husbands should content themselves with baked potatoes and milk for dinner, to give their wives time to educate themselves. She never understood that the institution of the family itself necessarily stands in the way of women's freedom. Indeed, she could not reconcile herself to the idea that divorce should be legalized. But for all these limita¬tions, Sarah's book is the pioneer American work on the subject. She was deeply interested in women workers, and polemicized against unequal wages; she attacked with great bitterness the lack of educational opportunities for women and their total lack of legal rights. "I ask no favors for my sex," she wrote, "All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."

Many fellow abolitionists demanded that the sisters give up their arguments on women's rights, fearing that it would detract from the more important question of the hour: freedom for the slave. But Angelina pointed out that the outcry against women's public lecturing was a tool of the slaveholders: "We cannot push Abolitionism forward with all our might until we take up the stumbling block out of the road.... Can you not see the deep laid scheme of the clergy against us as lecturers?... If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year, and the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?" (emphasis in original; letter to Theodore Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier, 20 August 1837).

The Making of a Southern Abolitionist

The sisters' effectiveness as abolitionist agents had to do not only with the power and sweep of their arguments, but with the fact that they were native-born eyewitnesses to Southern slavery. Yet precisely because they were gently bred daughters of one of South Carolina's most prominent slaveholding families, they had not seen the worst of it, as they themselves were quick to point out. They did not see the slave gangs on the plantations, the brutal whippings, but the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves.

Sarah was born in 1792. The invention of the cotton gin in her infancy led her father, like many others, to expand his plantation holdings and build up his slave force. He was one of the wealthiest men in Charleston, the political capital of the South, and a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a former Speaker in the state House, a judge and author. Sarah grew up with every advantage that wealth and position could offer a woman of her time. But instead of satisfying herself with embroidery, piano and a little French, she studied her brother's lessons in mathematics, history and botany, and declared her wish to become a lawyer. Her family mocked her; her father forbade her to study Latin. Perhaps influenced by her own educational frustrations as well as her childhood revulsion for the slave system, she started to teach her personal maid to read. "I took an almost malicious satisfaction in teaching my little waiting-maid at night, when she was supposed to be occupied in combing and brushing my long locks. The light was put out, the keyhold screened, and flat on our-stomachs, before the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the laws of South Carolina."

As an adult Sarah's aspirations to make something of her life turned in the one direction open to "respectable" women of her day and class: religion. She became a Quaker. Later she converted Angelina, 12 years her junior. Before joining her sister in Philadel¬phia, the Quakers' center, Angelina undertook a personal conversion crusade against slavery among her family and friends. In her gray Quaker dress, she started arguments at tea against the sin of holding slaves, becoming quite unpopular with Charleston's ruling elite. Inquiries were made about her sanity.

Convinced at last that there was no future in this, Angelina went north. But she could not be satisfied with the orthodox Quaker doctrine, which at that time included colonization as a "solution" to slavery. Black "Friends" were made to sit on a separate bench. In the early 1830s Angelina became interested in the growing abolitionist movement, and was horrified at the violence the free North turned against anti-slavery spokesmen. William Lloyd Garrison was barely saved from lynching at the hands of a Boston mob in 1835. Theodore Weld was repeatedly mobbed as he toured the Midwest, as were many others. Early in the decade Prudence Crandall was forced to close her school for black girls in Connecticut when the well was poisoned, doctors refused to treat the students, and finally a mob torched the school building. In 1838 a pro-slavery mob, egged on by the mayor himself, burned down Philadelphia Hall, which had been built by the abolitionists as a partial answer to their difficulty in finding places to meet. An interracial- meeting of abolitionists was in progress there at the time; two days earlier, Angelina and Weld had married, and the attendance of both blacks and whites at their wedding fueled the fury of the race-terrorists.

The abolitionists were part of a broader bourgeois radical movement, the 19th century herrs of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals, and the American Revolution so dramatically unfulfilled in the "Land of the Free" where four million suffered in slavery. Although opposition to slavery was by no means as widespread in the 1830s as it was to become immediately before the Civil War, nonetheless many prominent men, such as the wealthy Tappan brothers of New York and Gerrit Smith, the biggest landowner in the North, had joined the movement by the middle of the decade. Many of the abolitionists had been part of the religious and intellectual upsurge which swept the United States after 1820. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists were formulating their philos¬ophy. Religious revivalists such as Charles G. Finney, who converted Weld, preached temperance and that slavery was a sin against god.
Angelina became convinced that god had called her to work actively for the emancipation of the slaves. Defying the Quakers (who later expelled the sisters when Angelina and Weld married in a non-Quaker ceremony), the sisters went to New York where they participated in a conference for the training of abolitionist agents. Thus began the famous speaking tour of 1837-38.

The politics of the Grimke sisters was radical bourgeois egalitarianism profoundly rooted in religion. They believed that slavery was a sin, that as "immortal, moral beings" women and blacks were the equals of white men. They argued that slavery was contrary to the laws of god (the Bible) and of man, as put forth in the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; they disagreed with Garrison's view of the Constitution as a "pro-slavery" document. Again unlike Garrison, they wrote and spoke for rights of education and property for free blacks as well, and bitterly denounced racism within the abolitionist movement. They were the integrationists of their time.

For many years, however, the sisters agreed with Garrison that slavery could be done away with peacefully by moral persuasion. They preached a boycott of slave-made goods (Angelina's wedding cake was made of "free" sugar by a free black baker). One of Angelina's first writings was "An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States," widely circulated by the AASS, in which she urged Southern women to begin a petition campaign for immediate emancipation, to free their own slaves and to educate them. When copies of this pamphlet reached Charleston, the postmaster publicly burned them and the police informed the Grimke' family that if their daughter ever attempted to set foot in the city, she would be jailed and then sent back on the next ship.

The sisters were also for many years staunch pacifists, as would be expected from their Quaker background. Sarah took this to such an extreme that she denied that abolitionists had the right to arm themselves in defense against pro-slavery mobs. This became a subject of controversy in the abolitionist movement in 1837 when publisher Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, Illinois by a mob. True to her pacifist idealism, Sarah ques¬tioned his right to bear the gun with which he tried to save his life.

Splits and the Coming Storm

By the 1840s the Grimke'sisters had largely withdrawn from public activity. In part this was due to ill health Angelina suffered as a result of her pregnancies, as well as family financial problems. But much of it was probably political demoralization. In 1840the abolitionist movement split over the issues of women's rights and political action. The Garrisonian wing wanted to include women in the organization, but was opposed to abolitionists voting or running for political office, since Garrison believed the "pro-slavery" U.S. Con¬stitution should be abolished and that the North should expel the South. The other wing, represented by eminent men like the Tappan brothers, excluded women from office within the organization, was against women's rights, and wanted to orient to political work in Congress. Since they agreed with neither side in this split, the Grimke's and Weld retired to private life. In later years Angelina spoke bitterly against "organizations."

Meanwhile, however, on the left wing of the abolitionist movement there were gathering forces which saw the irrepressible and inevitable necessity for a violent assault on the slave system, to end it forever by force of arms. The brilliant black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and John Brown spearheaded this growing conviction. As we noted in our SL pamphlet, "Black History and the Class Struggle," "Douglass' political evolution was not merely from 'non-resistance' to self-defense. Contained in the 'moral suasion' line was a refusal to fight slavery politically and to the wall, by all methods. That is the importance of the Douglass-Brown relationship: together they were planning the Civil War." And it was John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 which galvanized the nation; abolitionists who the day before were pacifists took the pulpit to proclaim the necessity of a violent end to the slave system.

The Grimke' sisters and especially Theodore Weld had earlier become convinced that only war could end slavery. Sarah believed she had communed with John Brown's spirit the night before his martyrdom at the hands of Colonel Robert E. Lee, acting under command of President Buchanan. "The John Huss of the United States now stands ready... to seal his testimony with his life's blood," she wrote in her diary. Two of the executed men from the Harpers Ferry raid were buried in the commune at Raritan Bay, New Jersey, where the sisters and Weld were living at the time. The graves had to be guarded against a pro-slavery mob.

When the Civil War officially began the Grimke's did emerge briefly from private life. They were staunch Unionists, supported the draft and were critical of Lincoln for not freeing the slaves sooner. They were founding members of the Women's Loyal League. It was at a meeting of this group that Angelina made her famous statement: "I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."

Reconstruction Betrayed: Finish the Civil War!

Following the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction, the most democratic period for blacks in U.S. history, the former abolitionist movement split again. During that period, women suffrage leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—formerly avowed abolitionists—turned their movement for women's rights into a tool of racist reaction. They organized against passage of the Fifteenth Amendment because it gave votes to blacks and not to women (the Grin-ike sisters were silent on this question, even though this disgusting racism was foreign to everything they had fought for). Stanton and Anthony worked closely with such racist Southern Democrats as James Brooks, because he purported to support women's suffrage. In a letter to the editor of the New York Standard (1865), Stanton wrote,

"...now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk
into the kingdom first In fact, it is better to be the slave
of an educated white man, then of a degraded, ignorant black one."

It was Frederick Douglass who fought this racist assault. Douglass had been a fervent supporter of the infant women's rights movement, which began largely as a result of the chauvinism which women anti-slavery activists encountered from many abolitionists. At the 1869 convention of the Equal Rights Association, Douglass made a final attempt to win the suffragists from their reactionary policy:

"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have [the same] urgency to obtain the ballot."
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands," while imploring a redou¬bling "of our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." And for the rest of his life Douglass remained a staunch champion of women's rights.

Though the Civil War freed the slaves, it was not the fulfillment of Angelina's vision of a great, all-encompassing human emancipation. The betrayal of Reconstruction by the counterrevolutionary and triumphant capitalist reaction of the 1870s, in which the bourgeois feminists played their small and dirty part, left unfulfilled those liberating goals to which the Grimke sisters were committed. Yet Angelina's statement—"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours"—was and is true in a way the Grimke's could not understand. Their social perspective was limited to the bourgeois order: they never identified property as the source of the oppression of both women and blacks. Indeed, as bourgeois egalitarians, the basis of their arguments was that women and blacks should have the same right to acquire property as the white man and that this would liberate them completely. As Marx noted:

"The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other."

—"The Civil War in the United States," Collected Works, Volume 19, 1861-64

The system of "free labor," capitalism, won out. Radical Reconstruction, enforced by military occupation, sought to impose equality of bourgeois democratic rights in the South. It was defeated by.compromise between the Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern land-owning aristocracy, thus revealing the ultimate incapacity of bourgeois radicalism to finally liberate any sector of the oppressed. This failure and betrayal of Reconstruction perpetuated the oppression of blacks as a color caste at the bottom of American capitalist society. This racial division, with whites on top of blacks, has been and continues to be the main historical obstacle to the development of political class con¬sciousness among the American proletariat. It will take a third American Revolution, led by a multiracial workers party against capitalism itself, to break the fetters of blacks, women and all the oppressed.