Click on the headline to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry- "Carl Davidson On The 50th Anniversary Of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)."
Markin comment:
For my own political evolution and its relationship to what was happening with SNCC see today's other entry-"On The Cold War And The Civil Rights Movement".
Sunday, May 02, 2010
*The Latest Boston Anti-Authoritarian Movement (BAAM)Newsletter#33
Click on the headline to link to the latest BAAM Newsletter #33.
Markin comment:
As always, I disclaim any political kinship with this newsletter. However, I have many times found interesting articles there. This issue has a good article on the struggle in Greece. And, in any case, it is always good to see what the younger anarchist militants are up to.
Markin comment:
As always, I disclaim any political kinship with this newsletter. However, I have many times found interesting articles there. This issue has a good article on the struggle in Greece. And, in any case, it is always good to see what the younger anarchist militants are up to.
Saturday, May 01, 2010
*On May Day-Labor's Untold Story- The Memorial In Honor Of The Haymarket Martyrs
Click on title to link to Youtube's film clip of the Haymarket Martyrs Memorial.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Friday, April 30, 2010
*The Defeat Of The French At Dien Bien Phu- "Valley Of Death"- A Guest Book Review
Click on the headline to link to a "The Boston Sunday Globe",dated March 14, 2010, book review of "Valley Of Death: The Tragedy At Dien Bein Phu That Led America Into The Vietnam War".
Today marks the 35th anniversary of the defeat of American imperialism in Vietnam with the NLF/NVA takeover in Ho Chi Minh City (then Saigon). All honor to the Vietnamese national liberation fighters.
Markin comment:
Obviously the sub-title tells the viewpoint here. That struggle, now seemingly long ago in 1975, however was a victory for our side. As was Dien Bien Phu in 1954. We need more, and we will get them in due course.
Today marks the 35th anniversary of the defeat of American imperialism in Vietnam with the NLF/NVA takeover in Ho Chi Minh City (then Saigon). All honor to the Vietnamese national liberation fighters.
Markin comment:
Obviously the sub-title tells the viewpoint here. That struggle, now seemingly long ago in 1975, however was a victory for our side. As was Dien Bien Phu in 1954. We need more, and we will get them in due course.
*On The 35th Anniversary Of The Fall Of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)
Click On Title To Link To "Wikipedia"'s Entry For The Fall Of Saigon And A Famous Photograph Of The Evacuation Of The United States Embassy In The Wake Of The North Vietnamese Army Advances On Saigon.
Markin comment:
This is a repost of last year's 34th anniversary commemoration and the points below still apply, perhaps more so in light of Democratic president Obama's troops escalations in Afghanistan since then.
****
April 30th Marks The 35th Anniversary Of The Military Victory Of The North Vietnamese Army/South Vietnamese National Liberation Front With The Fall Of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City).
Other years I have used this occasion to review some work directly related to that victory from the view point of highlighting some exploit of the victors in that war- our side. One should not underestimate the importance of that victory by a determined, if outgunned military force, in crimping the style of American imperial policy for a significant period (and some would argue its continuing effect today). One should also note, sadly, that this event (always dramatically visualized in the mind’s eye by those pictures of the helicopters evacuating American and other personnel from the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy) the last clear cut anti-capitalist victory that we have been able to celebrate. That, in itself, is cause for reflection.
This year, with the almost daily growing evidence by the Obama administration that it is seeking to escalate the American presence in the quagmire that is Afghanistan beyond any rational necessity, I wish to review the memoir of one of the American architects of the American escalation in Vietnam, Secretary of War Robert Strange McNamara. As McNamara’s version of the Vietnam saga unfolds, and not incidentally or accidentally his craven attempt to reshape the history of his involvement in that process as well, one cannot help but see that the same sense of American hubris is at play now. As always to be on the safe side here the slogan remains- Obama- All U.S./Allied Troops Out Of Iraq and Afghanistan Now!
The Fog Of War, Part II- War Secretary Robert McNamara’s View Of His Handiwork in Vietnam
Book Review
In Retrospect: The Tragedy And Lessons Of Vietnam, Robert Strange McNamara with Brain VanDeMark, Random House, 1995
Anyone who had caught the Friday March 27, 2009 headlines is aware that the Democratic Party-run Obama government has called for some 4,000 additional troops for Afghanistan and what they, euphemistically, call civilian support teams in order to bolster the sagging regime of “Mayor of Kabul” Karzai. Those numbers are in addition to the 17,000 extras already committed by the Obama regime in February. Does the word escalation seem appropriate here?
One of the problems of having gone through the Vietnam experience in my youth (including periods of lukewarm support for American policy under John F. Kennedy, a hands-off attitude in the early Lyndon B. Johnson years and then full-bore opposition under the late Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford regimes) is a tendency to view today’s American imperial policy in the same by-the-numbers approach as I took as a result of observing the Vietnam War as it unfolded. There are differences, some of them hugely so, between Vietnam and Afghanistan. Just as, I have previously noted in this space, there are differences between Vietnam and the recently “completed” Iraq War. (Hey, I’m just going by what the media tells me is going on. They wouldn’t lead us astray, would they?)
But, I keep getting this eerie feeling in the back of my neck every time I hear, or see, anything concerning Afghanistan coming out of this new Obama administration. They appear clueless, yet are determined to forge ahead with this policy that can only lead to the same kind of quagmire than Vietnam and Iraq turned into. That is where the analogies to Vietnam do connect up. In this regard, I have recently been re-reading Kennedy/Johnson War Secretary Robert Strange (that’s his middle name, folk, I didn’t make it up and didn’t need to) McNamara’s memoirs, written in 1995, of his central role in the development of Vietnam policy, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam”.
Obviously McNamara has put his own ‘spin’ on his personal role then in order to absolve himself (a little) before history. That is to be expected. What comes through crystal clear, however, because in the final analysis McNamara still doesn’t get it, is that when you’re the number one imperial power all the decisions you make are suppose to fall into place for your benefit because you represent the “good guys”. Regardless of what you do, or do not, know about the internal workings of the situation at hand. The Kennedy/Johnson administrations were almost totally ignorant of the internal working of Vietnamese society. That is why I have that eerie, very eerie, feeling about this Obama war policy.
In the normal course of events former high level bureaucrats in American presidential administrations usually save their attempts at self-justification for high ticket published memoirs or congenial `softball' speaking tours and conferences. In short, they prefer to preach to the choir at retail prices. Apparently, Cold Warrior extraordinaire Secretary of War Robert Strange McNamara felt that such efforts were very necessary in his case and hence he had to go to the prints in order to whitewash his role in the history of his times. Despite an apparent agreement with his “ghost writer” not to cover certain subjects and be allowed to present his story his way it is always good to catch a view of how the other side operates. It ain't pretty.
After a lifetime of relative public silence, at the age of 8o something, McNamara decided to give his take on events in which he was a central figure like dealing with the fact of American imperial military superiority in the post- World War II period, dealing with the Russians and the fight for American nuclear superiority during the Cold War, the ill-conceived Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the later Cuban Missile crisis and above all his role in the escalation of the wars in Southeast Asia, primarily Vietnam.
Very little here focuses on his time at the World Bank, a not unimportant omission that would highlight my point that he might have changed his clothing in the course of his career but not his mindset. While those of us interested in learning the lessons of history have long understood that to know the political enemy is the beginning of wisdom one will not find much here that was not infinitely better covered by the late journalist David Halberstam in his classic “The Best and The Brightest”.
McNamara has chosen to present his story in the form of parables, or rather, little vignettes about the “lessons” to be drawn from experiences (eleven in all by the way). Thus, we are asked to sit, embarrassingly, through McNamara's freshman course in revisionist history as he attempts to take himself from the cold-hearted Cold Warrior and legitimate “war criminal” to the teddy-bearish old man who has learned something in his life- after a lifetime of treachery. Yet, like that freshman course there are things to be learned despite the professor and more to learn, if only by reading between the lines, than he or she wanted to express.
McNamara presents his take by dividing the Vietnam War buildup, at least at the executive level, into periods; the early almost passive Kennedy days; the post Kennedy assassination period when Lyndon Johnson was trying to be all things to all men; the decisive post-1964 election period; and, various periods of fruitless and clueless escalation. It is this process that is, almost unwittingly, the most important to take from this world. Although McNamara, at the time of writing was an older and wiser man, when he had power he went along with ever step of the “hawks”, civilian and military. He led no internal opposition, and certainly not public one. This is the classic “good old boys” network where one falls on one’s sword when the policy turns wrong. And he is still scratching his head over why masses of anti-war protesters chanted “war criminal” when they confronted him with his deeds. And then listen to the latest screeds by current War Secretary Gates concerning Afghanistan. It will sound very familiar.
In the end, if one took his story at face value, one could only conclude that he was just trying to serve his bosses the best way he could and if things went wrong it was their fault. Nothing new there, though. Henry Kissinger has turned that little devise into an art form. Teary-eyed at the end McNamara might be as he acknowledges his role in the mass killings of his time, but beware of a wolf in sheep's clothing. Yet, you need to read this book if you want to understand how these guys (and gals) defended their state then, and now.
As is always appropriate on international working class holidays and days of remembrance here is the song most closely associated with that movement “The Internationale” in English, French and German. I will not vouch for the closeness of the translations but certainly of the spirit. Workers Of The World Unite!
The Internationale [variant words in square brackets]
Arise ye workers [starvelings] from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We'll change henceforth [forthwith] the old tradition [conditions]
And spurn the dust to win the prize.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we'll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They'll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We'll shoot the generals on our own side.
No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
E'er the thieves will out with their booty [give up their booty]
And give to all a happier lot.
Each [those] at the forge must do their duty
And we'll strike while the iron is hot.
________________________________________
L'Internationale
Debout les damnés de la terre
Debout les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère
C'est l'éruption de la fin
Du passe faisons table rase
Foules, esclaves, debout, debout
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout
C'est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous, et demain (bis)
L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain
Il n'est pas de sauveurs suprêmes
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun
Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes
Décrétons le salut commun
Pour que le voleur rende gorge
Pour tirer l'esprit du cachot
Soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge
Battons le fer quand il est chaud
L'état comprime et la loi triche
L'impôt saigne le malheureux
Nul devoir ne s'impose au riche
Le droit du pauvre est un mot creux
C'est assez, languir en tutelle
L'égalité veut d'autres lois
Pas de droits sans devoirs dit-elle
Egaux, pas de devoirs sans droits
Hideux dans leur apothéose
Les rois de la mine et du rail
Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose
Que dévaliser le travail
Dans les coffres-forts de la bande
Ce qu'il a crée s'est fondu
En décrétant qu'on le lui rende
Le peuple ne veut que son dû.
Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans
Appliquons la grève aux armées
Crosse en l'air, et rompons les rangs
S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales
A faire de nous des héros
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux
Ouvriers, paysans, nous sommes
Le grand parti des travailleurs
La terre n'appartient qu'aux hommes
L'oisif ira loger ailleurs
Combien, de nos chairs se repaissent
Mais si les corbeaux, les vautours
Un de ces matins disparaissent
Le soleil brillera toujours.
________________________________________
Die Internationale
Wacht auf, Verdammte dieser Erde,
die stets man noch zum Hungern zwingt!
Das Recht wie Glut im Kraterherde
nun mit Macht zum Durchbruch dringt.
Reinen Tisch macht mit dem Bedranger!
Heer der Sklaven, wache auf!
Ein nichts zu sein, tragt es nicht langer
Alles zu werden, stromt zuhauf!
Volker, hort die Signale!
Auf, zum letzten Gefecht!
Die Internationale
Erkampft das Menschenrecht
Es rettet uns kein hoh'res Wesen
kein Gott, kein Kaiser, noch Tribun
Uns aus dem Elend zu erlosen
konnen wir nur selber tun!
Leeres Wort: des armen Rechte,
Leeres Wort: des Reichen Pflicht!
Unmundigt nennt man uns Knechte,
duldet die Schmach langer nicht!
In Stadt und Land, ihr Arbeitsleute,
wir sind die starkste Partei'n
Die Mussigganger schiebt beiseite!
Diese Welt muss unser sein;
Unser Blut sei nicht mehr der Raben
und der machtigen Geier Frass!
Erst wenn wir sie vertrieben haben
dann scheint die Sonn' ohn' Unterlass!
Markin comment:
This is a repost of last year's 34th anniversary commemoration and the points below still apply, perhaps more so in light of Democratic president Obama's troops escalations in Afghanistan since then.
****
April 30th Marks The 35th Anniversary Of The Military Victory Of The North Vietnamese Army/South Vietnamese National Liberation Front With The Fall Of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City).
Other years I have used this occasion to review some work directly related to that victory from the view point of highlighting some exploit of the victors in that war- our side. One should not underestimate the importance of that victory by a determined, if outgunned military force, in crimping the style of American imperial policy for a significant period (and some would argue its continuing effect today). One should also note, sadly, that this event (always dramatically visualized in the mind’s eye by those pictures of the helicopters evacuating American and other personnel from the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy) the last clear cut anti-capitalist victory that we have been able to celebrate. That, in itself, is cause for reflection.
This year, with the almost daily growing evidence by the Obama administration that it is seeking to escalate the American presence in the quagmire that is Afghanistan beyond any rational necessity, I wish to review the memoir of one of the American architects of the American escalation in Vietnam, Secretary of War Robert Strange McNamara. As McNamara’s version of the Vietnam saga unfolds, and not incidentally or accidentally his craven attempt to reshape the history of his involvement in that process as well, one cannot help but see that the same sense of American hubris is at play now. As always to be on the safe side here the slogan remains- Obama- All U.S./Allied Troops Out Of Iraq and Afghanistan Now!
The Fog Of War, Part II- War Secretary Robert McNamara’s View Of His Handiwork in Vietnam
Book Review
In Retrospect: The Tragedy And Lessons Of Vietnam, Robert Strange McNamara with Brain VanDeMark, Random House, 1995
Anyone who had caught the Friday March 27, 2009 headlines is aware that the Democratic Party-run Obama government has called for some 4,000 additional troops for Afghanistan and what they, euphemistically, call civilian support teams in order to bolster the sagging regime of “Mayor of Kabul” Karzai. Those numbers are in addition to the 17,000 extras already committed by the Obama regime in February. Does the word escalation seem appropriate here?
One of the problems of having gone through the Vietnam experience in my youth (including periods of lukewarm support for American policy under John F. Kennedy, a hands-off attitude in the early Lyndon B. Johnson years and then full-bore opposition under the late Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford regimes) is a tendency to view today’s American imperial policy in the same by-the-numbers approach as I took as a result of observing the Vietnam War as it unfolded. There are differences, some of them hugely so, between Vietnam and Afghanistan. Just as, I have previously noted in this space, there are differences between Vietnam and the recently “completed” Iraq War. (Hey, I’m just going by what the media tells me is going on. They wouldn’t lead us astray, would they?)
But, I keep getting this eerie feeling in the back of my neck every time I hear, or see, anything concerning Afghanistan coming out of this new Obama administration. They appear clueless, yet are determined to forge ahead with this policy that can only lead to the same kind of quagmire than Vietnam and Iraq turned into. That is where the analogies to Vietnam do connect up. In this regard, I have recently been re-reading Kennedy/Johnson War Secretary Robert Strange (that’s his middle name, folk, I didn’t make it up and didn’t need to) McNamara’s memoirs, written in 1995, of his central role in the development of Vietnam policy, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam”.
Obviously McNamara has put his own ‘spin’ on his personal role then in order to absolve himself (a little) before history. That is to be expected. What comes through crystal clear, however, because in the final analysis McNamara still doesn’t get it, is that when you’re the number one imperial power all the decisions you make are suppose to fall into place for your benefit because you represent the “good guys”. Regardless of what you do, or do not, know about the internal workings of the situation at hand. The Kennedy/Johnson administrations were almost totally ignorant of the internal working of Vietnamese society. That is why I have that eerie, very eerie, feeling about this Obama war policy.
In the normal course of events former high level bureaucrats in American presidential administrations usually save their attempts at self-justification for high ticket published memoirs or congenial `softball' speaking tours and conferences. In short, they prefer to preach to the choir at retail prices. Apparently, Cold Warrior extraordinaire Secretary of War Robert Strange McNamara felt that such efforts were very necessary in his case and hence he had to go to the prints in order to whitewash his role in the history of his times. Despite an apparent agreement with his “ghost writer” not to cover certain subjects and be allowed to present his story his way it is always good to catch a view of how the other side operates. It ain't pretty.
After a lifetime of relative public silence, at the age of 8o something, McNamara decided to give his take on events in which he was a central figure like dealing with the fact of American imperial military superiority in the post- World War II period, dealing with the Russians and the fight for American nuclear superiority during the Cold War, the ill-conceived Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the later Cuban Missile crisis and above all his role in the escalation of the wars in Southeast Asia, primarily Vietnam.
Very little here focuses on his time at the World Bank, a not unimportant omission that would highlight my point that he might have changed his clothing in the course of his career but not his mindset. While those of us interested in learning the lessons of history have long understood that to know the political enemy is the beginning of wisdom one will not find much here that was not infinitely better covered by the late journalist David Halberstam in his classic “The Best and The Brightest”.
McNamara has chosen to present his story in the form of parables, or rather, little vignettes about the “lessons” to be drawn from experiences (eleven in all by the way). Thus, we are asked to sit, embarrassingly, through McNamara's freshman course in revisionist history as he attempts to take himself from the cold-hearted Cold Warrior and legitimate “war criminal” to the teddy-bearish old man who has learned something in his life- after a lifetime of treachery. Yet, like that freshman course there are things to be learned despite the professor and more to learn, if only by reading between the lines, than he or she wanted to express.
McNamara presents his take by dividing the Vietnam War buildup, at least at the executive level, into periods; the early almost passive Kennedy days; the post Kennedy assassination period when Lyndon Johnson was trying to be all things to all men; the decisive post-1964 election period; and, various periods of fruitless and clueless escalation. It is this process that is, almost unwittingly, the most important to take from this world. Although McNamara, at the time of writing was an older and wiser man, when he had power he went along with ever step of the “hawks”, civilian and military. He led no internal opposition, and certainly not public one. This is the classic “good old boys” network where one falls on one’s sword when the policy turns wrong. And he is still scratching his head over why masses of anti-war protesters chanted “war criminal” when they confronted him with his deeds. And then listen to the latest screeds by current War Secretary Gates concerning Afghanistan. It will sound very familiar.
In the end, if one took his story at face value, one could only conclude that he was just trying to serve his bosses the best way he could and if things went wrong it was their fault. Nothing new there, though. Henry Kissinger has turned that little devise into an art form. Teary-eyed at the end McNamara might be as he acknowledges his role in the mass killings of his time, but beware of a wolf in sheep's clothing. Yet, you need to read this book if you want to understand how these guys (and gals) defended their state then, and now.
As is always appropriate on international working class holidays and days of remembrance here is the song most closely associated with that movement “The Internationale” in English, French and German. I will not vouch for the closeness of the translations but certainly of the spirit. Workers Of The World Unite!
The Internationale [variant words in square brackets]
Arise ye workers [starvelings] from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We'll change henceforth [forthwith] the old tradition [conditions]
And spurn the dust to win the prize.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we'll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They'll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We'll shoot the generals on our own side.
No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
E'er the thieves will out with their booty [give up their booty]
And give to all a happier lot.
Each [those] at the forge must do their duty
And we'll strike while the iron is hot.
________________________________________
L'Internationale
Debout les damnés de la terre
Debout les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère
C'est l'éruption de la fin
Du passe faisons table rase
Foules, esclaves, debout, debout
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout
C'est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous, et demain (bis)
L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain
Il n'est pas de sauveurs suprêmes
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun
Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes
Décrétons le salut commun
Pour que le voleur rende gorge
Pour tirer l'esprit du cachot
Soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge
Battons le fer quand il est chaud
L'état comprime et la loi triche
L'impôt saigne le malheureux
Nul devoir ne s'impose au riche
Le droit du pauvre est un mot creux
C'est assez, languir en tutelle
L'égalité veut d'autres lois
Pas de droits sans devoirs dit-elle
Egaux, pas de devoirs sans droits
Hideux dans leur apothéose
Les rois de la mine et du rail
Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose
Que dévaliser le travail
Dans les coffres-forts de la bande
Ce qu'il a crée s'est fondu
En décrétant qu'on le lui rende
Le peuple ne veut que son dû.
Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans
Appliquons la grève aux armées
Crosse en l'air, et rompons les rangs
S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales
A faire de nous des héros
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux
Ouvriers, paysans, nous sommes
Le grand parti des travailleurs
La terre n'appartient qu'aux hommes
L'oisif ira loger ailleurs
Combien, de nos chairs se repaissent
Mais si les corbeaux, les vautours
Un de ces matins disparaissent
Le soleil brillera toujours.
________________________________________
Die Internationale
Wacht auf, Verdammte dieser Erde,
die stets man noch zum Hungern zwingt!
Das Recht wie Glut im Kraterherde
nun mit Macht zum Durchbruch dringt.
Reinen Tisch macht mit dem Bedranger!
Heer der Sklaven, wache auf!
Ein nichts zu sein, tragt es nicht langer
Alles zu werden, stromt zuhauf!
Volker, hort die Signale!
Auf, zum letzten Gefecht!
Die Internationale
Erkampft das Menschenrecht
Es rettet uns kein hoh'res Wesen
kein Gott, kein Kaiser, noch Tribun
Uns aus dem Elend zu erlosen
konnen wir nur selber tun!
Leeres Wort: des armen Rechte,
Leeres Wort: des Reichen Pflicht!
Unmundigt nennt man uns Knechte,
duldet die Schmach langer nicht!
In Stadt und Land, ihr Arbeitsleute,
wir sind die starkste Partei'n
Die Mussigganger schiebt beiseite!
Diese Welt muss unser sein;
Unser Blut sei nicht mehr der Raben
und der machtigen Geier Frass!
Erst wenn wir sie vertrieben haben
dann scheint die Sonn' ohn' Unterlass!
*From The International Communist League- Once Again On Haiti- A Repudiation- A Guest Commentary
Click on the headline to link to an "American Left History" blog entry, dated February 20, 2010, a polemic concerning the question of the timing of the call for U.S./U.N. withdrawal from Haiti between the International Communist League and the Internationalist Group.
Markin comment:
I am not privy to the internal workings of the International Communist League or of the Spartacist League/U.S. or of all their motivations behind issuing this repudiation. Obviously the tasks of a left organization, including its internal functioning, and that of a left individual militant are of different orders. However I am not persuaded, on a first reading of this repudiation of their earliest position on U.S./U.N. withdrawal from Haiti, that they were wrong to NOT raise the issue of withdrawal in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. That, in any case, was my own position at the time and although I have been wrong politically more times than I like to admit I do not think that it was wrong in that short window of time. I will, however, think about this one some more based on the issues raised in the statement. U.S./U.N Troops Out Of Haiti Now!
********
27 April 2010
Statement of the International Executive Committee of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
Repudiating Our Position on Haiti Earthquake
A Capitulation to U.S. Imperialism
In its articles on the Haitian earthquake, Workers Vanguard, the newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S., committed a betrayal of the fundamental principle of opposition to one’s “own” imperialist rulers. In addition to justifying the U.S. imperialist troops as essential to the aid effort, these articles polemicized against the principled and correct position of demanding the immediate withdrawal of the troops. This line was carried in a number of presses in other ICL sections, becoming the de facto line of the International Communist League. Without a public accounting and correction, we would be far down the road to our destruction as a revolutionary party. From the beginning the only revolutionary internationalist position was to demand that all U.S./UN troops get out of Haiti!
In our article in WV No. 951 (29 January), repeated in subsequent issues of the newspaper, we baldly stated:
“The U.S. military is the only force on the ground with the capacity—e.g., trucks, planes, ships—to organize the transport of what food, water, medical and other supplies are getting to Haiti’s population. And they’re doing it in the typical piggish U.S. imperialist manner. We have always opposed U.S. and UN occupations in Haiti and everywhere—and it may become necessary to call for U.S./UN out of Haiti in the near future—but we are not going to call for an end to such aid as the desperate Haitian masses can get their hands on.”
The International Executive Committee of the ICL repudiates this betrayal of our revolutionary program. As stated in the SL/U.S. Programmatic Statement: “We unconditionally oppose all U.S. military intervention—and U.S. military bases—abroad, and defend the colonial, semicolonial and other smaller, less developed countries in the face of U.S./UN attack and embargo.”
Even in very belatedly raising the call for “All U.S./UN Troops Out of Haiti Now!” in WV No. 955 (26 March), we continued to evade and reject the principle of opposition to the U.S. imperialist occupation of neocolonial Haiti. Moreover this article stated: “As we made clear in our article, ‘Haiti Earthquake Horror: Imperialism, Racism and Starvation’ (WV No. 951, 29 January), while we were not for the U.S. military going into Haiti, neither were we going to demand, in the immediate aftermath of that horrific natural disaster, the immediate withdrawal of any forces that were supplying such aid as was reaching the Haitian masses.” In fact, our earlier article had not clearly stated that we were not for the U.S. troops going in nor did it even call the U.S. military takeover what it was.
The U.S. military invasion was designed to provide a “humanitarian” face-lift to bloody U.S. imperialism and was aimed at securing U.S. military control in Haiti and reasserting American imperialist domination over the Caribbean, including against imperialist rivals like France. In failing to oppose the invasion, we also ignored the particular danger this posed to the Cuban deformed workers state (as well as to the bourgeois nationalist-populist regime of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela). We accepted Washington’s line that the provision of aid was inextricably linked to the U.S. military takeover and thus helped to sell the myth peddled by the Democratic Party Obama administration that this was a “humanitarian” mission. Our statement that “it may become necessary to call for U.S./UN out of Haiti in the near future” (emphasis added) amounted to giving conditional support to U.S. military intervention. As one leading party comrade argued, the only difference between the position we took and August 4, 1914, when the German Social Democrats voted war credits to the German imperialist rulers at the outset of the First World War, is that this was not a war.
Thus we gutted the revolutionary internationalist essence of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution linking the fight for social and national liberation to the struggle for proletarian state power both in neocolonial and in more advanced countries. This means educating the proletariat in North America, and internationally, that its class interests lie in actively championing the fight against the imperialist domination of Haiti. Instead our articles did the opposite, promoting illusions in U.S. imperialist “democracy” as the savior of the Haitian people. We all but echoed Barack Obama as he dispatched imperialist combat troops, including elements of the 82nd Airborne Division and a Marine expeditionary unit. One doubts that we could so easily have taken such a position if the Republican Bush administration were still in the White House.
In its latest article, “SL Twists and Turns on Haiti” (Internationalist, 9 April), the centrist Internationalist Group (IG) writes: “While support to imperialist occupation is a small step for reformists, who only seek to modify imperialist policies rather than to bring down the imperialist system, in the case of the SL/ICL it should be harder to digest.” Indeed it is. For its part, the IG treated the earthquake as an opening for revolution in Haiti, asserting: “This small but militant proletariat can place itself at the head of the impoverished urban and rural masses seeking to organize their own power, particularly at present where the machinery of the capitalist state is largely reduced to rubble and a few marauding bands of police” (“Haiti: Workers Solidarity, Yes! Imperialist Occupation, No!” Internationalist, 20 January).
Instead of simply exposing the IG’s Third Worldist fantasies, we concentrated in our polemics on zealous apologies for the U.S. imperialist military intervention, a position to the right of the IG. These centrist apologists for Third World nationalism quite correctly characterized our position as “social imperialist”—socialist in words, support for imperialism in deeds. This is a bitter pill to swallow. Only through a savage indictment of our line can we avoid the alternative of going down the road that led the founders of the IG to defect from our organization in the pursuit of forces other than the proletariat. In their case, this has ranged from remnants of the Stalinist bureaucracy that sold out to imperialist counterrevolution in the DDR to Latin American nationalists and left-talking trade-union bureaucrats.
In the context of polemics with the IG, Workers Vanguard misused the authority of the revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky in order to alibi support to an imperialist occupation. In his 1938 article “Learn to Think,” Trotsky argued that one should not always put a minus where the bourgeoisie puts a plus. He was referring not to a military occupation force but to instances where an imperialist government might send military aid to anti-colonialist fighters. Moreover, Trotsky’s reference in this article to workers fraternizing with an army called in to fight a fire manifestly did not refer to a situation like Haiti where U.S. imperialist troops were invading a neocolonial country, an act which Leninists unconditionally oppose on principle.
However, neither do revolutionaries foster illusions in such non-military aid as capitalist governments may provide. In responding to the U.S. imperialist invasion of Haiti following the earthquake, we would have done well to look to the position of our Australian section in 2005 responding to the imperialist “aid” intervention in Indonesia, specifically the secessionist province of Aceh, following the tsunami. Demanding “Australian/all imperialist military/cops get out of Aceh now!” an article in Australasian Spartacist titled “Australian Imperialists Seize on Tsunami Catastrophe” (No. 190, Autumn 2005) indicted imperialist aid programs. The article pointed out that “whatever short-term benefit a part of them may provide to a small number of oppressed people,” such aid is “always aimed at reinforcing neocolonial subjugation of the Third World masses.”
The “Politics of the Possible”
From the time of our tendency’s inception as a left opposition within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the early 1960s, we have recognized that national isolation must in short order destroy any subjectively revolutionary formation, not least one subjected to the pressures of operating in the heartland of world imperialism, the United States. Genuine proletarian internationalism means disciplined international collaboration, without which we cannot successfully counter the powerful pull of nationalist opportunism.
The handmaiden to our embellishment of U.S. imperialist intervention was the abrogation of international democratic centralism. The role of propaganda as the scaffolding of a revolutionary party is to publish the line of the party as decided through discussion and motions by the party leadership. Prior to going into print opposing the call for “troops out of Haiti” in WV No. 951, the SL/U.S. Political Bureau and the International Secretariat (the resident administrative body of the IEC) abdicated responsibility by not holding an organized discussion and vote, instead setting our line through informal consultation. However, once the line was published in Workers Vanguard it was picked up by many of the ICL’s other sectional presses, indicating that there was little initial disagreement.
A meeting of the I.S. on March 18 did at last vote to call for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. and United Nations troops. However, the motions adopted at that meeting, which became the basis for the article in WV No. 955, reaffirmed that “we were correct in not calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.” In stating that “the particular exceptional circumstances that obtained two months ago no longer exist,” the motions also continued to insist that conditional defense of the U.S. military invasion was correct in the immediate conjuncture of a natural disaster. Moreover, while criticizing the formulation that the U.S. military was the only force on the ground with the wherewithal to deliver aid, the I.S. motions did not mandate a public correction of this statement. This kind of dishonesty was condemned by James P. Cannon, founder of American Trotskyism. In addressing a situation where the Trotskyist SWP at its 1954 convention needed to acknowledge mistakes, he noted: “You know, the Stalinists make more changes, and more rapid and drastic changes, than any other party in history. But they never say: ‘We made a mistake.’ They always say: ‘The situation has changed.’ We should be more precise and more honest.”
Menshevism often takes the guise of “realism” and “expediency.” Looking to come up with a “concrete solution” in a situation where there was no such solution from a proletarian revolutionary vantage point, we capitulated. What our small revolutionary party had to put forward was a proletarian internationalist perspective for the liberation of Haiti, above all through opposition to our “own” imperialist rulers. In the immediate situation, the only concrete expression of such a program was negative—to demand that any and all Haitian refugees be allowed into the U.S. with full citizenship rights, to oppose any deportations of Haitians who had made it here and above all to demand all U.S./UN troops out.
Our articles distorted reality in order to justify the American military presence. We correctly criticized the reformists for spreading illusions in the imperialist governments by demanding that they provide “aid, not troops” but our own response was worse. Our articles presented U.S. military intervention as the only “realistic” way for the Haitian masses to get “aid” and claimed demagogically that withdrawal of U.S. combat troops “would result in mass death through starvation.” This was to treat the question not from the standpoint of Marxist program, but through the liberal lens of “disaster relief.” Michael Harrington—the former leader of the Democratic Socialists of America and adviser to the “war on poverty” programs of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Democratic Party administration—captured the core of such a social-democratic worldview with the expression, “the left wing of the possible.”
The “politics of the possible” is a palpable pressure in the period of post-Soviet reaction, where revolution—or even, particularly in the U.S., militant class struggle—appears remote and there is an overwhelming absence of resonance for our political views. There is a yawning abyss between what we stand for and the consciousness of the working class and young radicals, even those who claim to be socialist. As we have noted, it has been very difficult to maintain our revolutionary continuity and very easy to have it destroyed.
The Fight to Maintain a Revolutionary Perspective
In fighting against the Cochranite opposition in the then-revolutionary American Socialist Workers Party in the early 1950s, James P. Cannon argued:
“The revolutionary movement, under the best conditions, is a hard fight, and it wears out a lot of human material. Not for nothing has it been said a thousand times in the past: ‘The revolution is a devourer of men.’ The movement in this, the richest and most conservative country in the world, is perhaps the most voracious of all.
“It is not easy to persist in the struggle, to hold on, to stay tough and fight it out year after year without victory; and even, in times such as the present, without tangible progress. That requires theoretical conviction and historical perspective as well as character. And, in addition to that, it requires association with others in a common party.”
— “Trade Unionists and Revolutionists,” 11 May 1953
The example of the degeneration of the SWP from a revolutionary party through centrism to abject reformism is instructive. The party endured more than a decade of stagnation and isolation during the anti-Communist witchhunt. Seeing their role reduced essentially to a holding operation in the citadel of U.S. imperialism, aging party cadre like those in the Cochran wing gave up on a revolutionary perspective. The SWP majority under Cannon and Farrell Dobbs fought to preserve the revolutionary continuity of Trotskyism against this liquidationism. But they themselves were not immune from the deforming pressures that led the Cochranites to split.
Four years later, in 1957, the SWP supported the introduction of federal troops into Little Rock, Arkansas—the end result of which was the crushing of local black self-defense efforts against the howling racist mobs fighting school integration. Painting U.S. troops as reliable defenders of black people engendered significant opposition within the party in the 1950s, particularly from Richard Fraser whose program of revolutionary integrationism as the road to black freedom in the U.S. we take as our own. But the wrong line was never corrected and the view of the U.S. imperialist army as the only “realistic” force to defend civil rights protesters in the Jim Crow South against racist terror deepened. By 1964 the SWP had adopted the grotesque campaign slogan, “Withdraw the Troops from Viet Nam and Send Them to Mississippi!” By 1965, the SWP had thrown overboard the last remnant of a revolutionary opposition to imperialism, promoting the reformist lie that a classless peace movement could stop U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants.
The young SWP cadre in the Revolutionary Tendency who fought the party’s degeneration were the founding leaders of our organization. Recognizing where the SWP went, and holding it up as a mirror of where we could go without correcting our mistakes and the outright betrayal of our revolutionary internationalist program in response to the Haiti earthquake, is part of the fight to preserve this continuity with Cannon’s revolutionary party that extends back to Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks.
But the ability to make such a correction is hardly cause for celebration. It merely lays the basis for political rectification. We crossed the class line and the urgent necessity is to reassert and struggle to maintain the proletarian internationalist program of Leninism.
—27 April 2010
Markin comment:
I am not privy to the internal workings of the International Communist League or of the Spartacist League/U.S. or of all their motivations behind issuing this repudiation. Obviously the tasks of a left organization, including its internal functioning, and that of a left individual militant are of different orders. However I am not persuaded, on a first reading of this repudiation of their earliest position on U.S./U.N. withdrawal from Haiti, that they were wrong to NOT raise the issue of withdrawal in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. That, in any case, was my own position at the time and although I have been wrong politically more times than I like to admit I do not think that it was wrong in that short window of time. I will, however, think about this one some more based on the issues raised in the statement. U.S./U.N Troops Out Of Haiti Now!
********
27 April 2010
Statement of the International Executive Committee of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
Repudiating Our Position on Haiti Earthquake
A Capitulation to U.S. Imperialism
In its articles on the Haitian earthquake, Workers Vanguard, the newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S., committed a betrayal of the fundamental principle of opposition to one’s “own” imperialist rulers. In addition to justifying the U.S. imperialist troops as essential to the aid effort, these articles polemicized against the principled and correct position of demanding the immediate withdrawal of the troops. This line was carried in a number of presses in other ICL sections, becoming the de facto line of the International Communist League. Without a public accounting and correction, we would be far down the road to our destruction as a revolutionary party. From the beginning the only revolutionary internationalist position was to demand that all U.S./UN troops get out of Haiti!
In our article in WV No. 951 (29 January), repeated in subsequent issues of the newspaper, we baldly stated:
“The U.S. military is the only force on the ground with the capacity—e.g., trucks, planes, ships—to organize the transport of what food, water, medical and other supplies are getting to Haiti’s population. And they’re doing it in the typical piggish U.S. imperialist manner. We have always opposed U.S. and UN occupations in Haiti and everywhere—and it may become necessary to call for U.S./UN out of Haiti in the near future—but we are not going to call for an end to such aid as the desperate Haitian masses can get their hands on.”
The International Executive Committee of the ICL repudiates this betrayal of our revolutionary program. As stated in the SL/U.S. Programmatic Statement: “We unconditionally oppose all U.S. military intervention—and U.S. military bases—abroad, and defend the colonial, semicolonial and other smaller, less developed countries in the face of U.S./UN attack and embargo.”
Even in very belatedly raising the call for “All U.S./UN Troops Out of Haiti Now!” in WV No. 955 (26 March), we continued to evade and reject the principle of opposition to the U.S. imperialist occupation of neocolonial Haiti. Moreover this article stated: “As we made clear in our article, ‘Haiti Earthquake Horror: Imperialism, Racism and Starvation’ (WV No. 951, 29 January), while we were not for the U.S. military going into Haiti, neither were we going to demand, in the immediate aftermath of that horrific natural disaster, the immediate withdrawal of any forces that were supplying such aid as was reaching the Haitian masses.” In fact, our earlier article had not clearly stated that we were not for the U.S. troops going in nor did it even call the U.S. military takeover what it was.
The U.S. military invasion was designed to provide a “humanitarian” face-lift to bloody U.S. imperialism and was aimed at securing U.S. military control in Haiti and reasserting American imperialist domination over the Caribbean, including against imperialist rivals like France. In failing to oppose the invasion, we also ignored the particular danger this posed to the Cuban deformed workers state (as well as to the bourgeois nationalist-populist regime of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela). We accepted Washington’s line that the provision of aid was inextricably linked to the U.S. military takeover and thus helped to sell the myth peddled by the Democratic Party Obama administration that this was a “humanitarian” mission. Our statement that “it may become necessary to call for U.S./UN out of Haiti in the near future” (emphasis added) amounted to giving conditional support to U.S. military intervention. As one leading party comrade argued, the only difference between the position we took and August 4, 1914, when the German Social Democrats voted war credits to the German imperialist rulers at the outset of the First World War, is that this was not a war.
Thus we gutted the revolutionary internationalist essence of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution linking the fight for social and national liberation to the struggle for proletarian state power both in neocolonial and in more advanced countries. This means educating the proletariat in North America, and internationally, that its class interests lie in actively championing the fight against the imperialist domination of Haiti. Instead our articles did the opposite, promoting illusions in U.S. imperialist “democracy” as the savior of the Haitian people. We all but echoed Barack Obama as he dispatched imperialist combat troops, including elements of the 82nd Airborne Division and a Marine expeditionary unit. One doubts that we could so easily have taken such a position if the Republican Bush administration were still in the White House.
In its latest article, “SL Twists and Turns on Haiti” (Internationalist, 9 April), the centrist Internationalist Group (IG) writes: “While support to imperialist occupation is a small step for reformists, who only seek to modify imperialist policies rather than to bring down the imperialist system, in the case of the SL/ICL it should be harder to digest.” Indeed it is. For its part, the IG treated the earthquake as an opening for revolution in Haiti, asserting: “This small but militant proletariat can place itself at the head of the impoverished urban and rural masses seeking to organize their own power, particularly at present where the machinery of the capitalist state is largely reduced to rubble and a few marauding bands of police” (“Haiti: Workers Solidarity, Yes! Imperialist Occupation, No!” Internationalist, 20 January).
Instead of simply exposing the IG’s Third Worldist fantasies, we concentrated in our polemics on zealous apologies for the U.S. imperialist military intervention, a position to the right of the IG. These centrist apologists for Third World nationalism quite correctly characterized our position as “social imperialist”—socialist in words, support for imperialism in deeds. This is a bitter pill to swallow. Only through a savage indictment of our line can we avoid the alternative of going down the road that led the founders of the IG to defect from our organization in the pursuit of forces other than the proletariat. In their case, this has ranged from remnants of the Stalinist bureaucracy that sold out to imperialist counterrevolution in the DDR to Latin American nationalists and left-talking trade-union bureaucrats.
In the context of polemics with the IG, Workers Vanguard misused the authority of the revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky in order to alibi support to an imperialist occupation. In his 1938 article “Learn to Think,” Trotsky argued that one should not always put a minus where the bourgeoisie puts a plus. He was referring not to a military occupation force but to instances where an imperialist government might send military aid to anti-colonialist fighters. Moreover, Trotsky’s reference in this article to workers fraternizing with an army called in to fight a fire manifestly did not refer to a situation like Haiti where U.S. imperialist troops were invading a neocolonial country, an act which Leninists unconditionally oppose on principle.
However, neither do revolutionaries foster illusions in such non-military aid as capitalist governments may provide. In responding to the U.S. imperialist invasion of Haiti following the earthquake, we would have done well to look to the position of our Australian section in 2005 responding to the imperialist “aid” intervention in Indonesia, specifically the secessionist province of Aceh, following the tsunami. Demanding “Australian/all imperialist military/cops get out of Aceh now!” an article in Australasian Spartacist titled “Australian Imperialists Seize on Tsunami Catastrophe” (No. 190, Autumn 2005) indicted imperialist aid programs. The article pointed out that “whatever short-term benefit a part of them may provide to a small number of oppressed people,” such aid is “always aimed at reinforcing neocolonial subjugation of the Third World masses.”
The “Politics of the Possible”
From the time of our tendency’s inception as a left opposition within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the early 1960s, we have recognized that national isolation must in short order destroy any subjectively revolutionary formation, not least one subjected to the pressures of operating in the heartland of world imperialism, the United States. Genuine proletarian internationalism means disciplined international collaboration, without which we cannot successfully counter the powerful pull of nationalist opportunism.
The handmaiden to our embellishment of U.S. imperialist intervention was the abrogation of international democratic centralism. The role of propaganda as the scaffolding of a revolutionary party is to publish the line of the party as decided through discussion and motions by the party leadership. Prior to going into print opposing the call for “troops out of Haiti” in WV No. 951, the SL/U.S. Political Bureau and the International Secretariat (the resident administrative body of the IEC) abdicated responsibility by not holding an organized discussion and vote, instead setting our line through informal consultation. However, once the line was published in Workers Vanguard it was picked up by many of the ICL’s other sectional presses, indicating that there was little initial disagreement.
A meeting of the I.S. on March 18 did at last vote to call for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. and United Nations troops. However, the motions adopted at that meeting, which became the basis for the article in WV No. 955, reaffirmed that “we were correct in not calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.” In stating that “the particular exceptional circumstances that obtained two months ago no longer exist,” the motions also continued to insist that conditional defense of the U.S. military invasion was correct in the immediate conjuncture of a natural disaster. Moreover, while criticizing the formulation that the U.S. military was the only force on the ground with the wherewithal to deliver aid, the I.S. motions did not mandate a public correction of this statement. This kind of dishonesty was condemned by James P. Cannon, founder of American Trotskyism. In addressing a situation where the Trotskyist SWP at its 1954 convention needed to acknowledge mistakes, he noted: “You know, the Stalinists make more changes, and more rapid and drastic changes, than any other party in history. But they never say: ‘We made a mistake.’ They always say: ‘The situation has changed.’ We should be more precise and more honest.”
Menshevism often takes the guise of “realism” and “expediency.” Looking to come up with a “concrete solution” in a situation where there was no such solution from a proletarian revolutionary vantage point, we capitulated. What our small revolutionary party had to put forward was a proletarian internationalist perspective for the liberation of Haiti, above all through opposition to our “own” imperialist rulers. In the immediate situation, the only concrete expression of such a program was negative—to demand that any and all Haitian refugees be allowed into the U.S. with full citizenship rights, to oppose any deportations of Haitians who had made it here and above all to demand all U.S./UN troops out.
Our articles distorted reality in order to justify the American military presence. We correctly criticized the reformists for spreading illusions in the imperialist governments by demanding that they provide “aid, not troops” but our own response was worse. Our articles presented U.S. military intervention as the only “realistic” way for the Haitian masses to get “aid” and claimed demagogically that withdrawal of U.S. combat troops “would result in mass death through starvation.” This was to treat the question not from the standpoint of Marxist program, but through the liberal lens of “disaster relief.” Michael Harrington—the former leader of the Democratic Socialists of America and adviser to the “war on poverty” programs of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Democratic Party administration—captured the core of such a social-democratic worldview with the expression, “the left wing of the possible.”
The “politics of the possible” is a palpable pressure in the period of post-Soviet reaction, where revolution—or even, particularly in the U.S., militant class struggle—appears remote and there is an overwhelming absence of resonance for our political views. There is a yawning abyss between what we stand for and the consciousness of the working class and young radicals, even those who claim to be socialist. As we have noted, it has been very difficult to maintain our revolutionary continuity and very easy to have it destroyed.
The Fight to Maintain a Revolutionary Perspective
In fighting against the Cochranite opposition in the then-revolutionary American Socialist Workers Party in the early 1950s, James P. Cannon argued:
“The revolutionary movement, under the best conditions, is a hard fight, and it wears out a lot of human material. Not for nothing has it been said a thousand times in the past: ‘The revolution is a devourer of men.’ The movement in this, the richest and most conservative country in the world, is perhaps the most voracious of all.
“It is not easy to persist in the struggle, to hold on, to stay tough and fight it out year after year without victory; and even, in times such as the present, without tangible progress. That requires theoretical conviction and historical perspective as well as character. And, in addition to that, it requires association with others in a common party.”
— “Trade Unionists and Revolutionists,” 11 May 1953
The example of the degeneration of the SWP from a revolutionary party through centrism to abject reformism is instructive. The party endured more than a decade of stagnation and isolation during the anti-Communist witchhunt. Seeing their role reduced essentially to a holding operation in the citadel of U.S. imperialism, aging party cadre like those in the Cochran wing gave up on a revolutionary perspective. The SWP majority under Cannon and Farrell Dobbs fought to preserve the revolutionary continuity of Trotskyism against this liquidationism. But they themselves were not immune from the deforming pressures that led the Cochranites to split.
Four years later, in 1957, the SWP supported the introduction of federal troops into Little Rock, Arkansas—the end result of which was the crushing of local black self-defense efforts against the howling racist mobs fighting school integration. Painting U.S. troops as reliable defenders of black people engendered significant opposition within the party in the 1950s, particularly from Richard Fraser whose program of revolutionary integrationism as the road to black freedom in the U.S. we take as our own. But the wrong line was never corrected and the view of the U.S. imperialist army as the only “realistic” force to defend civil rights protesters in the Jim Crow South against racist terror deepened. By 1964 the SWP had adopted the grotesque campaign slogan, “Withdraw the Troops from Viet Nam and Send Them to Mississippi!” By 1965, the SWP had thrown overboard the last remnant of a revolutionary opposition to imperialism, promoting the reformist lie that a classless peace movement could stop U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants.
The young SWP cadre in the Revolutionary Tendency who fought the party’s degeneration were the founding leaders of our organization. Recognizing where the SWP went, and holding it up as a mirror of where we could go without correcting our mistakes and the outright betrayal of our revolutionary internationalist program in response to the Haiti earthquake, is part of the fight to preserve this continuity with Cannon’s revolutionary party that extends back to Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks.
But the ability to make such a correction is hardly cause for celebration. It merely lays the basis for political rectification. We crossed the class line and the urgent necessity is to reassert and struggle to maintain the proletarian internationalist program of Leninism.
—27 April 2010
*From The "HistoMat" Blog- An Update On The UK Elections
Click on the headline ot link to a "HistoMat" blog entry, dated April 29, 2010, on the upcoming UK parliamentary elections.
Markin comment:
I have already given my view on the UK elections in this space today. "HistoMat" just gives some nice anecdotal evidence for that view. Thanks- "HistoMat".
Markin comment:
I have already given my view on the UK elections in this space today. "HistoMat" just gives some nice anecdotal evidence for that view. Thanks- "HistoMat".
Thursday, April 29, 2010
*No Vote To New Labor In The United Kingdom (UK) Parliamentary Elections
Click on the headline to link to a "Lenin Internet Archive" online copy of his 1920 classic statement of revolutionary tactics, "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder-"Left-Wing" Communism In Great Britain"
Markin comment:
For radicals and revolutionaries in America come election time it is, or should be, a no-brainer to call for a NO vote to all the pro-capitalist parties, big or small, donkeys, elephants or greens. Occasionally, at least this has been the case in the span of my political lifetime; we can support one or another socialist or communist candidate depending on their programs. However, for the most part, lacking even a reformist workers party to campaign for, we use the heightened political atmosphere that elections bring to get out our propaganda messages. On such themes as the need to for labor to break from the capitalist parties, in particular its long alliance with the American Democratic Party, the need to build an independent working class party with a class struggle program and the need to deal with questions of special oppression for women, blacks and others.
The tasks for radicals and revolutionaries in the United Kingdom (UK) are slightly different. (I am under the sway of the BBC in this usage as it is their preferred form, and it further recognizes something that should be painful to every revolutionary-that Great Britain is still a monarchy). There, for the past century or so, the working class has had its own party, at least in a formal sense. So the question of whether to support or not support this reformist formation is an open and lively political question. As this entry’s headline indicates there should be no question that New Labor should not be supported by a vote in the upcoming parliamentary elections. After over a decade of hard, bitter, austere administration of the capitalist state against the short and ling term interests of the working class this should be a “no-brainer” as well. The only question then would be support, if any, to the myriad ostensibly socialist organizations that populate the left of the Labor Party, inside or out.
I say that No vote position should be a “no-brainer” but I am beginning to see and hear rumblings from the UK, now that the three-way race seems to be a donnybrook, that those to the left of Labor should give some kind of “critical support” to Labor- the “poodle” party to the Bush/Obama imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan…and who knows where tomorrow. And, of course, those who wish to do so will trot out Lenin, the Lenin of “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder”, to argue that New Labor should be supported “like a rope supports a hanging man”, but supported nevertheless. As the linked article above by Lenin demonstrates Arthur Henderson, and his cohorts, seem almost to be bloody "Bolsheviks" by comparison with today's crop of "labor leaders".
Now critical support to reformist parties, of which Old Labor in the UK was a sterling example, can be an important tactic. Old Labor, however, was at least solidly based on the trade unions and was a class party. An argument could easily be made that Old Labor would not have existed without the support, financial or otherwise, from the trade unions. New Labor is increasingly, and consciously, breaking from that path and modeling itself on the American Democratic Party. But, although at some point, the question of being able to support New Labor at all, as a matter of principle, may come up that is not the case today, nor is it the main criterion for calling for a No vote. Critical support is a tactic that revolutionaries use, including old comrades Lenin and Trotsky, to point out the contradictions between the working class base and the actions of the leadership in cases where revolutionaries are not powerful and authoritative enough to lead the working class. Where can one point to any contradiction in New Labor that revolutionaries could use to draw the lessons for the working class base. To pose the question is to give the answer in this case. No Vote To New Labor!
Note: I had a certain amount of sport bringing up the United Kingdom (UK) designation. However there is a point to be made here. The minimum, minimum, minimum program that revolutionaries should thing about on the question of critical support is actually a democratic program from the 17th century, Cromwell’s program. Abolish the monarchy! Abolish the House of Lords! Abolish the state church! Doesn’t Socialist Republics of the British Isles, although a little bulky to say and write, read and sound better than UK? Ya, I thought so.
Markin comment:
For radicals and revolutionaries in America come election time it is, or should be, a no-brainer to call for a NO vote to all the pro-capitalist parties, big or small, donkeys, elephants or greens. Occasionally, at least this has been the case in the span of my political lifetime; we can support one or another socialist or communist candidate depending on their programs. However, for the most part, lacking even a reformist workers party to campaign for, we use the heightened political atmosphere that elections bring to get out our propaganda messages. On such themes as the need to for labor to break from the capitalist parties, in particular its long alliance with the American Democratic Party, the need to build an independent working class party with a class struggle program and the need to deal with questions of special oppression for women, blacks and others.
The tasks for radicals and revolutionaries in the United Kingdom (UK) are slightly different. (I am under the sway of the BBC in this usage as it is their preferred form, and it further recognizes something that should be painful to every revolutionary-that Great Britain is still a monarchy). There, for the past century or so, the working class has had its own party, at least in a formal sense. So the question of whether to support or not support this reformist formation is an open and lively political question. As this entry’s headline indicates there should be no question that New Labor should not be supported by a vote in the upcoming parliamentary elections. After over a decade of hard, bitter, austere administration of the capitalist state against the short and ling term interests of the working class this should be a “no-brainer” as well. The only question then would be support, if any, to the myriad ostensibly socialist organizations that populate the left of the Labor Party, inside or out.
I say that No vote position should be a “no-brainer” but I am beginning to see and hear rumblings from the UK, now that the three-way race seems to be a donnybrook, that those to the left of Labor should give some kind of “critical support” to Labor- the “poodle” party to the Bush/Obama imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan…and who knows where tomorrow. And, of course, those who wish to do so will trot out Lenin, the Lenin of “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder”, to argue that New Labor should be supported “like a rope supports a hanging man”, but supported nevertheless. As the linked article above by Lenin demonstrates Arthur Henderson, and his cohorts, seem almost to be bloody "Bolsheviks" by comparison with today's crop of "labor leaders".
Now critical support to reformist parties, of which Old Labor in the UK was a sterling example, can be an important tactic. Old Labor, however, was at least solidly based on the trade unions and was a class party. An argument could easily be made that Old Labor would not have existed without the support, financial or otherwise, from the trade unions. New Labor is increasingly, and consciously, breaking from that path and modeling itself on the American Democratic Party. But, although at some point, the question of being able to support New Labor at all, as a matter of principle, may come up that is not the case today, nor is it the main criterion for calling for a No vote. Critical support is a tactic that revolutionaries use, including old comrades Lenin and Trotsky, to point out the contradictions between the working class base and the actions of the leadership in cases where revolutionaries are not powerful and authoritative enough to lead the working class. Where can one point to any contradiction in New Labor that revolutionaries could use to draw the lessons for the working class base. To pose the question is to give the answer in this case. No Vote To New Labor!
Note: I had a certain amount of sport bringing up the United Kingdom (UK) designation. However there is a point to be made here. The minimum, minimum, minimum program that revolutionaries should thing about on the question of critical support is actually a democratic program from the 17th century, Cromwell’s program. Abolish the monarchy! Abolish the House of Lords! Abolish the state church! Doesn’t Socialist Republics of the British Isles, although a little bulky to say and write, read and sound better than UK? Ya, I thought so.
Films To While Away The Class Struggle By- In The Halls Of Justice The Only Justice Is In The Halls- "Lenny"
Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of a Lenny Bruce stand- up routine.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
DVD Review
Lenny, starring Dustin Hoffman and Valerie Perrine, directed by Bob Fosse, MGM, 1974
Except for the last paragraph the rest of this review was used to review the documentary "Lenny Bruce: Without Tears". The points made there apply here, for the most part, as well.
Okay, the average black male kid on the average ghetto city block knows, and knows without blinking, and knows from some seemingly unspoken source deep within his genetic structure that the cards are stacked against him. That the cops, the courts, or some other part of the “justice” system will, eventually, come knocking at the door or grab him off the street for something, usually dope. The average Latino male kid on the average barrio city now knows pretty much knows that same thing, again usually on some bogus drug charge. And nowadays even young black and Latina women are getting that same message coded into their psyches. What is not encoded is for a white, Jewish comic guy who has an off-beat sense of humor and has something to say, sometimes something profound to say, to face that same music, anytime. That, my friends, is the Lenny Bruce story in a nutshell and forms the theme for this commentary.
Really, I could leave the headline, taken from something Lenny Bruce said when he was in deep and surreal legal trouble back in the 1960s, and that would tell the tale here. Nevertheless the case of one off –beat comic who tried to “go outside the envelope” of the confines of safe, secure, no waves, post-World World II cultural expression is an object lesson for the rest of us. Being a little bit uppity, being a little too black or brown, or being a little too red could get you in more trouble than you can shake a stick at then, and now.
On viewing this documentary my first impression was “what is all the fuss about?” At the vantage point, forty or fifty years after the events, it is hard to see what the so-called moral police of the day got in a dither over in Bruce’s work. On any given day you can hear more lewdness, lunacy, and sheer vulgarity on “talk” radio or television than Lenny ever uttered. That, however, is the point. Lenny was the point man, the trenchant social critic cum comedian who is honored now after the fact, but was not while the heat was on.
One of the highlights of this documentary is Lenny Bruce performing in various venues interspersed with “talking head” commentary by those who knew or interviewed him. The most interesting one is with jazz critic and social activist, Nat Hentoff, when Lenny is deep in trouble and has physically been ravished by his struggle. Kenneth Tynan, of 1950s San Francisco poetic fame, and Malcolm Muggeridge add their somewhat bizarre two cents worth. As does Bruce fellow social critic, Mort Sahl.
Throwing out the above names and discussing the time frame of Bruce’s troubles brings one final point. Was Lenny, like Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Tynan, part of the 1950s “beat” generation? Certainly he was part of the avant guarde back door jazz scene and miles in front of any one else in the Milton Berle/Sid Caesar 1950s comedy world. One of the commentators noted that Bruce was primarily an entertainer, a man trying to make a living at what he did best. That seems right. But whether he was “beat” or not, he certainly pushed the envelop. And that is part of his legacy, and worthy of honor by us.
*****
The commercial movie "Lenny", starring Dustin Hoffman as Lenny, delves more into the personal side of Lenny's life, including his various affairs with women, especially the one leading up to his marriage(his wife here played by Valerie Perrine who seems perfect in this languid, strangely alluring stripper role), his jones, and his sinking down as a person under the weight of all those things and the long arm of the law. Hoffman is strongest when he digs deep into the legal imbroglio of Bruce's life and when he does some of his stand-up routines although anyone who has watched the Bruce documentary will note that it is almost impossible to mimic Bruce's mannerisms successfully. But a well done job, nevertheless.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
DVD Review
Lenny, starring Dustin Hoffman and Valerie Perrine, directed by Bob Fosse, MGM, 1974
Except for the last paragraph the rest of this review was used to review the documentary "Lenny Bruce: Without Tears". The points made there apply here, for the most part, as well.
Okay, the average black male kid on the average ghetto city block knows, and knows without blinking, and knows from some seemingly unspoken source deep within his genetic structure that the cards are stacked against him. That the cops, the courts, or some other part of the “justice” system will, eventually, come knocking at the door or grab him off the street for something, usually dope. The average Latino male kid on the average barrio city now knows pretty much knows that same thing, again usually on some bogus drug charge. And nowadays even young black and Latina women are getting that same message coded into their psyches. What is not encoded is for a white, Jewish comic guy who has an off-beat sense of humor and has something to say, sometimes something profound to say, to face that same music, anytime. That, my friends, is the Lenny Bruce story in a nutshell and forms the theme for this commentary.
Really, I could leave the headline, taken from something Lenny Bruce said when he was in deep and surreal legal trouble back in the 1960s, and that would tell the tale here. Nevertheless the case of one off –beat comic who tried to “go outside the envelope” of the confines of safe, secure, no waves, post-World World II cultural expression is an object lesson for the rest of us. Being a little bit uppity, being a little too black or brown, or being a little too red could get you in more trouble than you can shake a stick at then, and now.
On viewing this documentary my first impression was “what is all the fuss about?” At the vantage point, forty or fifty years after the events, it is hard to see what the so-called moral police of the day got in a dither over in Bruce’s work. On any given day you can hear more lewdness, lunacy, and sheer vulgarity on “talk” radio or television than Lenny ever uttered. That, however, is the point. Lenny was the point man, the trenchant social critic cum comedian who is honored now after the fact, but was not while the heat was on.
One of the highlights of this documentary is Lenny Bruce performing in various venues interspersed with “talking head” commentary by those who knew or interviewed him. The most interesting one is with jazz critic and social activist, Nat Hentoff, when Lenny is deep in trouble and has physically been ravished by his struggle. Kenneth Tynan, of 1950s San Francisco poetic fame, and Malcolm Muggeridge add their somewhat bizarre two cents worth. As does Bruce fellow social critic, Mort Sahl.
Throwing out the above names and discussing the time frame of Bruce’s troubles brings one final point. Was Lenny, like Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Tynan, part of the 1950s “beat” generation? Certainly he was part of the avant guarde back door jazz scene and miles in front of any one else in the Milton Berle/Sid Caesar 1950s comedy world. One of the commentators noted that Bruce was primarily an entertainer, a man trying to make a living at what he did best. That seems right. But whether he was “beat” or not, he certainly pushed the envelop. And that is part of his legacy, and worthy of honor by us.
*****
The commercial movie "Lenny", starring Dustin Hoffman as Lenny, delves more into the personal side of Lenny's life, including his various affairs with women, especially the one leading up to his marriage(his wife here played by Valerie Perrine who seems perfect in this languid, strangely alluring stripper role), his jones, and his sinking down as a person under the weight of all those things and the long arm of the law. Hoffman is strongest when he digs deep into the legal imbroglio of Bruce's life and when he does some of his stand-up routines although anyone who has watched the Bruce documentary will note that it is almost impossible to mimic Bruce's mannerisms successfully. But a well done job, nevertheless.
*Films To While Away The Class Struggle By- The Halls Of Justice The Only Justice Is In The Halls- The Life and Hard Times Of Lenny Bruce
Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of "Lenny Bruce On The Irish". Ouch!
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
DVD Review
Lenny Bruce: Without Tears, Lenny Bruce and various commentators, directed by Fred Baker, New Titles Productions, 1972
Okay, the average black male kid on the average ghetto city block knows, and knows without blinking, and knows from some seemingly unspoken source deep within his genetic structure that the cards are stacked against. That the cops, the courts, or some other part of the “justice” system will, eventually, come knocking at the door or grab him off the street for something, usually dope. The average Latino male kid on the average barrio city now knows pretty much knows that same thing, again usually on some bogus drug charge. And nowadays even young black and Latina women are getting that same message coded into their psyches. What is not encoded is for a white, Jewish comic guy who has an off-beat sense of humor and has something to say, sometimes something profound to say to face that same music, anytime. That, my friends, is the Lenny Bruce story in a nutshell and forms the theme for this commentary.
Really, I could leave the headline, taken from something Lenny Bruce said when he was in deep and surreal legal trouble back in the 1960s, and that would tell the tale here. Nevertheless the case of one off –beat comic who tried to “go outside the envelope” of confines of safe, secure, no waves, post-World World II cultural expression is an object lesson for the rest of us. Being a little bit uppity, being a little too black or brown, or being a little too red will get you in more trouble than you can shake a stick at then, and now.
On viewing this documentary my first impression was “what is all the fuss about?” At the vantage point, forty or fifty years after the events, it is hard to see what the so-called moral police of the day got in a dither over in Bruce’s work. On any given day you can hear more lewdness, lunacy, and sheer vulgarity on “talk” radio or television than Lenny ever uttered. That, however, is the point. Lenny was the point man, the trenchant social critic cum comedian who was honored after the fact, but not while the heat was on.
One of the highlights of this documentary is Lenny Bruce performing in various venues interspersed with “talking head” commentary by those who knew or interviewed him. The most interesting one is with jazz critic and social activist, Nat Hentoff, when Lenny is deep in trouble and has physically been ravished by his struggle. Kenneth Tynan, of 1950s San Francisco poetic fame, and Malcolm Muggeridge add their somewhat bizarre two cents worth. As does Bruce fellow social critic, Mort Sahl.
Throwing out the above names and discussing the time frame of Bruce’s troubles brings one final point. Was Lenny, like Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Tynan, part of the 1950s “beat” generation? Certainly he was part of the avant guarde back door jazz scene and miles in front of any one else in the Milton Berle/Sid Caesar 1950s comedy world. One of the commentators noted that Bruce was primarily an entertainer, a man trying to make a living at what he did best. That seems right. But whether he was “beat” or not, he certainly pushed the envelop. And that is part of his legacy, and worthy of honor by us.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
DVD Review
Lenny Bruce: Without Tears, Lenny Bruce and various commentators, directed by Fred Baker, New Titles Productions, 1972
Okay, the average black male kid on the average ghetto city block knows, and knows without blinking, and knows from some seemingly unspoken source deep within his genetic structure that the cards are stacked against. That the cops, the courts, or some other part of the “justice” system will, eventually, come knocking at the door or grab him off the street for something, usually dope. The average Latino male kid on the average barrio city now knows pretty much knows that same thing, again usually on some bogus drug charge. And nowadays even young black and Latina women are getting that same message coded into their psyches. What is not encoded is for a white, Jewish comic guy who has an off-beat sense of humor and has something to say, sometimes something profound to say to face that same music, anytime. That, my friends, is the Lenny Bruce story in a nutshell and forms the theme for this commentary.
Really, I could leave the headline, taken from something Lenny Bruce said when he was in deep and surreal legal trouble back in the 1960s, and that would tell the tale here. Nevertheless the case of one off –beat comic who tried to “go outside the envelope” of confines of safe, secure, no waves, post-World World II cultural expression is an object lesson for the rest of us. Being a little bit uppity, being a little too black or brown, or being a little too red will get you in more trouble than you can shake a stick at then, and now.
On viewing this documentary my first impression was “what is all the fuss about?” At the vantage point, forty or fifty years after the events, it is hard to see what the so-called moral police of the day got in a dither over in Bruce’s work. On any given day you can hear more lewdness, lunacy, and sheer vulgarity on “talk” radio or television than Lenny ever uttered. That, however, is the point. Lenny was the point man, the trenchant social critic cum comedian who was honored after the fact, but not while the heat was on.
One of the highlights of this documentary is Lenny Bruce performing in various venues interspersed with “talking head” commentary by those who knew or interviewed him. The most interesting one is with jazz critic and social activist, Nat Hentoff, when Lenny is deep in trouble and has physically been ravished by his struggle. Kenneth Tynan, of 1950s San Francisco poetic fame, and Malcolm Muggeridge add their somewhat bizarre two cents worth. As does Bruce fellow social critic, Mort Sahl.
Throwing out the above names and discussing the time frame of Bruce’s troubles brings one final point. Was Lenny, like Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Tynan, part of the 1950s “beat” generation? Certainly he was part of the avant guarde back door jazz scene and miles in front of any one else in the Milton Berle/Sid Caesar 1950s comedy world. One of the commentators noted that Bruce was primarily an entertainer, a man trying to make a living at what he did best. That seems right. But whether he was “beat” or not, he certainly pushed the envelop. And that is part of his legacy, and worthy of honor by us.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
***Books To While Away The Class Struggle By- The Short Stories Of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the 19th century American writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin
Book Review
Hawthorne’s Short Stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vintage Books, New York, 1946
The old social democratic literary critic and editor of “Dissent”, Irving Howe, once noted that Mark Twain, and his post-Civil War works represented a dramatic break from the Euro-centric ante bellum literary establishment. And on this question I agree with him. As I do on his choice of Nathaniel Hawthorne as an exemplar of that tradition. Certainly his most famous work, “The Scarlet Letter”, reflects that European influence, as do the collected short stories under review here.
As the reader, perhaps, knows Hawthorne made his living writing short stories for the women reader-oriented literary magazines of the day long before he wrote “The Scarlet Letter” and some of these have turned out to be classics of the early American Republic. Moreover, and this is one of his attractions for me, I know virtually every place where the action of the short stories takes place from the Merrymount May Day pole to the granite mountains of New Hampshire and beyond. More importantly, I know the weight, the dead weight of that grinding Puritan foundation that drove much of the early American experience here in New England. Hawthorne, in short, knows where the WASP-ish bodies are buried and is here to tell one and all the tales. Sometimes with pathos, sometimes with gothic effects, but always with a sense of some underlying moral purpose. You see Hawthorne too is smitten and bitten by that same Puritan ethos and that is the secret to the power of his writing.
As is usually the case with compilations, literary or otherwise, not all the work here is top-shelf. The best, and most representative to my mind, are the high Puritan “The Minister’s Black Veil, the chilling “The White Old Maid’, the swamp Yankee classic “Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure”, the prophetic “The Birthmark”, the Gothic classic “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, and another high Puritan classic “The Maypole of Merrymount.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin
Book Review
Hawthorne’s Short Stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vintage Books, New York, 1946
The old social democratic literary critic and editor of “Dissent”, Irving Howe, once noted that Mark Twain, and his post-Civil War works represented a dramatic break from the Euro-centric ante bellum literary establishment. And on this question I agree with him. As I do on his choice of Nathaniel Hawthorne as an exemplar of that tradition. Certainly his most famous work, “The Scarlet Letter”, reflects that European influence, as do the collected short stories under review here.
As the reader, perhaps, knows Hawthorne made his living writing short stories for the women reader-oriented literary magazines of the day long before he wrote “The Scarlet Letter” and some of these have turned out to be classics of the early American Republic. Moreover, and this is one of his attractions for me, I know virtually every place where the action of the short stories takes place from the Merrymount May Day pole to the granite mountains of New Hampshire and beyond. More importantly, I know the weight, the dead weight of that grinding Puritan foundation that drove much of the early American experience here in New England. Hawthorne, in short, knows where the WASP-ish bodies are buried and is here to tell one and all the tales. Sometimes with pathos, sometimes with gothic effects, but always with a sense of some underlying moral purpose. You see Hawthorne too is smitten and bitten by that same Puritan ethos and that is the secret to the power of his writing.
As is usually the case with compilations, literary or otherwise, not all the work here is top-shelf. The best, and most representative to my mind, are the high Puritan “The Minister’s Black Veil, the chilling “The White Old Maid’, the swamp Yankee classic “Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure”, the prophetic “The Birthmark”, the Gothic classic “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, and another high Puritan classic “The Maypole of Merrymount.
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard" -On The West Virginia Coal Mine Diaster - A Guest Commentary
Click on the headline to link to a "Workers Vanguard" article, dated April 23, 2010 concerning the recent West Virginia coal mine disaster.
Markin comment:
The headline of the "Workers Vanguard" article said it all. And I say, mourn, then organize like hell.
Markin comment:
The headline of the "Workers Vanguard" article said it all. And I say, mourn, then organize like hell.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
*From "The Rag Blog"-Coal Mining : Union-Busting and the Massey Disaster
Click on the headline to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry concerning the Massey mining company and the desperate need to organize the mines, all mines.
Markin comment:
Mourn, then organize, and organize like hell.
Markin comment:
Mourn, then organize, and organize like hell.
From "The Rag Blog"-Paul Krassner : Kent State Anniversary Blues- A Guest Commentary-And Jackson State Too
Click on the headline to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry by Paul Krassner, well- known radical figure from the 1960s, on the events at Kent State in Ohio in 1970. I would add also down at Jackson State in Mississippi, as well
Markin comment:
Kent State/Jackson State- Never Forget- Never Forgive!
Neil Young » Ohio Lyrics
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
Markin comment:
Kent State/Jackson State- Never Forget- Never Forgive!
Neil Young » Ohio Lyrics
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
From The "HistoMat" Blog- A New Work On Karl Marx By An Aficionado
Click on the headline to link to a "HistoMat" entry concerning an interesting, apparently non-academic, if you can believe that, work on Karl Marx by a life-long devotee to the cause. Now we just need to strenuously apply the Old Moor's lessons about the neature of the class struggle, and how to win it.
*Activists Chain Themselves to Arizona Capitol to Protest Russell Pearce's SB 1070-Down With The Arizona Immigrant Profiling Bill
Click on the headline to link to a "Green Left News" blog entry concerning an Arizona (on the front lines of the immigration question) piece of anti-immigrant legislation now pending there. Down with this bill, SB 1070. Full citizenship rights for all who make it here!
*From The "HistoMat" Blog- On Christopher Hitchens and Orwell's Animal Farm
Click on the headline to link to a "HistoMat" blog entry concerning Orwellians, new and old. This entry double-speaks for itself
*The Jackson State Killings, 1970- Never Forget, Never Forgive- Kent State Too
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the Jackson State (Mississippi) killing of two students , and injuring of several others.
Markin comment:
Hey, am I the only one, except Bob Feldman, who has linked the Kent State and Jackson State student killings by the government together today as we mark the fortieth anniversary of those events. It was the same struggle by us and the same rationale by those in power. Remember all students (and others) were put on notice that the American government, federal and local, had you in their cross hairs if you decided to get uppity. Etch that in your brains for future reference.
Markin comment:
Hey, am I the only one, except Bob Feldman, who has linked the Kent State and Jackson State student killings by the government together today as we mark the fortieth anniversary of those events. It was the same struggle by us and the same rationale by those in power. Remember all students (and others) were put on notice that the American government, federal and local, had you in their cross hairs if you decided to get uppity. Etch that in your brains for future reference.
Monday, April 26, 2010
*Films to While Away The Class Struggle By-"The Cartel"- A Guest Review
Click on the title to link to a "Boston Sunday Globe" article, dated April 25, 2010, reviewing "The Cartel", a film about teachers unions and their effect on public education from an essentially anti-union perspective.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
Markin comment:
One would think that with a title like "The Cartel" we would be treated to an expose of the greedy, profit-hungry underside of the international capitalist order and its nefarious doings. Or of some murky South American drug operation gone bust. No, the cartel in question is the organized teachers movement in America, also known as teachers unions. Apparently, according to the producer of this documentary, our fellow unionists are the root cause (although to be 'fair' he tacks on administrators as well) of the demise of public education in this country. Also, apparently, rather than have a stable and dedicated workforce to solve the very real problems of the public education system we are to bow down to 'virtues' of selective, elite charter schools, or better, something like Volunteers For America where young, unemployed college graduates go out and give the best two years, or so, of their lives to teaching, burn out, and then go back to graduate or professional schools in order to get real dough. That said, under the old political principle "know thy enemy" go out and watch this thing. Defend Public Education! Defend Teachers Unions! No More Central Falls!
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
Markin comment:
One would think that with a title like "The Cartel" we would be treated to an expose of the greedy, profit-hungry underside of the international capitalist order and its nefarious doings. Or of some murky South American drug operation gone bust. No, the cartel in question is the organized teachers movement in America, also known as teachers unions. Apparently, according to the producer of this documentary, our fellow unionists are the root cause (although to be 'fair' he tacks on administrators as well) of the demise of public education in this country. Also, apparently, rather than have a stable and dedicated workforce to solve the very real problems of the public education system we are to bow down to 'virtues' of selective, elite charter schools, or better, something like Volunteers For America where young, unemployed college graduates go out and give the best two years, or so, of their lives to teaching, burn out, and then go back to graduate or professional schools in order to get real dough. That said, under the old political principle "know thy enemy" go out and watch this thing. Defend Public Education! Defend Teachers Unions! No More Central Falls!
* A Second Look At Bad Blake- A Jeff Bridges Film Retropsective
Click on the headline to link to a "Boston Sunday Globe" article, dated April 25, 2010, concerning a Jeff Bridges retrospective at a local theater.
Markin comment:
Long before Jeff Bridges won his well-deserved Oscar for his Bad Blake role in last year’s “Crazy Hearts” I noted, in a response to someone’s comment in another blog, that in a sense he had been playing those kind of award-worthy roles all his now forty year acting career and that he should have been honored long time ago. I also noted the similarities between the way he played his role as Duane in “The Last Picture Show” and Bad Blake in “Crazy Hearts”. Now for those who did not, or do not, believe me and need visual proof you are to be well-treated. At least those in the Boston area and, perhaps, in your town if you push for it you will get a chance to see a Jeff Bridges retrospective at the local theater described in the “Boston Sunday Globe” linked article. The following is not an exclusive list of my choices but “Last Picture”, “Rancho Deluxe”, “Fat City”, “ The Big Lebowski”, and, of course “Crazy Hearts” should be on your dance card. If no retrospective is coming up in your area check out “Netflix”. They are all available on that site. Kudos, Duane. Kudos, Bad.
Markin comment:
Long before Jeff Bridges won his well-deserved Oscar for his Bad Blake role in last year’s “Crazy Hearts” I noted, in a response to someone’s comment in another blog, that in a sense he had been playing those kind of award-worthy roles all his now forty year acting career and that he should have been honored long time ago. I also noted the similarities between the way he played his role as Duane in “The Last Picture Show” and Bad Blake in “Crazy Hearts”. Now for those who did not, or do not, believe me and need visual proof you are to be well-treated. At least those in the Boston area and, perhaps, in your town if you push for it you will get a chance to see a Jeff Bridges retrospective at the local theater described in the “Boston Sunday Globe” linked article. The following is not an exclusive list of my choices but “Last Picture”, “Rancho Deluxe”, “Fat City”, “ The Big Lebowski”, and, of course “Crazy Hearts” should be on your dance card. If no retrospective is coming up in your area check out “Netflix”. They are all available on that site. Kudos, Duane. Kudos, Bad.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)