Markin comment:
Every Month Is Labor History MonthThis post is part of an on-going series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
Other Septembers in this series I have concentrated on various sometimes now obscure leaders and rank and file militants in the international working class movement, especially those who made contributions here in America like "Big Bill" Haywood and Eugene V. Debs. This year, given the pressing need for clarity around the labor party question in America(algebraically expressed in our movement as the struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government) I have gone back to the sources-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their correspondence on working class organizationwith various associates and opponents. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely given the state of working class organization here these days, many of their comments, taken in due regard for changed times and circumstances, are germane today. This correspondence is only a start and should just whet the reader's appetite to research further.
*****
Marx-Engels Correspondence 1865
Engels To Joseph Weydemeyer In St Louis-1865
Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 121;
First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, 1906-1907, and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1934.
Manchester, 10 March 1865
Dear Weydemeyer,
At last I have got down to answering your letter of 20 January. I had sent it to Marx who — partly because he was indisposed — kept it a very long while, in fact did not return it until a week ago today, so that my letter could no longer catch the steamer; I was too occupied with business on that day.
My best thanks for your detailed answers to my questions. With the negligent reporting on militaria in the papers here, I had lost the thread of all the ‘combined’ operations; I found the Red River expedition quite puzzling and I was not much wiser about Sherman’s move eastward from Vicksburg, as there was no mention here of the Southern corps advancing from New Orleans. These combined operations with a point of meeting up not merely in the enemy’s territory but even behind his very lines show precisely how crude are the ideas of strategy of a nation that has no experience of war whatever. And yet if the noble Wrangel and Prince Frederick Charles had not been 2 to 1 in the Danish war they would have got up to much the same tricks. The battle at Missunde and the 2 inexplicable ‘demonstrations’ (to give a nameless thing some kind of name, nevertheless) against Düppel before the assault were, if anything, even more childish.
As to Grant’s conduct at Richmond, I am trying to explain it in another way. I am completely of the same opinion as you that strategically the only correct thing was to attack Richmond from the west. However, it seems to me — insofar as one can form a judgement from such a distance and from such vague reports — that Grant preferred the eastern side for 2 reasons:
1. because he could provision himself more easily there. Whilst on the western side he commanded only the roads to Fredericksburg and to Tennessee (both crossing areas that had been exhausted), on the eastern side he had the Fredericksburg line, and the York and James Rivers as well. Since the difficulty of supplying large armies with provisions has played an important part throughout the war, I would not like to condemn Grant out of hand until I am clear on that score. You reproach him with having turned his back to the sea. But if one controls the sea and has secure points of embarkation (Monroe and Norfolk), then that is an advantage. Compare Wellington’s campaigns in Spain and the Crimean campaign, where the Allies, who had been victorious on the Alma, positively ran away from the enemy in order to ensure their rear the protective cover of the sea south of Sevastopol. That the possession of the Shenandoah valley was the best way to secure Washington is clear. But? The question arises
2. did Grant (and Lincoln) want to have Washington completely secure? On the contrary, it seems to me that with the loose constitution of the Federation and the great indifference to the war in some parts of the North, Lincoln never seriously wanted to drive the Confederates out of Richmond, that, on the contrary, he just wanted to pin them down in a position where they represented something of a threat to Washington, Pennsylvania and even New York. I believe that without that he would have got neither the recruits nor the money to finish the war. I certainly believe that Grant would have very much liked to have taken Richmond in the last 3-4 months, but he has not sufficient forces to do so. I see them estimated at from 70-90,000 men and Lee at 50-70,000. If this ratio is approximately correct, then, with his attack acknowledged to be strategically wrong, he has done everything possible to frustrate any offensive defence by Lee, and to encircle Richmond on at least 3 sides out of 4. For, after distinguishing himself amongst all the other generals of North and South in the last 2 years just by his brilliant use of counter-attacks, I cannot believe that Lee would now abandon this tactic unless forced to. It was, however, a stupendous gain for the North if it succeeded in pinning down the South’s best army at Richmond, in one corner of the southern territory, because of a childish point d'honneur, until the whole hinterland was cut off and militarily disrupted for the South, firstly by conquest of the Mississippi valley and then again by Sherman’s campaign, until finally, and this seems to be the case now, all the Union’s available troops are marching on Richmond and one decisive blow can put an end to the whole business.
The latest news we have is from New York, dated 25 February, i.e. it includes the taking of Charleston and Wilmington, and Sherman’s advance from Columbia to Winnsborough. This Sherman appears to be the only fellow in the North who knows how to use his men’s legs to win battles. But he must, incidentally, have splendid lads under him. I can’t wait to see what will happen. If Lee assesses his desperate situation aright, he has no choice but to pack up and go south. But where to? The only way open to him is to Lynchburg and Tennessee; but that would be exceedingly hazardous to march into such a narrow mountain valley with just one railway, and Knoxville and Chattanooga fortified ahead of him. Besides, that would probably mean sacrificing Beauregard, Hardee and all other Confederate troops positioned in North Carolina, and exposing his flank to Sherman. Or he could advance from Petersburg, turn Grant’s left flank and march directly south against Sherman? Daring, but better; the only way to draw to himself the remnants of the fleeing armies, delay Grant by destroying the railways and bridges, and fall on Sherman with superior strength. If the latter offers battle to this combined force, he will certainly be beaten; if he falls back toward the coast, he will open up the road toward Augusta for Lee who will there be able to make his first respite. But Sherman and Grant would then surely join forces and Lee would then again be faced by a superior force, this time as good as in open country; for I do not believe the Confederates can again concentrate so many heavy guns in any one place inland as to organise another Richmond there. And even if they were to do so, they would only be jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire. Or else — invasion of the North? Jefferson Davis would no doubt be capable of this, but that would also spell the end within a fortnight.
Now, however, Lee can only send some of his forces southwards as well to join with Beauregard and company and stop Sherman, and this seems to me the most probable course. In this case, Sherman will probably give them a proper ‘drubbing’, as they say in South Germany, and then Lee will really be stuck. But even if Sherman were to be defeated, Lee would only have gained one month’s respite, and the troops advancing from every part of the coast — not to mention Grant’s successes in the meantime against the weakened Richmond army — would soon make his position as bad as it had been before. One way or another, the game is up, and I look forward to the arrival of each steamer with expectancy; there is a positive deluge of exciting news just now. The strategic speculations of the numerous Southern sympathisers here are most comical to listen to, they are all epitomised by the remark made by the Polish general Sznaycle in the Palatinate who said after every rout, ‘We are doing exactly what Kossuth did’.
Incidentally, I am most grateful to you for your explanations about military organisation in America, it was only as a result of them that I obtained a clear picture of many aspects of the war there. I have been familiar with the canons Napoléon for many a long year, the English had already replaced them (light, smooth-bore 12-pounders with a charge weighing 1/4 of the ball) when Louis Bonaparte re-invented them. You may have any number of Prussian howitzers, as they have all been withdrawn now and replaced by rifled 6-pounders and 4-pounders (which fire 13-pound and 9-pound heavy shells). I am not surprised that the elevation of your howitzers is only 5°, it was no higher with the old long howitzers the French had (until 1856), and, if I am not mistaken, the English ones were only a little more. In general, the high-angle fire from howitzers has been used for a long time only by the Germans; its great unreliability in range-finding in particular had brought it into disrepute.
Now to other matters.
A Frankfurt lawyer ‘von Schweitzer’ had indeed established himself in Berlin with a little paper called Der Social-Demokrat and asked us to write for it. As Liebknecht, who is in Berlin, was to join the editorial board, we accepted. But then, firstly, the little paper embarked on an insufferable cult of Lassalle, whilst we meanwhile received positive proof (the old Hatzfeldt woman told Liebknecht about it and urged him to work for the same ends) that Lassalle was much more deeply implicated with Bismarck than we had ever realised. There was an actual alliance between the two which had gone so far that Lassalle was to go to Schleswig-Holstein and there to advocate the annexation of the duchies by Prussia, while Bismarck had rather less definitely consented to the introduction of a sort of universal suffrage and more definitely to the right of combination and concessions regarding social policy, state support for workers’ associations, etc. The foolish Lassalle had no guarantee whatever from Bismarck, au contraire he would have been put in prison sans façon as soon as he became troublesome. The gentlemen on the Social-Demokrat knew this but, for all that, they continued to intensify their cult of Lassalle. In addition to that, the fellows allowed themselves to be intimidated by threats from Wagener (of the Kreuz-Zeitung) into paying court to Bismarck, flirting with him, etc., etc. That was the last straw. We published the enclosed statement and made our exit, with Liebknecht doing likewise. The Social-Demokrat then declared that we did not belong to the Social-Democratic Party, which excommunication naturally did not bother us. The whole Lassallean General Association of German Workers’ has taken such a wrong road that nothing can be done with it; however, it will not last long.
I was asked to write about the military question, which I did, but, in the meantime, relations between us became more strained, and the article turned into a pamphlet, which I have now had published separately; I am now sending you a copy of it by the same steamer. To judge by the newspapers I receive, the thing appears to be creating quite a furore, especially on the Rhine, and it will, at any rate, make it very difficult for the workers to ally themselves with reaction just now.
The International Association in London is going from strength to strength. In Paris especially, in London no less so. It is also going well in Switzerland and Italy. Only the German Lassalleans are refusing to bite, and in present circumstances least of all. However, we are again receiving letters and offers from all sides in Germany, a decisive change has taken place, and the rest will turn out right.
The only reply I can make to your wife’s question is that I have not yet entered into a state of holy matrimony.
Photographs enclosed, of Lupus and myself, I have come out a little too dark; but it is the only one I have left.
Schimmelpfennig has taken Charleston — Hurrah!
Write soon.
Your
F. Engels
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives-The Founding Conference Of The Fourth International (1938)-The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Program)
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed above.
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
*******
Markin comment on this document
Everybody, and that most notably included Leon Trotsky, knew something was going awry with the Bolshevik Revolution by 1923 for many reasons, some of them beyond correction outside of an international extension of the revolution, especially to Germany that would provide the vital industrial infrastructure to aid the struggling Soviet Union. Nevertheless, and this is important to note about serious revolutionary politics and politicians in general, the fight in 1923 still needed to aimed at winning the party cadre over. That was the failing point of many oppositionists, inside and outside the party, then.
By 1933, with the rise of the virtually unopposed rise and consolidation of Nazism in Germany clearly putting paid to the Communist International’s (read: Stalin’s) erroneous strategy, working inside the party, or acting as an expelled fraction of the party, was no longer tenable. Like earlier with the First and Second Internationals the Communist International was now dead as a revolutionary organizational center. Time now to gather, by fits and starts, the cadre for a new international- the Fourth International.
***
I will place a special comment entry at the end of this series on September 30, 2011 concerning the Transitional Program, it continuing validity (mostly), and it application for today's desperate class struggle needs.-Markin
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
*******
Markin comment on this document
Everybody, and that most notably included Leon Trotsky, knew something was going awry with the Bolshevik Revolution by 1923 for many reasons, some of them beyond correction outside of an international extension of the revolution, especially to Germany that would provide the vital industrial infrastructure to aid the struggling Soviet Union. Nevertheless, and this is important to note about serious revolutionary politics and politicians in general, the fight in 1923 still needed to aimed at winning the party cadre over. That was the failing point of many oppositionists, inside and outside the party, then.
By 1933, with the rise of the virtually unopposed rise and consolidation of Nazism in Germany clearly putting paid to the Communist International’s (read: Stalin’s) erroneous strategy, working inside the party, or acting as an expelled fraction of the party, was no longer tenable. Like earlier with the First and Second Internationals the Communist International was now dead as a revolutionary organizational center. Time now to gather, by fits and starts, the cadre for a new international- the Fourth International.
***
I will place a special comment entry at the end of this series on September 30, 2011 concerning the Transitional Program, it continuing validity (mostly), and it application for today's desperate class struggle needs.-Markin
Monday, September 12, 2011
On “Sexless” Internet Sex Sites- Or How “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin Got His Comeuppance- Finally- With The North Adamsville Salducci's Pizza Parlor Corner Boys In Mind
Normally I provide a link to some relevant topic in the headline on my posts. Do not click on the headline to link to an Internet sex site. Are you kidding? All you have to do is type in the word sex on any search engine and you will be inundated with every type of fetish you every wanted, or didn't want, to know about. We are all adults here-happy hunting-on your own.
*******
Peter Paul Markin comment:
Hey, everybody knows, or should be presumed to know to use some legal parlance which may become necessary before this latest “fire storm” is over, that this site is an exemplar of politics, mainly communist propaganda politics. No way is it some way station for AARP-worthy sex-starved refugees and fidgety lonely-hearts from back in my corner boy youth days. Although apparently that fate, short of some drastic legal action on my part, is what looms before me after I, unwittingly I think, let an old corner boy friend from the North Adamsville Salducci’s Pizza Parlor high school hang-out night, Johnny Silver, have some space here to tell what turned out to be a pretty salacious story about how he “hooked-up” with some young, very young, barely legal woman that he met through a sex-oriented Internet site.
My permissive attitude on this not strictly politically-driven subject was to let Johnny hold forth on the basis that intergenerational sex is still, more or less, socially taboo in this society and that under a future communist society we will take a much more liberal attitude on the subject as well as on many other now sexually-repressed notions. Johnny’s story, which I admit had even my temperature going up a bit after reading it, however set off this current fire storm.
Not about the struggle against imperialism in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Not the struggle to make some headway against the bosses and their relentless drive for profits at the workers expense here in America, and internationally. Not even commentary on the death penalty, gay marriage, the perfidy of Barack Obama, or the lunacy of the tea-partiers. No, I have been deluged with e-mails by every AARP-type that I know who want to harass me in order to tell their misbegotten tales of missed sexual opportunities, the sexual discrimination against oldsters by younger, well, younger women okay, or whatever else is on their minds except those much more important subjects. Please, please stop. Tell it to Oprah, or whoever is working that street these days.
The worst of the lot was my old corner boy (part-time corner boy at Salducci’s but full-time at the Surf and Sea Club in summer and whatever and wherever in winter) “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin. Now Phil, who I actually met in junior high school (a.k.a. middle school) through my chieftain in those days, Frankie Riley, really did deserve that nickname. Even Frankie and I walked away from Phil when he got going with every swear known to the English language (and some in Gaelic too-at least that is what he said his grandfather taught him). So you can imagine what the girls felt when he went full-bore. Strangely Phil, unlike now as his story below will explain, never lacked for girlfriends, and not just wrong side of the tracks, low-life, slutty girls either but many girls who you could see, see and stare at, every Sunday at 8:00 AM Mass over at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. So, maybe, he touched off something basic in them with his language. Personally, while I could swear like a trooper when necessary, I didn’t around girls or in public that much.
In any case, as I have already telegraphed above Phil, still using that ill-bred language has threatened murder, mayhem, and, more importantly, legal action (something about gross denial of freedom of expression) if I don’t post his sad-ass story. Needless to say that approach by itself does not get one anywhere with me. However in line with my idea in posting Johnny Silver’s salacious little sex tale noted above I have agreed to post Phil’s saga if only to use it as an example of sexual repression under capitalism and why we need, desperately need, that socialist revolution that is the hallmark of the real purpose of this space. Needless to say I take no personal, political, social, linguistic, or, most importantly, legal responsibility for this story. I have edited it lightly for language and content but this is strictly “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin’s story. If you want to take legal action against him feel free to do so. Needless to say as well that Phil is in no way (thankfully) political, much less a communist, although he desperately could use a shot, a big shot, of what our communist future promises.
Phillip Larkin comment:
First of all before I get into my f--king hard luck story about my sexless life on the sex sites let me clear the air about something that that twerp Peter Paul Markin said about my “foul-mouth.” You know in junior high school (now known as middle school) young,f--king hormone-juggling guys (and girls I found out later) don’t always know how to deal with that hard fact of growing up and my way was to swear a little. Big deal, right? Big deal then, or now. But you also know, and even f- -king Markin knows this, at that age you get a certain “rep” and it carries around with you like a lead balloon all through school, especially with guys that you hang around with. Like Markin was always from day one that I met him “The Scribe” (always capitalized, by the way) anointed by Frankie Riley and it stuck even though he hated to be called that. [Markin: Okay Phil we get the point. Let’s move on.] And so my little swearing episodes, not much really, got me tagged as, well, foul-mouthed [Markin: Phil must have a slight case of amnesia on this “little” thing. He was the world, well, at least the North Adamsville Junior High, champion swearer. He is the only kid, and Frankie Riley will back me up on this, who was able to make a sentence using only swear words. Some feat. Phil is, apparently, far too “humble” now to take a bow for that now.]
The thing about swearing though is that it never got me in much trouble with the girls. The Scribe [Markin: Watch it, Phil] was always (and Frankie too) very prim and proper in his language around girls although it never got him anywhere. And The Scribe (oops, Markin) could swear worst than me when he got his Irish up. But that is neither here nor there. Unless he wants to make something of it now. What it all ties in with though is that I have always used a certain amount of rough language around girls and they have either found it “cute” or, and here you have to take my word for it, kind of got “turned on” by it. [Markin: Sure thing, Phil]. I’ll give an example and Markin will be surprised. Millie Callahan the best, or one of the best, looking sixteen-year old girls in old North Adamsville was very prim and proper as well as hot-looking. She went to 8:00 AM Sunday Mass at Sacred Heart every week. And every week I would meet her after Mass and walk her to old Adamsville Beach. Sweating like a trooper. Maybe once in a while she would blush but mostly she got “turned on.” Turned on especially by one word that I used in many contexts on our walks. One Sunday, I swear, she got so aroused that, well let’s say we “did it” and you can figure out what the “did it” part was, right down on the beach near the old North Adamsville Yacht Club (there was a little secluded area that everybody knew about). And we were together through the rest of high school, “doing it” just fine. [Markin: Yes, Phil, Millie was a fox, for sure. I used sit a couple of rows in back of her at Mass to look at her ass. By the way everybody knew you two were “doing it.” And I was jealous, no question. It was only because she went to St. Anne’s High and not North Adamsville High that it was not more widely known and commented on. Nice work, Phil.]
The whole point of bringing this swearing thing up this many years later though is that, more often that not, the way I got entangled [Markin: Nice word, Phil] with women later on was that same basic approach. Sure I went through three marriages, and a several girlfriends, so maybe my “sticking” power wasn’t so great but it got short haul, short ashes hauled results. Anyway after the last one left a couple of years ago I started to notice that because of that lost and my changed work situation (working out of the house more with the luxury of the Internet age computer niceness) I wasn’t running into women to swear to, any maybe turn on.
Now I have read Johnny Silver’s wicked little story about his “trials and tribulations” with the young quail and how he was wasting away without it. [Markin: Young women, not quail Phil. Did you hear about the women’s liberation movement in your travels?] And how he finally “got lucky” with some teeny-bopper. Well we all knew Johnny was that way. In fact I had to f--king warn him off of my younger sister, Kate, one time. [Markin: Oh ya, I remember that time. I think you had a baseball bat in hand at the time, right?] Me, I like women a little older, more my own fifty-ish age and so I figured since nothing was happening elsewhere I would, like Johnny did, give one of the Internet sex sites a try. [Markin: Is every lonely-heart guy over the age of about thirty “running” to the sex sites for love and whatever? Am I missing some important sociological trend here? Also what is it with you old corner boy guys. Nobody expects you to tell the whole true to strangers, especially on the Internet, although it helps, but this age thing is weird. We are all sixty-something. That fifty-something was a while back but I never was a snitch, and I won’t be one now.]
I don’t know if you know how these sex sites work. Let’s just call the one I went on Get Laid Fast and you will get the flavor of the thing. [Markin: Phil, you don’t have to tell anybody over the age of about ten about Internet sex sites. All you have to do is Google the word sex on any search engine in the world and you will get more sex sites than you can possibly imagine, including, I assume, your Get Laid Fast site.] Naturally the lure (for an old-time heterosexual man) is sexy, semi-and unclothed women, young and middle- aged (nobody, nobody in their right minds that is, confesses to being, well, mature, hell, I will just say it straight here, old), just waiting to get their hands on you (where I will leave to the reader’s imagination but you get the point) and show you paradise, yes paradise. Just my cup of f-- king tea. Where do I sign up, and how quickly.
That signing up was the easy part. Well, almost easy. See, the hook is that everybody can sign up and put whatever they want on their very own personal profile page. The problem is that unless you pay up, pay up a fee, nobody in the known cyberspace world is going to know about your sex hunger, especially those alluring semi and unclothed young and middle-aged women. Hey, I am a man of the f -- king world so I know that I have to pony up, and gladly to get in on the action. And so I am off to the races for a few ducats.
Well, almost. Almost on two counts. First I have to figure out what my profile message will be and then my “message” to those women’s profiles that strike my fancy. So, naturally I go light on my personal profile. You know how I am looking for the love of my life (already had it). [Markin: I bet six, two, and even it was old time Millie Callahan, hands down. Hell, she might have been the love of my life too if I could have ever gotten beyond staring at her ass during Sunday Mass.] And companionship and all that other crap when everybody knows it a roll in the hay that is driving me, and about three billion (or whatever number of guys are in the world), to sites like this. And, maybe, women too. Or at least that is what I my worldly assumption would have been. The really, the Phil Larkin reality, is that I might have been better off on some mix and match dot com square dating service. Hell, I am willing to bet Markin his six, two and even I would have had more rolls in the hay by now that way than on this “hyper”- sex site.
Here is why. And don’t laugh at a f - - king fifty-something guy for being so silly. [Markin: Phil, I know you, we went to school together, get real-sixty-something, okay.] I went back to my old tried and true strategy with my personal messages to various women who struck my fancy. Nothing like in kid time but still basically- “babe, do you want to f- - k tonight, don’t be a bitch, call me now, here is my cell phone number," and the like. Now the site is loaded with women within about fifty miles of my residence so I naturally click on all those thirty and forty something women who have been around a little, are looking for a little sugar in their bowl, and are bound to go for rough and ready fifty-something guy. No sweat.
Actually my line, as I found out later, was kind of tame and “civilized” compared to some of the younger guys who were swinging their dicks in full view and stuff like that. Hell, it was tame and civilized compared to some of the women’s profile information and photos. I blushed, actually blushed, at some of the stuff they, theoretically, wanted to do, and do right this minute. Notice that word "theoretical" though. For example, first off I got a proposal from a thirty-something woman who wanted me to help her in her new career as a cosmetologist. She had, foolishly, gone to art school when she was younger and when the art-related job that she had didn’t survive the recent economic downturns she saw the light of working the women who are still working hair and nails racket. Still kind of artistic, right?
And I was willing to give the idea some consideration; although unlike Johnny Silver I did not play the older, wiser “sugar-daddy” angle. Or give any thought to such a notion with older women. If I was looking for Johnny’s teeny-boppers sure. But with older women, no way. Here is the hitch though. Said future hairdresser in return for my largesse was only willing to be a companion, a platonic, no sex companion for an “old geezer” (my term, hers was a man “old enough to be her father”).
And it went down from there. Although nobody, absolutely nobody that answered my messages was put off by my so-called lewd language. Case closed on that. What was also case closed though was my faulty understanding of the cyberspace “meat market.” I will not run down every click but just give some observation examples.
Many of the semi- and unclothed women whose profiles spoke of sexual adventure on personal contact wanted, desperately wanted in fact, not be a “one-night stand” and therefore put off any notion of sex with them to the Greek calends. That happened several times. Needless to say, other than the question of false advertising on their part here that I may speak to my lawyer about, I stopped communication very quickly. No sale, no way. Moreover, many women were carrying “baggage” of various sorts. Kids, broken marriages, bad-ass ex-boyfriends, you name it. That would not have put off old Phil but one or two messages was enough to indicate that their “get laid tonight” come-on was nothing more than getting some psychic comfort for their old wounds, and nothing more until the Greek calends. Again, no sale, no way.
So you can begin to see why I suggested the title “sexless” sex sites to Markin. And why he grabbed onto the idea right away (aside from my admittedly incessant badgering him after pure-as-gold Johnny Silver got his say). A couple of “conversations” warrant special attention though. One woman, an otherwise very interesting arty-type woman whom I actually met in person if you can believe that, did not believe that her “aging” thirty-something life would be complete unless she had a lip-enhancement operation so she could have those pouty Angela Jolie lips. Jesus, what the hell has the world come to. I admit I was tempted, sorely tempted, to help her out although her lips looked perfectly kissable to me. But again the notion of sex before I was placed in an assisted- living facility was out of the question. Ya, you have got it by now. No sale, no way.
Another woman, and here she can serve as an example of other similar instances that happened, was fired-up to chat (as I was with her as well) and we e-mailed a blizzard of messages back and forth. She, more than many others, was someone I wanted to meet in person and I brought the subject up in one e-mail after we had been “cyber-chatting” for a few weeks. Kaput. She went off-site the day after that and left no forwarding address, no e-mail address, as they said in the old days. Maybe I have to change my line. Or better, and here I could get back at Markin as well for his silly “comeuppance” remark in the headline. Maybe, Mille Callahan is out there is cyberspace somewhere. Honey, I still remember that swear word that “turned” you on. Help.
*******
Peter Paul Markin comment:
Hey, everybody knows, or should be presumed to know to use some legal parlance which may become necessary before this latest “fire storm” is over, that this site is an exemplar of politics, mainly communist propaganda politics. No way is it some way station for AARP-worthy sex-starved refugees and fidgety lonely-hearts from back in my corner boy youth days. Although apparently that fate, short of some drastic legal action on my part, is what looms before me after I, unwittingly I think, let an old corner boy friend from the North Adamsville Salducci’s Pizza Parlor high school hang-out night, Johnny Silver, have some space here to tell what turned out to be a pretty salacious story about how he “hooked-up” with some young, very young, barely legal woman that he met through a sex-oriented Internet site.
My permissive attitude on this not strictly politically-driven subject was to let Johnny hold forth on the basis that intergenerational sex is still, more or less, socially taboo in this society and that under a future communist society we will take a much more liberal attitude on the subject as well as on many other now sexually-repressed notions. Johnny’s story, which I admit had even my temperature going up a bit after reading it, however set off this current fire storm.
Not about the struggle against imperialism in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Not the struggle to make some headway against the bosses and their relentless drive for profits at the workers expense here in America, and internationally. Not even commentary on the death penalty, gay marriage, the perfidy of Barack Obama, or the lunacy of the tea-partiers. No, I have been deluged with e-mails by every AARP-type that I know who want to harass me in order to tell their misbegotten tales of missed sexual opportunities, the sexual discrimination against oldsters by younger, well, younger women okay, or whatever else is on their minds except those much more important subjects. Please, please stop. Tell it to Oprah, or whoever is working that street these days.
The worst of the lot was my old corner boy (part-time corner boy at Salducci’s but full-time at the Surf and Sea Club in summer and whatever and wherever in winter) “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin. Now Phil, who I actually met in junior high school (a.k.a. middle school) through my chieftain in those days, Frankie Riley, really did deserve that nickname. Even Frankie and I walked away from Phil when he got going with every swear known to the English language (and some in Gaelic too-at least that is what he said his grandfather taught him). So you can imagine what the girls felt when he went full-bore. Strangely Phil, unlike now as his story below will explain, never lacked for girlfriends, and not just wrong side of the tracks, low-life, slutty girls either but many girls who you could see, see and stare at, every Sunday at 8:00 AM Mass over at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. So, maybe, he touched off something basic in them with his language. Personally, while I could swear like a trooper when necessary, I didn’t around girls or in public that much.
In any case, as I have already telegraphed above Phil, still using that ill-bred language has threatened murder, mayhem, and, more importantly, legal action (something about gross denial of freedom of expression) if I don’t post his sad-ass story. Needless to say that approach by itself does not get one anywhere with me. However in line with my idea in posting Johnny Silver’s salacious little sex tale noted above I have agreed to post Phil’s saga if only to use it as an example of sexual repression under capitalism and why we need, desperately need, that socialist revolution that is the hallmark of the real purpose of this space. Needless to say I take no personal, political, social, linguistic, or, most importantly, legal responsibility for this story. I have edited it lightly for language and content but this is strictly “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin’s story. If you want to take legal action against him feel free to do so. Needless to say as well that Phil is in no way (thankfully) political, much less a communist, although he desperately could use a shot, a big shot, of what our communist future promises.
Phillip Larkin comment:
First of all before I get into my f--king hard luck story about my sexless life on the sex sites let me clear the air about something that that twerp Peter Paul Markin said about my “foul-mouth.” You know in junior high school (now known as middle school) young,f--king hormone-juggling guys (and girls I found out later) don’t always know how to deal with that hard fact of growing up and my way was to swear a little. Big deal, right? Big deal then, or now. But you also know, and even f- -king Markin knows this, at that age you get a certain “rep” and it carries around with you like a lead balloon all through school, especially with guys that you hang around with. Like Markin was always from day one that I met him “The Scribe” (always capitalized, by the way) anointed by Frankie Riley and it stuck even though he hated to be called that. [Markin: Okay Phil we get the point. Let’s move on.] And so my little swearing episodes, not much really, got me tagged as, well, foul-mouthed [Markin: Phil must have a slight case of amnesia on this “little” thing. He was the world, well, at least the North Adamsville Junior High, champion swearer. He is the only kid, and Frankie Riley will back me up on this, who was able to make a sentence using only swear words. Some feat. Phil is, apparently, far too “humble” now to take a bow for that now.]
The thing about swearing though is that it never got me in much trouble with the girls. The Scribe [Markin: Watch it, Phil] was always (and Frankie too) very prim and proper in his language around girls although it never got him anywhere. And The Scribe (oops, Markin) could swear worst than me when he got his Irish up. But that is neither here nor there. Unless he wants to make something of it now. What it all ties in with though is that I have always used a certain amount of rough language around girls and they have either found it “cute” or, and here you have to take my word for it, kind of got “turned on” by it. [Markin: Sure thing, Phil]. I’ll give an example and Markin will be surprised. Millie Callahan the best, or one of the best, looking sixteen-year old girls in old North Adamsville was very prim and proper as well as hot-looking. She went to 8:00 AM Sunday Mass at Sacred Heart every week. And every week I would meet her after Mass and walk her to old Adamsville Beach. Sweating like a trooper. Maybe once in a while she would blush but mostly she got “turned on.” Turned on especially by one word that I used in many contexts on our walks. One Sunday, I swear, she got so aroused that, well let’s say we “did it” and you can figure out what the “did it” part was, right down on the beach near the old North Adamsville Yacht Club (there was a little secluded area that everybody knew about). And we were together through the rest of high school, “doing it” just fine. [Markin: Yes, Phil, Millie was a fox, for sure. I used sit a couple of rows in back of her at Mass to look at her ass. By the way everybody knew you two were “doing it.” And I was jealous, no question. It was only because she went to St. Anne’s High and not North Adamsville High that it was not more widely known and commented on. Nice work, Phil.]
The whole point of bringing this swearing thing up this many years later though is that, more often that not, the way I got entangled [Markin: Nice word, Phil] with women later on was that same basic approach. Sure I went through three marriages, and a several girlfriends, so maybe my “sticking” power wasn’t so great but it got short haul, short ashes hauled results. Anyway after the last one left a couple of years ago I started to notice that because of that lost and my changed work situation (working out of the house more with the luxury of the Internet age computer niceness) I wasn’t running into women to swear to, any maybe turn on.
Now I have read Johnny Silver’s wicked little story about his “trials and tribulations” with the young quail and how he was wasting away without it. [Markin: Young women, not quail Phil. Did you hear about the women’s liberation movement in your travels?] And how he finally “got lucky” with some teeny-bopper. Well we all knew Johnny was that way. In fact I had to f--king warn him off of my younger sister, Kate, one time. [Markin: Oh ya, I remember that time. I think you had a baseball bat in hand at the time, right?] Me, I like women a little older, more my own fifty-ish age and so I figured since nothing was happening elsewhere I would, like Johnny did, give one of the Internet sex sites a try. [Markin: Is every lonely-heart guy over the age of about thirty “running” to the sex sites for love and whatever? Am I missing some important sociological trend here? Also what is it with you old corner boy guys. Nobody expects you to tell the whole true to strangers, especially on the Internet, although it helps, but this age thing is weird. We are all sixty-something. That fifty-something was a while back but I never was a snitch, and I won’t be one now.]
I don’t know if you know how these sex sites work. Let’s just call the one I went on Get Laid Fast and you will get the flavor of the thing. [Markin: Phil, you don’t have to tell anybody over the age of about ten about Internet sex sites. All you have to do is Google the word sex on any search engine in the world and you will get more sex sites than you can possibly imagine, including, I assume, your Get Laid Fast site.] Naturally the lure (for an old-time heterosexual man) is sexy, semi-and unclothed women, young and middle- aged (nobody, nobody in their right minds that is, confesses to being, well, mature, hell, I will just say it straight here, old), just waiting to get their hands on you (where I will leave to the reader’s imagination but you get the point) and show you paradise, yes paradise. Just my cup of f-- king tea. Where do I sign up, and how quickly.
That signing up was the easy part. Well, almost easy. See, the hook is that everybody can sign up and put whatever they want on their very own personal profile page. The problem is that unless you pay up, pay up a fee, nobody in the known cyberspace world is going to know about your sex hunger, especially those alluring semi and unclothed young and middle-aged women. Hey, I am a man of the f -- king world so I know that I have to pony up, and gladly to get in on the action. And so I am off to the races for a few ducats.
Well, almost. Almost on two counts. First I have to figure out what my profile message will be and then my “message” to those women’s profiles that strike my fancy. So, naturally I go light on my personal profile. You know how I am looking for the love of my life (already had it). [Markin: I bet six, two, and even it was old time Millie Callahan, hands down. Hell, she might have been the love of my life too if I could have ever gotten beyond staring at her ass during Sunday Mass.] And companionship and all that other crap when everybody knows it a roll in the hay that is driving me, and about three billion (or whatever number of guys are in the world), to sites like this. And, maybe, women too. Or at least that is what I my worldly assumption would have been. The really, the Phil Larkin reality, is that I might have been better off on some mix and match dot com square dating service. Hell, I am willing to bet Markin his six, two and even I would have had more rolls in the hay by now that way than on this “hyper”- sex site.
Here is why. And don’t laugh at a f - - king fifty-something guy for being so silly. [Markin: Phil, I know you, we went to school together, get real-sixty-something, okay.] I went back to my old tried and true strategy with my personal messages to various women who struck my fancy. Nothing like in kid time but still basically- “babe, do you want to f- - k tonight, don’t be a bitch, call me now, here is my cell phone number," and the like. Now the site is loaded with women within about fifty miles of my residence so I naturally click on all those thirty and forty something women who have been around a little, are looking for a little sugar in their bowl, and are bound to go for rough and ready fifty-something guy. No sweat.
Actually my line, as I found out later, was kind of tame and “civilized” compared to some of the younger guys who were swinging their dicks in full view and stuff like that. Hell, it was tame and civilized compared to some of the women’s profile information and photos. I blushed, actually blushed, at some of the stuff they, theoretically, wanted to do, and do right this minute. Notice that word "theoretical" though. For example, first off I got a proposal from a thirty-something woman who wanted me to help her in her new career as a cosmetologist. She had, foolishly, gone to art school when she was younger and when the art-related job that she had didn’t survive the recent economic downturns she saw the light of working the women who are still working hair and nails racket. Still kind of artistic, right?
And I was willing to give the idea some consideration; although unlike Johnny Silver I did not play the older, wiser “sugar-daddy” angle. Or give any thought to such a notion with older women. If I was looking for Johnny’s teeny-boppers sure. But with older women, no way. Here is the hitch though. Said future hairdresser in return for my largesse was only willing to be a companion, a platonic, no sex companion for an “old geezer” (my term, hers was a man “old enough to be her father”).
And it went down from there. Although nobody, absolutely nobody that answered my messages was put off by my so-called lewd language. Case closed on that. What was also case closed though was my faulty understanding of the cyberspace “meat market.” I will not run down every click but just give some observation examples.
Many of the semi- and unclothed women whose profiles spoke of sexual adventure on personal contact wanted, desperately wanted in fact, not be a “one-night stand” and therefore put off any notion of sex with them to the Greek calends. That happened several times. Needless to say, other than the question of false advertising on their part here that I may speak to my lawyer about, I stopped communication very quickly. No sale, no way. Moreover, many women were carrying “baggage” of various sorts. Kids, broken marriages, bad-ass ex-boyfriends, you name it. That would not have put off old Phil but one or two messages was enough to indicate that their “get laid tonight” come-on was nothing more than getting some psychic comfort for their old wounds, and nothing more until the Greek calends. Again, no sale, no way.
So you can begin to see why I suggested the title “sexless” sex sites to Markin. And why he grabbed onto the idea right away (aside from my admittedly incessant badgering him after pure-as-gold Johnny Silver got his say). A couple of “conversations” warrant special attention though. One woman, an otherwise very interesting arty-type woman whom I actually met in person if you can believe that, did not believe that her “aging” thirty-something life would be complete unless she had a lip-enhancement operation so she could have those pouty Angela Jolie lips. Jesus, what the hell has the world come to. I admit I was tempted, sorely tempted, to help her out although her lips looked perfectly kissable to me. But again the notion of sex before I was placed in an assisted- living facility was out of the question. Ya, you have got it by now. No sale, no way.
Another woman, and here she can serve as an example of other similar instances that happened, was fired-up to chat (as I was with her as well) and we e-mailed a blizzard of messages back and forth. She, more than many others, was someone I wanted to meet in person and I brought the subject up in one e-mail after we had been “cyber-chatting” for a few weeks. Kaput. She went off-site the day after that and left no forwarding address, no e-mail address, as they said in the old days. Maybe I have to change my line. Or better, and here I could get back at Markin as well for his silly “comeuppance” remark in the headline. Maybe, Mille Callahan is out there is cyberspace somewhere. Honey, I still remember that swear word that “turned” you on. Help.
“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives-The Founding Conference Of The Fourth International (1938)-"World Congress Greetings to Leon Trotsky"
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed above.
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
******
Markin comment on this document
Everybody, and that most notably included Leon Trotsky, knew something was going awry with the Bolshevik Revolution by 1923 for many reasons, some of them beyond correction outside of an international extension of the revolution, especially to Germany that would provide the vital industrial infrastructure to aid the struggling Soviet Union. Nevertheless, and this is important to note about serious revolutionary politics and politicians in general, the fight in 1923 still needed to aimed at winning the party cadre over. That was the failing point of many oppositionists, inside and outside the party, then.
By 1933, with the rise of the virtually unopposed rise and consolidation of Nazism in Germany clearly putting paid to the Communist International’s (read: Stalin’s) erroneous strategy, working inside the party, or acting as an expelled fraction of the party, was no longer tenable. Like earlier with the First and Second Internationals the Communist International was now dead as a revolutionary organizational center. Time now to gather, by fits and starts, the cadre for a new international- the Fourth International
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
******
Markin comment on this document
Everybody, and that most notably included Leon Trotsky, knew something was going awry with the Bolshevik Revolution by 1923 for many reasons, some of them beyond correction outside of an international extension of the revolution, especially to Germany that would provide the vital industrial infrastructure to aid the struggling Soviet Union. Nevertheless, and this is important to note about serious revolutionary politics and politicians in general, the fight in 1923 still needed to aimed at winning the party cadre over. That was the failing point of many oppositionists, inside and outside the party, then.
By 1933, with the rise of the virtually unopposed rise and consolidation of Nazism in Germany clearly putting paid to the Communist International’s (read: Stalin’s) erroneous strategy, working inside the party, or acting as an expelled fraction of the party, was no longer tenable. Like earlier with the First and Second Internationals the Communist International was now dead as a revolutionary organizational center. Time now to gather, by fits and starts, the cadre for a new international- the Fourth International
Labor's Untold Story-From The Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Archives-The Struggle For Working Class Organization-Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann In Hanover-1865
Markin comment:
Every Month Is Labor History MonthThis post is part of an on-going series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
Other Septembers in this series I have concentrated on various sometimes now obscure leaders and rank and file militants in the international working class movement, especially those who made contributions here in America like "Big Bill" Haywood and Eugene V. Debs. This year, given the pressing need for clarity around the labor party question in America(algebraically expressed in our movement as the struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government) I have gone back to the sources-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their correspondence on working class organizationwith various associates and opponents. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely given the state of working class organization here these days, many of their comments, taken in due regard for changed times and circumstances, are germane today. This correspondence is only a start and should just whet the reader's appetite to research further.
*****
Marx-Engels Correspondence 1865
Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann In Hanover-1865
Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 101;
First published: in Sozialistische Auslandspolitik, No. 18, 1918;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
London, 23 February 1865
1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill
Dear Friend,
Yesterday I received your letter, which I found most interesting, and will now reply to the various points.
First of all, I shall briefly describe my attitude towards Lassalle. Whilst he was pursuing his agitation, our relations were suspended, 1. on account of his bombastic self-adulation, which he managed to combine with the most shameless plagiarism of writings by myself and others; 2. because I condemned his political tactics; 3. because, even before he began his agitation, I had fully explained and ‘proved’ to him here in London that direct socialist intervention by a ‘Prussian state’ was an absurdity. In his letters to me (from 1848 to 1863), as well as when we met personally, he had always declared himself a supporter of the party I represent. As soon as he had become convinced in London (at the end of 1862) that he could not play his game with me, he resolved to set himself up as ‘workers’ dictator’ against me and the old party. In spite of all that, I acknowledged his merits as an agitator, although towards the end of his brief career even that agitation appeared to me in an increasingly dubious light. His sudden death, our friendship of old, the grief-stricken letters from Countess Hatzfeldt, my indignation at the cowardly impudence of the bourgeois papers towards the man they had feared so much while he was alive, all these things induced me to publish a short statement attacking that wretch Blind but not dealing with the substance of Lassalle’s doings (Hatzfeldt sent the statement to the Nordstern). For the same reasons, and in the hope of being able to drive out those elements whom I thought dangerous, Engels and I promised to contribute to the Social-Demokrat (it has published a translation of the ‘Address’, and, at its request, I wrote an article about Proudhon when the latter died) and allowed our names to be put out as contributors, after Schweitzer had sent us a satisfactory programme of its editorial board. We had a further guarantee in W. Liebknecht being an unofficial member of the editorial board. In the meantime, it soon became clear — the proof of this came into our possession — that Lassalle had in fact betrayed the party. He had entered into a formal contract with Bismarck (with no guarantees of any kind in his hands, of course). At the end of September 1864, he was to go to Hamburg and there (together with the crazy Schramm and the Prussian police spy Marr) ‘force’ Bismarck to incorporate Schleswig-Holstein, i.e. to proclaim such in the name of the ‘workers’, etc., in return for which Bismarck promised universal suffrage and a few spurious socialist measures. It is a pity that Lassalle was unable to play this farce through to its conclusion! It would have made him appear deuced foolish and an utter gull! And it would have put paid to all such attempts for ever!
Lassalle got on the wrong path because he was, like Mr Miquel, a ‘realistic politician’, only on a larger scale and with grander aims! (By-the-bye, I had long ago seen through Miquel sufficiently to explain his conduct to myself by the fact that the National Association offered a splendid excuse for a petty Hanoverian lawyer to make himself heard beyond his own four walls, in Germany at large, and then to exploit the enhanced ‘reality’ of his own self retrospectively in his native Hanover, playing the ‘Hanoverian’ Mirabeau under ‘Prussian’ protection, furthermore.) Just as Miquel and his present friends eagerly seized hold of the ‘New Era’ inaugurated by the Prussian Prince Regent in order to national-associate and to fasten on to the ‘Prussian leadership’, just as in general they cultivated their ‘pride of citizenship’ under Prussian protection so Lassalle wanted to play the Marquis Posa of the proletariat to the Philipp II of the Uckermark, with Bismarck as intermediary between himself and the Prussian monarchy. He was merely imitating the gentlemen of the National Association. But, if the latter were invoking Prussian ‘reaction’ in the interests of the middle class, he was shaking hands with Bismarck in the interests of the proletariat. Those gentlemen had more justification than Lassalle, inasmuch as the bourgeois is accustomed to regard the interest he perceives immediately in front of his nose as ‘reality’, and as this class has, in fact, compromised everywhere, even with feudalism, whereas the working class must in the nature of things be genuinely ‘revolutionary’.
For a histrionically vain character like Lassalle (who was not, however, to be bribed with such paltry things as office, mayoralties, etc.), it was a most seductive thought that he, Ferdinand Lassalle, might perform a deed for the direct benefit of the proletariat! He was, in fact, too ignorant of the real economic conditions required for such a deed to be critically self-consistent! The German workers, on the other hand, had ‘demoralised’ too far in consequence of the despicable ‘realistic politics’ with which the German bourgeoisie had tolerated the reaction of 1849-1859 and watched the people’s minds being stultified, for them not to hail such a mountebank of a saviour who was promising to help them reach the promised land with one bound!
So, to take up the thread where I left off above! Hardly had the Social-Demokrat been established when it became clear that the old Hatzfeldt woman was planning to execute Lassalle’s ‘testament’ posthumously. She had contact with Bismarck through Wagener (of the Kreuz-Zeitung). She placed the ‘Workers’ Association’ (Gen. German), the Social-Demokrat, etc., at Bismarck’s disposal. The annexation of Schleswig-Holstein was to be proclaimed in the Social-Demokrat, Bismarck to be generally acknowledged as patron, etc. The whole of this fine plan was frustrated because we had Liebknecht in Berlin and on the editorial board of the Social-Demokrat. Although Engels and I disliked the editorial board of the paper, its lick-spittling cult of Lassalle, its occasional flirting with Bismarck, etc., it was, of course, more important publicly to stay with the paper for the time being in order to thwart the intrigues of the old Hatzfeldt woman and prevent the workers’ party from being totally compromised. We therefore put on bonne mine à mauvais jeu [put brave face on it] although privatim we were constantly writing to the Social-Demokrat telling them that they should stand up to Bismarck just as much as to the men of Progress. We even tolerated that affected fop, Bernhard Becker, who is taking the importance bequeathed to him in Lassalle’s testament quite seriously, intriguing against the International Workingmen’s Association.
In the meantime, Mr Schweitzer’s articles in the Social-Demokrat were becoming more and more Bismarckian. I had earlier written to him to say that, although the men of Progress can be intimidated over the ‘Combination question’, the Prussian government would never under any circumstances concede the complete abolition of the Combination Laws because that would entail breaching the bureaucratic system, giving freedom of thought and expression to the workers, tearing up the Rules Governing Servants, abolishing flogging and birching by the aristocracy in rural areas, etc., etc., which Bismarck could never allow, it being altogether incompatible with the Prussian bureaucratic state. I added that, if the Chamber were to repudiate the Combination Laws, the government would resort to empty phrases (such as e.g. that the social question requires ‘profounder’ steps to be taken, etc.) in order to preserve them. All this has come to pass. And what did Mr von Schweitzer do? He wrote an article in support of Bismarck and is reserving all his heroism for such infiniment petits as Schulze, Faucher, etc.
I believe that Schweitzer, etc., mean it sincerely, but they are ‘realistic politicians’. They wish to take due account of the existing state of affairs and not leave this privilege of ‘realistic politics’ to Messrs Miquel et Comp. alone. (The latter seem to wish to reserve the right of intermixture with the Prussian government.) They know that the workers’ papers and the workers’ movement in Prussia (and hence in the rest of Germany) only exist par la grâce de la police. They thus want to take the circumstances as they are, not to irritate the government, etc., quite as our ‘republican’ realistic politicians want to ‘put up with’ a Hohenzollern emperor. As I am not a ‘realistic politician’, however, I found it necessary together with Engels to serve notice on the Social-Demokrat in a public statement (which you will probably soon see in one paper or other).
You will see at the same time why there is nothing I can do in Prussia at the moment. The government there has flatly refused to restore my Prussian citizenship. I should only be permitted to agitate there in a manner agreeable to Mr von Bismarck.
I prefer my agitation here through the ‘International Association’ a 100 times. The effect on the English proletariat is direct and of the greatest importance. We are now stirring the general suffrage question here, which is, naturally, of quite different significance here than in Prussia.
As a whole, the progress made by this ‘Association’ has exceeded all expectations here, in Paris, in Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy. Only in Germany, of course, I am opposed by Lassalle’s successors who 1. are stupidly afraid of forfeiting their own importance; 2. are aware of my avowed opposition to what the Germans call ‘realistic politics’. (It is this sort of ‘reality’ that puts Germany so far behind all civilised countries.)
Since any person who takes out a card at 1 shilling can become a member of the Association; since the French have chosen this form of individual membership (ditto the Belgians) because the law prohibits them from joining us as an ‘association'; and since the situation is similar in Germany, I have now resolved to ask my friends here and in Germany to form small societies, regardless of how many members there may be in each locality, each member of which will acquire an English card of membership. Since the English society is public, there is no obstacle to this procedure even in France. I should appreciate it if you, too, would get in touch with London in this way in your neighbourhood.
My thanks to you for your prescription. Oddly enough this vile disease had broken out once more 3 days before it arrived. So, the prescription was most timely.
In a few days I shall send you another 24 Addresses. I have just been interrupted in my writing by a friend, and, as I very much want to send off this letter, I shall take up the other points in your letter next time.
Yours
K. M.
Every Month Is Labor History MonthThis post is part of an on-going series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
Other Septembers in this series I have concentrated on various sometimes now obscure leaders and rank and file militants in the international working class movement, especially those who made contributions here in America like "Big Bill" Haywood and Eugene V. Debs. This year, given the pressing need for clarity around the labor party question in America(algebraically expressed in our movement as the struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government) I have gone back to the sources-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their correspondence on working class organizationwith various associates and opponents. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely given the state of working class organization here these days, many of their comments, taken in due regard for changed times and circumstances, are germane today. This correspondence is only a start and should just whet the reader's appetite to research further.
*****
Marx-Engels Correspondence 1865
Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann In Hanover-1865
Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 101;
First published: in Sozialistische Auslandspolitik, No. 18, 1918;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
London, 23 February 1865
1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill
Dear Friend,
Yesterday I received your letter, which I found most interesting, and will now reply to the various points.
First of all, I shall briefly describe my attitude towards Lassalle. Whilst he was pursuing his agitation, our relations were suspended, 1. on account of his bombastic self-adulation, which he managed to combine with the most shameless plagiarism of writings by myself and others; 2. because I condemned his political tactics; 3. because, even before he began his agitation, I had fully explained and ‘proved’ to him here in London that direct socialist intervention by a ‘Prussian state’ was an absurdity. In his letters to me (from 1848 to 1863), as well as when we met personally, he had always declared himself a supporter of the party I represent. As soon as he had become convinced in London (at the end of 1862) that he could not play his game with me, he resolved to set himself up as ‘workers’ dictator’ against me and the old party. In spite of all that, I acknowledged his merits as an agitator, although towards the end of his brief career even that agitation appeared to me in an increasingly dubious light. His sudden death, our friendship of old, the grief-stricken letters from Countess Hatzfeldt, my indignation at the cowardly impudence of the bourgeois papers towards the man they had feared so much while he was alive, all these things induced me to publish a short statement attacking that wretch Blind but not dealing with the substance of Lassalle’s doings (Hatzfeldt sent the statement to the Nordstern). For the same reasons, and in the hope of being able to drive out those elements whom I thought dangerous, Engels and I promised to contribute to the Social-Demokrat (it has published a translation of the ‘Address’, and, at its request, I wrote an article about Proudhon when the latter died) and allowed our names to be put out as contributors, after Schweitzer had sent us a satisfactory programme of its editorial board. We had a further guarantee in W. Liebknecht being an unofficial member of the editorial board. In the meantime, it soon became clear — the proof of this came into our possession — that Lassalle had in fact betrayed the party. He had entered into a formal contract with Bismarck (with no guarantees of any kind in his hands, of course). At the end of September 1864, he was to go to Hamburg and there (together with the crazy Schramm and the Prussian police spy Marr) ‘force’ Bismarck to incorporate Schleswig-Holstein, i.e. to proclaim such in the name of the ‘workers’, etc., in return for which Bismarck promised universal suffrage and a few spurious socialist measures. It is a pity that Lassalle was unable to play this farce through to its conclusion! It would have made him appear deuced foolish and an utter gull! And it would have put paid to all such attempts for ever!
Lassalle got on the wrong path because he was, like Mr Miquel, a ‘realistic politician’, only on a larger scale and with grander aims! (By-the-bye, I had long ago seen through Miquel sufficiently to explain his conduct to myself by the fact that the National Association offered a splendid excuse for a petty Hanoverian lawyer to make himself heard beyond his own four walls, in Germany at large, and then to exploit the enhanced ‘reality’ of his own self retrospectively in his native Hanover, playing the ‘Hanoverian’ Mirabeau under ‘Prussian’ protection, furthermore.) Just as Miquel and his present friends eagerly seized hold of the ‘New Era’ inaugurated by the Prussian Prince Regent in order to national-associate and to fasten on to the ‘Prussian leadership’, just as in general they cultivated their ‘pride of citizenship’ under Prussian protection so Lassalle wanted to play the Marquis Posa of the proletariat to the Philipp II of the Uckermark, with Bismarck as intermediary between himself and the Prussian monarchy. He was merely imitating the gentlemen of the National Association. But, if the latter were invoking Prussian ‘reaction’ in the interests of the middle class, he was shaking hands with Bismarck in the interests of the proletariat. Those gentlemen had more justification than Lassalle, inasmuch as the bourgeois is accustomed to regard the interest he perceives immediately in front of his nose as ‘reality’, and as this class has, in fact, compromised everywhere, even with feudalism, whereas the working class must in the nature of things be genuinely ‘revolutionary’.
For a histrionically vain character like Lassalle (who was not, however, to be bribed with such paltry things as office, mayoralties, etc.), it was a most seductive thought that he, Ferdinand Lassalle, might perform a deed for the direct benefit of the proletariat! He was, in fact, too ignorant of the real economic conditions required for such a deed to be critically self-consistent! The German workers, on the other hand, had ‘demoralised’ too far in consequence of the despicable ‘realistic politics’ with which the German bourgeoisie had tolerated the reaction of 1849-1859 and watched the people’s minds being stultified, for them not to hail such a mountebank of a saviour who was promising to help them reach the promised land with one bound!
So, to take up the thread where I left off above! Hardly had the Social-Demokrat been established when it became clear that the old Hatzfeldt woman was planning to execute Lassalle’s ‘testament’ posthumously. She had contact with Bismarck through Wagener (of the Kreuz-Zeitung). She placed the ‘Workers’ Association’ (Gen. German), the Social-Demokrat, etc., at Bismarck’s disposal. The annexation of Schleswig-Holstein was to be proclaimed in the Social-Demokrat, Bismarck to be generally acknowledged as patron, etc. The whole of this fine plan was frustrated because we had Liebknecht in Berlin and on the editorial board of the Social-Demokrat. Although Engels and I disliked the editorial board of the paper, its lick-spittling cult of Lassalle, its occasional flirting with Bismarck, etc., it was, of course, more important publicly to stay with the paper for the time being in order to thwart the intrigues of the old Hatzfeldt woman and prevent the workers’ party from being totally compromised. We therefore put on bonne mine à mauvais jeu [put brave face on it] although privatim we were constantly writing to the Social-Demokrat telling them that they should stand up to Bismarck just as much as to the men of Progress. We even tolerated that affected fop, Bernhard Becker, who is taking the importance bequeathed to him in Lassalle’s testament quite seriously, intriguing against the International Workingmen’s Association.
In the meantime, Mr Schweitzer’s articles in the Social-Demokrat were becoming more and more Bismarckian. I had earlier written to him to say that, although the men of Progress can be intimidated over the ‘Combination question’, the Prussian government would never under any circumstances concede the complete abolition of the Combination Laws because that would entail breaching the bureaucratic system, giving freedom of thought and expression to the workers, tearing up the Rules Governing Servants, abolishing flogging and birching by the aristocracy in rural areas, etc., etc., which Bismarck could never allow, it being altogether incompatible with the Prussian bureaucratic state. I added that, if the Chamber were to repudiate the Combination Laws, the government would resort to empty phrases (such as e.g. that the social question requires ‘profounder’ steps to be taken, etc.) in order to preserve them. All this has come to pass. And what did Mr von Schweitzer do? He wrote an article in support of Bismarck and is reserving all his heroism for such infiniment petits as Schulze, Faucher, etc.
I believe that Schweitzer, etc., mean it sincerely, but they are ‘realistic politicians’. They wish to take due account of the existing state of affairs and not leave this privilege of ‘realistic politics’ to Messrs Miquel et Comp. alone. (The latter seem to wish to reserve the right of intermixture with the Prussian government.) They know that the workers’ papers and the workers’ movement in Prussia (and hence in the rest of Germany) only exist par la grâce de la police. They thus want to take the circumstances as they are, not to irritate the government, etc., quite as our ‘republican’ realistic politicians want to ‘put up with’ a Hohenzollern emperor. As I am not a ‘realistic politician’, however, I found it necessary together with Engels to serve notice on the Social-Demokrat in a public statement (which you will probably soon see in one paper or other).
You will see at the same time why there is nothing I can do in Prussia at the moment. The government there has flatly refused to restore my Prussian citizenship. I should only be permitted to agitate there in a manner agreeable to Mr von Bismarck.
I prefer my agitation here through the ‘International Association’ a 100 times. The effect on the English proletariat is direct and of the greatest importance. We are now stirring the general suffrage question here, which is, naturally, of quite different significance here than in Prussia.
As a whole, the progress made by this ‘Association’ has exceeded all expectations here, in Paris, in Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy. Only in Germany, of course, I am opposed by Lassalle’s successors who 1. are stupidly afraid of forfeiting their own importance; 2. are aware of my avowed opposition to what the Germans call ‘realistic politics’. (It is this sort of ‘reality’ that puts Germany so far behind all civilised countries.)
Since any person who takes out a card at 1 shilling can become a member of the Association; since the French have chosen this form of individual membership (ditto the Belgians) because the law prohibits them from joining us as an ‘association'; and since the situation is similar in Germany, I have now resolved to ask my friends here and in Germany to form small societies, regardless of how many members there may be in each locality, each member of which will acquire an English card of membership. Since the English society is public, there is no obstacle to this procedure even in France. I should appreciate it if you, too, would get in touch with London in this way in your neighbourhood.
My thanks to you for your prescription. Oddly enough this vile disease had broken out once more 3 days before it arrived. So, the prescription was most timely.
In a few days I shall send you another 24 Addresses. I have just been interrupted in my writing by a friend, and, as I very much want to send off this letter, I shall take up the other points in your letter next time.
Yours
K. M.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
***From The "In Defense Of Marxism" Website- Chile-September 11, 1973
Click on the headline to link to a In Defense Of Marxism website entry concerning another September 11th event now seemingly lost in the mist of time.
Markin comment:
Chile, 1973 is a classic case of the central lesson that Karl Marx drew, and drew sharpely, concerning the fate of the Paris Commune, 1871. Workers must create their own state, not merely take over the existing apparatus of the capitalist state. A hard lesson very seldom honored. In short, popular front governments are a roadblock to socialist revolution not the road forward. Period, Karl Marx's period, not mine.
Markin comment:
Chile, 1973 is a classic case of the central lesson that Karl Marx drew, and drew sharpely, concerning the fate of the Paris Commune, 1871. Workers must create their own state, not merely take over the existing apparatus of the capitalist state. A hard lesson very seldom honored. In short, popular front governments are a roadblock to socialist revolution not the road forward. Period, Karl Marx's period, not mine.
Out In The Be-Bop Be-Bop 1960s Night- The Heart Of Rock ‘n’ Rock: 1960-61- When Love Blossomed In The Clintondale Memorial Park Night
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Shirelles performing their classic Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.
CD Review
The Heart Of Rock ‘n’ Roll: 1960-61, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1996
Scene: Brought to mind by the snapshot photos that grace each CD in this series. Clintondale Memorial Park, early 1960s, a traditional city-maintained park with the usual kiddies playgrounds, various sports fields, picnic and barbecue facilities, rest rooms and, most importantly, teenage most importantly, many off-the- beaten path secluded spots for teen night sports. Although by the 1960s it was suffering from some neglect since it has been at least a generation since it had been a “hot” spot for teenage love in the night. Those “hot” spots in this car-driven age are now down at Adamsville Beach a few towns over by the bay, and more recently the new rage at the Gloversville Amusement Park a few towns over going inland out toward farm country.
*******
Let me tell you about Clintondale Memorial park first, although that might seem funny for a guy who usually starts out describing all the gossip around town, or at least the North Clintondale part of town, about who at North Clintondale High is, or isn’t, trying to get some girl’s (or more rarely some guy’s) attention. Or about who broke up, or didn’t break up and I wish she would, with what overreaching guy after what he tried to do down at Adamsville Beach. Or about some other lovelorn bits of trivia that really, now with big issues like war and peace and black civil rights stuff down south staring us in the face, should take a back seat. But what are you going to do when you are stuck, stuck forever it seems, in the backwater of Squaresville, oops, Clintondale, the same thing.
I will get to the people part, the Jeannie Curran and Walter Pitts part, which fills out this saga as soon as I tell you about the park. See, for one thing, I actually had to go to the park in order to able to tell you about it. That may seem odd in a small town, a backwater square town like Clintondale, but I hadn’t personally been there since I was a kid, maybe seven or eight years ago. And ever since the Gloversville Amusement Park opened up around that same time there has been absolutely no reason to go there. Period. And when I got older, old enough to ride in a car cruising for girls and other stuff down at Adamsville Beach, which became even truer. This park, whatever it meant for my parents who kept going on and on about how much fun they had there as kids, was strictly nowhere. Or at least I thought so and my opinion didn’t change when I took the two mile walk across town to get over there.
Funny when I was a kid the place seemed like a huge primeval forest that a kid could get lost in pretty easily and we were reminded of that hard fact constantly when we played in the woods there. Now it seemed pretty small since I could walk around the whole thing in fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. Sure the old swings, seesaws and slides from childhood were still there, although they seemed to have a little rust on them and didn’t look like they had been repaired in a while. And the picnic tables, now a little weather-beaten and standing in serious need of some paint, were still tableau-like in the same places they were back then as were the barbecue pits. The rest rooms had seen better days, could have used a very thorough fumigation, and appeared to have become the “property” of the town’s increasing population of winos. For that matter the whole layout could have used some serious landscaping or at least something more than a quick summer job student mow and permanent city worker grim reaper swathing. But back in some corners, near the old granite rocks, and a couple of other places off the bridle paths I could see where there might be some very cozy places to bring a date for some serious workouts in the old days. So what my parents, although they neglected to mention that part of the old time teenage “fun” night, and Benny Rosen’s older brother, David, told us about when the place was a “hot” spot might have been true after all. Still this place ain’t coming back anytime soon as a serious teenage scene. No way.
Like I say this Clintondale Memorial Park was strictly from hunger. Except, and here you will have to take my word for it, maybe, just maybe, as a meeting place for those who could not meet in public any other place. And that is where Jeanie Curran and Walter Pitts finally get to enter this story. No, hell, no they didn’t do any wrong. Anything legally, morally, politically, economically, culturally, or socially wrong. Well, maybe they did on the last one come to think of it. Clintondale, now that people have started moving here from Boston in droves, has gotten over the past several years too big to have just one high school. So now there are two. Jeanie’s Clintondale High (the old high school) in the older part of town and Walter (and my) North Clintondale High in the newer section where the housing developments have sprung up. And that is where Jeanie and Walter’s “problem” takes center stage. See in Clintondale it is taboo, wrong, evil, or whatever you want to call it, but just don’t do it, for a student from one high school to date, hell maybe even to talk to, a student from the other high school. Oh sure they can ride on the same buses and stuff like that. It’s not like down South with one school riding in the back of the bus or anything like that but no dating. Not done, okay.
But Jeannie and Walter, are dating, definitely dating, as I will tell you about later. Now the reason I know this is that Walter is none other than a corner boy with me over at Doc Sprague’s Drugstore and Soda Fountain. So he kind of confided his story to me. Now every one in town, well in North Adamsville, well, okay at the high school, knows that once I get a story it is going to be around in nothing flat. So I think Walter’s idea was to tell it to me and then I would spread it around and then people (read: fellow teenage high school students) might learn to accept his (and Jeanie’s) status. And if that was his idea he was right because I am holding you to no vow of silence. Not only that but I half agree that Walter and Jeanie, although they attend those two antagonistic high schools, should have the right to date if they want to and let the town be damned. But I only half agree so far because I can see where these “mixed” relationships are hard on everybody and then again, as well, where do you draw the line.
Now this Jeannie Curran, if you know Walter as I do and his tastes in girls, is nothing but a fox. A sandy blonde, nice shape in all the right places, nice face and, so Walter tells me, someone you would never tire of talking to (a big plus, for sure). In other words someone the gods created on one of their good days. Thanks, gods. And Walter is a good-looking guy although not too bright if he both confided in me seriously and was bold enough to go against convention. How they met though will give you an idea as to their problem.
Pete’s Platters record Shop is the only place in town where kids can go to get rock ‘n’ roll music, the latest stuff anyway. So it is kind of “neutral” territory in the high school wars since every kid recognizes, like some Geneva Convention Accords protocol, that teenagers NEED their 45s and LPs and quick, quick as they come out sometimes. So one day, after school Walter was downtown at Pete’s looking for Ben E. King’s boss sound Spanish Harlem and Roy Orbison’s great crescendo-wave Running Scared when he spotted Jeannie. Like some primordial force he was “driven” to go over and ask her what she was looking for in records and she answered Patsy Cline’s I Fall To Pieces and, almost like it was the power of suggestion, Elvis’ dreamy and sad Are You Lonesome Tonight? And that was that. Click. For one thing Walter has just recently broken up with Susie Riley and for another, well, like I said Jeannie was a fox. A fox who, by the way, was wearing front and center her Clintondale High School cheerleader sweater so Walter should have backed off immediately. But such is smitten-ness.
Well one thing led to another after Walter got Jeannie phone number at that first meeting. And as a symbol of friendship he bought her The Drifters’ Please Stay right there and then. But things for teenage romance, especially Clintondale never the twain shall meet teenage romance, are never easy. Part of the problem was that Walter did not then have a car and even if he used his father’s he couldn’t take Jeanie to the Adamsville Beach although she expressed extreme interest in “watching the submarine races.” With him. Nor could they go the Gloversville Amusement Park. Nobody from either high school would have stood for that. So Jeannie (like I said Walter is not too bright in the idea department) said why not meet at her house and walk over to the Clintondale Memorial Park and find some quiet spot to “make out.” Well, where there is a will there is a way. And so one fine early October night before it got too cold one Jeannie Curran of Clintondale High and one Walter Pitts of North Clintondale High found a nice spot near the old granite rocks and “did it.” Here is the funny thing; funny to Walter anyway, while they were “doing it” the ubiquitous WMEX rock ‘n’ roll station was playing The Shirelles Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow. They both laughed about that one.
Now that I think of it I could see where “cruising” old Adamsville Beach is finally played out. And how many kewpie dolls, rabbits' feet, and leis can you win for your favorite girl over at the amusement park? Those granite rocks over at the memorial park sure were a quiet spot. Now if I could only find a Clintondale High girl to go there with me. And maybe, just maybe WMEX will be playing Brenda Lee’s I Want To Be Wanted and we can laugh over that.
CD Review
The Heart Of Rock ‘n’ Roll: 1960-61, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1996
Scene: Brought to mind by the snapshot photos that grace each CD in this series. Clintondale Memorial Park, early 1960s, a traditional city-maintained park with the usual kiddies playgrounds, various sports fields, picnic and barbecue facilities, rest rooms and, most importantly, teenage most importantly, many off-the- beaten path secluded spots for teen night sports. Although by the 1960s it was suffering from some neglect since it has been at least a generation since it had been a “hot” spot for teenage love in the night. Those “hot” spots in this car-driven age are now down at Adamsville Beach a few towns over by the bay, and more recently the new rage at the Gloversville Amusement Park a few towns over going inland out toward farm country.
*******
Let me tell you about Clintondale Memorial park first, although that might seem funny for a guy who usually starts out describing all the gossip around town, or at least the North Clintondale part of town, about who at North Clintondale High is, or isn’t, trying to get some girl’s (or more rarely some guy’s) attention. Or about who broke up, or didn’t break up and I wish she would, with what overreaching guy after what he tried to do down at Adamsville Beach. Or about some other lovelorn bits of trivia that really, now with big issues like war and peace and black civil rights stuff down south staring us in the face, should take a back seat. But what are you going to do when you are stuck, stuck forever it seems, in the backwater of Squaresville, oops, Clintondale, the same thing.
I will get to the people part, the Jeannie Curran and Walter Pitts part, which fills out this saga as soon as I tell you about the park. See, for one thing, I actually had to go to the park in order to able to tell you about it. That may seem odd in a small town, a backwater square town like Clintondale, but I hadn’t personally been there since I was a kid, maybe seven or eight years ago. And ever since the Gloversville Amusement Park opened up around that same time there has been absolutely no reason to go there. Period. And when I got older, old enough to ride in a car cruising for girls and other stuff down at Adamsville Beach, which became even truer. This park, whatever it meant for my parents who kept going on and on about how much fun they had there as kids, was strictly nowhere. Or at least I thought so and my opinion didn’t change when I took the two mile walk across town to get over there.
Funny when I was a kid the place seemed like a huge primeval forest that a kid could get lost in pretty easily and we were reminded of that hard fact constantly when we played in the woods there. Now it seemed pretty small since I could walk around the whole thing in fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. Sure the old swings, seesaws and slides from childhood were still there, although they seemed to have a little rust on them and didn’t look like they had been repaired in a while. And the picnic tables, now a little weather-beaten and standing in serious need of some paint, were still tableau-like in the same places they were back then as were the barbecue pits. The rest rooms had seen better days, could have used a very thorough fumigation, and appeared to have become the “property” of the town’s increasing population of winos. For that matter the whole layout could have used some serious landscaping or at least something more than a quick summer job student mow and permanent city worker grim reaper swathing. But back in some corners, near the old granite rocks, and a couple of other places off the bridle paths I could see where there might be some very cozy places to bring a date for some serious workouts in the old days. So what my parents, although they neglected to mention that part of the old time teenage “fun” night, and Benny Rosen’s older brother, David, told us about when the place was a “hot” spot might have been true after all. Still this place ain’t coming back anytime soon as a serious teenage scene. No way.
Like I say this Clintondale Memorial Park was strictly from hunger. Except, and here you will have to take my word for it, maybe, just maybe, as a meeting place for those who could not meet in public any other place. And that is where Jeanie Curran and Walter Pitts finally get to enter this story. No, hell, no they didn’t do any wrong. Anything legally, morally, politically, economically, culturally, or socially wrong. Well, maybe they did on the last one come to think of it. Clintondale, now that people have started moving here from Boston in droves, has gotten over the past several years too big to have just one high school. So now there are two. Jeanie’s Clintondale High (the old high school) in the older part of town and Walter (and my) North Clintondale High in the newer section where the housing developments have sprung up. And that is where Jeanie and Walter’s “problem” takes center stage. See in Clintondale it is taboo, wrong, evil, or whatever you want to call it, but just don’t do it, for a student from one high school to date, hell maybe even to talk to, a student from the other high school. Oh sure they can ride on the same buses and stuff like that. It’s not like down South with one school riding in the back of the bus or anything like that but no dating. Not done, okay.
But Jeannie and Walter, are dating, definitely dating, as I will tell you about later. Now the reason I know this is that Walter is none other than a corner boy with me over at Doc Sprague’s Drugstore and Soda Fountain. So he kind of confided his story to me. Now every one in town, well in North Adamsville, well, okay at the high school, knows that once I get a story it is going to be around in nothing flat. So I think Walter’s idea was to tell it to me and then I would spread it around and then people (read: fellow teenage high school students) might learn to accept his (and Jeanie’s) status. And if that was his idea he was right because I am holding you to no vow of silence. Not only that but I half agree that Walter and Jeanie, although they attend those two antagonistic high schools, should have the right to date if they want to and let the town be damned. But I only half agree so far because I can see where these “mixed” relationships are hard on everybody and then again, as well, where do you draw the line.
Now this Jeannie Curran, if you know Walter as I do and his tastes in girls, is nothing but a fox. A sandy blonde, nice shape in all the right places, nice face and, so Walter tells me, someone you would never tire of talking to (a big plus, for sure). In other words someone the gods created on one of their good days. Thanks, gods. And Walter is a good-looking guy although not too bright if he both confided in me seriously and was bold enough to go against convention. How they met though will give you an idea as to their problem.
Pete’s Platters record Shop is the only place in town where kids can go to get rock ‘n’ roll music, the latest stuff anyway. So it is kind of “neutral” territory in the high school wars since every kid recognizes, like some Geneva Convention Accords protocol, that teenagers NEED their 45s and LPs and quick, quick as they come out sometimes. So one day, after school Walter was downtown at Pete’s looking for Ben E. King’s boss sound Spanish Harlem and Roy Orbison’s great crescendo-wave Running Scared when he spotted Jeannie. Like some primordial force he was “driven” to go over and ask her what she was looking for in records and she answered Patsy Cline’s I Fall To Pieces and, almost like it was the power of suggestion, Elvis’ dreamy and sad Are You Lonesome Tonight? And that was that. Click. For one thing Walter has just recently broken up with Susie Riley and for another, well, like I said Jeannie was a fox. A fox who, by the way, was wearing front and center her Clintondale High School cheerleader sweater so Walter should have backed off immediately. But such is smitten-ness.
Well one thing led to another after Walter got Jeannie phone number at that first meeting. And as a symbol of friendship he bought her The Drifters’ Please Stay right there and then. But things for teenage romance, especially Clintondale never the twain shall meet teenage romance, are never easy. Part of the problem was that Walter did not then have a car and even if he used his father’s he couldn’t take Jeanie to the Adamsville Beach although she expressed extreme interest in “watching the submarine races.” With him. Nor could they go the Gloversville Amusement Park. Nobody from either high school would have stood for that. So Jeannie (like I said Walter is not too bright in the idea department) said why not meet at her house and walk over to the Clintondale Memorial Park and find some quiet spot to “make out.” Well, where there is a will there is a way. And so one fine early October night before it got too cold one Jeannie Curran of Clintondale High and one Walter Pitts of North Clintondale High found a nice spot near the old granite rocks and “did it.” Here is the funny thing; funny to Walter anyway, while they were “doing it” the ubiquitous WMEX rock ‘n’ roll station was playing The Shirelles Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow. They both laughed about that one.
Now that I think of it I could see where “cruising” old Adamsville Beach is finally played out. And how many kewpie dolls, rabbits' feet, and leis can you win for your favorite girl over at the amusement park? Those granite rocks over at the memorial park sure were a quiet spot. Now if I could only find a Clintondale High girl to go there with me. And maybe, just maybe WMEX will be playing Brenda Lee’s I Want To Be Wanted and we can laugh over that.
Labor's Untold Story-From The Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Archives-The Struggle For Working Class Organization-Joseph Weydemeyer, 19th Century Socialist and Karl Marx Associate
Click on title to link to Karl Marx's Letter To Joseph Weydemeyer from the Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels Internet Archives. More of their correspondence can be clicked on there. For more information about Wedemeyer a key transplanted to America German supporter of Karl Marx Google for his Wikipedia entry.
Every Month Is Labor History MonthThis post is part of an on-going series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
Other Septembers in this series I have concentrated on various sometimes now obscure leaders and rank and file militants in the international working class movement, especially those who made contributions here in America like "Big Bill" Haywood and Eugene V. Debs. This year, given the pressing need for clarity around the labor party question in America(algebraically expressed in our movement as the struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government) I have gone back to the sources-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their correspondence on working class organizationwith various associates and opponents. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely given the state of working class organization here these days, many of their comments, taken in due regard for changed times and circumstances, are germane today. This correspondence is only a start and should just whet the reader's appetite to research further.
Every Month Is Labor History MonthThis post is part of an on-going series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
Other Septembers in this series I have concentrated on various sometimes now obscure leaders and rank and file militants in the international working class movement, especially those who made contributions here in America like "Big Bill" Haywood and Eugene V. Debs. This year, given the pressing need for clarity around the labor party question in America(algebraically expressed in our movement as the struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government) I have gone back to the sources-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their correspondence on working class organizationwith various associates and opponents. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely given the state of working class organization here these days, many of their comments, taken in due regard for changed times and circumstances, are germane today. This correspondence is only a start and should just whet the reader's appetite to research further.
“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives-The Founding Conference Of The Fourth International (1938)-"Greetings to the Fighters in Spain"
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed above.
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
****
Markin comment on this document
Everybody, and that most notably included Leon Trotsky, knew something was going awry with the Bolshevik Revolution by 1923 for many reasons, some of them beyond correction outside of an international extension of the revolution, especially to Germany that would provide the vital industrial infrastructure to aid the struggling Soviet Union. Nevertheless, and this is important to note about serious revolutionary politics and politicians in general, the fight in 1923 still needed to aimed at winning the party cadre over. That was the failing point of many oppositionists, inside and outside the party, then.
By 1933, with the rise of the virtually unopposed rise and consolidation of Nazism in Germany clearly putting paid to the Communist International’s (read: Stalin’s) erroneous strategy, working inside the party, or acting as an expelled fraction of the party, was no longer tenable. Like earlier with the First and Second Internationals the Communist International was now dead as a revolutionary organizational center. Time now to gather, by fits and starts, the cadre for a new international- the Fourth International
Spain and its fate, of course, was on every labor militant's mind, then and now. My slogan since early youth has alway been that those who fought in Spain in for the republic were kindred spirits. The political analysis of those events, and what could have been done differently, might have changed over the years but that sentiment still animates my feelings about Spain in the 1930s.
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
****
Markin comment on this document
Everybody, and that most notably included Leon Trotsky, knew something was going awry with the Bolshevik Revolution by 1923 for many reasons, some of them beyond correction outside of an international extension of the revolution, especially to Germany that would provide the vital industrial infrastructure to aid the struggling Soviet Union. Nevertheless, and this is important to note about serious revolutionary politics and politicians in general, the fight in 1923 still needed to aimed at winning the party cadre over. That was the failing point of many oppositionists, inside and outside the party, then.
By 1933, with the rise of the virtually unopposed rise and consolidation of Nazism in Germany clearly putting paid to the Communist International’s (read: Stalin’s) erroneous strategy, working inside the party, or acting as an expelled fraction of the party, was no longer tenable. Like earlier with the First and Second Internationals the Communist International was now dead as a revolutionary organizational center. Time now to gather, by fits and starts, the cadre for a new international- the Fourth International
Spain and its fate, of course, was on every labor militant's mind, then and now. My slogan since early youth has alway been that those who fought in Spain in for the republic were kindred spirits. The political analysis of those events, and what could have been done differently, might have changed over the years but that sentiment still animates my feelings about Spain in the 1930s.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
The Gas Wars, Circa 1964-When The Souped-Up Car Ruled The North Adamsville Night-With The “Boss Man’s” ’57 Chevy In Mind
Click on the headline, but only after you have read this entry and after you have made your guess, to link to a 1960s Flashback Website for the answer. For those who graduated in other decades and wish to know the price of gas at the pump in your misbegotten youth you can link from there. Thanks, Internet.
Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class of 1964, comment and question:
How much did it cost for a gallon of gasoline in 1964? In the interest of "speaking" to the wider North Adamsville Graduate audience that might pick this comment up on Facebook just pick your year of graduation and guess from there. Then click on headline to seek the answer
Oil at $100 a barrel. Gasoline over three dollars per gallon at the pump (remember this is being written in September, 2011 in case you pick this up later). No, do not worry, this is not intended to be the start of a political screed about the need to bring the “Seven Sisters” oil monopolists to heel or to break up the international oil cartels, although those are very good ideas. At the beginning of this series of commentaries about the old days in North Adamsville I promised that I would not be political, at least not overtly so. So that is political aspect is no help here. All I want to ask today is whether, through the mist of time, you remember how much gasoline cost when you went to "fill 'er up" in high school.
Now this question requires some honesty on your part. Please, no Googling the Quincy Patriot Ledger or The Boston Globe to search their archives of the time. Nor should you use a graphic calculator to factor back the effect of the rate of inflation on oil since 1964 to come up with an answer. Dear readers, this is not some torturous calculus problem. What you basically need to do is to remember some numbers from when you were daydreaming out the window in study hall at old North Adamsville High. Maybe in between thinking away the hours about that certain she (or he) a couple of rows over and how, well, how you would like to get acquainted with her (or him) or what was up for Saturday when your true corner boy “boss man,” Sid Hemmings, came by to pick you up in his “boss” (hence the Boss Man nickname) ’57 Chevy and you went “cruising” into the great teenage Adamsville Beach night. Or maybe you spotted those numbers when you went out the door, assuming you survived opening that fortress-like door while still thinking about that certain she (or he) whom you almost had enough courage to talk to after class today but only got to a meaningful look, onto Hancock Street after school.
What is this guy talking about with all these study hall and looking out the window references? Just this. Unless you were a total grind and always had your nose in a book then the answer merely requires that you had looked out the window. Directly across the street, Hancock Street, from the school were two gas stations (I believe somewhere near the mass transportation depot parking lot and the MacDonald's are now if you have been in the old town recently) that were always in competition with each other. They, and I am not making this up for I do not have such a vivid imagination, actually were having very public price wars to bring in customers by REDUCING the price of their gas. But enough hints. Your answers, please?
No comment on the 1964 North Adamsville gas wars night would be complete without reference to the manner in which we got the dough to pay for said gas. A lot of kids then got it from mom or pop reflecting the more affluence post-World War II times when the old parents has enough dough to spare for a kid to own his or her own car, and have a gas money allowance to boot. Even in working class North Adamsville. Others, like me and most of my corner boys, my Salducci’s Pizza Parlor night corner boys, walked, hitchhiked or borrowed the “old man’s” car (or that of an older brother) for a be-bop Saturday night romp. That is until I met up with the “Boss Man” mentioned above. Sid Hemming’s, who lived just down the end of my dead-end street, had a ’57 Chevy that he was always working on (and when he wasn’t working on it was riding around, usually with a bevy of girls before the night was over, down that now famous Adamsville Beach night).
For a couple of years he took me in tow. The price, well the price was that I was “in charge” of filling up his tank when it was empty. In short, paying for gas to be “cool.” Since I was poorer than a church mouse and never heard of such a thing as an allowance until somebody told me about them that meant taking my hard-earned money from caddying up at the local private golf course to fill the damn thing. And those golfer guys whether they had dough or not, and they usually did, were cheap when it came caddie pay-off time. A primer in capitalist economics, I guess. So you know, roughly, that gas could not have cost too much. Still, you are duty-bound to guess.
Of course, buying the gas got me nothing when it came to the girls the filled the other seats of Sid’s souped-up car. Well usually got me nothing, that is. See they, most of them prime A-one foxes, only had eyes for Sid, or more correctly Sid’s ’57 Chevy. Hell they were one in the same. Now Sid, whatever his mechanical wizard abilities with an automobile motor were, and I will be kind here, had nothing for looks. Even “cute” was a stretch. And even more of a stretch was that “cute” when Sid was seriously into his auto repair work and smelled of oils, cigarettes and whiskey. Still the girls (read: young women) actually came up to him looking for a ride and, well, just leave it as and. The way it worked is that once the car filled up with girls I was out the door. No problem, well no problem on those few occasions when he left me down at the beach (Adamsville Beach, if you didn’t know), with one of his “cast-offs”. A cast-off being something like some older girl’s sister whom she was kind stuck baby-sitting for and wanted to ditch to have a minute’s passion with Sid, or so that is what I heard they were doing. All I know is that I could hear that old Chevy roaring down the end of the street with Sid at the wheel and one last “pick of the evening” sitting tight next to him. Ya, that was Sid’s way, always Sid’s way.
P.S. For later, post-North Adamsville MBTA station graduates, you are left to your own resources about finding the gas prices.
Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class of 1964, comment and question:
How much did it cost for a gallon of gasoline in 1964? In the interest of "speaking" to the wider North Adamsville Graduate audience that might pick this comment up on Facebook just pick your year of graduation and guess from there. Then click on headline to seek the answer
Oil at $100 a barrel. Gasoline over three dollars per gallon at the pump (remember this is being written in September, 2011 in case you pick this up later). No, do not worry, this is not intended to be the start of a political screed about the need to bring the “Seven Sisters” oil monopolists to heel or to break up the international oil cartels, although those are very good ideas. At the beginning of this series of commentaries about the old days in North Adamsville I promised that I would not be political, at least not overtly so. So that is political aspect is no help here. All I want to ask today is whether, through the mist of time, you remember how much gasoline cost when you went to "fill 'er up" in high school.
Now this question requires some honesty on your part. Please, no Googling the Quincy Patriot Ledger or The Boston Globe to search their archives of the time. Nor should you use a graphic calculator to factor back the effect of the rate of inflation on oil since 1964 to come up with an answer. Dear readers, this is not some torturous calculus problem. What you basically need to do is to remember some numbers from when you were daydreaming out the window in study hall at old North Adamsville High. Maybe in between thinking away the hours about that certain she (or he) a couple of rows over and how, well, how you would like to get acquainted with her (or him) or what was up for Saturday when your true corner boy “boss man,” Sid Hemmings, came by to pick you up in his “boss” (hence the Boss Man nickname) ’57 Chevy and you went “cruising” into the great teenage Adamsville Beach night. Or maybe you spotted those numbers when you went out the door, assuming you survived opening that fortress-like door while still thinking about that certain she (or he) whom you almost had enough courage to talk to after class today but only got to a meaningful look, onto Hancock Street after school.
What is this guy talking about with all these study hall and looking out the window references? Just this. Unless you were a total grind and always had your nose in a book then the answer merely requires that you had looked out the window. Directly across the street, Hancock Street, from the school were two gas stations (I believe somewhere near the mass transportation depot parking lot and the MacDonald's are now if you have been in the old town recently) that were always in competition with each other. They, and I am not making this up for I do not have such a vivid imagination, actually were having very public price wars to bring in customers by REDUCING the price of their gas. But enough hints. Your answers, please?
No comment on the 1964 North Adamsville gas wars night would be complete without reference to the manner in which we got the dough to pay for said gas. A lot of kids then got it from mom or pop reflecting the more affluence post-World War II times when the old parents has enough dough to spare for a kid to own his or her own car, and have a gas money allowance to boot. Even in working class North Adamsville. Others, like me and most of my corner boys, my Salducci’s Pizza Parlor night corner boys, walked, hitchhiked or borrowed the “old man’s” car (or that of an older brother) for a be-bop Saturday night romp. That is until I met up with the “Boss Man” mentioned above. Sid Hemming’s, who lived just down the end of my dead-end street, had a ’57 Chevy that he was always working on (and when he wasn’t working on it was riding around, usually with a bevy of girls before the night was over, down that now famous Adamsville Beach night).
For a couple of years he took me in tow. The price, well the price was that I was “in charge” of filling up his tank when it was empty. In short, paying for gas to be “cool.” Since I was poorer than a church mouse and never heard of such a thing as an allowance until somebody told me about them that meant taking my hard-earned money from caddying up at the local private golf course to fill the damn thing. And those golfer guys whether they had dough or not, and they usually did, were cheap when it came caddie pay-off time. A primer in capitalist economics, I guess. So you know, roughly, that gas could not have cost too much. Still, you are duty-bound to guess.
Of course, buying the gas got me nothing when it came to the girls the filled the other seats of Sid’s souped-up car. Well usually got me nothing, that is. See they, most of them prime A-one foxes, only had eyes for Sid, or more correctly Sid’s ’57 Chevy. Hell they were one in the same. Now Sid, whatever his mechanical wizard abilities with an automobile motor were, and I will be kind here, had nothing for looks. Even “cute” was a stretch. And even more of a stretch was that “cute” when Sid was seriously into his auto repair work and smelled of oils, cigarettes and whiskey. Still the girls (read: young women) actually came up to him looking for a ride and, well, just leave it as and. The way it worked is that once the car filled up with girls I was out the door. No problem, well no problem on those few occasions when he left me down at the beach (Adamsville Beach, if you didn’t know), with one of his “cast-offs”. A cast-off being something like some older girl’s sister whom she was kind stuck baby-sitting for and wanted to ditch to have a minute’s passion with Sid, or so that is what I heard they were doing. All I know is that I could hear that old Chevy roaring down the end of the street with Sid at the wheel and one last “pick of the evening” sitting tight next to him. Ya, that was Sid’s way, always Sid’s way.
P.S. For later, post-North Adamsville MBTA station graduates, you are left to your own resources about finding the gas prices.
Labor's Untold Story-From The Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Archives-The Struggle For Working Class Organization-Marx To Lion Philips In Zalt-Bommel (1864)
Markin comment:
Every Month Is Labor History MonthThis post is part of an on-going series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
Other Septembers in this series I have concentrated on various sometimes now obscure leaders and rank and file militants in the international working class movement, especially those who made contributions here in America like "Big Bill" Haywood and Eugene V. Debs. This year, given the pressing need for clarity around the labor party question in America(algebraically expressed in our movement as the struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government) I have gone back to the sources-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their correspondence on working class organizationwith various associates and opponents. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely given the state of working class organization here these days, many of their comments, taken in due regard for changed times and circumstances, are germane today. This correspondence is only a start and should just whet the reader's appetite to research further.
*****
Marx-Engels Correspondence 1864
Marx To Lion Philips In Zalt-Bommel (1864)
Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 46;
First published: in International Review of Social History, Assen, 1956.
London, 29 November 1864
1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill
Dear Uncle,
I hope that you are in the best of health despite the abominable weather. All is well here. Except that, to the great alarm of the whole family, I had a most malignant carbuncle below the left breast at the beginning of this month, which kept me in great pain for 2-3 weeks. Other than that, everything has been going well.
The trade crisis, which I predicted to you long before its actual arrival has by this time long since lost its edge, although its consequences in the manufacturing districts proper are still very considerable. On the other hand, I believe a political crisis is to be expected in the spring or early summer. Bonaparte has again reached the point where he will have to make war again if he is to raise a loan. The Venetian business is being kept open (I am acquainted with some of the agents there) so that it can provide a point of contact if need be. It is possible that Bonaparte will again find a way out, and then he will keep the peace (for he is no real Napoleon), but that is rather improbable.
The enclosed printed Address is written by myself. The matter hangs together like this: in September the Parisian workers sent a delegation to the London workers to demonstrate support for Poland. On that occasion, an international Workers’ Committee was formed. The matter is not without importance because 1. in London the same people are at the head who organised the gigantic reception for Garibaldi and, by their monster meeting with Bright in St James’s Hall, prevented war with the United States. In a word, these are the real workers’ leaders in London, with one or two exceptions all workers themselves. 2. On the Parisian side, Mr Tolain (ouvrier himself, as well) et Co. are at the head, i.e., the same people who were prevented by a mere intrigue on the part of Garnier-Pagès, Carnot, etc., from entering the Corps législatif at the last elections in Paris as representatives of the workers there, and 3. on the Italian side, it has been joined by the representatives of the 4-500 Italian workers’ clubs which held their general congress in Naples some weeks ago an event which even The Times considered important enough to merit a few dozen lines in the paper.
Courtesy toward the French and the Italians, who always require florid language, has obliged me to include a few superfluous turns of phrase in the preamble to the ‘Rules’, though not in the ‘Address’.
A few day’s ago I received a letter from America from my friend Weydemeyer, Colonel in the regiment stationed at St Louis (Missouri). Amongst other things, he writes — and these are his exact words:
‘We are regrettably being detained here at St Louis, since, in view of the many “conservative” elements here, a military force is a continuing necessity to prevent a break-out and the possible release of the numerous Southern prisoners. ... The whole campaign in Virginia is a blunder, which has cost us innumerable men. But for all that, the South will not be able to hold out much longer: it has sent its last man into battle and has no fresh army to call upon. The present invasion of Missouri, like the incursions into Tennessee, has only the character of a raid, a foray: there can be no thought of a lasting re-occupation of districts that have been lost.’
When you reflect, my dear Uncle, how at the time of Lincoln’s election 3½ years ago it was only a matter of making no further concessions to the slave-owners, whereas now the avowed aim, which has in part already been realised, is the abolition of slavery, one has to admit that never has such a gigantic revolution occurred with such rapidity. It will have a highly beneficial influence on the whole world.
At a public meeting this week the fellow-member of our race Benjamin Disraeli has again made a dreadful laughing-stock of himself by assuming the mantle of guardian angel of the High Church and Church rates, repudiating criticism in religious affairs. He furnishes the best evidence of how a great talent unaccompanied by conviction creates rogues, albeit gold-braided and ‘Right Honorable’ ones.
Those jackasses in Germany have again made a proper laughing-stock of themselves over the Muller affair, with ex-parson Kinkel at their head.
With kindest regards from the whole family to you and from me to Jettchen, Dr, Fritz et Co.
Ever your faithful nephew
K. M.
Every Month Is Labor History MonthThis post is part of an on-going series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
Other Septembers in this series I have concentrated on various sometimes now obscure leaders and rank and file militants in the international working class movement, especially those who made contributions here in America like "Big Bill" Haywood and Eugene V. Debs. This year, given the pressing need for clarity around the labor party question in America(algebraically expressed in our movement as the struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government) I have gone back to the sources-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their correspondence on working class organizationwith various associates and opponents. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely given the state of working class organization here these days, many of their comments, taken in due regard for changed times and circumstances, are germane today. This correspondence is only a start and should just whet the reader's appetite to research further.
*****
Marx-Engels Correspondence 1864
Marx To Lion Philips In Zalt-Bommel (1864)
Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 46;
First published: in International Review of Social History, Assen, 1956.
London, 29 November 1864
1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill
Dear Uncle,
I hope that you are in the best of health despite the abominable weather. All is well here. Except that, to the great alarm of the whole family, I had a most malignant carbuncle below the left breast at the beginning of this month, which kept me in great pain for 2-3 weeks. Other than that, everything has been going well.
The trade crisis, which I predicted to you long before its actual arrival has by this time long since lost its edge, although its consequences in the manufacturing districts proper are still very considerable. On the other hand, I believe a political crisis is to be expected in the spring or early summer. Bonaparte has again reached the point where he will have to make war again if he is to raise a loan. The Venetian business is being kept open (I am acquainted with some of the agents there) so that it can provide a point of contact if need be. It is possible that Bonaparte will again find a way out, and then he will keep the peace (for he is no real Napoleon), but that is rather improbable.
The enclosed printed Address is written by myself. The matter hangs together like this: in September the Parisian workers sent a delegation to the London workers to demonstrate support for Poland. On that occasion, an international Workers’ Committee was formed. The matter is not without importance because 1. in London the same people are at the head who organised the gigantic reception for Garibaldi and, by their monster meeting with Bright in St James’s Hall, prevented war with the United States. In a word, these are the real workers’ leaders in London, with one or two exceptions all workers themselves. 2. On the Parisian side, Mr Tolain (ouvrier himself, as well) et Co. are at the head, i.e., the same people who were prevented by a mere intrigue on the part of Garnier-Pagès, Carnot, etc., from entering the Corps législatif at the last elections in Paris as representatives of the workers there, and 3. on the Italian side, it has been joined by the representatives of the 4-500 Italian workers’ clubs which held their general congress in Naples some weeks ago an event which even The Times considered important enough to merit a few dozen lines in the paper.
Courtesy toward the French and the Italians, who always require florid language, has obliged me to include a few superfluous turns of phrase in the preamble to the ‘Rules’, though not in the ‘Address’.
A few day’s ago I received a letter from America from my friend Weydemeyer, Colonel in the regiment stationed at St Louis (Missouri). Amongst other things, he writes — and these are his exact words:
‘We are regrettably being detained here at St Louis, since, in view of the many “conservative” elements here, a military force is a continuing necessity to prevent a break-out and the possible release of the numerous Southern prisoners. ... The whole campaign in Virginia is a blunder, which has cost us innumerable men. But for all that, the South will not be able to hold out much longer: it has sent its last man into battle and has no fresh army to call upon. The present invasion of Missouri, like the incursions into Tennessee, has only the character of a raid, a foray: there can be no thought of a lasting re-occupation of districts that have been lost.’
When you reflect, my dear Uncle, how at the time of Lincoln’s election 3½ years ago it was only a matter of making no further concessions to the slave-owners, whereas now the avowed aim, which has in part already been realised, is the abolition of slavery, one has to admit that never has such a gigantic revolution occurred with such rapidity. It will have a highly beneficial influence on the whole world.
At a public meeting this week the fellow-member of our race Benjamin Disraeli has again made a dreadful laughing-stock of himself by assuming the mantle of guardian angel of the High Church and Church rates, repudiating criticism in religious affairs. He furnishes the best evidence of how a great talent unaccompanied by conviction creates rogues, albeit gold-braided and ‘Right Honorable’ ones.
Those jackasses in Germany have again made a proper laughing-stock of themselves over the Muller affair, with ex-parson Kinkel at their head.
With kindest regards from the whole family to you and from me to Jettchen, Dr, Fritz et Co.
Ever your faithful nephew
K. M.
“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives-The Founding Conference Of The Fourth International (1938)-"Salute to Our Living Martyrs And Our Heroic Dead"
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed above.
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
********
Markin comment on this document:
Everybody, and that most notably included Leon Trotsky, knew something was going awry with the Bolshevik Revolution by 1923 for many reasons, some of them beyond correction outside of an international extension of the revolution, especially to Germany that would provide the vital industrial infrastructure to aid the struggling Soviet Union. Nevertheless, and this is important to note about serious revolutionary politics and politicians in general, the fight in 1923 still needed to aimed at winning the party cadre over. That was the failing point of many oppositionists, inside and outside the party, then.
By 1933, with the rise of the virtually unopposed rise and consolidation of Nazism in Germany clearly putting paid to the Communist International’s (read: Stalin’s) erroneous strategy, working inside the party, or acting as an expelled fraction of the party, was no longer tenable. Like earlier with the First and Second Internationals the Communist International was now dead as a revolutionary organizational center. Time now to gather, by fits and starts, the cadre for a new international- the Fourth International
A major task then, and now, was the preservation, protection and comfort of revolutionary militants-your own organization's and others. Some, like we here in the United States work under relatively easy conditions (for now anyway). Others work under incredible adversity. An injury to one is an injury to all as the old IWW (Wobblies) slogan went. That is about right.
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
********
Markin comment on this document:
Everybody, and that most notably included Leon Trotsky, knew something was going awry with the Bolshevik Revolution by 1923 for many reasons, some of them beyond correction outside of an international extension of the revolution, especially to Germany that would provide the vital industrial infrastructure to aid the struggling Soviet Union. Nevertheless, and this is important to note about serious revolutionary politics and politicians in general, the fight in 1923 still needed to aimed at winning the party cadre over. That was the failing point of many oppositionists, inside and outside the party, then.
By 1933, with the rise of the virtually unopposed rise and consolidation of Nazism in Germany clearly putting paid to the Communist International’s (read: Stalin’s) erroneous strategy, working inside the party, or acting as an expelled fraction of the party, was no longer tenable. Like earlier with the First and Second Internationals the Communist International was now dead as a revolutionary organizational center. Time now to gather, by fits and starts, the cadre for a new international- the Fourth International
A major task then, and now, was the preservation, protection and comfort of revolutionary militants-your own organization's and others. Some, like we here in the United States work under relatively easy conditions (for now anyway). Others work under incredible adversity. An injury to one is an injury to all as the old IWW (Wobblies) slogan went. That is about right.
Friday, September 09, 2011
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Capitalism in Crisis: Karl Marx Was Right-We Need an All New Ruling Class—the Workers!......And Markin Says Pronto!
Workers Vanguard No. 985
2 September 2011
Capitalism in Crisis: Karl Marx Was Right
We Need an All New Ruling Class—the Workers!
In 2007-2008, the world was plunged into an economic crisis unrivaled since the days of the Great Depression. The con men on Wall Street whose financial swindles were central to this collapse were bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars. The working class, black people, Latinos, the poor, the sick and the aged have been made to foot the bill, losing their jobs, homes, pensions and virtually anything else that makes life remotely livable. Today, one in six people in the U.S. are unemployed, with the average time out of work close to ten months. Forty-five million people are on food stamps, an increase of 34 percent over the past two years. Those who still have a job are being sweated to work harder for lower wages. In racist America, it’s all the worse for black people and Latinos, who were among the main victims of the banks’ subprime mortgage scams. One-third of black and Latino households have no net worth, with many underwater in debt. The capitalist authors of this ruin have, in the meantime, made out like bandits.
During the “jobless and wageless recovery” of the past two years, corporate profits have broken all historic records. This comes on top of the enormous enrichment of the wealthiest 1 percent of the population, who more than doubled their share of the national income in the past three decades. The government’s “welfare for the rich” schemes have boosted financial speculation, artificially driving up the price of stocks, while the already rotting productive capacity of U.S. capitalism goes through the floor. With the U.S. economy overwhelmingly based on consumer spending—and with the vast majority having no money to spend—this whole house of cards is crashing down again as the economy spirals into a double-dip recession.
For over a month, the stock market has been on a wild roller-coaster ride of panicked buying and selling. Among the detonators of this panic were concerns that the Democratic president of the United States, Barack Obama, had lost control of the imperialist “ship of state” to a pack of deranged Republican Tea Party yahoos. Liberal Democrats and others raged that the Republicans were holding America “hostage” by refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless they got trillions in spending cuts and no rise in taxes for the rich. But it was the Democratic Party president himself who manufactured the myth that the “world’s only superpower” was about to default on its debt like some impoverished Third World country. Even if they didn’t have the money—which they do, and plenty of it—they “can always print money,” as former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan put it.
Obama’s purpose in this charade was not much different from that of the Republicans, as he pushed for a “grand bargain” of massive austerity through slashing more than $4 trillion from so-called “entitlement” programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security over the next decade. His sop of closing a few tax loopholes for the rich was about all the Democrats could choke out to try to maintain the fraud that they are the “friends” of the little guy. And they even caved on that one.
Nonetheless, the recklessness of the Republicans has disturbed Wall Street and even their own party establishment. As Doug Henwood put it in his Left Business Observer (21 August): “Wall Street, the Fortune 500, center-right Dems, non-insane Republicans—who’ve been happy to let the Teabaggers promote the austerity agenda, would now like them to get out of the way. Not only are they undermining the blue-blood status of Treasury bonds, they’re making our political system look foolish on a world stage. But when you use odious and/or lunatic agents, there is always what the CIA types call a ‘disposal problem’.”
The madness of the Republican Party “Tea Baggers” is merely an extreme expression of the depravity of America’s capitalist rulers, who have no other way out of the economic crisis—a crisis of their own making—than to further starve the poor, bust the unions and drive down wages. As the political servants of the same capitalist class, the Democrats are increasingly incapable of even putting a phony “kinder, gentler” facade on the cruel inhumanity of imperialist rule.
It Is Desperately Necessary to Fight!
While Congress was gridlocked over the “debt ceiling,” the imperialist masters of the European Union (EU) were in emergency session to come up with another bailout of Greece—in reality, a bailout of the investments of French and German bankers on the backs of the Greek working class. Then it looked like Spain and Italy might go belly-up as rising interest on their government bonds was freezing them out of money to keep their economies afloat. After EU and IMF bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal totaling hundreds of billions of dollars, the European Central Bank started spending tens of billions more to buy up the bonds of Spain and Italy and drive down interest rates, while the governments of those two countries announced even more savage austerity.
Meanwhile, Britain was exploding in anger ignited by the cop killing of a young black man (see article, page 16). From London to other cities, thousands took to the streets in an upheaval fueled by vicious spending cuts and job slashing. The London Guardian Weekly (19 August) warned: “Together, the global imbalances, the manic-depressive behavior of stock markets, the venalilty of the financial sector, the growing gulf between rich and poor, the high levels of unemployment, the naked consumerism and the English riots are telling us something. This is a system in deep trouble, and it is waiting to blow.”
In Europe, austerity has been met with strikes and protests, at times massive, in defense of workers’ livelihoods. But the workers’ struggles are hamstrung by their reformist misleaders, who accept the inevitability of capitalist austerity while merely pleading that the blows be softened.
In this country, tens of thousands of unionists and their supporters came out in protest early this year against Wisconsin Republican governor Scott Walker’s union-busting law tearing up the collective bargaining rights of public workers unions. With public workers unions everywhere threatened with obliteration, the Wisconsin protests inspired workers across the country who saw them as the beginning of a fightback against the one-sided class war targeting organized labor. But the bureaucratic misleaders of the AFL-CIO worked overtime to squelch any move toward actually using labor’s strike weapon, channeling the anger of the ranks into support for the Democratic Party with a petition campaign to recall Walker and a number of Republican state legislators.
The decades of betrayals by these labor fakers have encouraged the U.S. rulers in the arrogant belief that they can get away with doing anything to the working class, the poor and most everyone else without provoking any social struggle. But the rulers and their labor lieutenants cannot eliminate the class struggle which is born of the irreconcilable conflict of interests between labor and its exploiters. The same conditions that grind down the workers can and will propel them into battle against the capitalist class enemy. This was seen in the midst of the Great Depression, when, at a brief upturn in the economy, workers began to engage in hard-fought battles to organize industrial unions in this country.
The sit-down strikes, mass pickets and other actions that built the CIO were ignited by the 1934 San Francisco general strike and mass strikes in Toledo and Minneapolis the same year. All of those strikes were led by reds. It was to head off the threat that class battles would challenge capitalist rule that New Deal social programs such as Social Security were implemented. Following World War II, Cold War red purges in the unions drove out socialists and Communists, including the Stalinists who had channeled workers’ discontent into support for Roosevelt’s Democratic Party.
Today, there are no longer avowed socialists with a significant base in the unions. But even in the absence of militants inspired by such political convictions, radical leaders will arise and they will be no less militant. Renewed labor battles will lay the basis for reviving and extending the unions, with a new, class-struggle leadership coming to the fore. For the workers to prevail against their exploiters, they must be armed with a Marxist political program that links labor’s fight to the struggle to build a multiracial workers party that will do away with this entire system of wage slavery through socialist revolution. Fight, don’t starve! Those who labor must rule!
The Bourgeoisie: An Unfit Ruling Class
In the Communist Manifesto, written more than 150 years ago, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identified the key contradiction of capitalist society, which lies at the root of repeated economic crises. On the one hand, under capitalism production is socialized. But the means of production remain the private property of a few, who appropriate the wealth that is produced by workers’ collective labor.
The boom-bust economic cycles are direct products of the capitalist system of production for profit. Capitalists invest in expanding productive capacity on the assumption that the additional output—autos, houses, etc.—can be sold at the existing rate of profit, at least. However, during periods of expansion the average rate of profit tends to fall. This situation eventually creates a crisis of overproduction, as capitalists produce more goods and services than can be sold at a satisfactory rate of profit. Thus there is the repeated spectacle of masses of workers losing their jobs and being thrown into destitution because too much has been produced. As described by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto:
“Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce…. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.”
Marx and Engels underlined that the rise of capitalism and the destruction of the feudal order represented a historic advance in the development of the productive forces—science, industry and technology. Yet capitalism in turn became a fetter on the further development of those productive forces. Out of the destitution and destruction produced by capitalism’s inevitable economic crises, the means of production came to be monopolized by fewer and bigger conglomerates. Their ever-growing need for investment funds and other financing led to the domination of finance capital, that is, of banking goliaths.
By the late 19th century, capitalism reached its ultimate, imperialist stage. The capitalists in the advanced industrial countries were driven to wage wars to redivide the world in order to plunder markets and secure spheres of exploitation in less-developed countries. In their competition for world domination, the imperialist powers engulfed the peoples of the world in the barbarism of World Wars I and II, as well as waging countless wars in colonial and semicolonial countries.
The utter irrationality of capitalism reached new depths in the epoch of imperialism. While industrial capitalists continued to concentrate on the production of goods for sale (commodities), the machinations of the giant financial institutions took on unheard-of proportions. As revolutionary Marxist leader V.I. Lenin explained in his 1916 study Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism:
“Although commodity production still ‘reigns’ and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and the bulk of the profits go to the ‘geniuses’ of financial manipulation. At the basis of these manipulations and swindles lies socialised production; but the immense progress of mankind which achieved this socialisation, goes to benefit…the speculators.”
A case in point is the U.S. bourgeoisie, which for decades has shunned investment that would expand and modernize its decaying industrial capacity or repair the country’s crumbling bridges, roads, power lines and levees. Instead, it has squandered much of the economic surplus appropriated through the exploitation of labor on a succession of speculative binges. And in fact it was rampant financial speculation in the housing industry that triggered the current economic crisis.
In Europe, such financial swindles have sharply accentuated the contradictions inherent in the European Union, an unstable consortium of rival capitalist states. At the heart of the EU’s contradictions is the fact that the maintenance of a common currency requires a common state power. That is simply not possible under capitalism. The International Communist League long ago debunked the illusion that the EU could lay the basis for a capitalist United States of Europe. In a statement on the Maastricht Treaty, which laid the basis for the euro, the ICL wrote:
“Since capitalism is organised on the basis of particular national states, itself the cause of repeated imperialist wars to redivide the world, it is impossible to cohere a stable pan-European bourgeois state. A European imperialist ‘superstate’ can be achieved only by the methods of Adolf Hitler, not those of Jacques Delors, the French social-democratic architect of Maastricht.”
—“For a Workers Europe—For Socialist Revolution!”
WV No. 670, 13 June 1997
Only the conquest of state power by the proletariat can lay the basis for a socialist United States of Europe and a rationally planned economy.
As proletarian revolutionary internationalists, we have always opposed the EU as an imperialist trade bloc. Dominated by capitalist France and Germany, the EU’s purpose is to increase their competitive edge against their imperialist rivals in the U.S. and Japan through the increased exploitation of the working class of the EU countries. As the price of entry, the weaker EU states were locked into the euro. Now they are going down, scrambling to meet their debt obligations by driving the working class into the ground. It couldn’t have been otherwise.
In 1848, Marx and Engels indicted the bourgeoisie as “unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society” because “it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery.” If the bourgeoisie of that time was unfit to rule, the imperialist rulers today have long passed their sell-by date.
An Empire in Decline
Beginning with the 1898 Spanish-American War, the capitalist rulers of the rapidly developing U.S. set out to conquer the world, seizing Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines for their own plunder. When they emerged as the dominant imperialist power following World War II, the U.S. imperialists boasted of the beginning of the “American Century.” But by the 1970s, they were seeing their dominance challenged by the rising economic might of Germany and Japan. With its treasury drained by the long, losing war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants, the U.S. was no longer the world’s undisputed capitalist powerhouse. This was signaled by the devaluation of the dollar on 15 August 1971.
To reverse its declining fortunes, the U.S. ruling class launched a campaign to increase profitability through the increased exploitation of the working class—closing auto and steel factories, moving production to low-wage plants in the “open shop” South and to neocolonies in Latin America and Asia, increasing productivity through speedup and the institution of “two-tier” wage and benefits packages for younger workers. A key turning point was the smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981. It was Democratic president Jimmy Carter who drew up the plan to crush PATCO, which was implemented by his Republican successor, Ronald Reagan. The AFL-CIO bureaucrats let Reagan get away with it, crucially by refusing to call out other unions to shut down the airports. This defeat helped usher in a wave of broken unions and busted strikes.
Like Obama today, Reagan manufactured a debt crisis in order to destroy social programs. The “war on poverty” programs enacted to buy social peace in the inner cities following the mass ghetto upheavals of the 1960s were increasingly shredded. But it took Democratic president Bill Clinton to finally eliminate “welfare as we know it.” Acting on Reagan’s racist demagogy about black “welfare queens” living off the back of “hard-working taxpayers,” Clinton abolished Aid to Families with Dependent Children for impoverished single mothers and their families.
Reagan had run a huge deficit spending program, slashing taxes for the rich while borrowing massively from Japanese and German bankers as well as oil-rich Arab sheikdoms. The overriding purpose was a huge military buildup for U.S. imperialism’s Cold War drive against the Soviet Union. Despite its bureaucratic degeneration under Stalin, the Soviet workers state continued to embody the main social gains of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The imperialists were determined to reconquer this vast territory—one-sixth of the planet—for their exploitation.
In 1991-92, the capitalists achieved their counterrevolutionary aim of destroying the world’s first workers state. Coming into office on the back of this “victory,” Clinton promised that the “peace dividend” would revitalize the economy by reducing the massive government debt. But the “dividend” was largely channeled into an orgy of speculative investment in telecommunications and Internet services, the so-called dot-com boom of the mid-late 1990s. That bubble burst in 2000-2001, ushering in another recession.
Clinton’s neoliberal Democrats were followed by the Republican neo-cons of the George W. Bush administration. These nuclear cowboys invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to send a message to the rest of the world that the U.S. remained militarily the top dog on the planet. These wars and occupations were financed through foreign borrowing, while the filthy rich got a tax cut that outdid even the free lunch they got under Reagan. Then the housing-price bubble of the early-mid 2000s burst in 2007-2008, touching off a global financial crisis. Today, we have Barack Obama lamely responding to Standard & Poor’s reduction of its AAA rating of U.S. treasury bonds by declaring that the U.S. has “always been and always will be a triple A country.” The stock market responded by taking a $2 trillion nosedive.
After the Soviet Union’s counterrevolutionary destruction, it appeared that the U.S. imperialists were successful in the quest they had begun almost a century earlier to be the masters of the world. But even as the U.S. has achieved unrivaled military supremacy, its domestic industrial base has continued to corrode. To some in the haughty U.S. ruling class, the decline of the country’s economic might is bereft of any explanation—besides being contrary to “God’s will.” In consequence, a wing of the American bourgeoisie has seemingly gone totally insane.
Even by the lights of their own party’s establishment, the current crop of Republican presidential candidates has gone off the deep end. On the campaign trail in Iowa, Texas governor Rick Perry accused the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, of treason for “printing more money to play politics,” threatening “we would treat him pretty ugly in Texas.” Perry, a dangerous reactionary, is here going after a Republican appointee of the Bush administration whose “soft money” policy has in fact been a boon for the bourgeoisie. By driving real interest rates down below zero, the Fed is essentially paying financial capitalists to borrow from the government—and then invest the money for a profit!
A week before Perry entered the race, he was the star of a 20,000-strong Christian fundamentalist revival meeting where he asked God to save the U.S. economy. Rival presidential candidate Michele Bachmann fervently believes that she and other good Christians are to be gathered in the air to sit at the right hand of God during what some call the coming “Rapture.” In their deranged worldview, Perry and Bachmann have much in common with the mad miracle monk Rasputin, who advised the Russian tsarina in the dying days of the brutal and rotted-out Tsarist Empire. Obama hopes to ride back into the Oval Office as the “sane” alternative, one who can more effectively implement a bipartisan drive to slash every remaining social program that reflects an impulse not to see masses of starving, homeless people in the streets.
There is no question that the current Republican candidates are lunatics. But their lunacy is the reflection of the dangerous irrationality of the U.S. imperialist order. Just as the decadent, crazed and corrupt court of the tsars was swept away by the Russian Revolution, we Marxists are determined to build the revolutionary internationalist party that can lead the workers in overthrowing the decaying rule of American capitalism.
For an International Socialist Planned Economy!
The reformist left pleads that the government “tax the rich” to provide the money for jobs, education, welfare for the poor and other beneficial programs. This refrain was recently taken up by multibillionaire Warren Buffett in a New York Times (14 August) op-ed column titled “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich.” In response, a Fox TV business analyst denounced Buffett, one of the world’s wealthiest financial profiteers, as a “socialist”! Actually, it is the fear that the masses might revolt that concerns Buffett, who opined: “Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.”
Amid a sea of millions of unemployed, the corporations and banks are sitting on mountains of cash. But you aren’t going to get your hands on it by appealing to the tax authority of the capitalist state, whose purpose is to guarantee and defend the interests of the bourgeoisie. To resolve their debt crisis, state and local governments are slashing pensions for retirees to pay off bondholders. To “make the rich pay,” the working class has to smash the rule of the bourgeoisie!
In an ideological climate conditioned by the imperialists’ proclamations that the destruction of the Soviet Union proved Marxism to be a “failed experiment,” the prospect of proletarian socialist revolution might appear implausible. But the collectivized economy in the Soviet Union worked! Despite its isolation in a world dominated by imperialism, the Soviet Union, arising from deep backwardness and the destruction of world war, civil war and imperialist intervention, became an industrial and military powerhouse.
Now, two decades after counterrevolution destroyed the Soviet degenerated workers state, many in Russia hark back to when they were guaranteed a job, education, housing, health care and vacations, regretting that they were taken in by the myth of capitalist “democracy.” What undermined the collectivized economy, and ultimately laid the basis for the destruction of the Soviet Union itself, was the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy, which robbed the workers of their political power and vainly sought to appease the imperialists by selling out workers’ struggles in other countries.
Today, the deep economic crisis in the capitalist countries contrasts sharply with the situation in China, where the industries central to production are collectivized. At the same time that the U.S. and European governments have been bailing out the financial capitalists while making the workers pay, Beijing has massively channeled investment into developing infrastructure and productive capacity. Faced with a growing number of strikes and protests, the regime has increased the income of workers and peasants. However, China’s Stalinist regime undermines the social gains of the 1949 Revolution by conciliating imperialism and promoting “market reforms” that strengthen internal counterrevolutionary forces. In its “partnership” with world capital, the Beijing bureaucracy is subsidizing American imperialism through its huge investment in U.S. treasury bonds, which, among other things, are used to finance the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As Trotskyists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state against imperialism and internal counterrevolution. At the same time, we understand that the defense and international extension of the remaining gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution require a proletarian political revolution to replace the Stalinist bureaucrats with a revolutionary internationalist leadership and a regime of workers democracy.
As we wrote in our article “Wall Street Nightmare Stalks Working People” (WV No. 921, 26 September 2008):
“You can solve a lot of problems with ‘domestic cash transfers’—make life livable for workers, blacks, Latinos, jobless, homeless, welfare mothers, drug users, etc. And we communists intend to do so. But you have to first smash the power of the bourgeoisie. For that you need to build a workers party, one that doesn’t ‘respect’ the property values of the bourgeoisie, a party that says to the exploited and oppressed: we want more, we want all of it, it ought to be ours, so take it. And when we have the wealth of this country, we will begin to build a planned socialist economy on an international scale. Then we can right some historical wrongs and crimes and pay off some debts left over by our rulers, like some tens of billions of dollars to the Vietnamese and others whose countries have been maimed under the passing treads of American tanks. As for ‘compensation’ to the people who have driven the United States to ruin, we can offer to those who don’t get in our way that they will live to see their grandchildren prosper in a truly humane society.”
2 September 2011
Capitalism in Crisis: Karl Marx Was Right
We Need an All New Ruling Class—the Workers!
In 2007-2008, the world was plunged into an economic crisis unrivaled since the days of the Great Depression. The con men on Wall Street whose financial swindles were central to this collapse were bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars. The working class, black people, Latinos, the poor, the sick and the aged have been made to foot the bill, losing their jobs, homes, pensions and virtually anything else that makes life remotely livable. Today, one in six people in the U.S. are unemployed, with the average time out of work close to ten months. Forty-five million people are on food stamps, an increase of 34 percent over the past two years. Those who still have a job are being sweated to work harder for lower wages. In racist America, it’s all the worse for black people and Latinos, who were among the main victims of the banks’ subprime mortgage scams. One-third of black and Latino households have no net worth, with many underwater in debt. The capitalist authors of this ruin have, in the meantime, made out like bandits.
During the “jobless and wageless recovery” of the past two years, corporate profits have broken all historic records. This comes on top of the enormous enrichment of the wealthiest 1 percent of the population, who more than doubled their share of the national income in the past three decades. The government’s “welfare for the rich” schemes have boosted financial speculation, artificially driving up the price of stocks, while the already rotting productive capacity of U.S. capitalism goes through the floor. With the U.S. economy overwhelmingly based on consumer spending—and with the vast majority having no money to spend—this whole house of cards is crashing down again as the economy spirals into a double-dip recession.
For over a month, the stock market has been on a wild roller-coaster ride of panicked buying and selling. Among the detonators of this panic were concerns that the Democratic president of the United States, Barack Obama, had lost control of the imperialist “ship of state” to a pack of deranged Republican Tea Party yahoos. Liberal Democrats and others raged that the Republicans were holding America “hostage” by refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless they got trillions in spending cuts and no rise in taxes for the rich. But it was the Democratic Party president himself who manufactured the myth that the “world’s only superpower” was about to default on its debt like some impoverished Third World country. Even if they didn’t have the money—which they do, and plenty of it—they “can always print money,” as former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan put it.
Obama’s purpose in this charade was not much different from that of the Republicans, as he pushed for a “grand bargain” of massive austerity through slashing more than $4 trillion from so-called “entitlement” programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security over the next decade. His sop of closing a few tax loopholes for the rich was about all the Democrats could choke out to try to maintain the fraud that they are the “friends” of the little guy. And they even caved on that one.
Nonetheless, the recklessness of the Republicans has disturbed Wall Street and even their own party establishment. As Doug Henwood put it in his Left Business Observer (21 August): “Wall Street, the Fortune 500, center-right Dems, non-insane Republicans—who’ve been happy to let the Teabaggers promote the austerity agenda, would now like them to get out of the way. Not only are they undermining the blue-blood status of Treasury bonds, they’re making our political system look foolish on a world stage. But when you use odious and/or lunatic agents, there is always what the CIA types call a ‘disposal problem’.”
The madness of the Republican Party “Tea Baggers” is merely an extreme expression of the depravity of America’s capitalist rulers, who have no other way out of the economic crisis—a crisis of their own making—than to further starve the poor, bust the unions and drive down wages. As the political servants of the same capitalist class, the Democrats are increasingly incapable of even putting a phony “kinder, gentler” facade on the cruel inhumanity of imperialist rule.
It Is Desperately Necessary to Fight!
While Congress was gridlocked over the “debt ceiling,” the imperialist masters of the European Union (EU) were in emergency session to come up with another bailout of Greece—in reality, a bailout of the investments of French and German bankers on the backs of the Greek working class. Then it looked like Spain and Italy might go belly-up as rising interest on their government bonds was freezing them out of money to keep their economies afloat. After EU and IMF bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal totaling hundreds of billions of dollars, the European Central Bank started spending tens of billions more to buy up the bonds of Spain and Italy and drive down interest rates, while the governments of those two countries announced even more savage austerity.
Meanwhile, Britain was exploding in anger ignited by the cop killing of a young black man (see article, page 16). From London to other cities, thousands took to the streets in an upheaval fueled by vicious spending cuts and job slashing. The London Guardian Weekly (19 August) warned: “Together, the global imbalances, the manic-depressive behavior of stock markets, the venalilty of the financial sector, the growing gulf between rich and poor, the high levels of unemployment, the naked consumerism and the English riots are telling us something. This is a system in deep trouble, and it is waiting to blow.”
In Europe, austerity has been met with strikes and protests, at times massive, in defense of workers’ livelihoods. But the workers’ struggles are hamstrung by their reformist misleaders, who accept the inevitability of capitalist austerity while merely pleading that the blows be softened.
In this country, tens of thousands of unionists and their supporters came out in protest early this year against Wisconsin Republican governor Scott Walker’s union-busting law tearing up the collective bargaining rights of public workers unions. With public workers unions everywhere threatened with obliteration, the Wisconsin protests inspired workers across the country who saw them as the beginning of a fightback against the one-sided class war targeting organized labor. But the bureaucratic misleaders of the AFL-CIO worked overtime to squelch any move toward actually using labor’s strike weapon, channeling the anger of the ranks into support for the Democratic Party with a petition campaign to recall Walker and a number of Republican state legislators.
The decades of betrayals by these labor fakers have encouraged the U.S. rulers in the arrogant belief that they can get away with doing anything to the working class, the poor and most everyone else without provoking any social struggle. But the rulers and their labor lieutenants cannot eliminate the class struggle which is born of the irreconcilable conflict of interests between labor and its exploiters. The same conditions that grind down the workers can and will propel them into battle against the capitalist class enemy. This was seen in the midst of the Great Depression, when, at a brief upturn in the economy, workers began to engage in hard-fought battles to organize industrial unions in this country.
The sit-down strikes, mass pickets and other actions that built the CIO were ignited by the 1934 San Francisco general strike and mass strikes in Toledo and Minneapolis the same year. All of those strikes were led by reds. It was to head off the threat that class battles would challenge capitalist rule that New Deal social programs such as Social Security were implemented. Following World War II, Cold War red purges in the unions drove out socialists and Communists, including the Stalinists who had channeled workers’ discontent into support for Roosevelt’s Democratic Party.
Today, there are no longer avowed socialists with a significant base in the unions. But even in the absence of militants inspired by such political convictions, radical leaders will arise and they will be no less militant. Renewed labor battles will lay the basis for reviving and extending the unions, with a new, class-struggle leadership coming to the fore. For the workers to prevail against their exploiters, they must be armed with a Marxist political program that links labor’s fight to the struggle to build a multiracial workers party that will do away with this entire system of wage slavery through socialist revolution. Fight, don’t starve! Those who labor must rule!
The Bourgeoisie: An Unfit Ruling Class
In the Communist Manifesto, written more than 150 years ago, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identified the key contradiction of capitalist society, which lies at the root of repeated economic crises. On the one hand, under capitalism production is socialized. But the means of production remain the private property of a few, who appropriate the wealth that is produced by workers’ collective labor.
The boom-bust economic cycles are direct products of the capitalist system of production for profit. Capitalists invest in expanding productive capacity on the assumption that the additional output—autos, houses, etc.—can be sold at the existing rate of profit, at least. However, during periods of expansion the average rate of profit tends to fall. This situation eventually creates a crisis of overproduction, as capitalists produce more goods and services than can be sold at a satisfactory rate of profit. Thus there is the repeated spectacle of masses of workers losing their jobs and being thrown into destitution because too much has been produced. As described by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto:
“Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce…. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.”
Marx and Engels underlined that the rise of capitalism and the destruction of the feudal order represented a historic advance in the development of the productive forces—science, industry and technology. Yet capitalism in turn became a fetter on the further development of those productive forces. Out of the destitution and destruction produced by capitalism’s inevitable economic crises, the means of production came to be monopolized by fewer and bigger conglomerates. Their ever-growing need for investment funds and other financing led to the domination of finance capital, that is, of banking goliaths.
By the late 19th century, capitalism reached its ultimate, imperialist stage. The capitalists in the advanced industrial countries were driven to wage wars to redivide the world in order to plunder markets and secure spheres of exploitation in less-developed countries. In their competition for world domination, the imperialist powers engulfed the peoples of the world in the barbarism of World Wars I and II, as well as waging countless wars in colonial and semicolonial countries.
The utter irrationality of capitalism reached new depths in the epoch of imperialism. While industrial capitalists continued to concentrate on the production of goods for sale (commodities), the machinations of the giant financial institutions took on unheard-of proportions. As revolutionary Marxist leader V.I. Lenin explained in his 1916 study Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism:
“Although commodity production still ‘reigns’ and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and the bulk of the profits go to the ‘geniuses’ of financial manipulation. At the basis of these manipulations and swindles lies socialised production; but the immense progress of mankind which achieved this socialisation, goes to benefit…the speculators.”
A case in point is the U.S. bourgeoisie, which for decades has shunned investment that would expand and modernize its decaying industrial capacity or repair the country’s crumbling bridges, roads, power lines and levees. Instead, it has squandered much of the economic surplus appropriated through the exploitation of labor on a succession of speculative binges. And in fact it was rampant financial speculation in the housing industry that triggered the current economic crisis.
In Europe, such financial swindles have sharply accentuated the contradictions inherent in the European Union, an unstable consortium of rival capitalist states. At the heart of the EU’s contradictions is the fact that the maintenance of a common currency requires a common state power. That is simply not possible under capitalism. The International Communist League long ago debunked the illusion that the EU could lay the basis for a capitalist United States of Europe. In a statement on the Maastricht Treaty, which laid the basis for the euro, the ICL wrote:
“Since capitalism is organised on the basis of particular national states, itself the cause of repeated imperialist wars to redivide the world, it is impossible to cohere a stable pan-European bourgeois state. A European imperialist ‘superstate’ can be achieved only by the methods of Adolf Hitler, not those of Jacques Delors, the French social-democratic architect of Maastricht.”
—“For a Workers Europe—For Socialist Revolution!”
WV No. 670, 13 June 1997
Only the conquest of state power by the proletariat can lay the basis for a socialist United States of Europe and a rationally planned economy.
As proletarian revolutionary internationalists, we have always opposed the EU as an imperialist trade bloc. Dominated by capitalist France and Germany, the EU’s purpose is to increase their competitive edge against their imperialist rivals in the U.S. and Japan through the increased exploitation of the working class of the EU countries. As the price of entry, the weaker EU states were locked into the euro. Now they are going down, scrambling to meet their debt obligations by driving the working class into the ground. It couldn’t have been otherwise.
In 1848, Marx and Engels indicted the bourgeoisie as “unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society” because “it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery.” If the bourgeoisie of that time was unfit to rule, the imperialist rulers today have long passed their sell-by date.
An Empire in Decline
Beginning with the 1898 Spanish-American War, the capitalist rulers of the rapidly developing U.S. set out to conquer the world, seizing Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines for their own plunder. When they emerged as the dominant imperialist power following World War II, the U.S. imperialists boasted of the beginning of the “American Century.” But by the 1970s, they were seeing their dominance challenged by the rising economic might of Germany and Japan. With its treasury drained by the long, losing war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants, the U.S. was no longer the world’s undisputed capitalist powerhouse. This was signaled by the devaluation of the dollar on 15 August 1971.
To reverse its declining fortunes, the U.S. ruling class launched a campaign to increase profitability through the increased exploitation of the working class—closing auto and steel factories, moving production to low-wage plants in the “open shop” South and to neocolonies in Latin America and Asia, increasing productivity through speedup and the institution of “two-tier” wage and benefits packages for younger workers. A key turning point was the smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981. It was Democratic president Jimmy Carter who drew up the plan to crush PATCO, which was implemented by his Republican successor, Ronald Reagan. The AFL-CIO bureaucrats let Reagan get away with it, crucially by refusing to call out other unions to shut down the airports. This defeat helped usher in a wave of broken unions and busted strikes.
Like Obama today, Reagan manufactured a debt crisis in order to destroy social programs. The “war on poverty” programs enacted to buy social peace in the inner cities following the mass ghetto upheavals of the 1960s were increasingly shredded. But it took Democratic president Bill Clinton to finally eliminate “welfare as we know it.” Acting on Reagan’s racist demagogy about black “welfare queens” living off the back of “hard-working taxpayers,” Clinton abolished Aid to Families with Dependent Children for impoverished single mothers and their families.
Reagan had run a huge deficit spending program, slashing taxes for the rich while borrowing massively from Japanese and German bankers as well as oil-rich Arab sheikdoms. The overriding purpose was a huge military buildup for U.S. imperialism’s Cold War drive against the Soviet Union. Despite its bureaucratic degeneration under Stalin, the Soviet workers state continued to embody the main social gains of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The imperialists were determined to reconquer this vast territory—one-sixth of the planet—for their exploitation.
In 1991-92, the capitalists achieved their counterrevolutionary aim of destroying the world’s first workers state. Coming into office on the back of this “victory,” Clinton promised that the “peace dividend” would revitalize the economy by reducing the massive government debt. But the “dividend” was largely channeled into an orgy of speculative investment in telecommunications and Internet services, the so-called dot-com boom of the mid-late 1990s. That bubble burst in 2000-2001, ushering in another recession.
Clinton’s neoliberal Democrats were followed by the Republican neo-cons of the George W. Bush administration. These nuclear cowboys invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to send a message to the rest of the world that the U.S. remained militarily the top dog on the planet. These wars and occupations were financed through foreign borrowing, while the filthy rich got a tax cut that outdid even the free lunch they got under Reagan. Then the housing-price bubble of the early-mid 2000s burst in 2007-2008, touching off a global financial crisis. Today, we have Barack Obama lamely responding to Standard & Poor’s reduction of its AAA rating of U.S. treasury bonds by declaring that the U.S. has “always been and always will be a triple A country.” The stock market responded by taking a $2 trillion nosedive.
After the Soviet Union’s counterrevolutionary destruction, it appeared that the U.S. imperialists were successful in the quest they had begun almost a century earlier to be the masters of the world. But even as the U.S. has achieved unrivaled military supremacy, its domestic industrial base has continued to corrode. To some in the haughty U.S. ruling class, the decline of the country’s economic might is bereft of any explanation—besides being contrary to “God’s will.” In consequence, a wing of the American bourgeoisie has seemingly gone totally insane.
Even by the lights of their own party’s establishment, the current crop of Republican presidential candidates has gone off the deep end. On the campaign trail in Iowa, Texas governor Rick Perry accused the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, of treason for “printing more money to play politics,” threatening “we would treat him pretty ugly in Texas.” Perry, a dangerous reactionary, is here going after a Republican appointee of the Bush administration whose “soft money” policy has in fact been a boon for the bourgeoisie. By driving real interest rates down below zero, the Fed is essentially paying financial capitalists to borrow from the government—and then invest the money for a profit!
A week before Perry entered the race, he was the star of a 20,000-strong Christian fundamentalist revival meeting where he asked God to save the U.S. economy. Rival presidential candidate Michele Bachmann fervently believes that she and other good Christians are to be gathered in the air to sit at the right hand of God during what some call the coming “Rapture.” In their deranged worldview, Perry and Bachmann have much in common with the mad miracle monk Rasputin, who advised the Russian tsarina in the dying days of the brutal and rotted-out Tsarist Empire. Obama hopes to ride back into the Oval Office as the “sane” alternative, one who can more effectively implement a bipartisan drive to slash every remaining social program that reflects an impulse not to see masses of starving, homeless people in the streets.
There is no question that the current Republican candidates are lunatics. But their lunacy is the reflection of the dangerous irrationality of the U.S. imperialist order. Just as the decadent, crazed and corrupt court of the tsars was swept away by the Russian Revolution, we Marxists are determined to build the revolutionary internationalist party that can lead the workers in overthrowing the decaying rule of American capitalism.
For an International Socialist Planned Economy!
The reformist left pleads that the government “tax the rich” to provide the money for jobs, education, welfare for the poor and other beneficial programs. This refrain was recently taken up by multibillionaire Warren Buffett in a New York Times (14 August) op-ed column titled “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich.” In response, a Fox TV business analyst denounced Buffett, one of the world’s wealthiest financial profiteers, as a “socialist”! Actually, it is the fear that the masses might revolt that concerns Buffett, who opined: “Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.”
Amid a sea of millions of unemployed, the corporations and banks are sitting on mountains of cash. But you aren’t going to get your hands on it by appealing to the tax authority of the capitalist state, whose purpose is to guarantee and defend the interests of the bourgeoisie. To resolve their debt crisis, state and local governments are slashing pensions for retirees to pay off bondholders. To “make the rich pay,” the working class has to smash the rule of the bourgeoisie!
In an ideological climate conditioned by the imperialists’ proclamations that the destruction of the Soviet Union proved Marxism to be a “failed experiment,” the prospect of proletarian socialist revolution might appear implausible. But the collectivized economy in the Soviet Union worked! Despite its isolation in a world dominated by imperialism, the Soviet Union, arising from deep backwardness and the destruction of world war, civil war and imperialist intervention, became an industrial and military powerhouse.
Now, two decades after counterrevolution destroyed the Soviet degenerated workers state, many in Russia hark back to when they were guaranteed a job, education, housing, health care and vacations, regretting that they were taken in by the myth of capitalist “democracy.” What undermined the collectivized economy, and ultimately laid the basis for the destruction of the Soviet Union itself, was the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy, which robbed the workers of their political power and vainly sought to appease the imperialists by selling out workers’ struggles in other countries.
Today, the deep economic crisis in the capitalist countries contrasts sharply with the situation in China, where the industries central to production are collectivized. At the same time that the U.S. and European governments have been bailing out the financial capitalists while making the workers pay, Beijing has massively channeled investment into developing infrastructure and productive capacity. Faced with a growing number of strikes and protests, the regime has increased the income of workers and peasants. However, China’s Stalinist regime undermines the social gains of the 1949 Revolution by conciliating imperialism and promoting “market reforms” that strengthen internal counterrevolutionary forces. In its “partnership” with world capital, the Beijing bureaucracy is subsidizing American imperialism through its huge investment in U.S. treasury bonds, which, among other things, are used to finance the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As Trotskyists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state against imperialism and internal counterrevolution. At the same time, we understand that the defense and international extension of the remaining gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution require a proletarian political revolution to replace the Stalinist bureaucrats with a revolutionary internationalist leadership and a regime of workers democracy.
As we wrote in our article “Wall Street Nightmare Stalks Working People” (WV No. 921, 26 September 2008):
“You can solve a lot of problems with ‘domestic cash transfers’—make life livable for workers, blacks, Latinos, jobless, homeless, welfare mothers, drug users, etc. And we communists intend to do so. But you have to first smash the power of the bourgeoisie. For that you need to build a workers party, one that doesn’t ‘respect’ the property values of the bourgeoisie, a party that says to the exploited and oppressed: we want more, we want all of it, it ought to be ours, so take it. And when we have the wealth of this country, we will begin to build a planned socialist economy on an international scale. Then we can right some historical wrongs and crimes and pay off some debts left over by our rulers, like some tens of billions of dollars to the Vietnamese and others whose countries have been maimed under the passing treads of American tanks. As for ‘compensation’ to the people who have driven the United States to ruin, we can offer to those who don’t get in our way that they will live to see their grandchildren prosper in a truly humane society.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)