From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-Their Struggles To Build Communist Organizations-The Early Days

From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-Their Struggles To Build Communist Organizations-The Early Days

 

Click below to link to the Marx-Engels Internet Archives.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/

Sam Eaton had to laugh, laugh a little anyway when he read something written by his old friend and longtime political accomplice Ralph Morris whom he had recently asked to write a little remembrance of the time in the 1970s when he first started to identify with the working class anthem, The Internationale, for an archival protest music blog that another friend of his Fritz Jasper ran. By the way don’t take that accomplice designation in a criminal way just because they had been arrested a number of times at various sit-ins, walk-ins, and the like, hell, once in Washington, D.C. on May Day 1971. That had been the day they first met just for being on the streets, although both would have to confess the reason for being in the streets was to shut down the government if it did not shut down the Vietnam War and maybe the government from its bastardly perspective had reason to sweep them up. Sam just didn’t want to use the word comrade these days when it had fallen out of favor as a term for working together politically. 

Ralph had gone out of his way to note in that blog entry for Fritz that before he got “religion” on the anti-war and later social justice issues he held as many anti-communist prejudices as anybody else in Troy, New York where he hailed from, not excluding his rabidly right-wing father who never really believed until his dying days in 2005 that the United States had lost the war in Vietnam. Ralph had also expressed his feelings of trepidation when after a lot of things went south on the social justice front with damn little to show for all the arrests, deaths, and social cataclysm he and Sam had gotten into a study group in Cambridge run by a “Red October Collective” which focused on studying “Che” Guevara and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky after an introduction to the Marxist classics. Sam who was living in a commune in Cambridge at the time, the summer of 1972, had invited Ralph to come over from Troy to spent the summer in the study group trying to find out what had gone wrong (and right too, as Sam told him not to forget), why they were spinning their wheels trying to change the world for the better just then and to think about new strategies and tactics for the next big break-out of social activism. At the end of each meeting they would sing the Internationale before they broke up. At first Ralph had a hard time with the idea of singing a “commie” song (he didn’t put it that way but he might as well have according to Sam) unlike something like John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance, songs like that. As he, they got immersed in the group Ralph lightened up and would sing along if not with gusto then without a snicker.

That same apprehensive attitude had prevailed when after about three meetings they began to study what the group leader, Jeremy, called classic Marxism, the line from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. See Ralph, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war movement for personal reasons at first which had to do a lot with ending the war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking world” (Ralph’s term). Ralph, who had served in the military in Vietnam, had been a grunt, and who had even extended his tour to eighteen months to get out a little early from his enlistment, had become fed up with what the war had done to him, what he had had to do to survive, what his buddies had had to do to survive and what the American government had turned them all into, nothing but animals, nothing more, as he told everybody who would listen. When he was discharged in late 1969 he wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and taking part in a lot of their actions around Albany and New York City mainly but also the key one for this piece the May Day demonstrations down in Washington, D. C. on May Day 1971 when they attempted, massively unsuccessfully attempted, to shut down the government if it would not shut down the war.

That event is when Ralph and Sam met, Sam having come down to Washington with a group of Cambridge radicals and “reds” to do what he could to shut down the war. They met on the bizarre football field at RFK Stadium which was the main holding area for the thousands of people arrested that day (and throughout the week) when Ralph noticed Sam wearing a VVAW button and asked him if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little sheepishly, explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was the sole support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away of a massive heart attack in 1965. He then told Ralph the reason that he had joined the anti-war movement after years of relative indifference since he was not involved had been that his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in the Central Highlands and that made him question what was going on. At first he had worked with Quakers and other pacifist types doing acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, military bases and recruiting stations to try to get the word out to kids who might get hoodwinked in joining up in the slaughter. As the war dragged on though he started going to Cambridge meetings where more radical elements were trying to figure out actions that might stop the damn war cold and that appealed to him more than the “assuming the government was rational and would listen to reason” protest actions of those “gentile little old ladies in tennis sneakers.” Sam too at that point in 1971 was like Ralph just trying to get the war ended, maybe help out the Panthers a little but before May Day had no grandiose ideas about changing the “whole freaking world.”                           

So May Day was a watershed for both men, both sensing that even to end the war would take much more, and many more people, than they had previously expected. Ralph, in particular, had been carried away with the notion that what he and his fellow veterans who were going to try to symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as veterans would cause the government pause, would make them think twice about any retaliation to guys who had served and seen it all. Ralph got “smart” on that one fast when the National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it that day, treated them like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968, treated them like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and like anybody else who raised their voices against governmental policy in the streets.

They were thus searching for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those few days of detention in D.C. not only started what would be a lifelong personal friendship but an on-going conversation between them over the next several years about how to bring about the greater social change they sensed was needed before one could even think about stopping wars and stuff like that. Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red collectives” that were sprouting up them peopled by others who had the same kind of questions which they would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few years before both men sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s had ebbed. 

But Ralph remained for a long time very unsure that studying with “reds,” studying Marx was the right thing to do, and Sam would confess later that he too had concerns based on his upbringing in Carver down in southeastern Massachusetts, the cranberry capital of the world then, and another working-class town like Troy, New York. Ralph had imbibed all the all the working class prejudices against reds (you know communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy), against blacks (stood there right next to his father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with him and his corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people sometimes to their faces), against gays and lesbians (you know fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where they spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other), against uppity woman (servile, domestic women like his good old mother and wanna-bes were okay). Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar. But mainly he had been a red, white and blue American patriotic guy who really did have ice picks for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around his hometown way).

Such thoughts even with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back of his brain crossed his mind when he thought of Marx, Lenin (he was not familiar very much with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes. Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told Ralph one night after a class and they were tossing down a few at Jack’s before heading home.

And the Marxism did not come easy, the theory part, maybe for Ralph a little more than Sam who had taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had been running since his father’s death (although for periods his old Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his campaigns). They got that the working-class, their class, should rule and be done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind Marxism, that impossible to read Das Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with seven seals for them both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976 when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see they hung around with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation struggles and political prisoner defense work.

After that time while they would periodically read the left press and participate any time somebody, some group needed bodied for a rally, demonstration, some street action they would be there in their respective hometowns that they both eventually filtered back to. Then 2002 came and the endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and seemingly a million other places drove them to drop their “armed truce” (Sam’s term picked up by Ralph) with society and return to the streets , return with an almost youthful vengeance. They would see young people at the rallies hocking their little Marxist papers, maybe buy one to read a home but that flame that had caused them to join study groups, to work with Marxist-oriented “red collectives,” to read books that were hard to fathom had passed, had passed just as socialism as a way to end humankind’s impasses had fallen out of favor once the Soviet Union and its satellites had gone up in a puff of smoke. Sam thought one time that maybe those earnest kids with their wafer-thin newspapers will study the classics and make more sense out of them than Sam and Ralph could. They would now just keep showing up to support the good old cause.               

Fritz Jasper comment:

The foundation article by Marx or Engels listed in the headline goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in other posts in this space. Just below is a thumbnail sketch of the first tentative proceedings to form a communist organization that would become a way-station on the road to building a Bolshevik-type organization in order fight for the socialist revolution we so desperately need and have since Marx and Engels first put pen to ink.

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Marx/Engels Internet Archive-The Communist League

A congress of the League of the Just opened in London on June 2, 1847. Engels was in attendance as delegate for the League's Paris communities. (Marx couldn't attend for financial reasons.)

Engels had a significant impact throughout the congress -- which, as it turned out, was really the "inaugural Congress" of what became known as the Communist League. This organization stands as the first international proletarian organization. With the influence of Marx and Engels anti-utopian socialism, the League's motto changed from "All Men are Brothers" to "Working Men of All Countries, Unite!"

Engels: "In the summer of 1847, the first league congress took place in London, at which W. Wolff represented the Brussels and I the Paris communities. At this congress the reorganization of the League was carried through first of all. ...the League now consisted of communities, circles, leading circles, a central committee and a congress, and henceforth called itself the 'Communist League'."

The Rules were drawn up with the participation of Marx and Engels, examined at the First Congress of the Communist League, and approved at the League's Second Congress in December 1847.

Article 1 of the Rules of the Communist League: "The aim of the league is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes, and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property."

The first draft of the Communist League Programme was styled as a catechism -- in the form of questions and answers. Essentially, the draft was authored by Engels. The original manuscript is in Engels's hand.

The League's official paper was to be the Kommunistische Zeitschrift, but the only issue produced was in September 1847 by a resolution of the League's First Congress. It was First Congress prepared by the Central Authority of the Communist League based in London. Karl Schapper was its editor.

The Second Congress of the Communist League was held at the end of November 1847 at London's Red Lion Hotel. Marx attended as delegate of the Brussels Circle. He went to London in the company of Victor Tedesco, member of the Communist League and also a delegate to the Second Congress. Engels again represented the Paris communities. Schapper was elected chairman of the congress, and Engels its secretary.

Friedrich Lessner: "I was working in London then and was a member of the communist Workers' Educational Society at 191 Drury Lane. There, at the end of November and the beginning of December 1847, members of the Central Committee of the Communist League held a congress.Karl Marx and Frederick Engels came there from Brussels to present their views on modern communism and to speak about the Communists' attitude to the political and workers' movement. The meetings, which, naturally, were held in the evenings, were attended by delegates only... Soon we learned that after long debates, the congress had unanimously backed the principles of Marx and Engels..."

The Rules were officially adopted December 8, 1847.

Engels: "All contradiction and doubt were finally set at rest, the new basic principles were unanimously adopted, and Marx and I were commissioned to draw up the Manifesto." This would, of course, become the Communist Manifesto.

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Additional Fritz Jasper comment on this series:

No question that today at least the figures of 19th century communist revolutionaries, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, are honored more for their “academic” work than their efforts to build political organizations to fight for democratic and socialist revolutions, respectively, as part of their new worldview. Titles like Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, The Peasants Wars In Germany, and the like are more likely to be linked to their names than Cologne Communist League or Workingmen’s International (First International).

While the theoretical and historical materialist works have their honored place in the pantheon of revolutionary literature it would be wrong to neglect that hard fact that both Marx and Engels for most of their lives were not “arm chair" revolutionaries or, in Engels case, merely smitten by late Victorian fox hunts with the upper crust. These men were revolutionary politicians who worked at revolution in high times and low. Those of us who follow their traditions can, or should, understand that sometimes, a frustratingly long sometimes, the objective circumstances do not allow for fruitful revolutionary work. We push on as we can. Part of that pushing on is to become immersed in the work of our predecessors and in this series specifically the work of Marx and Engels to create a new form of revolutionary organization to fight the fights of their time, the time from about the Revolutions of 1848 to the founding of various socialist parties in Europe in the latter part of the 19th century.

History of the Paris Commune, Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, translated by Eleanor Marx, Black and Red Press, St. Petersburg, Florida, 2007

When one studies the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 one learns something new from it even though from the perspective of revolutionary strategy the Communards made virtually every mistake in the book. This book by a participant and survivor of the Commune has historically been the starting point for any pro-Commune analysis. The original English translation by Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx, has given the imprimatur of the Marx family to that view.

Through a close study of the Paris Commune one learn its lessons and measure it against the experience acquired by later revolutionary struggles and above all by later revolutions, not only the successful Russian Revolution of October 1917 but the failed German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese and Spanish revolutions in the immediate aftermath of World War I. More contemporaneously we have the experiences of the partial victories of the later Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.

Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of these later experiences, as if to show that history is not always totally a history of horrors against the fate of the masses we honor the Paris Commune as a beacon of the coming world proletarian revolution. It is just for that reason that Karl Marx fought tooth and nail in the First International to defend it against the rage of capitalist Europe. It is one of our peaks. The Commune also presented in embryo the first post-1848 Revolution instance of what was later characterized by Lenin at the beginning of World War I as the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement. So this question that after Lenin’s death preoccupied Trotsky for much of the later part of his life really has a much longer lineage that I had previously recognized. Unfortunately, as we are too painfully aware that question is still to be resolved. Therefore, even at this great remove, it is necessary to learn the lessons of that experience in facing today’s crisis of leadership in the international labor movement.
 
As a final thought, I note that in the preface to this edition that the editors have given their own view about the lessons to be learned from the experience of the Paris Commune. Although virtually every page of Lissagaray’s account drips with examples of the necessity of a vanguard party their view negates that necessity. While we can argue until hell freezes over, and should, about the form that a future socialist state will take one would think that there should be no dispute on that necessity of the vanguard party at this late date in history. In any case read this important work (including the above-mentioned provocative preface) as it tells the tale of an important part of our working class history. 

Support "Courage To Resist"-The Organization Supporting Military Resisters And Chelsea Manning

Support "Courage To Resist"-The Organization Supporting Military Resisters And Chelsea Manning 

Frank Jackman comment on Courage To Resist and military resisters: 

During the early stages of the Vietnam War, say 1965, 1966, frankly, I was annoyed at, dismayed by, appalled by and perplexed by guys my age, who were refusing to be drafted, refusing in some cases to even sign up for the draft (although I admit I was “late” signing up myself not for political or moral reasons but because I was not living at home having left on the first of about six estrangements from my family and did not receive the letter about the legal requirement to register until much later). Refusing and making a big public deal out of it. And this draft resistance movement was not some faraway situation heard on the news out in the suburbs about actions in the big cities or on some ivy-covered Ivy League elitist campuses but because while I was going to school I supported myself by getting up very early and servicing coffee- making machines in various locales in downtown Boston, including near the landmark draft resistance center, the Arlington Street Church (now U/U –Universalist-Unitarian but then I believe home to only one of the two having subsequently united but I am not sure which denomination ruled the roost at that location then although I believe it was the blessed Unitarians, now blessed for their generous help in the struggles against war and lesser known place of refuge for vagrant monthly folk-music friendly coffeehouses.) The Arlington Street Church moreover held itself out as a main sanctuary protecting under long time religious principles draft-resisters who had taken shelter there in order to avoid being arrested by federal law enforcement agents. So many mornings there would be a bee-hive of activity outside and around the church in support of the resisters. The sight of straggly guys and their supporters protesting would get my blood pressure rising.   

Now it was not that I was particularly pro-war even then, probably had not been in favor of escalation of that war and support to the South Vietnamese government since about the time of the Diem regime, the time before Jack Kennedy was murdered in 1963. Somehow I sensed that with each tragic turn there the noose of the draft would tighten around my own neck. But in those days, whatever else I held politically sacred, I, a working class guy from North Adamsville, held all of the usual patriotic sentiments about country, about service and about military duty of my neighborhood and upbringing.

 

As my grandfather, a veteran of World War I, said of his own experience of volunteering when President Wilson pulled the hammer down looking for recruits back then, never volunteer but if called you go, say you went willingly if anybody asked. So the thought of anybody “shirking” their duty if called really rankled me and while later I did a complete turn-around about the draft resisters, especially the ones who chose jail rather military service then I was disgusted. Disgusted as well by what I perceived vaguely as a class-bias about who was refusing to go and who had to go if those who would normally be called refused to go-working class and minority guys. Don’t hold me to some kind of prescience on that because that was just a vague underpinning for my general reasons of patriotic duty but in the case when I did my own military service, my infantryman grunt service guess who the other guys in the barracks and tents were-yeah, working class and minority guys.

 

I, on the other hand, have always admired military resisters since my knowledge of them and their actions came later after I had begun my sea-change of views. Knowing too by personal experience that “bucking” the Army system and winding up in the stockade, or worse the dreaded Fort Leavenworth every drill sergeant made a point of telling us about if we screwed up. But I was no resister having, frankly, done my time in the military, Vietnam time, without any serious reflection about the military, my role in the military, or what was just and unjust about that war until after I got out. After I got out and began to see things without “the fog of war” and its infernal “do it for your buddies” which is what a lot of things came down to in the end blinding me and got serious “religion” on the questions of war and peace from several sources.

 

At first I began working with the Cambridge Quakers who I had noticed around the fringes of anti-war GI work in the early 1970s when there was a serious basis for doing such work as the American army, for one reason or another whether the craziness of pursuing the war, racism, or just guy being fed-up with being cannon-fodder for Mister’s war, was half in mutiny and the other half disaffected toward the end of American involvement in that war. The Quakers front and center on the military resisters just as they had been with the draft resisters at a time when there was a serious need as guys, guys who got their “religion” in the service needed civilian help to survive the military maze that they were trying to fight. This connection with the Quakers had been made shortly after I got out of the service when my doubts crept in about what I had done in the service, and why I had let myself be drafted and why I hadn’t expressed serious anti-war doubts before induction about what the American government was doing in Vietnam to its own soldiers. But, more importantly, and this was the real beginning of wisdom and something I am keenly aware every time the American government ratchets up the war hysteria for its latest adventure, to the Vietnamese who to paraphrase the great boxer Mohammed Ali (then Cassius Clay) had never done anything to me, never posed any threat to me and mine. But as much as I admired the Quakers and their simple peace witness, occasionally attended their service and briefly had a Quaker girlfriend, I was always a little jumpy around them, my problem not theirs, since their brand of conscientious objection to all wars was much broader than my belief in just and unjust wars.

Later I worked with a couple of anti-war collectives that concentrated on anti-war GI work among active GIs through the vehicle of coffeehouses located near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and Fort Dix down in New Jersey. That work was most satisfying and rewarding as I actually worked with guys who knew the score, knew the score from the inside, and had plenty to tell, especially those who had gotten “religion” under fire although that experience was short-lived once American on the ground involvement in Vietnam was minimalized and the horrific draft was abolished as a means of grabbing “cannon fodder” for the damn war. Once the threat of being sent to Vietnam diminished the soldiers drifted off and the anti-war cadre that held things together as well.

What really drove the issue of military resistance home to me though, what caused some red-faced shame was something that I did not find out about until well after my own military service was over. A few years later when I went back to my hometown on some family-related business (another futile attempt to rekindle the family ties) I found out after meeting him on the street coming out of a local supermarket that my best friend from high school, Sean Kiley, had been a military resister, had refused to go to Vietnam, and had served about two years in various Army stockades here in America for his efforts. Had done his “duty” as he saw it. Had earned his “anti-war” colors the hard way.  

See Sean like me, like a lot of working-class kids from places like our hometown  up in Massachusetts, maybe had a few doubts about the war but had no way to figure out what to do and let himself be drafted for that very reason. What would a small town boy whose citizens supported the Vietnam War long after it made even a smidgen of sense, whose own parents were fervent “hawks,” whose older brother had won the DSC in Vietnam, and whose contemporaries including me did their service without a public murmur know of how to maneuver against the American military monster machine. But what Sean saw early on, from about day three of basis training, told him he had made a big error, that his grandmother who grew up in Boston and had been an old Dorothy Day Catholic Worker supporter had been right that there was no right reason for him to be in that war. And so when he could, after receiving orders for Vietnam, he refused to go (I will tell you more of the details some time when I ask him some questions about events that I have forgotten) and did his time in the military that way.          

Sean’s story, and in a sense my belated story, are enough reasons to support Courage to Resist since, unfortunately, there are today very few organizations dedicated to providing informational, legal, and social support for the military resisters of the heinous onslaughts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The organization needs the help of every ex-soldier who got “religion,” of every anti-war activist, and of every honest citizen who realizes, now more than ever, that the short way to end the endless wars of this generation is to get to the soldiers, get to the cadre on the ground fighting the damn wars. Enough said.     

 

A New Day? Organizing to Change US Policy on Israel and Palestine

A New Day? Organizing to Change US Policy on Israel and Palestine

A New Day?

Organizing to Change US Policy on Israel and Palestine

Saturday, November 14, 12:30 pm to 4:30 pm
Note New Location: Harvard University, Jefferson Laboratory 250, 17 Oxford St, Cambridge, MA

A half-day conference 

Speakers

Rami Khouri: a Palestinian-Jordanian and U.S. citizen whose family resides in Beirut, Amman, and Nazareth. He is director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut and he is a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative . His journalistic work includes writing books and an internationally syndicated column, and he also serves as editor at large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper.

MJ Rosenberg: A thirty-five-year career on Capitol Hill, at the State Department and, significantly, four years at AIPAC led Rosenberg to become a champion of Israeli-Palestinian peace and a vocal opponent of the right-wing "pro-Israel" lobby. Rosenberg writes for The Nation, Washington Spectator, and has a weekly column for the Huffington Post.  He blogs at http://mjrosenberg.net/

Nadia Ben-Youssef: a lawyer and human rights advocate serving as the first USA Representative for Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. After four years in the Naqab (Negev) in southern Israel leading Adalah’s international advocacy efforts on behalf of the Palestinian Bedouin community, she is now developing Adalah’s US advocacy strategy to shape American discourse and influence American policy and practice towards a human rights-based approach in Israel/Palestine. Nadia holds a BA in Sociology from Princeton University, and J.D. from Boston College Law School.

Waves of violence and reprisals, demolitions and detentions, religious incitement and “extrajudicial executions” are once again the norm in occupied Palestine, even as Israel’s Prime Minister comes to the White House in November to collect billions more in US military aid.  For a time, this horrible pattern was seemingly about to change.  Is change still possible?  

Our conference will bring together activists from a variety of local organizations and movements to ask:

• What is the current state of the US politics and policy regarding Israel-Palestine?

• What are the new opportunities arising from the growing partisan divide on the issue?

• What are the lessons from the struggle against South African apartheid?

• How can we organize more consistently and effectively to pressure our elected representatives?

The conference as a whole will assess the two Massachusetts senators, and also break up into workshops based on Congressional districts, with workshop leaders able to outline the experience so far and the members voting record.  It is expected that the conference will establish the organizational basis and mechanisms for improved ongoing work in this arena.

We invite area groups, activists and all those interested in Palestine/Israel/Peace issues to help better organize our efforts to challenge US government policy more effectively. In addition to other ongoing important campaigns such as direct solidarity, BDS and public education, we see the need for a simultaneous campaign to contest the reigning US government policies which enable Israeli occupation, oppression and military aggression.

Sponsored by the Massachusetts Peace Action Palestine/Israel Working Group. 

Cosponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace - Boston, United for Justice with Peace, Arlington UJP, Greater Boston Code Pink, Friends of Sabeel North America - New England Chapter, Dorchester People for Peace, Watertown Citizens for Peace, Justice and the Environment, North Shore Coalition for Peace & Justice, Tree of Life Educational Fund, Jewish Women for Justice in Israel/Palestine, Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East – Massachusetts chapter, Palestine Israel Task Team of First Church in Cambridge, Congregational, UCC, Cambridge Bethlehem People to People Project, Grassroots International, Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee, Merrimack Valley People for Peace (list in formation).

Sign up to attend.  $5 donation requested/ No one turned away.

For information contact pi@masspeaceaction.org or call 617-354-2169 

Yours for peace and justice,

In Maine October 31-Peace Delegation to Attempt to Enter BIW 'Christening' Ceremony to Deliver Letter to Elected Officials

In Maine October 31-Peace Delegation to Attempt to Enter BIW 'Christening' Ceremony to Deliver Letter to Elected Officials

 

October 31 in Bath

 

 

For Immediate Release

 

 

 

Representatives from various peace groups will attempt to enter the scheduled BIW ‘Christening’ ceremony of a new Aegis destroyer on Saturday, October 31 with a letter addressed to Maine’s elected officials who will be present at the event to give their ‘blessings’ to another expensive and destabilizing warship.

 

The groups will hold a legal rally on the corner of Washington and Hinckley Streets in Bath from 9:00 am to noon with speakers and music.  Near the end of the event they will send a delegation from the rally to attempt to enter the shipyard in order to deliver an “Open Letter to Maine Elected Officials” who will be speaking at the event.

 

The letter will include the following:

 

On this day another Navy Aegis destroyer is being ‘christened’ at Bath Iron Works and many of Maine’s elected officials will be present to give their official blessings.  These very expensive warships are outfitted with offensive cruise missiles and so-called ‘missile defense’ interceptors that in fact are key elements in Pentagon first-strike attack planning.  The Aegis warship program is not about defending our nation but in fact these ships are being used to provocatively encircle the coasts of China and Russia.

Under the former Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with Russia these ‘missile defense’ interceptors were outlawed because they were highly destabilizing to world peace – they gave one side a clear advantage and an incentive to attack first.  In 2002 Washington unilaterally pulled out of the ABM Treaty which has only resulted in a new arms race.

Today many of our elected officials will talk about the jobs that come from building warships at BIW.  What they won’t say is that the Navy ship building budget is unsustainable and that very soon the nation will hit the economic wall as aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and destroyers are all over budget.  In fact studies done by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst Economics Department have long shown that military spending is the worst way to create jobs – military production is capital intensive.  That means we get fewer jobs building weapons for endless war than any other job creation program.  The studies also reveal that if commuter rail systems were built at BIW we’d nearly double the jobs – something every politicians should be demanding.

We do have a serious problem today and that is to immediately deal with climate change and the growing acidification of the Gulf of Maine.  Increasing, due to warming oceans, the lobsters and other fish are moving further north to colder temperatures.  That means Maine’s fishing industry will be hit hard.  If Maine is to survive economically we need a crash program to reduce our carbon footprint on the planet.  Building rail systems, solar, wind turbines and tidal power systems would create more jobs and help us deal with the coming reality of climate change.

It is morally wrong for the US to think it can control the world.  The idea that the US is an ‘exceptional’ nation, better than the rest of the world, must give way to a humility where we see our place in the world as one nation amongst many.  We don’t have a right to control and dominate the world on behalf of corporate interests.

We call on all of Maine’s elected officials to find the courage to stand up and represent the future generation’s desire for life on our Mother Earth.  Our children and grandchildren cannot survive by us building more destroyers for endless war.  We need a future that is sustainable, practical and peaceful.  We don’t believe that Christ, the Prince of Peace, would come here and give his blessing to more war and violence.

 

This October 31 peace rally at BIW comes just one week after the conclusion of the 16-day Maine Walk for Peace: Pentagon’s Impact on the Oceans that began in Ellsworth, Maine and followed US Hwy 1 South to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  Along the way suppers were held each night in a different community and people were invited to come to BIW to protest the ‘Christening’ of another Navy destroyer on October 31.  Along the journey thousands of people directly witnessed the walking protest that called for an end to the militarization of the oceans.  The public was overwhelmingly supportive of the walk that also demanded the conversion of the weapons industry to sustainable production so that we can deal with our real problem – climate change.

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein will be one of the speakers at the BIW protest rally.

The October 31 rally is being sponsored by: Midcoast PeaceWorks; Smilin’ Trees Disarmament Farm; CodePink Maine; and the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space

Join Us-Protesters plan to enter Maine at Bath  shipyard during christening

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Courtesy of Bath Iron Works

Pictured are two of the three Zumwalt-class stealth destroyers under construction at Bath Iron Works, the DDG 1001, the future USS Michael Monsoor (far left) and the DDG 1000, the USS Zumwalt (far right), along with the Arleigh Burke-class DDG 115, the future USS Rafael Peralta, in between.

By Beth Brogan, BDN Staff

Posted Oct. 27, 2015, at 10:56 a.m.
Last modified Oct. 27, 2015, at 1:19 p.m.

BATH, Maine — With an estimated 3,000 people expected to gather at Bath Iron Works on Saturday to watch the christening of the 35th Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer built by the shipyard, peace protesters plan to use the event to condemn military spending and send a message to Maine’s political leaders.
Members of Midcoast Peace Works, CodePink Maine and other organizations will hold a rally near the shipyard, then send a “peace delegation” to attempt to enter the yard and deliver a letter to Sen. Susan Collins, Sen. Angus King, Rep. Chellie Pingree and Rep. Bruce Poliquin, who are expected to attend the ceremony, according to BIW spokesman Matt Wickenheiser.
Gen. Robert B. Neller, commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Sean Stackley and Vice Adm. Robin Braun, chief of the Navy Reserve and commander of the Navy Reserve Force, are also scheduled to speak Saturday.

The DDG 115 destroyer is named for Sgt. Rafael Peralta, a rifleman in the U.S. Marine Corps who was killed in action on Nov. 15, 2004, in Fallujah, Iraq.
Beginning at 10 a.m., protesters will rally at the corner of Washington and Hinckley streets, according to a release from Bruce Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. At the end of the event, they will send “a delegation” to attempt to enter the shipyard to deliver “An Open Letter to Maine Elected Officials.”
In the letter, protesters argue that “very expensive warships are outfitted with offensive cruise missiles and so-called ‘missile defense’ interceptors that in fact are key elements in Pentagon first-strike attack planning. The Aegis warship program is not about defending our nation, but in fact these ships are being used to provocatively encircle the coasts of China and Russia.”
The letter states that while elected officials will likely speak Saturday about the jobs created by building “warships” at BIW, “what they won’t say is that the Navy shipbuilding budget is unsustainable and that very soon the nation will hit the economic wall as aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and destroyers are all over budget.”
Peace vigils and anti-war demonstrators outside the shipyard during christenings are the norm, but it’s rare for protests to occur inside the yard. In February 1997, excommunicated Catholic priest Philip Berrigan and five other protesters were arrested after they entered the yard and poured blood on the USS Sullivans.
The christening is open to the public, but in order to attend the event, civilians must pass through a security check at a shipyard gate. Bath Police Lt. Robert Savary said Tuesday that protesters wouldn’t be allowed through if they are noticed. If they do get into the yard, police will issue a lawful order to leave, and if they don’t, the protesters could be charged with trespassing.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve had any major issues,” he said.

He Came Through The Woods-With The Carter Family In Mind

He Came Through The Woods-With The Carter Family In Mind 

 

He wasn’t his father’s only son, not by a long shot. There was Isiah, Levi, Joshua, Samuel, David and Isaac but Preston was his favorite, his youngest son that he got around to naming after him when the smoke blew off of his “burned over” religious experience when the evangelical movement made it way south as it did periodically through the mountains by the early 1920s and he had been a previous sinner “reborn” and stopped naming his sons after some ancient high king in heaven Jehovah and his progeny. Preston also had a parcel of sisters, his father’s measurement term for the girls that he had called Missy, Little Peach or “hey you” when they were younger and almost nothing as they came of age, became womanly with their womanly needs most pressingly to be separated in sleeping quarters from the boys meaning  that the old man was forever building lean-to sheds for each newly minted young woman in the back of the cabin giving the whole property the look of so many  mismatched ticky-tack boxes, which they were.  As the parcel came of age he could not frankly understand them and their ways any more than he could understand his late wife, Sarah, bless her soul, when it came right down to it but they were kin and so the boxes and the not so secret wish that some young bucks would come and take them off his hands.

It had not been that young Preston (that is how we will call it here since you know who old Preston is) was so like his father in his old-fashioned ideas about women, about religion (although the old man had calmed down a bit about the matter after Sarah died but he still read his good book every evening and while he was lenient about many things he still would not abide [his term] swearing in his house and put one than one boy out for a time to prove his point) but that he had an independent streak that he had sensed that he had gotten from the old man. Like the time that young Preston at age twelve had run off with a couple of boys from up the road, Hobart Smith’s boys, going up to the Ohio River from their home in Hazard, Kentucky to see if they could hear John Newbury and his Appalachian Mountain Boys play on a riverboat sited at Paducah.

See young Preston had the music bug just like his father had before he was married and before he came to believe against all good reason that music was the devil’s work (although here too the old man had backed down a bit only refusing to personally be the devil’s servant, again his term), had been working on his guitar for since he was eleven singing old Jimmy Rodgers tunes, you know the Texas yodeler although he was actually born in Mississippi for some reason, and a few from A.P. Carter’s vast collection of simple songs guaranteed to get the girls to pay attention. (Carter would go around the countryside into the hillbilly hills and hallows, into the Nigger-towns and grab up every song he could, rework them a little, although keeping some monotonous same melody and then copyright them as his own like a few other guys would do later like Bob Dylan with traditional songs that were in the public domain.

He needn’t have worried about the girls since from early on the girls around Hazard, Prestonsburg, hell, even down to Haran County come Saturday night barn dance at Red Miller’s old homestead the girls had eyes for him, and not just the younger ones either. (It was a sixteen year old girl from over in Lewisburg who took away his virginity and hers at the same time when he was fourteen so yes he did not need to worry on the young girl front). But the way he figured the situation the guitar was his way out, his way out of the coal mines that dotted the countryside that turned everything within a few miles into black, and more  black on top of that until one sickened of the color ruining the natural beauty of the valley. So young Preston would practice constantly, got pretty good at it until it was his time at fourteen to go into the mines to help the family, and go like his older brothers down to the pits along with half the men in the town (the other half not working, nor not wanting to work, just sitting on their front porch tar paper shacks drinking homemade whiskey or just hanging out looking to be hanging out. The classic Tobacco Road white trash situation that more than one author has milked for all it was worth, not too much worth in the end but enough to hang that name on them). So he went, went to do coal separation work like all the boys did on day one in the mines, and then to the mines themselves when he grew too big for the separation work.

But he always thought about that guitar, about that possible way out of his freaking existence (my term). Then one night when he was sixteen he and a couple of boys stepped away from the pits, went to find out if they could get away first and then when they did they went their separate ways and good luck. Preston to Louisville and then over to try his luck in Nashville in the Tennessee night. Got himself into a small school that taught him how to really play the guitar, got him to be able to carry a tune with some precision. Got him noticed too when he entered a couple of talent search competitions one which had been judged by the most famous one of the famous Lally brothers, Shiloh, the master fiddler who kept the group lively, and although he did not win that competition he made an impression on Shiloh by doing a deep version of Anchored in Love, the old Carter Family standard. Preston got offered a job travelling with the Lally Brothers as second guitar and maybe some vocals (although Shiloh preferred to sing solo most of the time).  

That went along for a couple of good years with Preston playing back-up guitar but occasionally lead on some bass-ful songs. Got him plenty of come hither looks from the girls too, one of the things that Shiloh had noticed about Preston in that competition he had judged when the girls all crowded around close. Then December 7, 1941 came and blew a hole in a lot of dreams, a lot of expectations. Preston, as patriotic as the next man, and a couple of the younger Lally brothers went up to Louisville to enlist in the Marine, Semper Fi guys no question. When the Marine sergeant recruiter noticed that Preston had worked in the mines he told him that guys with mine experience could be exempted from military duty since many, many tons of coal would now be needed for all the ships and other vessels that would go against the Axis powers. Preston laughed, told that recruiter that between digging god awful coal and facing the “Nips” (a common term referring to the Japanese) he would take his chances against the latter.     

And he did facing off against the hated enemy on all of the big Marine Pacific Island operations that his division was called to perform. Before being discharged he was assigned to the Naval Depot in Hingham in Massachusetts where he met his future wife, stayed there and didn’t prosper but didn’t complain when in his turn he had five sons who were raised somehow. He would sing old Hank Williams songs when his oldest son, Preston III asked him to do so taking out that old woe begotten guitar that he salvaged from a trip back home. But he never got up on that big high stage again.