This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
On The 100th Anniversary Of Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage Of Capitalism
Workers Vanguard No. 1091
3 June 2016
TROTSKY
LENIN
Imperialism and Capitalist Plunder
(Quote of the Week)
This year marks the 100th anniversary of V.I. Lenin’s 1916 work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Written amid the carnage of World War I, Lenin’s pamphlet was a pioneering Marxist analysis of the origin and workings of capitalist imperialism. For Leninists, the development of imperialism underscores the urgent need for an internationalist revolutionary party to lead the proletariat to power and root out the decaying capitalist order.
It is characteristic of capitalism in general that the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all who are directly concerned in the management of capital. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions. The supremacy of finance capital over all other forms of capital means the predominance of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy; it means that a small number of financially “powerful” states stand out among all the rest....
Typical of the old capitalism, when free competition held undivided sway, was the export of goods. Typical of the latest stage of capitalism, when monopolies rule, is the export of capital....
On the threshold of the twentieth century we see the formation of a new type of monopoly: firstly, monopolist associations of capitalists in all capitalistically developed countries; secondly, the monopolist position of a few very rich countries, in which the accumulation of capital has reached gigantic proportions. An enormous “surplus of capital” has arisen in the advanced countries.
It goes without saying that if capitalism could develop agriculture, which today is everywhere lagging terribly behind industry, if it could raise the living standards of the masses, who in spite of the amazing technical progress are everywhere still half-starved and poverty-stricken, there could be no question of a surplus of capital. This “argument” is very often advanced by the petty-bourgeois critics of capitalism. But if capitalism did these things it would not be capitalism; for both uneven development and a semi-starvation level of existence of the masses are fundamental and inevitable conditions and constitute premises of this mode of production. As long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will be utilised not for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country, for this would mean a decline in profits for the capitalists, but for the purpose of increasing profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries. In these backward countries profits are usually high, for capital is scarce, the price of land is relatively low, wages are low, raw materials are cheap.
—V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)
Love In Asia Times-William Holden And Jennifer Jones’ Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing,
DVD Review
By Sam Lowell
Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing, Jennifer Jones, William Holden,
based on an autobiographical novel by Han Suyin, 1955
Hollywood, now Bollywood and rest of the world cinematic trends
as well, has always thrived on, heck, lived for decent if forlorn romantic movies
to set the hearts of the female patrons a-flitter (and get the guys or these
days whoever the escort may be to take the next seat). Back in the day, back in
the post-Code 1950 (well before subject matter, nudity, profanity and whatever else
a production company could think of to tititilate trumped the restrictions of
the increasingly unenforceable Code) most of the romances were straightforward,
were look a-like boy meets look a-like-girl vehicles (meaning same race).
Seldom did Hollywood venture in interracial relationships (at a time when in the
United States it was illegal for blacks and whites to intermarry, for example)
and so the subject matter here struck me as a viewer in 2016 of the 1955 “tear-jerker”
(good “tear-jerker” but tear-jerker nevertheless) Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing seemed as rather going against the stream.
Of course the main character Mark Elliot, played by William Holden
last seen in this space face down in faded film start Norma Desmond’s swimming
pool in the Oscar-winning Sunset
Boulevard, a classic All-American guy, good-looking guy with physique to
match, a writer, a newspaper writer living in Hong Kong waiting for the other
shoe to drop in the coming to a head Chinese Civil War is looking for love in
all the wrong places. But he can be excused for his errors since he was tied
down by an extremely unhappy marriage (to an unseen off-screen wife) and because
he was attracted to the Eurasian beauty Han Suyin, a stern and solid doctor out
to help her people, her Chinese people. Of course, maybe reflecting the tenor of
the times, as well that Eurasian beauty Suyin was played by the American actress
from Oklahoma Jennifer Jones (last seen in this space playing a seemingly goofy
Brit in Beat The Devil) and not a real
Eurasian beauty. (By the way Jones seems to have been an all-purpose 1950s “ethnic”
playing Latina, Native American and that Brit role as well).
In the nature of such films Mark and Suyin, or rather Suyin
played hard to get, or rather has no time for romance since the death of her
Nationalist-side husband in the civil war. She is all about work, all about not
getting involved with a married man (at least he was honest with her at the beginning
about his marital status), above all very concerned about being a proper Chinese
high society denizen above reproach and above getting tangled up with a gringo.
But he wears her defenses down and they begin thinking about marriage to make things
right (everybody except twelve year old boys like me when I was twelve back when
this film was first released knew they were “hitting the satin sheets,” having
sex, making love not shown on the screen in those days so leaving us clueless about
those chaste love scenes and then fade as usual). Making her an honest woman in
society, Chinese society as well as colonial, where she faced some serious
scorn and trauma for hanging with Mark. Including losing her position in the British
Crown Colony hospital. Then the Korean War came along to “save” them once Mark’s
wife would not divorce him. Came along and solved everything when he was killed
while reporting from that benighted place, leaving Suyin with nothing but beautiful
memories of her beautiful man. Love may be many-splendored but sometimes it’s a
tough dollar too. Like I said a tear-jerker, a good tear-jerker, but tear-jerker
nevertheless.
Ralph Morris had recently written a letter to his old friend and comrade Sam Lowell from the Vietnam anti-war struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s about how the advent of the Internet and with it the instrument of blogging many old time radicals like themselves had gained a new lease on life or at least some kind of cyber-audience after years of small rallies, small demonstrations, writing for small unread journals and preaching to the choir. Well, maybe not so many old time radicals since that lot has been as subject to the hazards of the actuarial charts as any other aging demographic and additionally subject to the change of heart politics that come over people as they age, and age especially in the post 9/11 world when many of them have unquestionably sided with whatever Washington regime was most belligerent in its use of military weaponry to make Americans “safe” in a dangerous world. Ralph noted a few blogs that he had “followed” (following in cyberspace not requiring anything more than a click to link you in as a follower, or another clink to opt out of status, and not anything as sinister as some cult nightmare thing that every parent worries about happening to their kids) including The Rag Blog out of Texas where he noted that every well-known and half-well-known name from the counter-cultural and oppositional politics of the 1960s apparently had found a home.
Ralph encouraged Sam to “follow” that blog to see what he meant. Sam did so for a while and wrote back to Ralph that he thought it was ironic that so many still-living personalities from that time like Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers, Bernadette Dohr, the late Carl Davidson and a host of others who had run themselves ragged (and others, too many others, many leaving the movement never to return as a result ) with whatever ill-conceived theory they could come up with to seem “smart” against the most vicious powerful enemies of all humankind, chiefly in the "heart of the beast," the United States government.
Life, or at least the life of their theories, has not been kind to them and now a goodly number of them (check the Rag Blog if you don't believe is what both Ralph and Sam recommended when another old radical friend discounted what they had seen) have made that unkind condition a basis for further muddying the waters when what we need is some clarity. Sam and Ralph had always been rank and file radicals in the days when being so was a badge of distinction and still carry on the struggle as best they can while aging less than gracefully. That aging though apparently has not stopped Sam from getting bilious about those who “led” back in the day and who when the deal went down and the government unleashed its fangs went back to academia, the think tanks, and the small unread journals while guys like him who kept the faith have done so at some considerable personal expense. So Sam never a theorist, never a writer although not a Jimmy Higgins (a guy who set up the chairs at meetings stuff like that) decided to write something about those old time radicals still selling the same snake oil as they did in sunnier days. Here is what he had to say straight up:
When we were young, meaning those of us who were militant leftist baby-boomers back in the days that I now call the “Generation Of ‘68,” (that expression not made up by me but my old time radical friend Ralph Morris who serve some time in prison for participating in various actions and who saw that the people he was being led by make their significant actions in that year) we would chuckle/gasp/shriek in horror when some Old Leftists tried to tell us a few of the ABCs of radical politics (mainly Communist Party, Socialist Worker Party adherents, an occasion labor union bureaucrat devotee of the moribund Socialist Party, Max Shachtman on a rant, Albert Shanker ditto, some left-overs from the Workmen’s Circle and ageless Wobblies). (The designation “Generation of ’68 " for those not in the know signifying 1968 being a watershed year for lots of things from Tet in Vietnam bringing home the reality of the lost war to the general population [the military leaders and a few civilians in their more candid moments knew years before what a lost deal it was] to the American bourgeois political partyupheavals that led to Chicago Democratic Party Convention shedding of any pretense of civility in the summer and the May events in Paris which showed the limits of that student-based vision of the "newer world" we sought once the struggle for power, for state power was seriously on the agenda and we had to look elsewhere for some segment of society that had the social power to lead that struggle.)
Those scorned old leftists, again mainly old Stalinist Communist Party hangers-on (thuggishStalinists to boot) who survived the 1950s red scare by keeping their heads down (not a cowardly thing, the only cowardly thing being “snitching” to save your worthless neck when the "red-hunters" came knocking at your door, to do that surviving by any other means necessary including that down-turned head waiting for sunnier days when you could once again get a hearing in the public square) or moribund Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party members who survived the red scare by keeping their heads down (ditto on the above) as they carried the revolutionary torch forward and who had come of political age in the 1930s and 1940s had nothing to tell us. Yes, we young stalwart in-your-face-rebels were going to re-invent the world we had not made and we needed no old fogies to put a damper on our efforts. See we were going to re-invent that world without the hurts and sorrows accumulated from millennia of previous struggles to push the rock up the hill of human progress. Yeah, sure easy to see now but then as the poet said “to be alive was very heaven.”
Well, we fell significantly short of that aim, had that Promethean rock come speeding down over our heads the minute the American government felt the least bit threatened. (Chicago 1968, Kent State 1970 and for me personally May Day 1971 when we without anywhere near adequate forces or much of a strategy beyond taking to the streets and trying to shut down specific targets were going to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war stand as signposts to those failures.) Today I am still not sure whether in retrospect those scorned Old Leftists of old had anything going or not except cautionary tales but all I know is we are now cast in somewhat the same light. We are now the Old New Leftists.
Problem is that unlike our ‘68 generation, warts and all, there is no sizable younger crowd of young stalwart in-your-face-rebels to thumb their noses up at us. And there should be, should be youthful voices crying to the high heavens. (Recent small stirrings out of the remnant of Occupy and Black Lives Matter do not negate the greater youthful indifference to our message.) That has not stopped many old radicals, many who have not succumbed to old age and hubris, from trying to be heard. And one of the place they have congregated, for better or worse, at least from what I can see is at this site.
So I find this The Rag Blog website very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody with some kind of name familiar to me and who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. The remembrances and recollections recorded no question are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least any that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time New Left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. That socialist “paradise” is still as forlorn and faraway as ever. Still this is a must read blog for today’s young left-wing militants.
Recently I wrote a short piece, Looking For A Few Good Revolutionary Intellectuals, on a left-wing political blog centered on the need for revolutionary intellectuals to take their rightful place on the active left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines (or wherever they were hiding out and I named some of the possible locations that I had noted they were hiding away in). One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a few years back (Fall, 2011), the continuing failed efforts to stop the incessant American war machine, and the lack of serious and righteous response to the beating that the working classes and oppressed in this country (and internationally) have taken from the ruling class (classes) and their hangers-on a certain stock-taking was in order. A stock-taking at first centered on those young radicals and revolutionaries that I had run into in the various campsites and had talked to on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses.
I noted there, and the point is germane here as I try to place the remnant of old New Left represented by the contributors in The Rag Blog in perspective, that it is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory which I mentioned in the article still hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its capitalist globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high-speed communications, the increased weight that non-working-class specific questions play in world politics; immigration, the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.
That said I have also made a note that some of theories from the old days are now being re-tread by some of the old New Left denizens of this blog as if nothing had changed since the 1960s made me think that making the revolution the old-fashioned Marxist working class way is the beginning of wisdom. In the interest of full disclosure though back in the day I was as likely as anybody to adhere to all kinds of new theories (mainly because the old theories being old must be irrelevant, a notion that was widespread then) but life, political life, itself has already made its judgments on the worth of those theories for pulling humankind ahead. The class struggle exists, although in a very one-sided manner right now, one-sided on their side not ours, and any theory, any plan worth its salt, worth the righteous oppressed rising up against the robber barons should reflect that and at its core the teachings of Marx and his progeny still make sense.
One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out, more times than I care to mention included my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past.
Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on.
*In
Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Maumin Khabir,(
aka Melvin Mayes)
http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html
A link above to more information
about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement
Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war
prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag
Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found
Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of
the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal,
are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of
the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site,
seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more
public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand.
Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan
Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense
organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of
advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that
spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement
list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all
serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these
brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and
disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old
Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of
class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise
incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their
cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to
your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make
this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All
Class-War Prisoners Now!
Casablanca Mon Ami- With Bergman and Bogart’s Casablanca in Mind
By Zack James
Funny how the power of suggestion works sometimes. Take the
situation with Fritz Taylor who ever since he was a kid, a kid in high school,
unlike his old-time friend from those times, Frank Jackman, avoided going to
movie houses like the plague. Said he had had his fill of going to the shows
back in the day when they were a refuge against the storms in the Taylor
house-hold. Meaning he had to high-tail it out when his father started on one
of his three day toots, three day drinking bouts with demon whiskey who would
use Fritz, the youngest boy, as a whipping post for all the frustration that he
had in a world that had been closing down on him once the steady work at the
Adamsville Shipyard began to dry up in the late 1950s as the industry headed
for the cheaper foreign shores. Meaning having to get away from nagging Ma who
always had some case against him, some why did he do that or more frequently
later what didn’t he do this, and would not let it go. Meaning that from about
fifth grade on all the way through high school he would seek refuge and solace
in the darkness of a movie theater, many times with Frank who had his own home
battles to confront. So Fritz had had enough of that kind of darkness by the
time he had finished high school, gone in the military service during the
Vietnam War, had come out in one piece, mainly, and then headed out on his own
moving away from his old hometown to get a fresh start in Riverdale. And he had
ambled along on that film abstinence path for a long time, many years going to
the theater very infrequently and only when some dame that he was interested in
insisted, or else, the “or else” being depriving him of some fun time under her
linen sheets.
Then one day Fritz was reading another schoolboy old friend Sam
Lowell’s Paris Notebooks where Sam
had mentioned after returning from Paris a couple of years before that he and
his long-time companion would “always have Paris” after they had had a
wonderful time there, revitalizing their affair and so Sam had written about
the whole trip to express what those moments meant to him. Sam had regaled some
of the old corner boys, Fritz, Bart Webber, Frank Jackman, Jimmy Jenkins, and Jack
Callahan who still hung out together at The Dublin Grille in Gloversville on
occasion with his Paris tales and invited each man to peruse a copy of the
notebooks. Fritz, not much of a reader as a general rule had been intrigued by
the thought of reading Sam’s take on Paris since he had not been there since
the late 1970s when he was looking for some dope in the days when Paris was a
serious opium depot. One night with his wife, Melinda, away in Fox-dale caring
for the grandkids while their parents, his son Jason and his son’s wife Mona,
were on a weekend getaway to New York City he decided to read Sam’s material. He
had chuckled when he came up that “always have Paris” reference toward the end
of the story.
Of course Sam had “stolen,” if that was the right way to
describe the offense, criminal or not, the expression from the film classic
starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. That reference made him think about all the memorable
lines from that film, “Play it again, Sam,” “here’s looking at you kid,”
“Louie, I think this is the start of a great friendship,” “the troubles of three
people in this cock-eyed world,” “of all the gin joints in all the world,” “round
up the usual suspect,” and some others that he had half-remembered. Half-remembered
from the days at the Strand Theater in downtown North Adamsville where they
played nothing but second runs and because of that was a favorite hang-out of
town drunks (who slept through the features on the cheap on cold winter nights
in the days before homeless shelters came to North Adamsville with a vengeance with
the closing of the shipyards), 1930s and 1940s movie aficionados, the nostalgic
and kids like Fritz and Frank seeking refuge from stormy home lives. Fritz was
not sure how many times he had seen the movie but probably ten time including a
couple of dates with some “hot” girls who once he told them the plotline were
eager to see the film, a blessing for him and his cheap date expenses (and getting
plenty of plenty when they got all weepy and he had to console them).
Fritz wasn’t sure whether it was age or just a whole
scattered life since the last time he had seen Casablanca but he sensed that there were more famous lines than he
had been able to remember. He also wondered whether that film had held up over
time as a classic or its classic status was just a figment of his imagination,
thrilling to the nonchalant tough guy Bogie character, Rick, and on those cheap
date occasions the romance with the Bergman character, Ilsa. Of course these
days it is as easy as pie to grab a copy of virtually any old-time film via the
Internet or some other commercial outlet. He and Melinda belonged to the Netflix movie service mostly for
Melinda’s benefit to see her various made-for-television series and an
occasional film she wanted to watch the grandkids came over from Fox-dale for a
night or two. Fritz ordered the film and a couple of days later it arrived in
the mail. That afternoon he asked Melinda if she would like to watch the film
with him after supper. She was thrilled that he had asked her since this was a
favorite “tear-jerker” of hers back in her own youth in Fairhaven, had seen it
back then three or four time when she and a couple of girlfriends would travel
up to Harvard Square in Cambridge where it played in repertoire with a million
other old films at the Brattle Theater all through the 1960s and early 1970.
Although Fritz was not much more into writing than reading
as a rule he decided after seeing this update version of Casablanca to write his “take” on the film to present to the guys
the next time they gathered at their favorite watering hole. It might be good
for a few laughs or maybe a few deep breathes from old Frank Jackman. Here’s
what he wanted the guys to get out of the movie (with a little editing help
from Sam Lowell):
Funny how the beginning of the movie Casablanca originally released in 1942 during the height of World
War II in Europe and elsewhere started with the plight of refugees, refugees leaving
Europe to get to America, or at least get out from under the jackboot of the
Nazis who were rumbling over every people in every possible just then. It was
not then, like now, a time to be on the planet without a passport or a visa.
Hey, as we shall find out letters of transit would do even better wonders for
your future. So at the most general level this film is about people in need,
desperate need, of lots of dough and lots of decent passable paperwork. But no
Hollywood, Bollywood, French film product would ever get off the ground if it
was only about refugees desperate for decent passable paperwork and so those
damn letters of transit which were once in the possession ofa couple of German couriers need some
romantic boosting. And they will before all is said and done get plenty of
that.
Then she came in, or her fragrance, jasmine he thought, just
like that last god forsaken time drifted in and she followed, Yes of all the
goddam places in the world that she could have plunked down in it had to be at
his big ass old gin mill in the middle of nowhere. Yes, Ilsa didn’t know what
storms she would churn up by showing up with the heroic anti-Fascist fighter
Victor Lazlo at his front door. That last Paris scene between Rick and Ilsa had
been a disaster, she had blown him off at the train station by not showing up as
they were supposed to catch the last train out of Paris before the Germans came
swarming in to raise hell. No more, Jesus, no more. But as fate would have it
there was one more play left in their story.
See Lazlo, now a pariah in Europe, a hunted man by the Nazis
across the continent needed to get out of the place, needed to get out of
Casablanca like a million other refugees not quite so heroic, get to Lisbon and
from there to America to continue the fight. But he needed those damn letters
of transit especially as the local Nazi military leader some jackass Major was
pressing Louie to round up Lazlo and throw away the keys. Rick though still
sore about the whole lost love affair with Ilsa said “no go.” No go until she
went up to his room and tried persuade him in the way only a woman could,
although remember this is a 1940s post-Code film and so the “shocking, shocking
sex” scenes would be left to the imagination of the Fritzes and Franks of the
world. That deal sealed the Rick-Ilsa pairing were prepared to go off into the sunset
and happiness. Nice ending, right.
Except the world was on fire just then and the romantic
problems of three people, maybe four, didn’t mean much in the world scale of
things, and they didn’t. See Rick pulled a switch, got Louie to get Lazlo out of
detention, and instead of Ilsa and him as the plane left the fog-bound Casablanca
airport it left with Lazlo and his wife. Rick, well, Rick somehow made Louie
see the light, made him see that Rick’s having had to kill that German Major
who wanted to stop Lazlo in his tracks was not going to be good for his career
and so they blew under fog-cover old corrupt Casablanca together. Friends, bosom
buddies.
Click On Title To Link To The Rosenberg Fund For Children
I have added a link to the Rosenberg Fund for Children that honors the memory of American Communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed by the American government in 1953 for espionage of behalf of the Soviet Union. The fund provides much needed help for the children, etc. of those class warriors who have faced, are facing or will face the furor of the American imperial state. As I pointed out in a review of a book about the Rosenbergs last year (See April 2007 archives)- They were not our people but they were our people. As we approach the 55th Anniversary of their execution give this site a look.
*****Remembrances Of Things Past-With Jeff Higgins’ Class Of 1964 In Mind
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
There was always something, some damn thing to remind Jeff Higgins, Class of 1964, a fateful year in his life and not just because that was the year that he graduated from North Quincy High School down in outer edge of the Southeastern corner of Massachusetts. He had recently, well, let's call it 2014 because who knows when some iterant reader might read this and because that as will be pointed in a second has significant for why Jeff Higgins that it was one damn thing after another when dealing with that class issue. If you did the math quickly in your head while I was pointing to the significance you would know that year represented the fiftieth anniversary of the his graduation and furthermore had gone through something of a serious traumatic experience which left him numb every time something came up about that year, some remembrance. If you knew Jeff in 1964, or better in 2014, with his three messy divorces and several affairs from flings to some more serious relationships along with scads of children and grandchildren now from the marriages not the affairs, you would know that it was about a woman, always about a woman, he eternally afflicted as old as he was.
About a woman this time, this eternally afflicted time,named Elizabeth Drury whom he had had a brief puff of air affair with in that same 2014 but which had seemingly vanished in his dust of memory until he went up in the attic to clean up some stuff. (By the way not Liz, which would show a certain informality, a certain good sport and not standing on ceremony or Betty, a nickname which conveyed continued childhood in those days as old as a woman might be, so no way she was not anything but a proper Elizabeth-type, who held maybe Queen Elizabeth I, you know the so-called Virgin Queen, the one who ruled England for a long time and had more lovers than you could shake a stick at but all we knew then was that she was the Virgin Queen, as her model, even in high school.) Yeah finally getting rid of most of stuff which had been gathering dust, maybe mold for years, in anticipation of selling his house and moving to a more manageable condo, down-sizing they call it in the real estate trade, and found a faded tattered copy of his class’ remembrance card. You know those time vault cards that card companies like Hallmark, the source of this one, put out so that people, or this case the whole class by some tabulations, can put down favorite films, people, records, who was President, and other momentous events from some important year like a graduation to be looked at in later years and ahhed over. That yellowed sheet brought back not just memories of that faded long ago year but of Elizabeth in the not so faded past. So, yes, it was always some damn thing.
But maybe we had better take you back to the beginning, back to how 1964 and Elizabeth Drury had been giving one Jeffery Higgins late of North Quincy nothing but pains. Jeff had been for many, many years agnostic about attending class reunions, had early on after graduation decided that he needed to show his back to the whole high school experience which was a flat-out zero once he thought about every indignity and hurt he had suffered for one reason or another, and to the town, a small hick town anyway which needed to be fled to see the big old world. A lot of that teenage angst having to do with his humble beginnings as a son of a “chiseler,” not meant as a nice term, a father who worked in the then depleting now depleted granite quarries when there was work for which the town was then famous and which represented the low-end of North Quincy society. The low-end which others in the town including his fellow classmates in high school who were as socially class conscious as any Mayfair swells made him feel like a nobody and a nothing for no known reason except that he was the son of a chiseler which after all he could not help. (Of course those social exclusions played themselves out under the veil of his not dressing cool, living off the leavings of his older brothers, living off of Bargain Center rejected materials not even cool when purchased, you know, white shirts with stripes when that was not cool, black chinos with cuffs like some farmer, ditto, dinky Thom McAn shoes with buckles for Chrissake, just as his younger brothers lived off his in that tight budget world of the desperate working poor, of his not having money for dates even with fellow bogger’s daughters, and hanging corner dough-less, girl-less corners with fellow odd-ball bogger outcasts). So Jeff had no trouble drifting away from that milieu, had no trouble putting dust on his shoes to get out and head west when the doings out west were drawing every wayward youth to the flame, to the summers of love.
And there things stood in Jeff’s North Quincy consciousness for many years until maybe 2012, 2013 when very conscious that a hallmark 50th class reunion would be in the works and with more time on his hands as he had cut back on the day to day operation of his small law practice in Cambridge he decided that he would check out the preparations, and perhaps offer his help to organize the event. He had received notification of his class’ fortieth reunion in 2004 (which he had dismissed out of hand only wondering how the reunion committee had gotten his address for while he was not hiding from anything he was also not out there publicly since he did not have clients other than other lawyers whom he wrote motions, briefs, appeals and the like for, until he realized that as a member of the Massachusetts bar he would have that kind of information on his bar profile page) so via the marvels of modern day technology through the Internet he was able to get hold of Donna Marlowe (married name Rossi) who had set up a Facebook page to advertise the event.
That connection led to Jeff drafting himself onto the reunion committee and lead directly to the big bang of pain that he would subsequently feel. Naturally in a world filled with social media and networking those from the class who either knew Donna or the other members of the committee or were Internet savvy joined the class’ Facebook page and then were directed to a class website (as he found out later his generation unlike later ones was on the borderline of entering the “information superhighway” and so not all classmates, those still alive anyway, were savvy that way). On that website set up by tech savvy Donna (she had worked in the computer industry at IBM during her working career) each classmate who joined the site had the ability to put up a personal profile next to their class photograph like many other such sites and that is where Sam saw Elizabeth Drury’s profile and a flood of memories and blushes.
In high school Jeff had been smitten by Elizabeth, daughter of a couple of school teachers who worked in Marshfield and therefore stationed well above the chiselers of the town. But in things of the heart things like class distinctions, especially in democratically-etched America, are forgotten, maybe not rightly forgotten when the deal goes down but there is enough of façade to throw one off if one gets feeling a certain way,and sometime makes one foolhardy. That had almost happened to Jeff, except his corner boy Jack Callahan put him wise. Jeff and Elizabeth had several classes together senior year and sat across from each other in English class and since both loved literature and were school-recognized as such they had certain interests in common. So they talked, talked in what Jeff thought was very friendly and somewhat flirty manner (or as he thought later after the flame had burned out maybe he just hoped that was the case) and he formed an intention (that is the way he said it the night he related the story to me so forgive the legal claptrap way he said it) to ask her out even if only to Doc’s Drugstore for an after school soda and a listen to the latest platters on Doc’s jukebox which had all the good stuff that kids were dancing to in those days. He figured from there he could work up to a real date. But sometimes the bumps and bruises of the chiseler life left one with a little sense and so before making attempts at such a conquest Jeff consulted with Jack Callahan to see if Elizabeth was “spoken for” (Jeff’s term if you can believe that). See Jack, a star football player even if a chiseler's son got something of an exemption from the rigid routine of the social structure of the Senior class just by being able to run through defensive lines on any given granite grey autumn afternoon and had excellent “intelligence” on the whole school system’s social network, in other words who was, or was not, spoken for. (By the way that “grapevine” any high school grapevine, maybe middle school too would put the poor technicians at the CIA and the spooks at NSA to shame with the accuracy of the information. It had to be that resourceful otherwise fists would fly.) The word on Elizabeth, forget it, off-limits, an “ice queen.” So Jeff saved himself plenty of anguish and he moved on with his small little high school life.
Seeing Elizabeth's name and profile though that many years later made him curious, made him wonder what had happened to her and since he was now “single” he decided he would write her a private e-mail to her profile page something which the website was set up to perform and which the reunion committee was recommending alumnus to do. That “single” a condition that he now considered the best course after three shifts of alimony, child support and college tuitions made him realize that it was infinitely cheaper to just live with a woman and be done with it. Jeff wrote a short message asking whether she remembered him and she replied that she very well did remember him and their “great” (her term) conversations about Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway and Edith Wharton. That short message and reply “sparked” something and they began a flurry of e-mails giving outlines of their subsequent history, including the still important one to Jeff whether she was “spoken for.” She was not having had two divorces although no kids in her career as a professor at the State University. Somehow these messages led Jeff to tell her about his talk with Jack Callahan. And she laughed not at the “intelligence” which was correct but not for the reasons that Jack gave (her father was an abusive “asshole,” her term for her standoffishness and reputation as an “ice queen”). She laughed because despite her being flirty, at least that was what she thought she was attempting to do because she certainly was interested when they would talk Jeff had never asked her out and then one day just stopped talking to her for no known reason. Damn.
They say, or at least Thomas Wolfe did in the title of one of his novels-you can’t go home again but neither Jeff nor Elizabeth after that last exchange of e-mails about the fateful missing chance back in senior year would heed the message. They decided to meet in Cambridge one night to see if that unspoken truth had any substance. They did meet, got along great, had many stories to exchange and it turned out many of the same interests (except golf a sport which relaxed Jeff when he was all wound up but which Elizabeth’s second husband had tried to teach her to no avail). And so their little affair started, started with great big bursts of flames but wound up after a few months smoldering out and being blown away like so much dust in the wind once Elizabeth started talking about marriage. Jeff was willing to listen to living together but his own strange marital orbit had made him very strongly again any more marriages. So this pair could not go home again, not at all, and after some acrimonious moments they parted.
Jeff knew that was the best course, knew he had to break it off but it still hurt enough that any reference to 1964 made him sad. As he took a look at the sentiment expressed in that tattered yellowed document he had a moment reprieve as he ahh-ed over the information presented. Had he really forgotten that there was not Vice-Presidential succession then when Lyndon Johnson became President after the assassination of home state Irish Jack Kennedy. That My Fair Lady was popular then as now. That the Beatles had appeared on Ed Sullivan’s Show and done a film, that Chapel of Love had been a hit that year as well. That 1964 was the year the Mustang that he would have died for came out into the world. That gas was only about thirty cent a gallon, and that another Elizabeth, Elizabeth Taylor, married one Richard Burton for the first time (although not the last). And on the note he put the yellowed tattered document in the trash pile. He would remember things past in his own way.
No I was never a “Dead Head,” never would have accepted that designation in any case if somebody tried to lay that moniker on me, tried to tie me down with that crowd who lived and breathed (still do) for every tune the Grateful Dead ever produced. In the old days, the days of the 1960s mad dash to seek a newer world that got trashed about seven million ways before the deal went down and “the authorities,” as my mother used to say when speaking of the ruling class or its agents, pulled the hammer down and soured a whole generation, no, make that three generations now, working on a fourth recently born, since they are still furiously trying to keep us in lock-down mode, I went out in San Francisco by the moniker Prince of Love. So it wasn’t about the moniker, wasn’t about being type-cast, just wasn’t into the group, although half, more than half of whatever group I was travelling with at any particular time would have Dead-Heads and Dead music coming out the sound system to be heard in Afghanistan or some such place, personal musical preference is all.
By the way that "Prince Of Love" moniker was strictly among the brethren, those who were, literally, my mates on the yellow brick road converted school bus, Captain Crunch's bus purchased according to rumor never confirmed by me or admitted to by the Captain for obvious reasons, obvious legal reasons, by money made in a big dope deal, a marijuana/hash deal with some guys south of the border. Hell maybe I shouldn't be saying anything about the source now because who knows who is listening and looking and who knows if there isn't some infinite statute of no limitations on such transactions although I heard somewhere that murder was the only crime tagged with that designation. That old yellow brick road school bus converted into an itinerant home for wandering waywards and seekers was a mode of transportation which while not ubiquitous on the California roads, that distinction would go to Volkswagen mini-buses, they were not an infrequent sight and after a while were not remarked on by anybody but tourists averting their eyes and the eyes of their children aged five and up,and cops, the cops usually lookingfor that fatal violation, you know, the rear license plate light out, a sagging tire, too many people on the bus which allowed them to haul the beast to the side of the road and give some each dweller some hassle, some hassle man.( That "on the bus," our version of "on the bus" being an expression stolen from Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, our blessed mothers and fathers who had come on the road a few year before us to signify "cool," to signify that one had made the leap from square-dom, to signify until one "got off the bus," that the iterant life was worth pursuing for a while anyway until the dope, the road itself, or about six thousand other reasons to go home, or go stationary for a while.
A group of us sometimes sticking together for months like the Be-Bop Kid, Peter Markin, my closest friend since he hailed from North Adamsville about twenty miles north of my hometown of Carver, Tiny Slim Tim as you might suspect a giant whose real name was Dexter something and Butterfly Swirl (Catherine Clark) from down in Carlsbad who was “slumming” from the perfect wave surfer crowd she hung with in high school to see what the next best thing was in the frenetic California night until she she decided to "get off the bus" and go back to her perfect yellow-haired pruned surfer boy and who every guy on the bus took a shot at, including Be-Bop, and me stuck together longest. (Markin as it turned would stay out on the road for years after the rest of us "got off" the road since psychologically he had much more invested that most of the rest of us in seeing what he called the "new breeze coming through the land" before he ended up badly down in Mexico, all sister crazy, over a busted drug deal he was trying to put together with the cartel boys who were not pleased). Others, Mustang Sally (you can figure that one out if you know the song by the same name which went over as a wild rock hit when Mustangs, the cars, became the "boss" vehicle replacing the '57 Chevy in the imaginations of the generation of '68), Reefer Jones (ditto on the figuring out the "reefer" part just throw yourselves back to any urban college dorm, student ghetto apartment, rock concert and high school boys’ or girls’ lav when it filtered down to the teenagers after say 1965, 66 and sniff the air for a second-hand high and you will be on the right track), Guy Fawkes (after the high holy Catholic Church English plotter against the Protestant King James I who has had a resurgence lately between the NSA and the young libertarians, at least for wearing anonymous masks), Digger Stewart (after the 17th century English communists led by Gerrard Winstanley up on Saint George’s Hill for a while anyway, a movement before its time which unfortunately depended on the good graces of Lord Fairfax who soon withheld his favor and the whole affair when tumbling down but communists even today I notice still pay homage to those efforts and there is even an appropriate modern folk song The World Turned Upside Down commemorating that struggle) stayed for shorter periods.
I called the Captain Crunch Express home for a couple of years as we went up and down the coast looking for the heart of Saturday night, looking for the great blue-pink American West night as the Be-Bop Kid described it and everybody kind of bought into that idea, hell, maybe just looking to turn the world upside down like those Diggers up on Saint George Hill just looking to be left along to wander although none of us at the time either wanted to work the land somewhere almost all being strictly urban dwellers or find some old broken down house and convert it into a wayward-driven commune, and see if that life was any better than the gruel that was on tap for us by "straight" society, the gruel force-fed to us for no known reason. The “Express” named after the guy, Captain Crunch (real name Slade Stokes, Haverford College Class of 1958), an older guy of indeterminate means (nice way to put that dope-injected rumor, right) who actually knew Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, knew everybody who was anybody in the West Coast alternative cultural scene (for example could get “boss” tickets for 20 of us to the Fillmore to see the Jefferson Airplane when the Be-Bop Kid “married Butterfly Swirl, before she tired of the road, and after she tired of me, but that is a long story for another time), who bought and rigged the bus complete with outrageous high end sound system, or wink, wink, got it in some drug trade barter deal, and was some kind of father we never knew a la Jack Kerouac-Neal Cassady/drug lord/ philosopher king to us.
No, as well, I never went to one of the Dead’s sold-out stoned out concerts at the Fillmore (which the Captain also could get tickets for since he knew the Dead drummer whose name I forget and who I think passed away a few years ago), and something of a ceremonial rite of passage for those who did consider themselves “Dead Heads” and insisted that each and every time out they eat so much acid (LSD, blotter, and so on not battery acid or some such thing), smoke so many reefers (for the clueless see reference above to Reefer Jones, student ghettos, dorms and the like about 1965 and after), swallow some many bennies (speed my drug of choice then and later in law school where I used them just to get through the damn silly case studies we were required to know at the cost of being berated by some professor who had shark’s teeth and was not afraid to use them or leave incriminating slashes) just like the very first time they heard the Dead in order to get that same guitar rush that drove them to eternal fan-dom. And taking something from sports figures and their superstitions like the baseball players who eat exactly the same thing every day they on some kind of streak, a positive streak, who wear the same outfit, the same faded denim, throng sandals, flowered shirt, male, granny dress, sandals, flowers in hair, female, each time to be washed clean by the Dead magic. Of course those who never gave up the tradition had pretty threadbare outfits something just south of tramp/bum/hobo before Jerry went over the top, went to see the “fixer” man to get well one more time, one time too many. (Jerry should have read Nelson Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm to know you can never mess with the fixer man, never trust him either especially if he is a junkie too, can never get washed clean no matter what they say).The fixer man no friend as the lyrics to The Pusher Man by Steppenwolf make perfectly clear, goddam. So like I say despite the voodoo macabre stuff I have any number of friends who were/are ardent fans and they seem to be, well, normal, normal except in those flashback moments where they see “colors, man, colors,” speak of having “far out” experiences when they would/will get ready for a Dead concert. Remind me to tell you sometime about a friend of mine, a stone-cold Dead Head, from back in Carver, my growing up hometown about thirty miles south of Boston, who to give you an idea of the tenor of the times back then went from a foul-mouthed corner boy looking to do a nickel or dime in some state pen for armed robbery, or at least straight up robbery although if you are going to make a career of that you should probably be armed against the crazies out there, if the ‘60s hadn’t come along, actually using that moniker "foul-mouth" in high school, he said it turned the girls on, and maybe it did, to “Far-Out Phil” when he came West to join us. So even the best of them would succumb to the western winds and the ghost dance night until the wheels kind of fall off ….for a while.
But here is my take on the Dead just to keep things in perspective, just to keep things right. I, after a couple of years on the road out there, and maybe not directly in the inner circle of the hippie/drug/literary scene but close enough to get tangled up in the new dispensation I liked to look at the connections, the West Coast connections, where a lot of the energy of the 1960s got its start or if started elsewhere got magnified there. Liked to draw the lines, if you will, from the wild boy alienated, there is no other word that says it so well, bikers over in Oakland and the edges of other working-class towns, mostly white, mostly with some kind of Okie/Arkie background roaring up the streets of Squaresville in search of the village daughters and putting the fear in the average citizen who thought Attila the Hun’s kin had descended, but remember that alienated part that is the hook-in to all the other stuff. Hot rod after midnight “chicken run” runners out in the valleys, alienated too but with a little dough and some swag and a hell-bend desire to go fast, go very fast, if for no other reason than to break out of valley ennui (although they would punch somebody out, fag bait somebody if they ever used such a word in their presence- if they knew what it meant) and surfer boys, coast boys and with a little more laid back approach in search of the perfect wave (read: Nirvana), maybe not quite so alienated because of that golden tan blonde dish sitting on the beach waiting to see if Sir Galahad finds the holy grail, golden tan blonde dishes like Butterfly Swirl who was a fox even when she wore a granny dress, to the “beat” guys Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg and friends running across America just to keep running, writing up a storm, wenching, whoring , pimping, white blue-eyed hipsters “speaking” be-bop to a jaded world, to sainted Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (and our Captain Crunch, leader of our own merry prankster psychedelic bus), the Hell’s Angels (bad dudes, bad dudes, no question), Fillmore with strobe light beams creating dreams, et. al and you have the skeleton for what went on then, right or wrong. Wasn’t that a time, yes, Lord, wasn’t that a time. And the Dead were right in the mix.
*****With Unemployment Still Way Too High, Way Too High - The Call "30 For 40"- Now More Than Ever- The Transitional Socialist Program
Click Below To Link To The Full Transitional Program Of The Fourth International Adopted In 1938 As A Fighting Program In The Struggle For Socialism In That Era. Many Of The Points, Including The Headline Point Of 30 Hours Work For 40 Hours Pay To Spread The Work Around Among All Workers, Is As Valid Today As Then.
From The Transitional Program Of The Fourth International In 1938- Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment,“structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
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As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
