An Encore Salute To The Untold Stories Of The Working- Class 1960s Radicals-“The Sam And Ralph Stories”- Hard Times Come Again No More -From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series-From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Allan Jackson, editor The Sam And Ralph Stories -New General Introduction

[As my replacement Greg Green, whom I brought in from American Film Gazette originally to handle the day to day site operations while I concentrated on editing but who led a successful revolt against my regime based on the wishes of the younger writers to as they said at the time not be slaves to the 1960s upheavals a time which they only knew second or third hand, mentioned in his general introduction above some of the series I initiated were/are worth an encore presentation. The Sam and Ralph Stories are one such series and as we go along I will try to describe why this series was an important testament to an unheralded segment of the mass movements of the 1960s-the radicalized white working- class kids who certainly made up a significant component of the Vietnam War soldiery, some of who were like Sam and Ralph forever after suspicious of every governmental war cry. Who also somewhat belatedly got caught up in the second wave rock and roll revival which emerged under the general slogan of “drug, sex and rock and roll” which represented a vast sea change for attitudes about a lot of things that under ordinary circumstances would have had them merely replicating their parents’ ethos and fate.        

As I said I will describe that transformation in future segment introductions but today since it is my “dime” I want to once again clear up some misapprehensions about what has gone on over the past year or so in the interest of informing the readership, as Greg Green has staked his standing at this publication on doing to insure his own survival, about what goes on behind the scenes in the publishing business. This would not have been necessary after the big flap when Greg tried an “end around” something that I and every other editor worth her or his salt have tried as well and have somebody else, here commentator and my old high school friend Frank Jackman, act as general introducer of The Roots Is The Toots  rock and roll coming of age series that I believe is one of the best productions I have ever worked on. That got writers, young and old, with me or against me, led by Sam Lowell, another of my old high school friends, who had been the decisive vote against me in the “vote of no confidence” which ended my regime up in arms. I have forgiven Sam, and others, as I knew full well from the time I entered into the business that at best it was a cutthroat survival of the fittest racket. (Not only have I forgiven Sam but I am in his corner in his recent struggles with young up and coming by-line writer Sarah Lemoyne who is being guided through the shoals by another old high school friend Seth Garth as she attempts to make her way up the film critic food chain, probably the most vicious segment of the business where a thousand knives wait the unwary from so-called fellow reviewers.) The upshot of that controversy was that Greg had to back off and let me finish the introducing the series for which after all I had been present at the creation.               

That would have been the end of it but once we successfully, and thankfully by Greg who gave me not only kudos around the water cooler but a nice honorarium, concluded that series encore in the early summer of 2018 he found another way to cut me. Going through the archives of this publication to try to stabilize the readership after doing some “holy goof” stuff like having serious writers, young and old, reviewing films based on comic book characters, the latest in video games and graphic novels with no success forgetting the cardinal rule of the post-Internet world that the younger set get their information from other sources than old line academic- driven websites and don’t read beyond their techie tools Greg found another series, the one highlighted here, that intrigued him for an encore presentation. This is where Greg proved only too human since he once again attempted an “end around,” by having Josh Breslin, another old friend whom I meet in the Summer of Love, 1967 out in San Francisco, introduce the series citing my unavailability as the reason although paying attention to the fact that I had sweated bullets over that one as well.      

This time though the Editorial Board, now headed by Sam Lowell, intervened even before Greg could approach Josh for the assignment. This Ed Board was instituted after my departure to insure the operation would not descend, Sam’s word actually, into the so-called autocratic one-person rule that had been the norm under my regime. They told Greg to call me back in on the encore project or to forget it. I would not have put up with such a suggestion from an overriding Ed Board and would have willingly bowed out if anybody had tried to undermine me that way. I can understand fully Greg’s desire to cast me to the deeps, have done with me as in my time I did as well knowing others in the food chain would see this as their opportunity to move up.  

That part I had no problem with, told Greg exactly that. What bothered me was the continuing “urban legend” about what I had done, where I had gone after that decisive vote of no confidence. Greg continued, may continue today, to fuel the rumors that not only after my initial demise but after finishing up the Roots Is The Toots series I had gone back out West to Utah of all places to work for the Mormons, or to Frisco to hook up with my old flame Madame La Rue running that high-end whorehouse I had staked her to in the old days, or was running around with another old high school pal, Miss Judy Garland, aka Timmy Riley the high priestess of the drag queen set out in that same town whom I also helped stake to  his high-end tourist attraction cabaret. All nonsense, I was working on my memoir up in Maine, up in Olde Saco where Josh grew up and which I fell in love with when he first showed me his hometown and its ocean views.          

If the reader can bear the weight of this final reckoning let me clear the air on all three subjects on the so-called Western trail. Before that though I admit, admit freely that despite all the money I have made, editing, doing a million pieces under various aliases and monikers, ballooning up 3000 word articles to 10,000 and having the publishers fully pay despite the need for editing for the latter in the days before the Guild when you worked by the word, accepting articles which I clearly knew were just ripped of the AP feed and sending them along as gold I had no dough, none when I was dethroned. Reason, perfectly sane reason, although maybe not, three ex-wives with alimony blues and a parcel of kids, a brood if you like who were in thrall to the college tuition vultures.

Tapped out in the East for a lot of reasons I did head west the first time looking for work. Landed in Utah when I ran out of dough, and did, DID, try to get a job on the Salt Lake Star and would have had it too except two things somebody there, some friend of Mitt Romney, heard I was looking for work and nixed the whole thing once they read the articles I had written mocking Mitt and his white underwear world as Massachusetts governor and 2012 presidential candidate. So it was with bitter irony when I heard that Greg had retailed the preposterous idea that I would now seek a job shilling for dear white undie Mitt as press agent in his run for the open Utah United States Senate seat. Here is where everybody should gasp though at the whole Utah fantasy-these Mormons stick close together, probably ingrained in them from Joseph Smith days, and don’t hire goddam atheists and radicals, don’t hire outside the religion if they can help it. You probably had to have slept with one of Joseph Smith’s or Brigham Young’s wives to even get one foot in the door. Done.              

The helping Madame La Rue, real name of no interest or need to mention,  running her high-end exclusive whorehouse out in Half Moon Bay at least had some credence since I had staked her to some dough to get started after the downfall of the 1960s sent her back to her real world, the world of a high class hooker who was slumming with “hippies” for a while when it looked like our dreams were going to be deterred in in the ebbtide. We had been hot and heavy lovers, although never married except on some hazed drug-fogged concert night when I think Josh Breslin “married” us and sent us on a “honeymoon” with a fistful of cocaine. Down on dough I hit her up for some which she gave gladly, said it was interest on the “loan: she never repaid and let me stay at her place for a while until I had to move on. Done

The whole drag queen idea tells me that whoever started this damn lie knew nothing about my growing up days and had either seen me in The Totem, Timmy Riley’s aka Miss Judy Garland’s drinking with a few drag queen who worked and drew the wrong conclusions or was out to slander and libel me for some other nefarious reason. See Miss Judy Garland is the very successful drag queen and gay man Timmy Riley from the old neighborhood who fled to Frisco when he could no longer hide his sexual identity and preferences. To our great shock since Timmy had been the out-front gay-basher of our crowd, our working-class corner boy gay-bashing crowd. I had lent, after getting religion rather late on the LGBTQ question, Timmy the money to buy his first drag queen cabaret on Bay Street and Timmy was kind enough to stake me to some money and a roof before I decided I had to head back East. Done.

But enough about me.  This is about two other working- class guys, Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris, met along life’s road one from Carver about fifty miles away from where Seth, Sam, Timmy and a bunch of other guys grew up and learned the “normal” working-class ethos-and broke, tentatively at times, from that same straitjacket and from Troy, New York. Funny Troy, Carver, North Adamsville, and Josh’s old mill town Olde Saco all down-in-the-mouth working class towns still produced in exceptional times a clot of guys who got caught up in the turmoil of their times-and lived to tell the tale. I am proud to introduce this encore presentation and will have plenty more to say about Sam and Ralph in future segments.]

***********

Hard Times Come Again No More -From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

As long as Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris had known each other they never spent much time or effort discussing their early lives, the events and happenstances of their coming of age. Maybe it was because they shared many personal similarities. Like their doggedness in pursuit when something important was on the line as it had been when Sam had vowed to fight against the war in Vietnam after his best friend, Jeff Mullins, who had been killed on the benighted battlefield there begged him in letters home to tell people what was really going on if he did not get back and Ralph having served in Vietnam had turned against the war that he had fought and tried to stop it every way he knew how and both men now in their sixties having put their lives on the line back then had stuck with the better instincts of their natures and were still fighting the good fight against the American government’s endless wars. Like their willingness to forgo life’s simple pleasures in order to provide for their families, a trait they had picked up from their own hard-working if distance fathers (they in turn if truth be told, or if you asked the collective broods of Eaton and Morris kids, courtesy respectively of two marriages and two divorces apiece, were hard-working and distance as well, more than a couple of them mad as hell about it too and the cause some periodic mutual estrangements). Like, to speak of the negative side, to speak of the effects of their hard-scrabble existences and the pull of other guys when they were young their delights in the small larcenies of their high school corner boy existences in their respective growing up towns in order to satisfy some hunger. Those “sins” (since both had been brought up in the Roman Catholic religion, a religion known for categorizing sins, great and small), made a close call, six, two and even, whether they would succeed or wind up in some jail doing successive nickels and dimes in the “life” (really not so small larcenies when one realizes that these were burglaries of homes, one of which in Sam’s crowd had been committed with at least one gun, if in the pocket, at least at the ready).

Maybe it was the Catholic reticence to speak of personal matters, personal sexual manners with another male (probably Catholic female too on that side but let’s stick to male here) both having come up “old school” working-class Catholics when that meant something before Vatican II in the 1960s when the “s” word was not used in polite society, not used either, God no, from the pulpit (even when discussion came up of the obligation to, unlike the bloody Protestants with their two point three children, propagate the faith; have scads of children to bump up the Catholic population of the world). Maybe closer to home, to domestic home life, it was the “theory,” probably honored more in the breech that the observance, of “not airing one’s dirty linen in public” drilled into them by their respective maternal grandmothers, especially when the “s” word was involved (certainly no parents gave the slightest clues on that subject probably assuming that the birds and the bees story line would suffice and both men learned like millions of their generation of ’68 kindred about sex on the streets, most of it erroneous or damn right dangerous).

Maybe, and this was probably closer to the core than the other possibilities, men of their generation, men of the generation of ’68 as Sam, the more literary of the two called their generation after the decisive year when all hell broke loose, for good or evil, mostly evil, did not as a rule speak much about private hurts, about personal issues unlike the subsequent generations who seemingly to both men’s  amazement (and occasional chagrin) kept their lives as open books in a more confessional time. That “generation of ’68” designation by the way picked up from the hard fact that that seminal year of 1968, a year when the Tet offensive by the Viet Cong and their allies put in shambles the lie that we (meaning the United States government) were winning that vicious bloodstained honor-less war, to the results in New Hampshire which caused Lyndon Baines Johnson, the sitting President to run for cover down in Texas somewhere after being beaten like a gong by a quirky Irish poet from the Midwest and a band of wayward troubadours from all over, mainly the seething college campuses, to the death of the post-racial society dream as advertised by the slain Doctor Martin Luther King, to the barricade days in Paris where for once and all the limits of what wayward students could do without substantial allies in bringing down a reactionary government, to the death of the search for a “newer world” as advertised by the slain Robert F. Kennedy, to the war-circus of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago which put paid to any notion that any newer world would come without the spilling of rivers of blood, to the election of Richard Milhous Nixon which meant that we had seen the high side go under, that the promise of the flamboyant 1960s was veering toward an ebb tide.

So the two men never spoke of various romantic interests. Never spoke of little rendezvous or trysts, never spoke of their two respective divorces much beyond recording the facts of the disengagements, and the animosity of the settlements which made nobody happy except the lawyers (although neither men were gripping since Sam’s old corner boy leader Frankie Riley performed “miracles” to get both men out from under the worse initial terms). Never spoke much about the difficulties of fatherhood for men who were so driven by the “big picture” world around them and, never spoke about the deep-seeded things that drove them both to distraction. At least that stance was true in their younger days when they had more than enough on their plates to try to keep the dwindling numbers committed to an all-out fight against the American military behemoth that had in a strange manner brought them together.   

Maybe too it could have been the way that they had “met,” that strange manner, a story that they have endlessly repeated in one form or another and which had been told so many times by Sam mostly in the old days in small alternative presses and magazines and more recently in 1960s-related blogs that even they confessed that everybody must be “bored” with the damn thing by now. So only the barest outline will suffice here since their meeting is not particularly relevant to the story except to help sort out this reticence about relationships business. Sam, an active opponent of the Vietnam War, and Ralph an ex-soldier of that war who had turned against the war after eighteen months of duty there and become an anti-war activist in his turn with Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) after being discharged from the Army “met” in RFK Stadium in Washington on May Day 1971 when they were down there with their respective groups trying to as the slogan of the time went “shut down the government, if the government did not shut down the war.”

For their ill-advised efforts they and thousands of others were tear-gassed, billy-clubbed and sent to the bastinado (ill-advised in that they did not have nearly enough people on hand and were incredibly naïve about the ability and willingness of the government to do any dirty deed to keep their power including herding masses of protestors into closed holding areas to be forgotten if possible although Ralph always had a sneaking suspicion the government would not have been unhappy seeing those bodies floating face down in the Potomac). Sam and Ralph met on the floor of the stadium and since they had several days to get acquainted were drawn to each other by their working-class background, their budding politics, and their mutual desire to “seek a newer world” as some old English poet once said. And so they had stuck together, almost like blood brothers although no silly ceremony was involved,  stuck politically mostly, through work in various peace organizations and ad hoc anti-war committees fighting the good fight along with dwindling numbers of fellow activists for the past forty plus years.                              

There were thick and thin times along the way as Ralph stayed close to home in Troy, New York working in his father’s high-precision electrical shop which he eventually took over and had just recently passed on to his youngest son and Sam had stayed in the Greater Boston area having grown up in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston building up a printing business that he had started from scratch and from which he in turn had just turned over to his more modern tech savvy print-imaging son, Jeff. The pair would periodically take turns visiting each other sometimes with families in tow, sometimes not and were always available to back each other up when some anti-war or other progressive action needed additional warm bodies in Boston, New York or when a national call came from Washington. Lately now that they were both retired from the day to day operations of their respective businesses and also now both after their last respective divorces “single” they have had more time to visit each other.

It had been on Ralph’s last visit to Sam who now resided in Cambridge that he tentatively broached to him his interest in the genesis of a term Sam had always used, “wanting habits” as in “I had my wanting habits on” when he was talking about wanting some maybe attainable, maybe not but which caused some ache, some pain, created some hole in him by not having the damn thing just in the way he said it. Of course maybe Ralph had been “rum brave” that night since he had asked the question while he and Sam were cutting up old touches at “Jack’s” in Cambridge a few blocks from Sam’s place and were drinking high-shelf whisky at the time. That high shelf whisky detail is important to the story if only by inference since in their younger days when they were down on their luck or times were tight they would drink low-shelf rotgut whisky or worst to get them through some frost-bitten night. Now they could afford the booze from the top-shelf behind Jimmy the bartender’s back. Of course as well since both men had been attached to music since childhood the reason besides being close to home that Sam liked to hang at Jack’s was that it had a jukebox stacked full of old time tunes that you could not find otherwise outside of maybe Googling YouTube these days.

The selection on the juke when Ralph posed the question had been the Mississippi Sheiks’ Rent Day Blues, a personal favorite of Sam’s, about how the narrator in the song had no chance in hell to make the rent and the rent collector man was at the door. Ralph had mentioned to Sam that at least his family had never had to worry about that problem, as tough as money times were before his father landed some contracts to do electrical work for the biggest concern in the area, General Electric. Ralph’s family had been the epitome of 1950s “golden age” working-class attitudes buying into the Cold War red scare every child under the desk in case the Russkies blow the big one, the atomic bomb, keep the damn n----rs out of the neighborhood, get ahead but not too far ahead and all the other aspects of that ethos but they also had enough dough to not need to have every penny accounted for and begrudged. Sam looked stunned for a moment as Ralph described his childhood existence and told Ralph that while they were both working-class guys coming up that his family lived much closer to the depths of society, closer to the place where the working poor of Carver met the con men, rip-off artists, drifters, grifters, midnight sifters and refuge of society, down in the projects, not a pretty place.  

Ralph, at first, could not see where Sam was going with the talk but then Sam let out some of the details. See his father, Thornton, had been nothing but an uneducated hillbilly from down in the coalmining country in Appalachia, Kentucky, had worked the mines himself. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor he had jumped in with both hands and feet as a Marine seeing action, seeing plenty of action although Sam who had been off and on estranged from his family for many years before they had passed away did not find this out until later after his father died from an uncle, in all the big Pacific War battles they teach in high school. Thornton never ever talked about his war that much but did say one time when they were on speaking terms that between fighting the “Nips” (Thornton’s term popular among American G.I.s who faced the Japanese on the islands) and the coal barons he would take the former, the former gladly. Before Thornton was demobilized he had been assigned to the big naval shipyard over in Hingham, not far from Carver where his mother grew up. His mother, Delores, due to wartime shortages of manpower had worked in the offices there. One USO dance night they met, subsequently fell in love and were married and thereafter had a brood of five boys close together. Maybe not a today story but not that uncommon then.

But go back to that part about Sam’s father’s heritage, about coal-mining country. Where the hell in all the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was there room for a hard-working coalminer, a coal miner’s son. Delores had made it clear she was not moving down to the hills and hollows of Kentucky after one brief shocking humiliating trip there to meet Thornton’s kin, his expression, and he had no feeling for the place after being out in the big world so their fates hinged on Carver, or Massachusetts anyway. They took a small apartment in the Tappan section of Carver, the section on the edge of where the poor, the poor in Carver being the “boggers,” those who worked the cranberry bogs in season that the town was famous for, and the, what did Marx call them, the lumpen, the refuge of society meet. As more boys came they doubled up on everything but there is no air to breathe when seven people trample over each other in a small space. Moreover Thornton in the throes of the 1950s “golden age of the American worker” got left behind; was inevitably the last hired, first fired and was reduced to whatever was left, including time served in the bogs ( a personal affront to whatever dignities Delores had since she had been taught to despise the “boggers” in her polite society home).

That hand-to-mouth existence took its toll. At some point after repeatedly dodging the rent collector man the Eaton family was evicted from their small private apartment and they were reduced to the heap, the Carver public housing projects, the lowest of the low and recognized by one and all as such. Here is where that view of the world Sam assimilated got formed. The never having money, the battle of the six nights straight of oatmeal for supper and no lunch (in those days before the school lunch programs mercifully spared the worst of the hungers), some days  of nothing to eat but patience, the passing down of the too larger-sized older brothers’ clothing bought by a desperate mother at the Bargain Center and which had been out of fashion for many a year (causing baiting by the non-projects classmates who lived up the road about shanty Irish and worse, about being a “bogger’s” son).

While Sam was talking he suddenly remembered, as an example of how tough things were, one time to impress some girl, a non-projects girl, a daughter of a middle class professional man he thought, he had cut up his pants to seem like a real farmer at some school square dance and Delores beat him with a belt buckle screaming how dare he ruin the only other pair of pants that he owned. And that was not the only beating Sam took as Delores, who handled discipline, to spare the ever weary hard-pressed Thornton, became overwhelmed with the care of five strapping boys. And so Sam graduated to the “clip” at first to get some spare dough and later those larcenies that almost got him into the county clink doing nickels and dimes. After that spiel Sam buttoned up, would say no more as if to say that if he did then he would be far too exposed to the glare of the world’s eyes even if only Ralph’s.     

Ralph, ever being Ralph, thought for a couple of minutes about what Sam had disclosed and then simply said-“Sam, you earned your ‘wanting habits,’ earned them the hard way. I don’t need to know any more” Enough said.               

On The 86th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky- Fourth International-We Need A Socialist International More Than Ever

On The 86^th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky- Fourth International-We Need A Socialist International More Than Ever 

By Harry Sims

Usually I am a behind the scenes guy dishing out anniversary dates and other facts and figures to site manager Greg Green and/or the recently created Editorial Board but I felt compelled to write a little something about the anniversary, the 80^th anniversary this month of September, of the Fourth International that will be forever linked to the name of the great Russian Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky. In accordance with the seemingly obligatory notice of transparency that accompanies anything today greater that what you had for breakfast at one time I was close to those who were carrying on the wilted tradition of the Fourth International after Trotsky was assassinated by a Stalinist agent down in Mexico in the summer of 1940. Aside from that though, as the headline to this introduction telegraphs, we are still in need of an international that will lead the way forward for humankind’s hopefully more equitable future. Such progress as we are now painfully aware does not happen automatically but must be planned and led by people committed to such aims. The same is true for those who want to revive the night of the long knives that was the hallmark of the 20^th century and now the first couple of decades of the 21^st century. So the die is cast.

Here is a short primer for those legions who do not have the foggiest notion of a what an International, Fourth or otherwise, is or was. These institutions are associated with various historical epochs of the socialist movement in all its struggles-victories and defeats. The first short-lived International was associated directly with the personages of the socialist revolutionaries Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of the Marxist wing of socialism back in the middle of the 19^th century. The two important events beyond the fact of creating the first international devoted to the struggle for socialism were the support for the Northern side led by Abraham Lincoln in the American Civil War and the stalwart defense of the Paris Commune, the first workers republic, of 1871 which was drowned in blood by Thiers and his mercenaries. The Second International before it became a “mail drop,” before it dropped the ball in not opposing World War I on any side, an event we are commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the Armistice this year as well, was the first mass organization of international socialism toward the end of the 19^th century. With the rapid rise of industrialization under late capitalism working people swarmed to this organization to defend them. In 1914 with the aforementioned failure to oppose the bloody war which decimated the flower of the working classes of all European nations its historic important as a serious force for social change much less socialism was finished even if the shell lingered, still lingers on today.

The Third International, Communist International, Comintern, and the Fourth share not only the personage of Leon Trotsky but purported to have the same aims at various points up to World War II. The Comintern was created as a direct result of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 by leaders Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky among others for the direct purpose of leading the world socialist revolution. When that task was abandoned in practice under the Stalin regime in Russia Trotsky in exile and with not enough resources called for and established the Fourth International we are commemorating.

Traces of that Fourth International like the Second still exist but unlike the first three Internationals it was essentially still-born in a time of defeats, serious defeats for the working classes especially with the rise of Hitler in Germany. So why beside nostalgia for an old International associated with the name of an honest revolutionary do I write this short piece today. Like I said the headline has telegraphed what is needed, what I think is needed today-another International, a fifth International if you like to lead the fight against the one-sided class struggle that is being waged by the international capitalist classes. While Trotsky’s organization for many reasons including the decimation of its cadre in Europe during World War II never got off the ground some of its programmatic points in the key document that came out of the conference which established the organization-the Transitional Program- read like they could have been written today.

Beyond the program though cadre, new cadre are needed to continue the forlorn fight against the greedy vultures who control the means of production and finance and that is where Leon Trotsky’s desperate and usually lonely fight to bring the 4^th International to the light of day can still serve as a model going forward. He, Trotsky, a man who has led the Russian Revolution of 1905, has subsequently been exiled and escaped the Czarist prisons when that revolution was crushed, had been central to the seizure of power in the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, had been Commissar of War during the bloody civil war against the counter-revolutionary Whites and their international imperialist allies, and had led the fight to save the revolution when the dark hand of Stalin and his henchmen pulled the hammer down stated unequivocally at the time in 1938 that establishing a new international to fight the dark clouds coming over Europe was the most important task he had done in his life. In our own epoch we are looking for such men and women to continue the task. They will have to read about and look at these 1938 documents and that very uneven struggle along the way.

Workers Vanguard No. 1139	7 September 2018

TROTSKY

LENIN

Reforge the Fourth International!

(Quote of the Week)

Eighty years ago, on 3 September 1938, the Fourth International was established under the leadership of Leon Trotsky. In opposition to the reformism of the social-democratic Second International and the Stalinized Communist International (Comintern), its founding document, excerpted below, provided the framework for building a new world party of socialist revolution. It is the task of the International Communist League to reforge the Fourth International, which was destroyed by a revisionist current under Michel Pablo in the early 1950s that renounced the need to build Trotskyist parties.

It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.

Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program, which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program, which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying. The Comintern has set out to follow the path of Social Democracy in an epoch of decaying capitalism: when, in general, there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and the raising of the masses’ living standards; when every serious demand of the proletariat and even every serious demand of the petty bourgeoisie inevitably reaches beyond the limits of capitalist property relations and of the bourgeois state.

The strategical task of the Fourth International lies not in reforming capitalism but in its overthrow. Its political aim is the conquest of power by the proletariat for the purpose of expropriating the bourgeoisie.

—Leon Trotsky, “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International,” commonly known as the Transitional Program (1938)

Remember Attica Blood in the Water The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson (Pantheon, 2016) A Review

Remember Attica Blood in the Water The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson (Pantheon, 2016) A Review Workers Vanguard No. 1103	13 January 2017

Remember Attica

Blood in the Water

The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

by Heather Ann Thompson

(Pantheon, 2016)

A Review

On the morning of 9 September 1971, nearly 1,300 inmates—predominantly black and Puerto Rican—took over the state prison at Attica, New York. Four days later 29 of them lay dead, cut down in a hail of bullets fired by New York State Police, sheriffs and corrections officers. Governor Nelson Rockefeller gave the order. President Richard Nixon cheered them on. In the aftermath, the surviving prisoners were subjected to hideous torture and later charged with a total of 1,300 crimes. Among these were kidnapping and, most obscenely, unlawful imprisonment based on taking prison guards hostage, ten of whom were gunned down by Rockefeller’s stormtroopers when they retook the prison.

For many years, Democratic and Republican administrations in Albany, along with the courts, have covered up much of the truth of what took place at Attica, assisted by the same capitalist press that peddled the lie that the prisoners shot the guards. A significant part of that shroud has been peeled back by Heather Ann Thompson in her recent book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Thompson’s book brings to life the dignity and humanity of the prisoners who were treated as little more than dirt by Rockefeller and his ilk. She describes in vivid detail the dehumanizing conditions that gave rise to the rebellion and the racist venom that ran from the governor’s mansion down to the cops and prison guards who hunted down the uprising’s leaders. Thompson got her own sampling of that venom for naming the prison guards who carried out assassinations and torture.

Thompson’s comprehensive history is a result of her many years of diligent archival research and a bit of good fortune in uncovering key sources that had been suppressed. As she notes, “The most important details of this story have been deliberately kept from the public. Literally thousands of boxes of documents relating to these events are sealed or next to impossible to access.” Regarding the most explosive documents she uncovered, Thompson says, “All of the Attica files that I saw in that dark room of the Erie County courthouse have now vanished.”

For millions around the world, Attica became a potent symbol of rebellion against brutal repression—and a stark emblem of racist state murder. To this day it continues to inspire struggles against the racist degradation of black people inside and outside of prison walls. The first issue of Workers Vanguard (October 1971) led with the headline “Massacre at Attica.” We stated bluntly: “The brutal, bloody murderers of Attica are none other than the ruling class of this society,” saying further:

“Rockefeller cut down the Attica prisoners in the manner of his father and grandfather before him—ruthlessly and to protect the system from which his profits spring. From the murder of the Ludlow miners to the present, this family has carried the policies of the armed fist over the entire globe.... The Rockefeller name and the Rockefeller practice symbolize, more than any other, the American capitalist class—a class that will stop at nothing to extend and protect its profitable holdings.”

Attica was an explosion waiting to happen. The 2,200 men warehoused in a facility built for 1,600 were routinely beaten by guards, locked in cells 16 hours a day, rationed one sheet of toilet paper daily, one bar of soap a month and one shower per week—even in the heat of summer. Among the main grievances was censorship of reading materials—no newspapers, very few books, and nothing at all to read in Spanish. It wasn’t an absolute ban—the prison authorities mocked the prisoners by supplying magazines such as Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, American Home and House Beautiful.

Hours after the revolt began, L.D. Barkley, a 21-year-old Black Panther Party member imprisoned for violating parole by driving without a license, read out the prisoners’ powerful declaration: “We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such.”

The prisoners called for the minimum wage for prison work (they were paid slave wages of between 20 cents and one dollar per day), accompanied by an end to censorship and restrictions on political activity, religious freedom, rehabilitation, education and decent medical care. They expressed solidarity with the Vietnamese workers and peasants as well as others fighting U.S. imperialism. The main demand was amnesty for participating in the rebellion, along with “speedy and safe transportation out of confinement, to a Non-Imperialist country.” Most likely in mind were Cuba, where the capitalist rulers had been overthrown and a bureaucratically deformed workers state led by Fidel Castro established, or Algeria, a capitalist state governed by left nationalists that had given refuge to Black Panthers in exile.

As Thompson points out, many of the prisoners at Attica were veterans of eruptions over similar conditions at Manhattan’s Tombs detention center and the prison in Auburn, New York, the prior year. The bitter anger that was about to explode at Attica was displayed 19 days earlier when word spread through the cells that prison authorities at California’s San Quentin prison had assassinated Black Panther Party member George Jackson on 21 August 1971. The next day, over 800 Attica inmates marched silently into breakfast wearing black armbands and held a fast in protest. California prison officials had targeted Jackson, along with W.L. Nolen and Hugo Pinell, for forging solidarity of black, Latino and white prisoners. New York officials were no less alarmed by the interracial unity growing among Attica’s inmates.

The prison revolt reflected the growing ferment and struggles taking place outside prison walls, not least the “black power” movement and radical protests against the war in Vietnam. Many of the black inmates identified with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) and Puerto Ricans looked to the Young Lords, which was inspired by the Panthers. Playing a leading role in the rebellion was Sam Melville, a white member of the Weather Underground who was serving 18 years for placing explosives in government buildings in protest against the war in Vietnam. As Thompson observes, the presence of such activists “offered Attica’s otherwise apolitical men—like [Frank] Big Black Smith—a new understanding of their discontents and a new language for articulating them.” Smith ended up leading the prisoners’ security force, made up largely of Black Muslims. His group treated the prison guards taken hostage with a humanity that the prisoners had been denied.

For a long time before Blood in the Water, the biggest window into what took place at Attica came from Tom Wicker’s A Time to Die. Wicker, a New York Times reporter, along with radical attorney William Kunstler, was among the outside observers whom the prisoners demanded to negotiate through rather than directly with prison and state authorities. Prison officials granted this one demand, intending to use the observers to convince the prisoners to release the hostages and surrender without amnesty. To his credit, BPP leader Bobby Seale, whom the prisoners also sought as an observer, uniquely refused to be involved in attempts to nudge the inmates toward surrender. Seale made clear the BPP position that “all political prisoners who want to be released to go to non-imperialistic countries should be complied with.”

The retaking of Attica began in the morning of September 13 with a cloud of CN and CS gas dropped from a helicopter that covered every prisoner with a nauseating, incapacitating powder and it ended with a bloodbath. The rebellion’s leadership paid dearly. Barkley, Melville and others were assassinated in the prison yard. Surviving prisoners, including the wounded, were stripped naked, made to crawl through the mud and the blood, then lined up to run a gantlet over broken glass and be beaten by cops and guards wielding what they called their “n----r sticks.” After being threatened with castration, Big Black Smith was forced to lie on a table for five hours with a football tucked under his chin, under threat of being shot if it rolled loose.

For the capitalist ruling class, Attica had to be crushed with particular vengeance because the rebels had begun to see their struggle in political and even revolutionary terms. One of Thompson’s discoveries is Nixon’s celebration of the bloodbath: “I think this is going to have a hell of a salutary effect on future prison riots.... Just like Kent State had a hell of a salutary effect” (referring to the 4 May 1970 National Guard killing of four students protesting the invasion of Cambodia—an extension of U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants). Nixon added, “They can talk all they want about force, but that is the purpose of force.”

Attica Nation

Thompson, a historian at the University of Michigan and expert on mass incarceration, is particularly motivated by prison reform. She notes that the immediate aftermath of the Attica revolt saw some improvements in food, medical care, clothing, mail censorship and number of showers permitted. However, as she points out, this was followed by an “unprecedented backlash against all efforts to humanize prison conditions in America.”

Inmates today continue to be used as slave labor, face censorship of political literature and conditions at least as dehumanizing and sadistic, including the increasing use of solitary confinement—universally recognized as a form of torture. Brutality by prison guards is a daily fact of life, especially for the black and Latino victims disproportionately singled out for discipline.

The backlash to which Thompson refers is one expression of the bipartisan rollback of the limited democratic gains for black people attained by the liberal-led civil rights movement. Its most glaring manifestation for the past three decades has been the mass incarceration of black people, largely a consequence of the “war on drugs.” This overt war on black people was accompanied by escalating cop terror against the ghettos and barrios.

Today’s plethora of drug laws is an outgrowth of the state repression under the “war on crime” kicked off by Democratic president Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 “Safe Streets Act” and Nixon’s 1970 “Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act” and carried on by Democratic and Republican administrations since. The number of people languishing in U.S. prisons and jails, 2.2 million, is six times what it was in 1971. The costs of maintaining this vast prison complex have led to calls for easing up on the war on drugs.

Prisons are the concentrated expression of the depravity of this society. They are a key instrument in coercing, torturing and brutalizing those who have been cast off as the useless residue of a system rooted in exploitation and racial oppression. The deindustrialization of much of the U.S. that began in the late 1960s drove millions of black people out of the workforce and into the ranks of the permanently outcast. In the calculations of the American bourgeoisie, a substantial part of the black population, who used to provide labor for the auto plants and steel mills, is simply written off as an expendable population. Having condemned black as well as Latino youth to desperate poverty, the rulers whipped up hysteria painting the ghettoized poor as criminal “superpredators,” whom cops can gun down with impunity, and for whom no sentence is too long, no prison conditions too harsh. This demonization of the black population has served to deepen the wedge between white and black workers in a period of virtually no class struggle.

Marxists support the struggle for any demand that meets the immediate needs of prisoners. But under capitalism no reforms can fundamentally alter the repressive nature of the prisons. Along with the cops, military and courts, prisons are a pillar of the capitalist state, whose basic function is to maintain, through force or threat of force, the rule of the capitalist class and its economic exploitation of the working class. In the U.S., where racial oppression is at the core of the capitalist system, any alleviation of prison conditions must be linked to the fight against black oppression in general. We fight to abolish the prison system, which will be done only when the capitalist order—with its barbaric state institutions—is shattered by a proletarian socialist revolution that establishes a planned, collectivized economy with jobs and quality, integrated housing and education for all.

Thompson’s sympathies clearly lie with the Attica prisoners. Yet she evinces a soft spot for the prison guards, whom she sees as victims as well. Her poster boy for humanizing the guards is Mike Smith, a 22-year-old former machinist apparently liked by the prisoners and sympathetic to their demands. Smith, after being taken hostage by the prisoners, was shot by the cops and grievously wounded. Thompson writes, “Like so many other small town boys who had grown up in rural New York Mike needed to make a living, and prisons were the going industry.” Thompson also gives voice to the guards taken hostage and the families of the ten of them whom Rockefeller’s assassins gunned down, who resent the fact that the surviving Attica prisoners won a paltry monetary settlement from the state after nearly three decades.

As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky pointed out 85 years ago, the worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state is a bourgeois cop, not a worker, an admonition no less applicable to prison guards. As we noted at the time of the Attica massacre, “These despicable racist guards are despised even by the ruling class that cynically uses them. The governor not only served notice on the prisoners that rebellion does not pay, and rebellion linked with revolutionary ideas means certain death, but he had a message for the guards too: Keep the upper hand or else!”

The basic function of the prisons is lost on the liberal academic Thompson, whose call for prison reform envisions a commonality of interests between inmates and prison guards—a relationship akin to that of slave and overseer. In a 2011 paper, “Rethinking Working-Class Struggle Through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards,” she declares, “It is time once again for the American working class to pay attention to penal facilities as sites of productive labor and wage competition and to recognize that its destiny is tied in subtle but important ways to the ability of inmates as well as prison guards to demand fair pay and safe working conditions.” Thompson lauds the return of prison guards to municipal unions, such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

What, then, are “safe working conditions” for prison guards? In our 1971 article, we sharply criticized Jerry Wurf, the AFSCME president, as he threatened a “slowdown” by union guards after the Attica massacre:

“Wurf demanded more and better riot equipment—helmets, tear gas and masks, to be borrowed from police departments if necessary, and hiring of more guards. Yet he had the effrontery to maintain, ‘We’re not at war with the inmates; the state of New York is at war with them.’ What forces does the state of New York employ to make war on the inmates if not the cops and guards Wurf is happy to represent?... No union can represent both workers and the sworn servants of the capitalist class, the police and prison guards.”

The increasing prominence of cops and prison guards—workers’ class enemies—in the shrinking union movement underscores the need for ousting the pro-capitalist bureaucrats and forging a class-struggle leadership in the basic organs of workers struggle.

Three years before L.D. Barkley read out the Attica Brothers’ powerful declaration, striking black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, famously walked picket lines with signs declaring, “I am a man.” Today, the racist capitalist ruling class continues to treat black people as if they were less than human and their lives don’t matter. But there is a reservoir of social power in the organized working class, in which black workers, who make up the unions’ most loyal and militant sector, remain disproportionately represented. Under revolutionary leadership, black workers, who form an organic link to the anger of the oppressed ghetto poor, will play a vanguard role in the struggles of the entire U.S. working class. It is the purpose of the Spartacist League to build a workers party that links the fight for black freedom to the struggle for proletarian state power. Workers rule on a world scale will open the road to a communist future in which the modern instruments of incarceration and death will be discarded as relics of a decaying social order that deserved only to perish.