*Stay Alert!- A Look At The American Radical Right- A Guest Commentary From "Fresh Air"

Click on the headline to link to a National Public Radio (NPR) broadcast of Terry Gross' "Fresh Air" program, for March 25, 2010, of a report on the rise of the radical right in America , including the militia-types since the election of Barack Obama.


Markin comment:

As I stated in the headline this rising threat from the ever present radical right in America is something we must be aware of the defense of our communist perspective. Hell, even for the defense of simple democratic rights. There is a storm of some magnitude brewing out there. This edge of militias, survivalist, nativists and Nazis is the breeding ground for those who we will have to face down in the streets, if it ever comes to that. This report should be a goad to get our side properly organized, and pronto.

*The Latest From The "Left In East Dakota" Blog- On Obama's State Of The Union Speech

Click on the title to link to the "Left In East Dakota" Blog for the article mentioned above.

Markin comment:

I am always thankful for those who are willing to do the "heavy lifting" of commentary on vacuous bourgeois politics. I have mentioned before that I tried to do it a couple of years ago and became nearly suicidal after a couple of months, and then it really got bad (and downhill) from there.

The Latest From The "International Bolshevik Tendency" Website- "Imperialist Troops Out Of Haiti"- A Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link to the "International Bolshevik Tendency" Website for the article listed in the headline.

Markin comment:

This entry is placed here specifically because of its intersection with the controversy between the Internationalist Group and the ICL/Spartacist League/U.S. over the latter organization's not calling for "Imperial Troops out of Haiti" in the midst of the recent earthquake disaster there. Check the Websites of those organizations, or my February 2010 archives, for their earlier polemics on the issue.

*Notes From The Old Home Town- In The Time Of The Jock- The Big Football Rally, Circa 1963

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of the film "The Last Picture Show" that evokes the sense of teen liff back in the days of the entry below, although it is about a decade earlier in time in the 1950s and in dust-blown Texas.

Markin comment:

Not all the entries in this space are connected to politics, although surely most of them can be boiled down into some political essence, if you try hard enough. The following is one of those instances where trying to gain any “political traction”, or as I am fond of saying drawing any “lessons” would be foolhardy. I should also note that this entry is part of a continuing, if sporadic, series of “trips down memory lane” provoked by a fellow high school classmate who has been charged with keeping tabs on old classmates and their doings, even those of old-line communists like this writer. Go figure?


The "Big Night" Thanksgiving Eve Football Rally, Circa 1963

Scene: Around and inside the old high school gym the night before the big Thanksgiving Day game against our cross town arch-rival in 1963, but it could have been a scene from any one of number of years in those days.

Guys and gals, old and young, students and alumni are milling about for the annual gathering of the Red Raider clan. Every unattached boy student, in addition, looking around to see if she has come for the festivities, and every unattached girl student for he. A couple of fervent quasi-jock male students, one of them writing this entry, members of the Class of 1964, with a vested interest in seeing their football-playing fellow classmates pummel the cross town rival are in attendance, and also in the hunt for those elusive shes. This is the final football game of their final football- watching season, as students, as well so they have brought extra energy to the night’s performance.

Finally, after much hubbub the rally begins, at first somewhat subdued due to the very recent trauma of the Kennedy assassination, the murder of one of our own as well as a president. But everyone, seemingly, has tacitly agreed for this little window of time that the outside world and its horrors will not intrude. A few obligatory (and forgettable) speeches follow with a little of this and that, mainly side show antics. But what every red-blooded senior boy, and probably others as well, is looking forward to is the cheer-leading to get things moving, led by the senior girls like the vivacious Roxanne G., the spunky Josie W., and the plucky Linda P.. They do not fail us with their flips, dips, and rah-rahs. Strangely, the band and its bevy of majorettes do not inspire that same kind of devotion, although no one can deny that some of those girls can twirl.

But all this spectacle is so much, too much, introduction. For what is wanted, up close and personal, is a view of the Goliaths that will run over the cross town arch-rival the next day. The season has been excellent, marred only by a bitter lost to a bigger area team on their home field, and our team is highly regarded by lukewarm fans and sports nuts alike. Naturally, in the spirit, if not the letter of high school athletic ethos, the back ups and non-seniors are introduced by Coach L.. Then come the drum roll of the senior starters, some of whom have been playing for an eternity it seems. Names like Tom K., Walt S., Lee M., Paul D., Joe Z., Don McN., Jim F., Charlie McD., Stevie C., "Woj" (Jesus, don’t forget him. I don't need that kind of madness coming down on my face, even now) and on and on.

Oh, yes and “Bullwinkle”, Bill C., a behemoth of a run-over fullback ,even by today’s standards. Yes, let him loose on that arch-rival's defense. Whoa. But something is missing. The crowd needs an oral reassurance from their warriors that the enemy is done for. And as he ambles up to the microphone and says just a couple of words we get that reassurance from “Bullwinkle” himself. That is all we need. Boys and girls, this one is in the bag. And the band plays the school fight song to the tune of “On Wisconsin”. Yes, those were the days when boys and girls, young and old, wise or ignorance bled Raider red in the old town. Do they still do so today? I hope so.

*Victory To The Boston Teachers Union- Defend Public Education!- No More Central Falls!- Rally March 24th At The Bosotn School Deparment Headquarters

Click on the headline to link to the "Boston Teachers Union" Website.


Markin comment:

This is another one of those fights that we must win in order to defend public education, both at the higher level as on March 4th and now with the attacks on basic education. Needless to say the issues are the same- cutting budgets, cutting staff, cutting health care and other benefits, and cutting teacher control of the class room. Enough is enough. Victory To The Boston Teachers Union! No More Central Falls!

From The Presient Of The Boston Teachers Union

Greetings!


We are gearing up for our rally at School March 24, 2010 at 5:00 PM. Our reason for rallying at Ct. St. on the night the appointed School Committee votes on next year's budget is three-fold:


1) Budget cuts hurt our students.
2) Our so-called "under-performing" schools are really under-resourced schools that have been under-funded for years.
3) The city's proposal to diminish our health insurance coverage will hurt our families.


Each year we who work in our schools are asked to do more with less. The school committee has a track record of obsequious and unquestioning approval of all of these yearly budget reductions. We are rallying to tell the committee to say "no."

We are also rallying to point out that the under-funding of our schools has led to the what the state now deems "under-performance." We say, "Give us the tools and the resources, and we will make our schools work."

Lastly, we are rallying because the city is proposing shifting $18 Million in health costs to city employees, increasing our yearly out-of-pocket costs an anywhere from $681 to $5191 per BTU member. We want to send a message that this increase is unacceptable.

The rally begins at 5:00 outside School Committee headquarters. We ask that our members and supporters (feel free to invite parents and other members of your school site council) report promptly at 5:00 for our rally.


The BTU will serve as a drop-off point for those who wish to take the T and leave their cars. Coffee and refreshments will be served, beginning at 2:15. Signs, placards, and other materials will be provided. We hope to see you there! We need you there! This is everyone's battle.




Rally
School Department
26 Court St.
Wednesday, 3/24
5:00 PM

*From The "HistoMat" Blog- The "Old" Left Review

Click on the headline to link to the "HistoMat" blog entry mentioned above concerning the original "Left Review", not "new" or "old" put out by sympathizes of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1934

Markin comment:

1934, Hell that would have to be named "old", "old" left review now. Was it a "third period" Stalinist journal? Or moving with the prevailing winds to the turn to the Comintern popular front policy?

*The Latest From The Internationalist Group Website

Click on the headline to link to the Internationalist Group Website.

*The Latest From The Journal- "Against The Stream"

Click on the headline to link to "Against The Stream" Website, the theoretical journal
of the Solidarity-U.S. group.

Markin comment:

I am not sure of the origins of this group, but like the previously mentioned "Socialist Action" and "Socialist Alternative" groups I will be commenting more on this group and their journal in the future in order to sort out who's who on the American and international left. And who we should, or should not, be listening to as the class struggle heats up.

*The Latest From The "Solidarity-U.S."-Website

Click on the headline to link to the latest from the "Solidarity-U.S." Website.


Markin comment:

I am not sure of the origins of this group, but like the previously mentioned "Socialist Action" and "Socialist Alternative" groups I will be commenting more on this group in the future in order to sort out who's who on the American and international left. And who we should, or should not, be listening to as the class struggle heats up.

*The Latest From The "Socialist Alternative" Website

Click on the headline to link to the latest from the "Socialist Alternative" Website.

Markin comment:

I am not sure of the origins of this group,but like the previously mentioned "Socialist Action" group I will be commenting more on this group in the future in order to sort out who's who on the American and international left. And who we should, or should not, be listening to as the class struggle heats up.

*The Latest From The " Socialist Action " Website

Click on the headline to link to the lastest from the " Socialist Action " Website.


Markin comment:

I will be commenting more in the future about this group that, I believe, had its origins in the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.), the historic party of Trostsky and Bolshevism in the U.S. before they gave that up for ????, fame, I guess in the 1960s. More, later.

*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-"The Color Purple" -A Guest Book Review

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for author Alice Walker.

February Is Black History Month

March Is Women's History Month

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Spring 1988 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

**************

Race, Sex and Class:
The Clash Over The Color Purple

By Don Alexander and Christine Wright

"Well, you know wherever there's a man, there's trouble."

—Alice Walker, The Color Purple

'"Why do you always feel the need to castrate the black man?'"

—Ishmael Reed, Reckless Eyeballing

When The Color Purple, Stephen Spielberg's film of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was released in 1985, it roused loud debates among blacks, picketing and furious letters to the editor across the country. Painting a compelling picture of a terribly abused black woman in rural Georgia between the two world wars, the film really hit a nerve; the controversy quickly got much bigger than the novel. While debates raged in community meetings, feminist supporters of Walker and her liberal and black nationalist critics took up their pens to wage a feud which still soaks up gallons of ink.

Many of Alice Walker's critics accuse her of presenting an image of the black male as a violent monster. Walker has responded that black men don't want to face her "truth-telling." As Marxists, we find what amounts to a highly literary contest for the status of "most oppressed" somewhat beside the point. Nonetheless, the furor over The Color Purple has raised some basic questions about the clash of race and sex in this deeply bigoted, anti-sex society, not least about the explosive tensions between black men and women bred by the destruction of the fabric of life through poverty and oppression.

The Color Purple tells the story of Celie and her struggle to survive and defeat a series of physical and psychological assaults by men. She is raped repeatedly by her father, who gives away her two children against her will. She is married off to a man (Mister) who only agrees to take her if he gets the cow too. Mister treats her worse than a dog, beats her, and has kids as rotten as you can get. As she is later mocked by her husband, "Look at you. You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam...you nothing at all."Then, through her relationship with Mister's lover, the blues singer Shug, Celie finds love and sexual pleasure, leaves her husband, goes into business making pants, discovers she is heiress to a fortune and is eventually reunited with her children, who have been raised in Africa by her missionary sister, Nettie.

Alice Walker's novel begins as a masterly evocation of Celie's nightmarish oppression through a series of letters in Celie's own words. But this artistic promise is betrayed to Walker's feminist agenda at the end of the book, which degenerates into a hokey miracle solution: Walker's "message" is that black women, however rotten and wretched their lives may be, can "make it." Celie embodies the liberal idealist myth that sheer individual will—and in her case, rather unbelievably good luck—can break the chains of oppression.

The novel largely ignores the social misery of the black sharecroppers in the rural Jim Crow South, and fails to so much as hint at the convulsive social struggles in the U.S. in the 1930s. The one exception is Celie's daughter-in-law, Sofia, who is destroyed when she tries to stand up to the white boss. Even then, no one else attempts to combat the vicious racism; Walker is already laying the basis for a retreat into "personal liberation." The novel also describes Nettie's experiences as a missionary in Africa, where she witnesses the destruction of tribal life by imperialism. All Walker can counterpose to this brutality is black Christian missionaries and throwbacks to such vicious, anti-woman tribal practices as ritual sexual mutilation.

Walker's brand of bourgeois feminism, which she calls "womanism," celebrates gooey, mystical "female bonding" not one whit different from the standard line in Ms., where she served on the editorial staff for years. Bourgeois feminism, preoccupied with the career advancement of female yuppies and closing porn shops in Times Square, cannot address the very real sexual and racial oppression of black women.

Who's Afraid of Alice Walker?

Most critics of The Color Purple enthusiastically embrace the liberal lies disguised in it. (Although the controversy exploded when Spielberg's movie was released, it's important to differentiate between Walker's novel and Spielberg's unintended parody.) Walker has been accused of reinforcing racist stereotypes because she wrote about a black woman who had been abused, raped and beaten by black men. There has also been a disgusting, moralistic streak in the outcry over The Color Purple, centering on opposition to Walker's sympathetic portrayal of black lesbianism. Black journalist/TV host Tony Brown, sounding like a Moral Majority Reaganite bigot, claims that anyone who liked the movie was either a "closet homosexual, a lesbian, a pseudo-intellectual or white."

Certain layers of the black establishment intelligentsia denounce as "racist" anything that presents black people in a negative or critical light. But this is another liberal lie just as dangerous as Walker's. Blacks are by no means exempt from 'social backwardness, such as anti-abortion and anti-gay bigotry. The real point (and Walker herself has made this point in previous novels such as The Third Life of Grange Copeland) is tha't terrible poverty and oppression breed personal cruelty and degradation such as that described in 7"he Color Purple. For example, in the eloquent film Nothing But a Man (1964), a spirited young black man, Duff, lives in a small Alabama town, where he is targeted by the racists for his independence and sense of pride. In one of the key scenes in the movie, Duff, blacklisted and unable to support his family, goes home to his wife feeling humiliated by racist mistreatment. Thinking that he sees his failure as a man reflected in his woman's eyes, he turns on her in rage, and their marriage is almost destroyed. Both Duff and his wife are victims of the
racist system which denies the black man his dignity.

When Richard Wright's Native Son was published in 1940, controversy broke out over his gripping portrayal of a brutalized and alienated young black man whose poverty and desperation turn him into a vicious anti-social criminal. Wright, influenced by the Stalinist Communist Party in the late '30s and early '40s, had been disturbed that even "bankers' daughters" were weeping over his earlier short stories, Uncle Tom's Children. As he said, "I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears." And so Wright brought his readers face to face with the starkness of brutal racial oppression in the U.S., implicitly suggest¬ing that there was no room for sentimental liberal drivel.

While Walker seems to have even the bankers' granddaughters bawling, many of her critics are no different from Wright's. Such critics want to perpetuate the myth that blacks owe their condition of savage oppression to the fact that they "don't stick together"—another version of blaming the victim. These critics seek merely to uphold the "respectable" image of the petty-bourgeois black establishment, personified by the "black family life" portrayed on TV's The Bill Cosby Show. And guilty liberals—both white and black—cannot acknowledge the truth about racist America: the ugly degradation of brutalized ghetto life that strips its victims of their dignity and humanity.

Clash of Race and Sex

Of all Walker's critics, the novelist and poet Ishmael Reed has made the best case against The Color Purple. Moving beyond concerns with mere image, Reed has raised some of the hard questions, and for this he has been smeared as a "misogynist" by the feminists. But Reed, whose seven novels are brilliant parables against American racism, is no more a misogynist than Walker is a racist. What the feminists can't stand is that he has got their number: drawing a simplistic sex line in society can put you on the wrong side on some fundamental questions. It simply is not woman-hating point out that Walker's man-hating is relentless. Celie says to Mister, "You a lowdown dog is what's,
wrong It's time to leave you and enter into Creation. And your dead body is just the welcome m need." And Celie berates her stepson, "If you had tried to rule over Sofia the white folks never would Pu caught her."

Reed's barbed and effective satire of feminism, Reckless Eyeballing, is the story of Ian Ball, a black dramal who has been "sex-listed" for his play about a black woman who likes having sex (with men). To make peace with the feminists Ball writes a new play in whi the body of a young black man, lynched by a racist mob for ogling (called "reckless eyeballing" in the South white woman, is exhumed so he can be tried for his se ist crime, which the feminists denounce as equally bad as the murder.

Those who think Reed is exaggerating should thir back about ten years to Susan Brown miller's Again Our Will, one of the bibles of contemporary Americc feminism. As part of her thesis that rape (or the threat of rape) is the main way that all women are controlled t all men, Brownmiller reviewed the famous case of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white man's wife.

This monstrous racist murder was a touchstone on th race question. But as a feminist, Brownmiller disgustingly insisted that Till and J.W. Millam (one of th murderers) had something in common: "They both understood that... it was a deliberate insult just short o physical assault, a last reminder to Carolyn Bryant tha this black boy, Till, had in mind to possess her." As result, Brownmiller says, "Today a sexual remark on the street causes within me a fleeting but murderous rage.' Brownmiller's sex-war politics put her in bed with i racist lynch mob.

In the course of Reckless Eyeballing, successful black woman playwright Tremonisha Smarts (who some say was modeled after Alice Walker) was accosted by a man who:
"tied her up, and shaved all of her hair off. His twisted explanation: this is what the French Resistance did to those women who collaborated with the Nazis. The man had said that because of her 'blood libel' of black men, she was doing the same thing. Collaborating with the enemies of black men."

The horrifying racist murder at Howard Beach in December 1986 inspired Reed to make his definitive argument against Alice Walker and other black feminists in an essay serialized in the Amsterdam News in January-February 1987. But when Reed takes his argument out of the realm of fiction, where poetic license allows him to get at a core of truth, he goes astray. Citing the fact that Jon Lester, the teenager who led the lynch mob that murdered Michael Griffith, was said toj be "real emotional" about the film The Color Purple Reed argues that the description of black male violence incites race-terror. He claims that black feminism's "group libel campaign" against black men "is the kind of propaganda spread by the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party." Reed has a point when he describes his "justifiable paranoia"—he knows it could have been him killed on that highway in Queens. (As black comedian Godfrey Cambridge said , "Paranoia is the occupational disease of black people.")

But the strutting little Mussolinis in Howard Beach could care less what black men do to black women in Harlem, and to lay the blame on "bad propaganda" is a dangerous trivialization of the real threat the race-terrorists pose. It is, however, to Reed's credit that in the days of the black nationalist anti-Semitic demagogue Farrakhan, Reckless Eyeballing savagely denounces anti-Semitism. The book's title page quotes an epigram: "What's the American dream? A million blacks swimming back to Africa with a Jew under each arm." Characters in Reed's novel include a psychotic New York City cop notorious for blowing away blacks and Puerto Ricans, and a Jewish writer who is beaten to death by a mob at the mythical Mary Phegan College. (Mary Phegan was in fact a young white woman murdered in Georgia in 1915; a Jewish businessman, Leo Frank, was framed up for the crime and lynched. The racist upsurge led to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.) Reed uses such themes to calculate by sex and ethnic group the chances of being murdered in the U.S. As the critic Darryl Pinckney said: "Reed's subtext might be that the rape of black women and the lynching of black men are part of the same historical tragedy" (New York Review of Books, 29 January 1987). As a vivid picture of the viciousness of social relations in the United States, Reckless Eyebslling is eons ahead of The Color Purple—and a much better read, too.

The Talented Tenth Squares Off

In a certain sense, the literary debate over The Color Purple reflects the careerist interests of the black intelligentsia, struggling over shrinking economic opportunities in the absence of any movement for radical change. Thus Walker can snipe at black men from her sanctuary at Ms., the darling of white bourgeois feminists, while Reed raves that there is a publishing conspiracy against black male writers. (We thought this was even nuttier than it is, until we tried to buy his books and discovered they were all out of print!) While seemingly Reed and Walker are at loggerheads, they have at bottom the same program. Walker envisages a female Horatio Alger; Reed sees the "solution" in independent black art. Both posit individual struggle within capitalist society, which necessarily pits one section of the oppressed against another. Their message is, "see, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps," ignoring the fact that the majority have no boots.

What lies behind these squabbles is the frustration of the "talented tenth"—the tiny selection of minority people who have been able to integrate into the professional layers of American society. In the face of the swift elimination of the token and reversible gains of the civil rights movement and in the absence of any mass struggle for social change, such debates among the black intelligentsia take on the air of a dispute over the shrinking job market.

But we must say in passing that even during the heyday of the civil rights movement the reality of sexual oppression was never addressed. The ensuing black social struggle under revolutionary leadership which today allows the fundamentally despairing ideologies of black nationalism and feminism to flourish among those who see themselves as spokesmen for the oppressed. Walker and Reed, in their different ways accepting the basically hopeless framework of the capitalist status quo, see black women's progress as necessarily coming at the expense of black men—and vice versa. Only an anti-capitalist perspective provides the basis for uniting all the oppressed in a fight for freedom at the expense of the class enemy which aims to keep us divided and in chains.

Capitalism and "American Apartheid"

In the 1980s the harsh realities of a decaying class system have become ever more bleak. Especially for blacks, capitalism has less and less to offer. The unemployment rate has soared with the closing of giant industrial plants in the Midwest, which once provided decent union wages and basic social power to a crucial component of the working class. Funding for educa¬tion has been slashed, while segregation in schools and
in housing has increased. Blacks are not safe in many neighborhoods throughout the U.S. as lynch mob terrorists are emboldened by racist government policy. "Political power" for blacks has come to mean more black elected officials, who the Democratic Party has deemed useful to preside over the deterioration of the big cities, where they exact racist cutbacks and enforce "law and order." Philadelphia mayor Wilson Goode, whose police firebombed an entire black neighbor¬hood in order to wipe out eleven MOVE members, including five of their children, is no more a champion of black rights than New York's fascistic Ed Koch.

With the exception of a very few who have "made it," the hellish conditions are compounded for black women through sexual oppression. Unskilled black women remain confined to the lowest-paying, most menial jobs, earning starvation wages as maids, laundresses and waitresses. Black women are made to bear the brunt of devastating cutbacks in social welfare. In the U.S., twice as many black girls are pregnant before the age of 18 as whites, twice the number of black infants die. The American bourgeoisie has long upheld the lie that ghetto poverty and degradation are the fault of the "deviant" promiscuous black "matriarch." In 1969 Daniel Moynihan argued that the black "matriarchy" was responsible for the breakdown of the black family and suggested that young black men should learn the right values by joining Uncle Sam's army. Over the years the black woman has been variously stereotyped as a presumed tower of strength, a sexless and obese mammy, a promiscuous baby machine, an emasculating fiend.

Yet the picture for black men is not much less bleak. The unemployment rate in big cities for a young black man is 50 to 60 percent. There is also the problem of "permanent unemployability"—e.g., black industrial workers, "last hired, first fired," who under today's conditions will never be rehired. Women account for two-thirds of all the professional jobs held by blacks: black women are seen by racist employers as docile,non-criminal, non-militant, non-violent, an upgraded version of what used to scrub floors; whereas that young black man in a suit who seems articulate and ambitious is suspected of being Malcolm X in disguise. In the 3 December 1987 New York Review of Books, the article "American Apartheid" describes the grim reality:
"...black men are more likely [than whites] to be in prisons or the military, or die at an early age. The fact that upward of 20 percent are missed by the census would point up their lack of stable jobs or even settled addresses. Moreover, of those black men the census manages to reach, fewer than half have full-time jobs."

It all comes home to roost in the black family. In a society which defines manhood as the ability to support a family, black men are often denied that very ability. "Single-parent households" are growing throughout the U.S., a phenomenon which affects blacks more heavily but by no means exclusively. Over 56 percent of black families are headed by women. Capitalist society needs the institution of the nuclear family not only to produce the next generation of wage laborers, but as an important force for social conservatism. At the same time, capitalist decay undermines the family through grinding poverty and oppression. The family is the main social institution by which women are oppressed. But in the absence of alternatives, those who fall outside the classic pattern of the family have nothing at all. Thus, this vicious racist system cannot but lead to embittered personal relations between men and women. Out of this rises the frustration which takes The Color Purple controversy out of the literary realm into the community, where it exploded in angry debates.

In this sense, Alice Walker triumphed as an artist: the depth of the controversy shows that she began to lay bare a painful reality. The solution to the reality she and Ishmael Reed have described in their novels lies not in the realm of art or bourgeois politics, but in the struggle for the socialist transformation of society."

*From The "Bob Feldman 68" Blog- The Youth Revolt Of 1964- Mario Savio and The Free Speech Movement At Berkeley

Click on the headline to link to, via the "Bob Feldman 68" blog, a "YouTube" film clip of 1964 Free Speech Movement and Berkeley student leader, Mario Savio.

Markin comment:

In many ways, for white leftists at least, this was their first major confrontation with the imperial state and its agents, and it was not pretty. Unfortunately, many of those who became radicalized back in the day have long ago giving up that ghost. Well, the next political generation that is now coming of age should view this clip to get a better idea of what they will confront in coming to terms with today's issues like education and social welfare budget cuts, war, and more war of all kinds.

*From The "SteveLendmanBlog"- "America's Permanent War Agenda"- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to the "SteveLendmanBlog" to read the above-mentioned entry.

Markin comment:

It is always good, and this is why I like this site to get the names and numbers of those who have created, and continue to create, the imperial hubris- and then move on to oppose them-hard.

*The March 20, 2010 Rally Against Obama's Iraq And Afghan Wars- The View From "The National Assembly"

Click on the headline to link to the "National Assembly Against The Iraq And Afghan Wars" Website for coverage of the March 20, 2010 Anti-Iraq And Afghan Wars Rally in Washington, D.C.

*Victory To The Shaw's Supermarket (Mass.)Warehouse Workers!- An Update From 'Boston Indy Media"

Click on the headline to link to an article on "Boston Indy Media" concerning the continuing strike by Massachusetts Shaw's Supermarket Warehouse workers.

Markin comment:

The issues here, as usual, are health benefits, safety concerns and working conditions. Wages seem to be secondary, as is generally the case theses days when companies are gutting the "extras", like health care, pensions and seniority rights, that used to be taken for granted in the old days. Victory To The Shaw's Workers!

*The March 20th 2010 Washington , D.C Rally Against Obama's Iraq And Afghan Wars- The View From "Boston Indy Media"

Click on the headline to link to a "Boston Indy Media" post for the March 20, 2010 March in Washington, D.C. against Obama's Iraq and Afghan wars.

Markin comment:

Hey, even this amateur posting beats the august "The New York Times" coverage, mentioned in an earlier post today, on this anti-war event.

*The March 20th 2010 Rally Against Obama's Iraq And Afghan Wars-The View From "Wikipedia"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the March 20, 2010 Washington, D.C. Anti-Iraq and Afghanistan Wars Rally.

Markin comment:

Some times you have to love the Internet. This time is one of them with an almost instant entry into the history books. If anyone is asking, on this one old "Wikipedia" is way ahead of the august "journal of record", "The New York Times", mentioned in a post earlier today.

*The March 20th 2010 Anti-War Rally in Washington- The Bourgeois View From "The New York Times"

Click on the headline to link to a "The New York Times" article, via "The Associated Press", on the March 20, 2010 Anti-Iraq and Afghan Wars Rally and March in Washington, D.C.

Markin comment:

Things are definitely tough when the "journal of record" for the bourgeoisie, "The New York Times", depends on an "AP" stringer's report of a major anti-war event in Washington, D.C. It may also reflect how little impact, newsworthiness-wise (ouch), the august editors of that newspaper considered the story. Much easier to keep the limelight on the Chief and his battle to get a totally inadequate health care plan passed through Congress. We, brothers and sisters, have our work cut out for us. I will pass on my own report on the event when I get a chance. The "AP" story though has it pretty right factually , as far as it goes.

Just a couple of quick comments here. First, the fight is now on against the Obama wars, although I am unhappy that the turnout was smaller that even I had expected. We are, its seems, in a somewhat analogous situation to about 1965 in the Vietnam anti-war era. The second comment is less heartening- the turnout was a "show the colors" event in more than one way- there were very few people there , at least from what I could tell, who had not been committed to the anti-war movement previously. Few new faces...and still many, many illusions in the "good faith" of Barack Obama. More, later.

*Notes from The Old Home Town- A Hats Off To Brother James C.

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the Catholic Worker movement.

Not all the entries in this space are connected to politics, although surely most of them can be boiled down into some political essence, if you try hard enough. The following is one of those instances where trying to gain any “political traction”, or as I am fond of saying drawing any “lessons” would be foolhardy. I should also note that this entry is part of a continuing, if sporadic, series of “trips down memory lane” provoked by a fellow high school classmate who has been charged with keeping tabs on old classmates and their doings, even those of old-line communists like this writer. Go figure?

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Markin comment:

The subject matter of this particular entry is in dire need of supplementary explanation before all my old and new leftist political associates think that I have gone over the edge- and crawled half-way back to some old variant of the Stalinist Popular Front “theory” where even churchman are our “comrades. Or worst, crawled half-way back to “Mother Church”. No, that is not the case at all. As I have had to say on other tricky occasions though- hear me out on this one.

I agree that to honor a churchman, although one somewhere pretty far down on the Catholic Church totem pole is highly unusual. More generally this space has been used to, and is noted for, honoring our fallen forbears like Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, other radicals and revolutionaries who were not our comrades but who were kindred spirits in the struggle for a better world, or other secular figures who have made a cultural impact that paved the way for us in some manner. That description would, in the usual case, not apply to churchmen, high or low.

I, moreover, have spent a good portion of my life struggling, one way or another, against the effects of my own youthful church indoctrination and steadfastly adhere to one of our great forbears', Karl Marx, description of religion as the “opiate of the people”. I also add to that sound bite, unlike our thoughtless political opponents who leave it at that and do not give the phrase in the context in which it was written-people need the dope of religion to bear up under the heretofore relentless struggle for survival in an unjust and unequal world. Marxists have never been against personal religious expression, per se, although in a communist society it would, I assume, be something of a curiosity, or something like the “Old Believers" in the Russian Orthodox tradition or, maybe, the Amish in America.

And that is where my tribute to Brother James C. fits in. I have no truck with his religious beliefs, personal or professional, but I do have truck with his sense of “doing good in the world”. Moreover, getting back to that united front question that I alluded to when I mentioned the Stalinist Popular Front policy up above, on a lot of questions, particularly around the death penalty, who the heck do you think some of the people we are united fronting with are? And in the old days, in the back in the day 1960s, for example, we certainly defended the Berrigan Brothers and the Catonsville Nine, all Catholic pacifists of one sort or another, many of them priest and nuns, who committed acts of civil disobedience trying to disrupt the military draft system during the Vietnam War.

Or going back even further we had a kind word to say about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement when they took part in the black civil rights sit-ins to desegregate the lunch counters of this world, North and South. Or fast forward to Central America in the 1980s and to those who operated under the sign of “liberation theology” and who got gunned down by the local tyrants and slapped down by their leader, the Pope, for their efforts. Yes, in the end these people will have to come over to us if they want to see justice done for those whom they work with. For today though, if they operate, as Brother Jim does, under the sign of “doing good in this wicked old world” I say hats off.

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For Brother James C.

Usually when I have had an occasion to use the word “brother” it is to ask for something like –“Say Brother, brother can you spare a dime?” Or have used it as a slang word when I have addressed one of the male members of the eight million political causes that I have worked on in my life. Here, in speaking of one of our fellow classmates, Brother James Connolly, I am using the term as a sincere honorific. For those of you who do not know Brother James is a member of the Oratorian Brothers, a Catholic order somewhere down the hierarchical ladder of the Roman Catholic Church. Wherever that is, he, as my devout Irish Catholic grandmother would say (secretly hoping that it would apply to me), had the “calling” to serve the Church.

Now Brother James and I, except for a few sporadic e-mails over the last couple of years, have neither seen nor heard from each other since our school days. So this is something of an unsolicited testimonial on my part (although my intention is to draw him out into the public spotlight to write about his life and work). Moreover, except for a shared youthful adherence to the Catholic Church which I long ago placed on the back burner of my life there are no religious connections that bind us together. At one time I did delight in arguing, through the night, about the actual number of angels that could dance on the head of a needle, and the like, but that is long past. I do not want to comment on such matters, in any case, but rather that fact of Brother James’ doing good in this world.

We, from an early age, are told, no, ordered by parents, preachers, and Sunday school teachers that while we are about the business of ‘making and doing’ in the world to do good, or at least to do no evil. Most of us got that ‘making and doing’ part, and have paid stumbling, fumbling, mumbling lip service to the last part. Brother James, as his profession, and as a profession of his faith and that is important here, choose a different path. Maybe not my path, and maybe not yours, but certainly in Brother James’ case, as old Abe Lincoln said, the “better angels of our nature” prevailed over the grimy struggle for this world’s good. Most times I have to fidget around to find the right endings to my entries, but not on this one. All honor to Brother James Connolly.